But in a breath’s space Mount Dunstan realised a certain truth—­a simple, elemental thing.  All the exaltation of the morning swooped and fell as a bird seems to swoop and fall through space.  It was all over and done with, and he understood it.  His normal awakening in the morning, the physical and mental elation of the first clear hours, the spring of his foot as he had trod the road, had all had but one meaning.  In some occult way the hypnotic talk of the night before had formed itself into a reality, fantastic and unreasoning as it had been.  Some insistent inner consciousness had seized upon and believed it in spite of him and had set all his waking being in tune to it.  That was the explanation of his undue spirits and hope.  If Penzance had spoken a truth he would have had a natural, sane right to feel all this and more.  But the truth was that he, in his guise—­was one of those who are “on the roadside everywhere—­all over the world.”  Poetically figurative as the thing sounded, it was prosaic fact.

So, still hearing the distant sounds of the hoofs beating in cheerful diminuendo on the roadway, he turned about and went back to talk to Bolter.

CHAPTER XXXVII

CLOSED CORRIDORS

To spend one’s days perforce in an enormous house alone is a thing likely to play unholy tricks with a man’s mind and lead it to gloomy workings.  To know the existence of a hundred or so of closed doors shut on the darkness of unoccupied rooms; to be conscious of flights of unmounted stairs, of stretches of untrodden corridors, of unending walls, from which the pictured eyes of long dead men and women stare, as if seeing things which human eyes behold not—­is an eerie and unwholesome thing.  Mount Dunstan slept in a large four-post bed in a chamber in which he might have died or been murdered a score of times without being able to communicate with the remote servants’ quarters below stairs, where lay the one man and one woman who attended him.  When he came late to his room and prepared for sleep by the light of two flickering candles the silence of the dead in tombs was about him; but it was only a more profound and insistent thing than the silence of the day, because it was the silence of the night, which is a presence.  He used to tell himself with secret smiles at the fact that at certain times the fantasy was half believable—­that there were things which walked about softly at night—­things which did not want to be dead.  He himself had picked them out from among the pictures in the gallery—­pretty, light, petulant women; adventurous-eyed, full-blooded, eager men.  His theory was that they hated their stone coffins, and fought their way back through the grey mists to try to talk and make love and to be seen of warm things which were alive.  But it was not to be done, because they had no bodies and no voices, and when they beat upon closed doors they would not open.  Still they came back—­came back.  And sometimes there was a rustle and a sweep through the air in a passage, or a creak, or a sense of waiting which was almost a sound.