I had plenty of anguish after that extraordinary moment,
but I had, thank God, no terror. And he knew I had not--I found
myself at the end of an instant magnificently aware of this.
I felt, in a fierce rigor of confidence, that if I stood
my ground a minute I should cease--for the time, at least--
to have him to reckon with; and during the minute, accordingly,
the thing was as human and hideous as a real interview:
hideous just because it WAS human, as human as to have
met alone, in the small hours, in a sleeping house, some enemy,
some adventurer, some criminal. It was the dead silence of our
long gaze at such close quarters that gave the whole horror,
huge as it was, its only note of the unnatural. If I had met
a murderer in such a place and at such an hour, we still at
least would have spoken. Something would have passed, in life,
between us; if nothing had passed, one of us would have moved.
The moment was so prolonged that it would have taken but little
more to make me doubt if even _I_ were in life. I can't
express what followed it save by saying that the silence itself--
which was indeed in a manner an attestation of my strength--
became the element into which I saw the figure disappear;
in which I definitely saw it turn as I might have seen the low
wretch to which it had once belonged turn on receipt of an order,
and pass, with my eyes on the villainous back that no hunch
could have more disfigured, straight down the staircase
and into the darkness in which the next bend was lost.
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