Farther down, where sparrows hopped, another and smaller bridge spanned the moat to the stable yard. Holden moved slowly forward toward the house. The dingy gilt hands of the stable-yard clock, facing eastward and only to be seen when you drew near, indicated twenty minutes to nine.
'There are certain secrets about certain people that ought to be given an airing.'
Confound it, why worry about Doris? After all, hadn't she given good proof that Celia had been telling the truth?
Holden's footsteps crunched on the white gravel of the drive. Beyond the bridge across the moat, thirty feet broad and faintly rippling, a double flight of stone stairs led up to an arched front door. Those stairs were necessary. Caswall's inhabited floors lay above the semi-underground rooms and cloisters, bleached museum pieces now, where the first abbess had held office over her nuns.
And, as Holden crossed the bridge and ascended the steps, the whole breath and atmosphere of the past reached out and drew him in. When he had closed the front door (which worked on a ponderous mechanism of bars and bolts always locked at nightfall), the atmosphere rose about him like water. Caswall, despite its antiquity, was not dead. It breathed; it stirred in sleep; it inspired dreams.
Dreams. Celia's dreams...
The renovated great hall, all scrubbed white in carven stone, contained a few bits of more modern furniture to relieve its chill. But several carpets only patched it; a big wine-colored sofa looked lost in it; a brass candelabrum became a mere toy. Margot and Thorley, Holden reflected, had held their wedding reception here. So had other Devereux girls, amid stringed music plucked and twanging, years before the accession of Queen Elizabeth.
Nobody here now; nobody stirring.
He turned to his right, and walked down the echoing length into the high, echoing Painted Room: green paneled except for its murals, the colors of whose figures were almost lost in the fading light.
Nobody here, either. But over there across from him, in the north-east comer, a short flight of carpeted stairs in an embrasure led up to the Long Gallery.
'Has Celia'—Dr. Shepton's voice returned to him as clearly as though the stoop-shouldered doctor, no fool, were here in the flesh—'has Celia told you about the night, immediately after her sister's death, when she saw ghosts walking in the Long Gallery?'
Celia wasn't mad! She wasn't! Celia was here now, amid the spell and the dreams of Caswall: 'resting,' they said. If she had beheld anything (anything, say, that crept out of these walls between the lights), it had been no delusion. Suppose he, Donald Holden, were to go over there now; and slip up the carpeted stairs to the Long Gallery; and suppose he were to see ... ?
He went, making hardly a sound on the steps.
The gallery, appearing narrow because of its great length, stretched from south to north. A single drugget of brownish carpet ran along the wooden floor to where, at the far end, another short flight of steps under an arch led up into the Blue Drawing Room. The Long Gallery was lighted, on the eastern side, by three very large oriel windows, deeply embrasured, with tall lights and diamond panes.
Modem upholstered chairs and smoking tables—as a rule in the window embrasures—were set out to give the effect of a bunging room. There were bookcases. But dominating the Long Gallery, vivid and powerful, loomed the line of portraits which stretched along the western wall. The light was still clear, though fading; nothing seemed to move or stir.
What Holden did hear, what stopped him dead in his tracks, was a real voice: a young voice, crying out in a tone of such utter and abject misery that Holden's nerves shrank from it. The owner of the voice imagined himself alone; he was not really speaking loudly, but the acoustics of the Long Gallery carried it
'God, please help me!' the voice said, in the form of a prayer. 'God, please help me! God, please help me!'
It was a little naive, and utterly sincere. A lanky, leggy young man in sports clothes, who had been sitting in a chair just outside the embrasure of the middle window, bent forward and pressed his hands over his eyes.
CHAPTER VIII
Holden very softly crept back down the stairs again. When anybody feels as deeply as that, whatever the cause, you cannot let him know you have overheard him. So Holden waited for long seconds, in the Painted Room, before making loud shuffling noises, coughing, and going up the steps again with a heavy and obvious tread. He strolled slowly along the gallery: disturbingly, the eyes of the portraits seemed fixed steadily on him as he passed.
The lanky and leggy young man, who might have been between nineteen and twenty, was now sitting sprawled back in his armchair, one hand shading his eyes, staring out at the fields through the oriel window.
'Hello,' said Holden, and stopped beside him.
'Oh!—Hello, sir.'
Instinctively, as a schoolboy rises when a master enters the room, the young man had started to get to his feet; the newcomer grinned and waved him back.
'My name's Holden,' he explained. 'You're Ronald Merrick, aren't you?'
The young man stared at him. His face, ravaged by anguish only a few moments before, had smoothed itself out
'That’s right. How did you know . . . ?'
'Oh, I rather thought you were. Cigarette?'
'Th-thanks.'
Holden saw instantly, as a light switch is clicked on, that he had made an ally. For this was the sort of young man who instinctively, out of a sixth sense, recognizes that congenial (and rare) type of schoolmaster whom he knows, whom he really respects, and in whom he sometimes confides as he will confide in no other person on this earth.
'Look, sir,' pursued young Merrick, as he hastily scrabbled to light a match for their cigarettes. 'Weren't you at Lupton before the war?'
'Yes.'
'I thought I'd heard Tom Clavering speak about you! And: wait a minutel Didn't Celia tell Doris'—his eyes widened— 'weren't you in MI5? Intelligence?'
'That’s right.'
Ronald Merrick's dark-haired, rather Byronic good looks were set in a kind of glaze. Holden studied him as the young man sat there, half raised up out of his chair, in an old sports coat patched with leather at the elbows. He had the artist's face, the artist’s hands, the artist's discontent; but his jaw was strong, and Holden liked the set of his shoulders.
'You mean,' young Merrick was so impressed as to be almost hypnotized, 'you mess about in disguise? And get dropped out of planes in a parachute?'
'That sometimes had to be done, yes.'
68
'Crikey!' breathed Ronald Merrick, and. his figure grew tense. He was obviously contrasting, in his mind, the wretched' ness of his own lot with what he conceived to be the bliss of messing about in disguise and foiling the Gestapo according to film versions of how this is done.
'Sir,' he burst out hopelessly, and whacked his fist down on the arm of the chair, 'why is life so... so....'
'Bloody?' suggested Holden.
The other looked a trifle startled. 'Well—yes.'
'Because it often is, Ronnie. I've been thinking exactly the same thing.'
'You?'
'Yes. It depends on the nature of the trouble.'
'Look, sir.' Ronnie stared very hard at the cigarette between his clasped fingers. He cleared his throat 'Do you know Doris Locke?'
'I've known her for a long time.'
'And of course you know,' his face darkened, 'Mr. Marsh?'
'Yes.'
'They're here now. In the Blue Drawing Room. I opened the door, I didn't mean to open the door, you
