After tea that evening Phillotson sat balancing the school registers.
She remained in an unusually silent, tense, and restless condition,
and at last, saying she was tired, went to bed early. When
Phillotson arrived upstairs, weary with the drudgery of the
attendance-numbers, it was a quarter to twelve o'clock. Entering
their chamber, which by day commanded a view of some thirty or forty
miles over the Vale of Blackmoor, and even into Outer Wessex, he went
to the window, and, pressing his face against the pane, gazed with
hard-breathing fixity into the mysterious darkness which now covered
the far-reaching scene. He was musing, "I think," he said at last,
without turning his head, "that I must get the committee to change
the school-stationer. All the copybooks are sent wrong this time."
There was no reply. Thinking Sue was dozing he went on: "And there must be a rearrangement of that ventilator in the
class-room. The wind blows down upon my head unmercifully and gives
me the ear-ache."
As the silence seemed more absolute than ordinarily he turned round.
The heavy, gloomy oak wainscot, which extended over the walls
upstairs and down in the dilapidated "Old-Grove Place," and the
massive chimney-piece reaching to the ceiling, stood in odd contrast
to the new and shining brass bedstead, and the new suite of birch
furniture that he had bought for her, the two styles seeming to nod
to each other across three centuries upon the shaking floor.
"Soo!" he said (this being the way in which he pronounced her name).
She was not in the bed, though she had apparently been there--the
clothes on her side being flung back. Thinking she might have
forgotten some kitchen detail and gone downstairs for a moment to
see to it, he pulled off his coat and idled quietly enough for a
few minutes, when, finding she did not come, he went out upon the
landing, candle in hand, and said again "Soo!"
"Yes!" came back to him in her voice, from the distant kitchen
quarter.
"What are you doing down there at midnight--tiring yourself out for
nothing!"
"I am not sleepy; I am reading; and there is a larger fire here."
He went to bed. Some time in the night he awoke. She was not there,
even now. Lighting a candle he hastily stepped out upon the landing,
and again called her name.
She answered "Yes!" as before, but the tones were small and confined,
and whence they came he could not at first understand. Under the
staircase was a large clothes-closet, without a window; they seemed
to come from it. The door was shut, but there was no lock or other
fastening. Phillotson, alarmed, went towards it, wondering if she
had suddenly become deranged.