The wooden stair led him into a flagged passage which smelt strongly
of fungus. He went down this as far as it would go, found a flight of
stone steps with a swing door a-top, pushed up here, and burst into a
vast hall. It was waste and empty, echoing like a vault, crying
desolation with all its tongues. There seemed to have been wild work;
benches, tables, tressles, chairs, torn up, dismembered and scattered
abroad. There were the ashes of a fire in the midst, some broken
weapons and head-pieces, and many dark patches which looked uncommonly
like blood. Prosper made what haste he could out of this haunted
place; the rats scuttled and squeaked as he traversed it from end to
end.
Beyond its great folding doors he found another corridor hung with the
ribbons of arras; in the midst of it a broad stone staircase. Up he
went three steps at a time, and stood in the counter-part of the lower
passage--a corridor equally flagged, equally gloomy, and smelling
equally of damp and death. There were, so far as he could see, open
doors on either side which stretched for what seemed an interminable
distance. But at the far end was the light he was after; he cared
little how many empty chambers there might be so that there was one
tenanted. He started off accordingly in pursuit of the light. The
passage ran the whole length of the house; the empty doors as he
passed them gave on to bare walls and broken windows. Over many of
them hung thick curtains of cobwebs and dust; white fungus cropped in
the cracks; the rats seemed everywhere. Now and then he caught sight
of a shredded arras on the walls; in one room a disordered bed; on the
floor of another a woman's glove. Never a sight of life but rats, and
never a sound but his own steps, the shrieking of the wind, the rattle
of crazy windows.
The door of the lighted chamber was set open. Prosper stood on the
threshold and looked in.
It was a narrow dusty place heaped with books on tables, chairs, and
floor. The lamp which had beaconed him from over the water was of
brass, and hung from the ceiling by a chain. At the window end sat a
young man with long yellow hair, which was streaked over his bowed
back; he was reading in a Hebrew book. The book was on a reading-
stand, and the young man kept his place in it with his thin finger. He
seemed short-sighted to judge by the space betwixt his nose and his
book. By his side on a little lacquered table was a deepish bowl of
dull red porphyry filled with water. Every now and again the young
man, having secured his place firmly with his finger, would gaze into
the bowl through a little crystal mace which he kept in his other
hand. Then he would fetch a deep sigh and return to his book.