Plans for the future were
discussed. I can recall no one of them.
I could not stifle my queer sentiments in regard to the mulatto, and
every time I found him behind my chair I was hard put to it to repress
a shudder. In this fashion the strange evening passed; and to the
accompaniment of distant, muttering thunder, we two guests retired to
our chambers in Cragmire Tower. Smith had contrived to give me my
instructions in a whisper, and five minutes after entering my own
room, I had snuffed the candles, slipped a wedge, which he had given
me, under the door, crept out through the window on to the guttered
ledge, and joined Smith in his room. He, too, had extinguished his
candles, and the place was in darkness. As I climbed in, he grasped my
wrist to silence me, and turned me forcibly toward the window again.
"Listen!" he said.
I turned and looked out upon a prospect which had been a fit setting
for the witch scene in _Macbeth_. Thunderclouds hung low over the
moor, but through them ran a sort of chasm, or rift, allowing a bar of
lurid light to stretch across the drear, from east to west--a sort of
lane walled by darkness. There came a remote murmuring, as of a
troubled sea--a hushed and distant chorus; and sometimes in upon it
broke the drums of heaven. In the west lightning flickered, though but
faintly, intermittently.
Then came the _call_.
Out of the blackness of the moor it came, wild and distant--"_Help!
help!_"
"Smith!" I whispered--"what is it? What.
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