Under Lock and Key: A Story. Volume 1 (of 3)Speight, T. W. (Thomas Wilkinson)
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Under Lock and Key: A Story. Volume 1 (of 3)
Speight, T. W. (Thomas Wilkinson)
Detective and mystery stories; English fiction -- 19th century
Having my attention thus concentrated as it were upon this one room,
and lying awake so many hours when I ought to have been asleep, my
suspicions gradually merged into certainty that it was visited every
midnight by some one who came and went so lightly and quietly that
only by intently listening could I distinguish the exact moment of
their passing my door. Who was this visitor that came and went so
mysteriously? To discover this, without being myself discovered, was a
matter that required both tact and courage, but it was one on which I
was almost as much a monomaniac as a child well can be. To have opened
my door when the landing was perfectly dark would have been to see
nothing. To have opened the door with a candle in my hand would have
been to betray myself. I must wait for a moonlight night, which would
light up the landing sufficiently for my purpose. I waited. My
opportunity came. With my doorway in deep shadow, my door just
sufficiently open for me to peer through, and with the staircase
lighted up by the rays of the moon, I saw and recognised the
mysterious midnight visitor to the room over mine. I saw and
recognised Sister Agnes.
CHAPTER VII.
EXIT JANET HOLME.
The effect upon me of the discovery that Sister Agnes was the midnight
visitor of the room over mine was at once to stifle that brood of
morbid fancies with which of late both room and visitor had become
associated in my mind. I loved her so thoroughly, she was to me so
complete an embodiment of all that was noble and beautiful in
womanhood, that however unsatisfying to my curiosity such visits might
be, I could not doubt that she must have excellent reasons for making
them. One thing was quite evident, that since she herself had said
nothing respecting the room and her visits to it, it was impossible
for me to question her on the matter. Such being the case, I felt that
it would be a poor return for all her goodness to me to question Dance
or any other person respecting what she herself wished to keep
concealed. Besides, it was doubtful whether Dance would tell me
anything, even if I were to ask her. She had warned me a few hours
after my arrival at Dupley Walls that there were many things under
that roof respecting which I must seek no explanation; and with no one
of the other domestics was I in any way intimate.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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