"You see, we are rather lonely here," said the landlord."We never have had any attempts made to break in yet, but it's always as well to be on the safe side.When nobody is sleeping here, Iam the only man in the house.My wife and daughter are timid, and the servant-girl takes after her missuses.Another glass of ale before you turn in? No! Well, how such a sober man as you comes to be out of place is more than I can make out, for one.Here's where you're to sleep.You're our only lodger to-night, and Ithink you'll say my missus has done her best to make you comfortable.You're quite sure you won't have another glass of ale? Very well.Good-night."It was half-past eleven by the clock in the passage as they went upstairs to the bedroom, the window of which looked on to the wood at the back of the house.
Isaac locked the door, set his candle on the chest of drawers, and wearily got ready for bed.
The bleak autumn wind was still blowing, and the solemn, monotonous, surging moan of it in the wood was dreary and awful to hear through the night-silence.Isaac felt strangely wakeful.
He resolved, as he lay down in bed, to keep the candle alight until he began to grow sleepy, for there was something unendurably depressing in the bare idea of lying awake in the darkness, listening to the dismal, ceaseless moaning of the wind in the wood.
Sleep stole on him before he was aware of it.His eyes closed, and he fell off insensibly to rest without having so much as thought of extinguishing the candle.
The first sensation of which he was conscious after sinking into slumber was a strange shivering that ran through him suddenly from head to foot, and a dreadful sinking pain at the heart, such as he had never felt before.The shivering only disturbed his slumbers; the pain woke him instantly.In one moment he passed from a state of sleep to a state of wakefulness--his eyes wide open--his mental perceptions cleared on a sudden, as if by a miracle.
The candle had burned down nearly to the last morsel of tallow, but the top of the unsnuffed wick had just fallen off, and the light in the little room was, for the moment, fair and full.
Between the foot of his bed and the closed door there stood a woman with a knife in her hand, looking at him.
He was stricken speechless with terror, but he did not lose the preternatural clearness of his faculties, and he never took his eyes off the woman.She said not a word as they stared each other in the face, but she began to move slowly toward the left-hand side of the bed.
His eyes followed her.She was a fair, fine woman, with yellowish flaxen hair and light gray eyes, with a droop in the left eyelid.
He noticed those things and fixed them on his mind before she was round at the side of the bed.Speechless, with no expression in her face, with no noise following her footfall, she came closer and closer--stopped--and slowly raised the knife.He laid his right arm over his throat to save it; but, as he saw the knife coming down, threw his hand across the bed to the right side, and jerked his body over that way just as the knife descended on the mattress within an inch of his shoulder.
His eyes fixed on her arm and hand as she slowly drew her knife out of the bed: a white, well-shaped arm, with a pretty down lying lightly over the fair skin--a delicate lady's hand, with the crowning beauty of a pink flush under and round the finger-nails.
She drew the knife out, and passed back again slowly to the foot of the bed; stopped there for a moment looking at him; then came on--still speechless, still with no expression on the blank, beautiful face, still with no sound following the stealthy footfalls--came on to the right side of the bed, where he now lay.
As she approached, she raised the knife again, and he drew himself away to the left side.She struck, as before, right into the mattress, with a deliberate, perpendicularly downward action of the arm.This time his eyes wandered from her to the knife.It was like the large cla sp-knives which he had often seen laboring men use to cut their bread and bacon with.Her delicate little fingers did not conceal more than two-thirds of the handle: he noticed that it was made of buck-horn, clean and shining as the blade was, and looking like new.
