I could hear him moving from room to room, and presently, as I waited
in hushed, tense watchfulness, he came in, depositing the grip upon
the table. His eyes were gleaming feverishly.
"The house is haunted, Pearce!" he cried. "But no ghost ever
frightened _me_! Come, I will show you your room."
CHAPTER XXVI
THE FIERY HAND
Smith walked ahead of me upstairs; he had snapped up the light in the
hall-way, and now he turned and cried back loudly:
"I fear we should never get servants to stay here."
Again I detected the appeal to a hidden Audience; and there was
something very uncanny in the idea. The house now was deathly still;
the ringing had entirely subsided. In the upper corridor my companion,
who seemed to be well acquainted with the position of the switches,
again turned up all the lights, and in pursuit of the strange comedy
which he saw fit to enact, addressed me continuously in the loud and
unnatural voice which he had adopted as part of his disguise.
We looked into a number of rooms all well and comfortably furnished,
but although my imagination may have been responsible for the idea,
they all seemed to possess a chilly and repellent atmosphere. I felt
that to essay sleep in any one of them would be the merest farce, that
the place to all intents and purposes was uninhabitable, that
something incalculably evil presided over the house.
And through it all, so obtuse was I that no glimmer of the truth
entered my mind.
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