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Updated: May 4, 2025
It was about half-past two in the morning, and a cold raw wind was whistling through the cordage and flinging the steamer's smoke down upon the decks and upon the water like a great veil of crêpe. A sickly half-light was spread out between the sea and the heavens.
The servant rubbed his eyes sleepily, then gazed in astonishment at the brilliant figure standing in the half-light beside his bed. What was the Lord Stanislaus doing, dressed in this unusual finery, at such an unearthly hour! "Listen," said Stanislaus, "I am going out for the day. I have received an invitation which I must accept. I am going now.
A few inquisitive steps into one of these trails revealed, at a little distance, a pool of water. Its basin was of mossy rock, and its edges were choked with ferns. A slender waterfall fed it, and through the cloistered half-light of the forest interior fell a few fervid dashes of sunlight like gold leaf on the somber tones of greenery.
Down there things may be prowling that scarce ever peep out to consciousness except in the grey half-light of sleepless nights, passions that flash out for an instant in an angry glance and are seen no more, starved victims and beautiful dreams bricked up to die. For the most of us there is no jail delivery of those inner depths, and the life above goes on to its honourable end.
In presence of all this ceremonial majesty this huge, empty pomp, which was all Body he recalled with a pang the emaciate architecture and statuary of the middle ages, which were all Soul. He vainly sought for some poor, kneeling woman, some creature swayed by faith or suffering, yielding in a modest half-light to thoughts of the unknown, and with closed lips holding communion with the invisible.
We had crept down to breakfast, Jaquetta and I, feeling very dreary in the half-light, and as if desolation had suddenly come on us; and when we heard her fly drive up to the door, Jaquetta cried out almost angrily, "Torwood, how could you!" and we would have run away, but he said, "Stay, dear girls; it is better to have it over."
In the half-light he saw her sorrowful face so near his. He murmured: "The day." She made no movement. He said: "So be it. What does it matter?" She opened her eyes and left him with an expression of utter weariness. She sat for a moment looking down at the floor. In a dull, colorless voice she said: "I thought of killing him last night." He gave a start of terror: "Anna!" he said.
He tried instead to divert his thoughts to the stormy strains which rolled in through the vibrating brickwork, and to picture to himself the large, capable figure of Miss Madden seated in the half-light at the organ-board, swaying to and fro in a splendid ecstasy of power as she evoked at will this superb and ordered uproar. But the doctor broke insistently in upon his musings.
"Oh! as it happens, he's apparently playing the game." In the half-light, Smith stared at me significantly "Which makes it all the more important," he concluded, "that we should not rely upon his aid!" Those grim words were prophetic. Once, a taxi-cab labored hideously up the steep gradient of the avenue ... It was gone. The lights at the upper windows above us became extinguished.
The light of a broad window under the ceiling fell from above on the heads and shoulders of the three men, and they were fiercely distinct in the half-light of the big court-room where the audience seemed composed of staring shadows. They wanted facts. Facts! They demanded facts from him, as if facts could explain anything!
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