"The night being so bad, sir," said the watchman, as he gave me back
my glass, "uncommon few have come in at my gate. Besides them three
gentlemen that I have named, I don't call to mind another since about
eleven o'clock, when a stranger asked for you."
"My uncle," I muttered. "Yes."
"You saw him, sir?"
"Yes. Oh yes."
"Likewise the person with him?"
"Person with him!" I repeated.
"I judged the person to be with him," returned the watchman. "The person
stopped, when he stopped to make inquiry of me, and the person took this
way when he took this way."
"What sort of person?"
The watchman had not particularly noticed; he should say a working
person; to the best of his belief, he had a dust-colored kind of clothes
on, under a dark coat. The watchman made more light of the matter than I
did, and naturally; not having my reason for attaching weight to it.
When I had got rid of him, which I thought it well to do without
prolonging explanations, my mind was much troubled by these two
circumstances taken together. Whereas they were easy of innocent
solution apart,--as, for instance, some diner out or diner at home,
who had not gone near this watchman's gate, might have strayed to my
staircase and dropped asleep there,--and my nameless visitor might have
brought some one with him to show him the way,--still, joined, they had
an ugly look to one as prone to distrust and fear as the changes of a
few hours had made me.
I lighted my fire, which burnt with a raw pale flare at that time of the
morning, and fell into a doze before it. I seemed to have been dozing a
whole night when the clocks struck six. As there was full an hour and
a half between me and daylight, I dozed again; now, waking up uneasily,
with prolix conversations about nothing, in my ears; now, making thunder
of the wind in the chimney; at length, falling off into a profound sleep
from which the daylight woke me with a start.
All this time I had never been able to consider my own situation, nor
could I do so yet. I had not the power to attend to it. I was greatly
dejected and distressed, but in an incoherent wholesale sort of way.
As to forming any plan for the future, I could as soon have formed an
elephant. When I opened the shutters and looked out at the wet wild
morning, all of a leaden hue; when I walked from room to room; when I
sat down again shivering, before the fire, waiting for my laundress to
appear; I thought how miserable I was, but hardly knew why, or how long
I had been so, or on what day of the week I made the reflection, or even
who I was that made it.