They told me then, and I heard of the haunted Red Room as one who hears a tale.  “We found you at dawn,” said he, “and there was blood on your forehead and lips.”

It was very slowly I recovered my memory of my experience.  “You believe now,” said the old man, “that the room is haunted?” He spoke no longer as one who greets an intruder, but as one who grieves for a broken friend.

“Yes,” said I; “the room is haunted.”

“And you have seen it.  And we, who have lived here all our lives, have never set eyes upon it.  Because we have never dared...  Tell us, is it truly the old earl who——­”

“No,” said I; “it is not.”

“I told you so,” said the old lady, with the glass in her hand.  “It is his poor young countess who was frightened——­”

“It is not,” I said.  “There is neither ghost of earl nor ghost of countess in that room, there is no ghost there at all; but worse, far worse——­”

“Well?” they said.

“The worst of all the things that haunt poor mortal man,” said I; “and that is, in all its nakedness—­Fear that will not have light nor sound, that will not bear with reason, that deafens and darkens and overwhelms.  It followed me through the corridor, it fought against me in the room——­”

I stopped abruptly.  There was an interval of silence.  My hand went up to my bandages.

Then the man with the shade sighed and spoke.  “That is it,” said he.  “I knew that was it.  A power of darkness.  To put such a curse upon a woman!  It lurks there always.  You can feel it even in the daytime, even of a bright summer’s day, in the hangings, in the curtains, keeping behind you however you face about.  In the dusk it creeps along the corridor and follows you, so that you dare not turn.  There is Fear in that room of hers—­black Fear, and there will be—­so long as this house of sin endures.”

  XVII.

  THE PURPLE PILEUS

Mr. Coombes was sick of life.  He walked away from his unhappy home, and, sick not only of his own existence but of everybody else’s, turned aside down Gaswork Lane to avoid the town, and, crossing the wooden bridge that goes over the canal to Starling’s Cottages, was presently alone in the damp pine woods and out of sight and sound of human habitation.  He would stand it no longer.  He repeated aloud with blasphemies unusual to him that he would stand it no longer.

He was a pale-faced little man, with dark eyes and a fine and very black moustache.  He had a very stiff, upright collar slightly frayed, that gave him an illusory double chin, and his overcoat (albeit shabby) was trimmed with astrachan.  His gloves were a bright brown with black stripes over the knuckles, and split at the finger ends.  His appearance, his wife had said once in the dear, dead days beyond recall—­before he married her, that is—­was military.  But now she called him—­it seems a dreadful thing to tell of between husband and wife, but she called him “a little grub.”  It wasn’t the only thing she had called him, either.