Beggar's Choice by Wentworth Patricia

Author:Wentworth, Patricia [Wentworth, Patricia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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XXII

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Mr. Bobby Markham opened the door of the hut on Linwood Edge. A complete and dense blackness confronted him.

The battery of his electric torch had given out, and at eleven o'clock on a moonless, starless night it had been dark enough coming here through the woods, but even to eyes grown accustomed to this darkness the inside of the hut presented an opaque and discouraging gloom.

Bobby Markham didn't really like the dark very much. He found it afflicting to be asked to meet Anna at midnight in a lonely wood, and it may be said at once that for no other human being would he have come. He had hoped that she would have been here already. Comforting thoughts of finding the hut pleasantly lit up had sustained him. He opened the door, and the place was as black as the pit.

Yet when he had advanced a step, and was wishing, not for the first time, that he had a box of matches on him, he thought that he heard something move. He stood still instantly, quite still, listening. Something ever so slightly stirred in the black silence. A most unpleasant damp, pringling feeling spread rapidly from the top of his head to the tips of his fingers and toes. He grasped the defunct torch. But, in his inmost mind, the thing that he was afraid of was not a thing that could be bashed on the head or struck down by a damp, heavy fist. The very ancient menace of the terror that walks in darkness stirred, here, close at his side.

He stiffened, tried to draw breath, and felt the clammy air of the place stick in his throat. With paralyzing suddenness a round disk of brilliant light broke the dark, A beam sprang from it and just touched his face and his blinded, staring eyes. Then the torch dropped, and Anna's voice said,

"You're late."

He got hold of the table and stood there shaking. How beastly--how beastly! His heart was thudding. He felt for the chair and sat down.

Anna switched off the torch.

"We can talk in the dark," she said.

"Where's the lantern?"--he managed to say that.

"It's here. But we don't want it--there's always a chance of its attracting attention."

He persisted.

"Light it. I can't talk in the dark."

He heard the spurt of a match and saw, with a most extraordinary relief, the yellow tongue of flame, the match, the outline of the lantern with the white guttered candle inside it. The flame caught the wick, and he could see the four walls of the hut, and Anna drawing back her hand and blowing out the match. She was bare-headed, with long shining diamond earrings that made rainbows of the light, and a black Chinese shawl wrapping her from shoulder to ankle. It was worked all over with small silken flowers bright as jewels. Her bare arm emerged from the long black fringe that edged it.

In the light, Bobby was himself again at once!--heavily good-natured and very much Anna Lang's adoring slave.

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