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What could it be? What could anyone be doing in the church at this hour of night? He was in the north porch now, and then he knew what it was. It was a low note of the organ a pedal-note; he was almost sure it was that very pedal-point which the organist had explained to him with such pride.
He must have fallen with much violence, and the pedal-note had made a bad wound, such as would be produced by a blunt instrument. The inquest was nearly finished when, without any warning, Westray found himself, as by intuition, asking: "The wound was such a one, you mean, as might have been produced by the blow of a hammer?"
It was strange, there was no sound of music; there was no one playing; there was only the intolerably monotonous booming of a single pedal-note, with an occasional muffled thud when the water-engine turned spasmodically to replenish the emptying bellows. "Sharnall!" he shouted "Sharnall, what are you doing? Don't you know how late it is?"
It was the white face of a man turned up towards the vaulting; he had stumbled over the body of Mr Sharnall, who lay on the floor with the back of his head on the pedal-note. Westray had bent low down, and he looked full in the eyes of the organist, but they were fixed and glazing.
What a strange accident it was, what a strange thing that Sharnall should have been haunted by that wandering fancy of a man following him with a hammer, and then have been found in this very loft, with the desperate wound on him that the pedal-note had dealt! How much had happened his own proposal to Anastasia, his refusal, and now that event for which the bells were ringing!
This door also was open, and he felt sure now that Mr Sharnall was not in the organ-loft at all, for had he been he would certainly have locked himself in. The pedal-note must be merely ciphering, or something, perhaps a book, might have fallen upon it, and was holding it down. He need not go up to the loft now; he would not go up.
"Oh, I am quite sure," the doctor responded. "Yes" and he hesitated for the fraction of a second "oh yes, there is no doubt such a wound could be caused by a fall." "I merely wish to point out," said Westray, "that the pedal-note on which he fell is to a certain extent a yielding substance; it would yield, you must remember, at the first impact."
The lateness of the hour, the isolation from all things living, the spectral moonlight which made the darkness darker this combination of utter silence, with the distressing vibration of the pedal-note, filled him with something akin to panic.
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