For this long corridor, lit faintly by high windows on the
left from the verandah, was very narrow, owing to the mass of shelves
and fancy tables it contained. It was not that I feared to knock over
precious things as I went, but, that, because of its ungenerous width,
there would be no room to pass another person--if I met one. And the
certainty had suddenly come upon me that somewhere in this corridor
another person at this actual moment stood. Here, somehow, amid all this
dead atmosphere of furniture and impersonal emptiness, lay the hint of a
living human presence; and with such conviction did it come upon me,
that my hand instinctively gripped the pistol in my pocket before I
could even think. Either some one had passed along this corridor just
before me, or some one lay waiting at its farther end--withdrawn or
flattened into one of the little recesses, to let me pass. It was the
person who had opened the door. And the blood ran from my heart as I
realized it.
It was not courage that sent me on, but rather a strong impulsion from
behind that made it impossible to retreat: the feeling that a throng
pressed at my back, drawing nearer and nearer; that I was already half
surrounded, swept, dragged, coaxed into a vast prison-house where there
was wailing and gnashing of teeth, where their worm dieth not and their
fire is not quenched.
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