water through the sluices formed immediately into long, fantastic
stalactites of clear ice. Rainham found it difficult to believe, at
times, that the bustle of the wharves, the roar of maritime London,
still went on at his elbows, the deserted yard cast such a panoply
of silence round him. It was as though he had fallen suddenly from
the midst of men into some wholly abandoned region, a land of
perpetual snows. It symbolized well for him the fantastic separation
which he had suffered from the rest of the world; so that, but for
the painter Oswyn, who was a constant visitor, and had, indeed,
since the departure of the Bullens, a room set apart for him in the
house, he might have been already dead and buried, and his old life
would not have seemed more remote. And if he found the atmosphere of
Blackpool, more often than not, to be of soothing quality, or at
least a harmonious setting to the long and aimless course of
introspection on which he had embarked, there were also times when
it had a certain terror for him.

It came upon him in the evening, as a rule, when Margot had been
carried away to bed by the hard-featured old woman who had succeeded
Mrs. Bullen in the superintendence of his household; for the child,
with her sweet, shrill voice and her infantile chatter, had come to
seem to him far more even than Oswyn, about whom there would always
lurk something shadowy and unreal, a last link with the living; when
the tide was nearly out, so that the stillness was not even broken
by the long, lugubrious syren of a passing steamer, his isolation
was borne in upon him with something of the sting of sharp, physical
pain.

The dark old room, with its mildewing wainscot, became full of
ghosts; and he could fancy that the spirits of his ancestors were
returned from the other side of Styx to finger the pages of bygone
ledgers, and to mock from between the shadows of his incongruous
bookshelves, at their degenerate descendant. And these did but give
place, amid strange creaking and contortions of the decaying walls,
to spectres more intimate, whose reprobation moved him more: the
faces of many persons whom he had known forming themselves, with
extraordinary vividness, out of the darkness, and in the red embers
of the fire, and each adding its item of particular scorn to the
round accusation of futility brought by the rest. They were part of
his introspection, all those--he was not sick enough to hold them
real--but neverthele