The smoke curled up and spread itself over the face
of the mirror confronting me. I followed it
lazily with my eyes. Then suddenly I bent forward,
staring up. Something very curious was happening
to the glass.
WHAT I SAW IN THE MIRROR.
The smoke that had dimmed the mirror’s face
for a moment was rolling off its surface and upwards
to the ceiling. But some of it still lingered
in filmy, slowly revolving eddies. The glass
itself, too, was stirring beneath this film and running
across its breadth in horizontal waves which broke
themselves silently, one after another, against the
dark frame, while the circles of smoke kept widening,
as the ripples widen when a stone is tossed into still
water.
I rubbed my eyes. The motion on the mirror’s
surface was quickening perceptibly, while the glass
itself was steadily becoming more opaque, the film
deepening to a milky colour and lying over the surface
in heavy folds. I was about to start up and
touch the glass with my hand, when beneath this milky
colour and from the heart of the whirling film, there
began to gleam an underlying brilliance after the fashion
of the light in an opal, but with this difference,
that the light here was blue— a steel blue
so vivid that the pain of it forced me to shut my eyes.
When I opened them again, this light had increased
in intensity. The disturbance in the glass began
to abate; the eddies revolved more slowly; the smoke-wreaths
faded: and as they died wholly out, the blue
light went out on a sudden and the mirror looked down
upon me as before.
That is to say, I thought so for a moment. But
the next, I found that though its face reflected the
room in which I sat, there was one omission.
I was that omission. My arm-chair was
there, but no one sat in it.
I was surprised; but, as well as I can recollect,
not in the least frightened. I continued, at
any rate, to gaze steadily into the glass, and now
took note of two particulars that had escaped me.
The table I saw was laid for two. Forks, knives
and glasses gleamed at either end, and a couple of
decanters caught the sparkle of the candles in the
centre. This was my first observation.
The second was that the colours of the hearth-rug
had gained in freshness, and that a dark spot just
beyond it—a spot which in my first exploration
I had half-amusedly taken for a blood-stain—was
not reflected in the glass.
As I leant back and gazed, with my hands in my lap,
I remember there was some difficulty in determining
whether the tune by which I was still haunted ran
in my head or was tinkling from within the old spinet
by the window. But after a while the music,
whencesoever it came, faded away and ceased.
A dead silence held everything for about thirty seconds.
And then, still looking in the mirror, I saw the door
behind me open slowly.
