In a grown-up person certainly I had never known it. I
associated it with animals rather--horribly. In the history of the
world, no doubt, it has been common enough, alas, but fortunately today
there can be but few who know it, or would recognize it even when heard.
The bones shot back into my body the same instant, but red-hot and
burning; the brief instant of irresolution passed; I was torn between
the desire to break down the door and enter, and to run--run for my life
from a thing I dared not face.
Out of the horrid tumult, then, I adopted neither course. Without
reflection, certainly without analysis of what was best to do for my
sister, myself or Mabel, I took up my action where it had been
interrupted. I turned from the awful door and moved slowly towards the
head of the stairs.
But that dreadful little sound came with me. I believe my own teeth
chattered. It seemed all over the house--in the empty halls that opened
into the long passages towards the music-room, and even in the grounds
outside the building. From the lawns and barren garden, from the ugly
terraces themselves, it rose into the night, and behind it came a
curious driving sound, incomplete, unfinished, as of wailing for
deliverance, the wailing of desperate souls in anguish, the dull and dry
beseeching of hopeless spirits in prison.
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