The Unsettled Dust Read Online Free PDF Page B

off as a mushroom farm or school of art.
    Up the dark staircase I went on my fourth evening (as I see it was from my Diary), while Elizabeth trailed back across the almost empty hall to the kitchen at the rear. I walked leftwards from the landing along the dark passage to my room.
    Then something absolutely unexpected took place. I opened the door and I saw the back of a man standing before one of the two windows; the window not fronted by the big dressing table. He was looking out into the dark park: dark, but not yet completely dark, and, of course, less dark than the interior of the house. I could see perhaps a little more than just his black silhouette.
    I know exactly what happened next, because I wrote it down the next morning. First, I stood there for a quite perceptible time, in plain shock and uncertainty. The man must have heard me approaching and opening the door, but he made no move. I then switched on the three poor lights, though far from sure what I ought to do next. The man did then turn and I got a quite good view of him. He was taller than I was, young and handsome, with a prominent nose and a quantity of dark hair which curled effectively on his brow. This description makes his aspect sound like that of an artist, but in fact, it was more like that of an athlete, and perhaps most of all like that of a soldier. I cite these misleading popular types only to give some idea of the impression he left upon me during the seconds I looked at him. Undoubtedly, he was very well dressed in a conventional, unostentatious way. He might have been a visitor to the house, who, in the dusk, had strayed into the wrong room. What he next did, however, made an idea of that kind unlikely (though not impossible): he simply walked with a quick step towards me as I stood by the door, looked straight into my eyes (of that, naturally, I am certain), and then, without a word, strode past me into the passage outside. I do not think I was more than normally upset (I noted down the next morning that I was not), but, none the less, I could find nothing to say, even though silence made me look a fool. He departed down the passage and vanished in the darkness. I made no note of how far I could hear his steps if at all. I imagine that waiting for him to speak took all my attention. And now, of course, I have no recollection.
    From every point of view, I should, I suppose, have followed him, but instead I shut the door, and walked over to the window where he had been standing. The floor boards were thick with dust, but there was no mark of his feet. It was when I saw this that real fear began to rise in me: the explanation that the dust had already covered the marks, though not in its own way impossible, to judge by what I had noticed elsewhere in the house, was by now hardly less unsettling than the notion of there being something queer about the man himself.
    I went through my drawers and I accounted for all objects that I could remember I had left lying about. Nothing seemed missing. I was almost sorry.
    I returned to the window and looked out into the darkening park. And then something really frightening took place. It was now dark enough for my ill-lighted room to reflect itself in the glass and appear in even more ill-lighted reproduction outside; but not dark enough for the room to be all I could see beyond the window. Through the reflection of the back wall of the room, the wall behind me as I stood, I could still see the shadows of trees and the whiteness of the intersecting drives. The outline of the huntsman fountain was clear enough quite to catch my attention. As I stared at it, I saw, or thought I saw, the figure of the man I had seen, standing on the drive a short distance to my left of it. There really was not enough light to distinguish one person from another, and certainly not at anything like that distance; but I had no doubt that this figure was he. Moreover, I had never before looked from my window and seen anyone on the