Bealby; A Holiday - Герберт Уэллс

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      He went blundering toward it and then stopped appalled. From the other side of this wooden wall to the right of him had come a voice.

      “Come in!” said the voice. A rich masculine voice that seemed scarcely two yards away.

      Bealby became rigid. Then after a long interval he moved—as softly as he could.

      The voice soliloquized.

      Bealby listened intently, and then when all was still again crept forward two paces more towards the gleam. It was a peephole.

      The unseen speaker was walking about. Bealby listened, and the sound of his beating heart mingled with the pad, pad, of slippered footsteps. Then with a brilliant effort his eye was at the chink. All was still again. For a time he was perplexed by what he saw, a large pink shining dome, against a deep greenish grey background. At the base of the dome was a kind of interrupted hedge, brown and leafless. …

      Then he realized that he was looking at the top of a head and two enormous eyebrows. The rest was hidden. …

      Nature surprised Bealby into a penetrating sniff.

      “Now,” said the occupant of the room, and suddenly he was standing up—Bealby saw a long hairy neck sticking out of a dressing-gown—and walking to the side of the room. “I won’t stand it,” said the great voice, “I won’t stand it. Ape’s foolery!”

      Then the Lord Chancellor began rapping at the panelling about his apartment.

      “Hollow! It all sounds hollow.”

      Only after a long interval did he resume his writing. …

      All night long that rat behind the wainscot troubled the Lord Chancellor. Whenever he spoke, whenever he moved about, it was still; whenever he composed himself to write it began to rustle and blunder. Again and again it sniffed—an annoying kind of sniff. At last the Lord Chancellor gave up his philosophical relaxation and went to bed, turned out the lights and attempted sleep, but this only intensified his sense of an uneasy, sniffing presence close to him. When the light was out it seemed to him that this Thing, whatever it was, instantly came into the room and set the floor creaking and snapping. A Thing perpetually attempting something and perpetually thwarted. …

      The Lord Chancellor did not sleep a wink. The first feeble infiltration of day found him sitting up in bed, wearily wrathful. … And now surely someone was going along the passage outside!

      A great desire to hurt somebody very much seized upon the Lord Chancellor. Perhaps he might hurt that dismal farceur upon the landing! No doubt it was Douglas sneaking back to his own room after the night’s efforts.

      The Lord Chancellor slipped on his dressing-gown of purple silk. Very softly indeed did he open his bedroom door and very warily peep out. He heard the soft pad of feet upon the staircase.

      He crept across the broad passage to the beautiful old balustrading. Down below he saw Mergleson—Mergleson again!—in a shameful deshabille—going like a snake, like a slinking cat, like an assassin, into the door of the study. Rage filled the great man’s soul. Gathering up the skirts of his dressing-gown he started in a swift yet noiseless pursuit.

      He followed Mergleson through the little parlour and into the dining-room, and then he saw it all! There was a panel open, and Mergleson very cautiously going in. Of course! They had got at him through the priest hole. They had been playing on his nerves. All night they had been doing it—no doubt in relays. The whole house was in this conspiracy.

      With his eyebrows spread like the wings of a fighting cock the Lord Chancellor in five vast noiseless strides had crossed the intervening space and gripped the butler by his collarless shirt as he was disappearing. It was like a hawk striking a sparrow. Mergleson felt himself clutched, glanced over his shoulder and, seeing that fierce familiar face again close to his own, pitiless, vindictive, lost all sense of human dignity and yelled like a lost soul. …

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      Sir Peter Laxton was awakened from an uneasy sleep by the opening of the dressing-room door that connected his room with his wife’s.

      He sat up astonished and stared at her white face, its pallor exaggerated by the cold light of dawn.

      “Peter,” she said, “I’m sure there’s something more going on.”

      “Something more going on?”

      “Something—shouting and swearing.”

      “You don’t mean—?”

      She nodded. “The Lord Chancellor,” she said, in an awe-stricken whisper. “He’s at it again. Downstairs in the dining-room.”

      Sir Peter seemed disposed at first to receive this quite passively. Then he flashed into extravagant wrath. “I’m damned,” he cried, jumping violently out of bed, “if I’m going to stand this! Not if he was a hundred Lord Chancellors! He’s turning the place into a bally lunatic asylum. Once—one might excuse. But to start in again. … What’s that?”

      They both stood still listening. Faintly yet quite distinctly came the agonized cry of some imperfectly educated person—“ ’Elp!”

      “Here! Where’s my trousers?” cried Sir Peter. “He’s murdering Mergleson. There isn’t a moment to lose.”

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      Until Sir Peter returned Lady Laxton sat quite still just as he had left her on his bed, aghast.

      She could not even pray.

      The sun had still to rise; the room was full of that cold weak inky light, light without warmth, knowledge without faith, existence without courage, that creeps in before the day. She waited. … In such a mood women have waited for massacre. …

      Downstairs a raucous shouting. …

      She thought of her happy childhood upon the Yorkshire wolds, before the idea of week-end parties had entered her mind. The heather. The little birds. Kind things. A tear ran down her cheek. …

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      Then Sir Peter stood before her again, alive still, but breathless and greatly ruffled.

      She put her hands to her heart. She would be brave.

      “Yes,” she said. “Tell me.”

      “He’s as mad as a hatter,” said Sir Peter.

      She nodded for more. She knew that.

      “Has he—killed anyone?” she whispered.

      “He looked uncommonly like trying,” said Sir Peter.

      She nodded, her lips tightly compressed.

      “Says Douglas will either have to leave the house or he does.”

      “But—Douglas!”

      “I know, but he won’t hear a word.”

      “But why Douglas?”

      “I tell you he’s as mad as a hatter. Got persecution mania. People tapping and bells ringing under his pillow all night—that sort of idea. … And furious. I tell you—he frightened me. He was awful. He’s given Mergleson a black eye. Hit him, you know. With his fist. Caught him in the passage to the priest hole—how they got there I don’t know—and went for him like a madman.”

      “But what

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