"NOTICE.--My immense imagination is at work. Visions of heroes unroll themselves before me. I reanimate in myself the spirits of the departed great. My brains are boiling in my head. Any persons who disturb me, under existing circumstances, will do it at the peril of their lives.--DEXTER."Mrs. Macallan looked around at me quietly with her sardonic smile.
"Do you still persist in wanting to be introduced to him?" she asked.
The mockery in the tone of the question roused my pride. Idetermined that I would not be the first to give way.
"Not if I am putting you in peril of your life, ma'am," Ianswered, pertly enough, pointing to the paper in her hand.
My mother-in-law returned to the hall table, and put the paper back on it without condescending to reply. She then led the way to an arched recess on our right hand, beyond which I dimly discerned a broad flight of oaken stairs.
"Follow me," said Mrs. Macallan, mounting the stairs in the dark.
"I know where to find him."
We groped our way up the stairs to the first landing. The next flight of steps, turning in the reverse direction, was faintly illuminated, like the hall below, by one oil-lamp, placed in some invisible position above us. Ascending the second flight of stairs and crossing a short corridor, we discovered the lamp, through the open door of a quaintly shaped circular room, burning on the mantel-piece. Its light illuminated a strip of thick tapestry, hanging loose from the ceiling to the floor, on the wall opposite to the door by which we had entered.
Mrs. Macallan drew aside the strip of tapestry, and, signing me to follow her, passed behind it.
"Listen!" she whispered.
Standing on the inner side of the tapestry, I found myself in a dark recess or passage, at the end of which a ray of light from the lamp showed me a closed door. I listened, and heard on the other side of the door a shouting voice, accompanied by an extraordinary rumbling and whistling sound, traveling backward and forward, as well as I could judge, over a great space. Now the rumbling and the whistling would reach their climax of loudness, and would overcome the resonant notes of the shouting voice. Then again those louder sounds gradually retreated into distance, and the shouting voice made itself heard as the more audible sound of the two. The door must have been of prodigious solidity. Listen as intently as I might, I failed to catch the articulate words (if any) which the voice was pronouncing, and Iwas equally at a loss to penetrate the cause which produced the rumbling and whistling sounds.
"What can possibly be going on," I whispered to Mrs. Macallan, "on the other side of that door?""Step softly," my mother-in-law answered, "and come and see."She arranged the tapestry behind us so as completely to shut out the light in the circular room. Then noiselessly turning the handle, she opened the heavy door.
We kept ourselves concealed in the shadow of the recess, and looked through the open doorway.