Page:Following darkness (IA followingdarknes00reid).pdf/41

snub nose, and spreading them out in a derisive and very familiar grimace. I began to talk about the picture, about school, and about Miss McWaters. Then a cloud waved back from my brain; the portrait slid into its place, the imp disappeared, and everything was once more as it should be. But I felt a burning thirst, and when Mrs. Carroll opened the door of a large, bright, sunny room, I was glato fling myself down on the bed. Almost immediately I was seized by a deadly sickness. I managed to get off the bed in time to avoid making a mess, but the vomiting returned again and again, till I collapsed into a state of exhaustion. Heavy clouds waved across my brain, obscuring my thoughts, and again clearing, leaving consciousness to flicker up, like the flame in a dying lamp, so that I knew I had been undressed and was safe in bed. And all the time I wanted to drink—to drink. . . . . More than one person was in the room with me; Mrs. Carroll was there, and old Doctor O'Brian. In the open doorway Miss Dick hovered. And then suddenly I was alone. I could hear a fire crackling in the grate, and it had grown darker. A lamp was burning on a table somewhere over beside the fireplace. I listened to the fire, and presently it seemed to me I could hear the lamp burning too. It burned with a soft low continuous sound that was like the note of a flute, and it occurred to me that everything in the world was only sound—the bed I was lying on, the shadows flickering across the ceiling, the dancing firelight—all were but notes of a tune. This appeared so strikingly obvious that I could not understand why I had never noticed it before. I tried to make out what the tune was, but it eluded me, flickering away from me like a butterfly. I turned round in my bed, for I had heard a slight noise at the door. All seemed now to have grown silent. I could not hear the lamp burning, nor even the fire. This silence was surely unusual, abnormal; it filled me with a vague disquietude. It grew deeper and deeper till I could