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Hilary Maltby and Stephen Braxton
by
`I wondered that I wasn’t tired physically. There my grand new silk pyjamas were, yet I felt no desire to go to bed…none while it was still possible for me to go. The little writing-table at the foot of my bed seemed to invite me. I had brought with me in my portmanteau a sheaf of letters, letters that I had purposely left unanswered in order that I might answer them on KEEB HALL note-paper. These the footman had neatly laid beside the blotting-pad on that little writing-table at the foot of the bed. I regretted that the notepaper stacked there had no ducal coronet on it. What matter? The address sufficed. If I hadn’t yet made a good impression on the people who were staying here, I could at any rate make one on the people who weren’t. I sat down. I set to work. I wrote a prodigious number of fluent and graceful notes.
`Some of these were to strangers who wanted my autograph. I was always delighted to send my autograph, and never perfunctory in the manner of sending it…. “Dear Madam,” I remember writing to somebody that night, “were it not that you make your request for it so charmingly, I should hesitate to send you that which rarity alone can render valuable.–Yours truly, Hilary Maltby.” I remember reading this over and wondering whether the word “render” looked rather commercial. It was in the act of wondering thus that I raised my eyes from the note-paper and saw, through the bars of the brass bedstead, the naked sole of a large human foot–saw beyond it the calf of a great leg; a nightshirt; and the face of Stephen Braxton. I did not move.
`I thought of making a dash for the door, dashing out into the corridor, shouting at the top of my voice for help. I sat quite still.
`What kept me to my chair was the fear that if I tried to reach the door Braxton would spring off the bed to intercept me. If I sat quite still perhaps he wouldn’t move. I felt that if he moved I should collapse utterly.
`I watched him, and he watched me. He lay there with his body half- raised, one elbow propped on the pillow, his jaw sunk on his breast; and from under his black brows he watched me steadily.
`No question of mere nerves now. That hope was gone. No mere optical delusion, this abiding presence. Here Braxton was. He and I were together in the bright, silent room. How long would he be content to watch me?
`Eleven nights ago he had given me one horrible look. It was this look that I had to meet, in infinite prolongation, now, not daring to shift my eyes. He lay as motionless as I sat. I did not hear him breathing, but I knew, by the rise and fall of his chest under his nightshirt, that he was breathing heavily. Suddenly I started to my feet. For he had moved. He had raised one hand slowly. He was stroking his chin. And as he did so, and as he watched me, his mouth gradually slackened to a grin. It was worse, it was more malign, this grin, than the scowl that remained with it; and its immediate effect on me was an impulse that was as hard to resist as it was hateful. The window was open. It was nearer to me than the door. I could have reached it in time….
`Well, I live to tell the tale. I stood my ground. And there dawned on me now a new fact in regard to my companion. I had all the while been conscious of something abnormal in his attitude–a lack of ease in his gross possessiveness. I saw now the reason for this effect. The pillow on which his elbow rested was still uniformly puffed and convex; like a pillow untouched. His elbow rested but on the very surface of it, not changing the shape of it at all. His body made not the least furrow along the bed…. He had no weight.