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Updated: May 26, 2025
The room was lighted by the glow from the fire and by a guttering candle on a chair beside the bed. She saw that the room was empty, save for the sleeping girl. Closing the door softly and locking it again, she turned and groped her way across to the kitchen door, beneath which a narrow line of light was visible.
Five minutes later I heard steps passing down the passage, and, without striking a light, I opened my door and peeped out, thinking that some one was taken unwell. There was Lord Avon walking towards me. In one hand he held a guttering candle and in the other a brown bag, which chinked as he moved. His face was all drawn and distorted so much so that my question was frozen upon my lips.
It had been a night of horror; a night without sleep; a night, after the guttering candle had gone out, when the blackness of the garret possessed added terrors created by an imagination which ran riot, and which she could not control. She could have fled from it, screaming in panic-stricken hysteria but there had been no other place as safe as that was. Safe!
"One tallow stain, or even two, might come by chance; but when I see no less than five, I think that there can be little doubt that the individual must be brought into frequent contact with burning tallow walks upstairs at night probably with his hat in one hand and a guttering candle in the other. Anyhow, he never got tallow-stains from a gas-jet. Are you satisfied?"
A bit of stalk floating on his tea presages an unlooked-for visitor, and the guttering of a candle is a sign of impending death. All this he believes firmly, and acts upon, although he would candidly acknowledge his inability to explain the principle supposed to underlie the sequence between the omen and its fulfilment.
They did not know the infuriated reveries in snow-swept hovels, when the guttering dip burns low, the passionate need which then comes upon one to wreak justice, to revolt, as from a sense of duty, in order that one may save wife and children from consumption, in order that they also may have a warm nest where life shall be a possibility!
"Bill and Jack's holdin' her at the crossin'." "Let 'em hold on a minit longer," said Dick. He turned and re-entered the house softly. By the light of the guttering candle and dying fire he saw that the door of the little room was open. He stepped toward it on tiptoe and looked in.
His face, as for an instant he turned aside to me, betrayed a frozen rage; for Ferry and Charlotte tarried just at our backs, she seated on the "horse-block" and he leaning against it. A stir of air brought by the rising moon had blown out their light. Gholson left me, and Camille waited at my side while I tried to read by the flare of her guttering candle.
She went back into the sitting-room, and Isabel followed. The candle was guttering, and aunt Mary Ellen pushed it toward her. "I don't know where the snuffers are," she said. "Lamp smoke?" Isabel did not answer, but she lighted the lamp. She had never seen her aunt so full of decision, so charged with an unfamiliar power. She felt as if strange things were about to happen.
Nothing was to be heard except the occasional crack of the sniper's shot, the dripping of the rain, and the low murmur of voices from the outer cave. In the narrow space beside me lay my equipment; revolver, and a sodden packet of cigarettes. Everything damp, cold and dark; candle-end guttering.
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