His sensitiveness--that peculiar, apprehensive, detective faculty of his--felt in a moment the unspoken complaint--the scarce-thought reproach. He asked quietly if I was offended. I shook my head as implying a negative.
"Permit me, then, to speak a little seriously to you before you go. You are in a highly nervous state. I feel sure from what is apparent in your look and manner, however well controlled, that whilst alone this evening in that dismal, perishing sepulchral garret--that dungeon under the leads, smelling of damp and mould, rank with phthisis and catarrh: a place you never ought to enter--that you saw, or thought you saw, some appearance peculiarly calculated to impress the imagination. I know that you are not, nor ever were, subject to material terrors, fears of robbers, &c.--I am not so sure that a visitation, bearing a spectral character, would not shake your very mind. Be calm now. This is all a matter of the nerves, I see: but just specify the vision."
"You will tell nobody?"
"Nobody--most certainly. You may trust me as implicitly as you did Père Silas. Indeed, the doctor is perhaps the safer confessor of the two, though he has not grey hair."
"You will not laugh?"
"Perhaps I may, to do you good: but not in scorn. Lucy, I feel as a friend towards you, though your timid nature is slow to trust."
He now looked like a friend: that indescribable smile and sparkle were gone; those formidable arched curves of lip, nostril, eyebrow, were depressed; repose marked his attitude--attention sobered his aspect. Won to confidence, I told him exactly what I had seen: ere now I had narrated to him the legend of the house--whiling away with that narrative an hour of a certain mild October afternoon, when be and I rode through Bois l'Etang.
He sat and thought, and while he thought, we heard them all coming down-stairs.
"Are they going to interrupt?" said he, glancing at the door with an annoyed expression.
"They will not come here," I answered; for we were in the little salon where Madame never sat in the evening, and where it was by mere chance that heat was still lingering in the stove. They passed the door and went on to the salle-à-manger.
"Now," he pursued, "they will talk about thieves, burglars, and so on: let them do so--mind you say nothing, and keep your resolution of describing your nun to nobody. She may appear to you again: don't start."
"You think then," I said, with secret horror, "she came out of my brain, and is now gone in there, and may glide out again at an hour and a day when I look not for her?"