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Updated: May 13, 2025
"Give us dinner," he said to Pitting. As the butler retired, Guildea shut the door rather cautiously. Father Murchison had never before seen him look so disturbed. "You're worried, Guildea," the Father said. "Seriously worried." "Yes, I am. This business is beginning to tell on me a good deal." "Your belief in the presence of something here continues then?" "Oh, dear, yes.
In saying the last words the Professor relapsed into his former tone of dry chaff. The Father could not quite make up his mind whether Guildea was feeling unusually grave or unusually gay. As the two men drew near to Hyde Park Place their conversation died away and they walked forward silently in the gathering darkness. "Here we are!" said Guildea at last.
His long toes, which looked as if they were covered with crocodile skin, clung to the bar. His round and blinking eyes were filmy, like old eyes. Guildea stared at the bird very hard, and then clucked with his tongue against his teeth. Napoleon shook himself, lifted one foot, extended his toes, sidled along the perch to the bars nearest to the Professor and thrust his head against them.
As the light reached him, he moved, ruffled the feathers about his neck, blinked his eyes, and began slowly to sidle to and fro, thrusting his head forward and drawing it back with an air of complacent, though rather unmeaning, energy. Guildea stood by the cage, looking at him closely, and indeed with an attention that was so intense as to be remarkable, almost unnatural.
"Then you consider yourself haunted?" said Father Murchison. He, too, was much moved and disturbed, although he was not conscious of the presence of anything near them in the room. "I have never believed in any nonsense of that kind, as you know," Guildea answered. "I simply state a fact which I cannot understand, and which is beginning to be very painful to me. There is something here.
But whereas most so-called hauntings have been described to me as inimical, what I am conscious of is that I am admired, loved, desired. This is distinctly horrible to me, Murchison, distinctly horrible." Father Murchison suddenly remembered the first evening he had spent with Guildea, and the latter's expression almost of disgust, at the idea of receiving warm affection from anyone.
"The worst of it is," continued Guildea, with a high, nervous accent, "that there's no brain with it, none at all only the cunning of idiotcy." The Father started at this exact expression of his own conviction by another. "Why d'you start like that?" asked Guildea, with a quick suspicion which showed the unnatural condition of his nerves. "Well, the very same idea had occurred to me." "What?"
Make haste ah, go!" The Father obeyed to soothe him, hurried to the door and opened it wide. Then he glanced back at Guildea. He was standing up, bent forward. His eyes were glaring with eager expectation, and, as the Father turned, he made a furious gesture towards the passage with his thin hands. The Father hastened out and down the stairs.
Some of the younger ones talked loudly or whistled shrilly as they walked. "Until the evening," murmured Father Murchison to himself. "What?" asked Guildea. "I was only quoting the last words of the text, which seems written upon life, especially upon the life of pleasure: 'Man goeth forth to his work, and to his labour." "Ah, those fellows are not half bad fellows to have in an audience.
His friend did not interrupt him, but quietly lit a pipe and began to smoke reflectively. The eyes of Guildea were fixed upon the fire. The Father glanced about the room, at the walls of soberly bound books, at the crowded writing-table, at the windows, before which hung heavy, dark-blue curtains of old brocade, at the cage, which stood between them. A green baize covering was thrown over it.
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