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to promise murder; or so the young man's intuition said, and the young are wise to trust to their intuitions.
The reader will know, if he be one of us, who have been to the wars and slept in curious ways, that it is hard
to sleep when sober upon a floor; it is not like the earth, or snow, or a feather bed; even rock can be more
accommodating; it is hard, unyielding and level, all night unmistakable floor. Yet Rodriguez took no risk of falling
asleep, so he said over to himself in his mind as much as he remembered of his treasured book, Notes in a
Cathedral, which he always read to himself before going to rest and now so sadly missed. It told how a lady who
had listened to a lover longer than her soul's safety could warrant, as he played languorous music in the moonlight
and sang soft by her low balcony, and how she being truly penitent, had gathered many roses, the emblems of
love (as surely, she said at confession, all the world knows), and when her lover came again by moonlight had cast
them all from her from the balcony, showing that she had renounced love; and her lover had entirely
misunderstood her. It told how she often tried to show him this again, and all the misunderstandings are sweetly
set forth and with true Christian penitence. Sometimes some little matter escaped Rodriguez's memory and then
he longed to rise up and look at his dear book, yet he lay still where he was: and all the while he listened to the
rats, and the rats went on gnawing and running regularly, scared by nothing new; Rodriguez trusted as much to
their myriad ears as to his own two. The great spiders descended out of such heights that you could not see
whence they came, and ascended again into blackness; it was a chamber of prodigious height. Sometimes the
shadow of a descending spider that had come close to the candle assumed a frightening size, but Rodriguez gave
little thought to it; it was of murder he was thinking, not of shadows; still, in its way it was ominous, and reminded
Rodriguez horribly of his host; but what of an omen, again, in a chamber full of omens. The place itself was
ominous; spiders could scarce make it more so. The spider itself was big enough, he thought, to be impaled on his
Castilian blade; indeed, he would have done it but that he thought it wiser to stay where he was and watch. And
then the spider found the candle too hot and climbed in a hurry all the way to the ceiling, and his horrible shadow
grew less and dwindled away.
It was not that the rats were frightened: whatever it was that happened happened too quietly for that, but
the volume of the sound of their running had suddenly increased: it was not like fear among them, for the running
was no swifter, and it did not fade away; it was as though the sound of rats running, which had not been heard
before, was suddenly heard now. Rodriguez looked at the door, the door was shut. A young Englishman would
long ago have been afraid that he was making a fuss over nothing and would have gone to sleep in the bed, and
not seen what Rodriguez saw. He might have thought that hearing more rats all at once was merely a fancy, and
that everything was all right. Rodriguez saw a rope coming slowly down from the ceiling, he quickly determined
whether it was a rope or only the shadow of some huge spider's thread, and then he watched it and saw it come
down right over his bed and stop within a few feet of it. Rodriguez looked up cautiously to see who had sent him
that strange addition to the portents that troubled the chamber, but the ceiling was too high and dim for him to
perceive anything but the rope coming down out of the darkness. Yet he surmised that the ceiling must have
softly opened, without any sound at all, at the moment that he heard the greater number of rats. He waited
then to see what the rope would do; and at first it hung as still as the great festoons dead spiders had made in
the corners; then as he watched it it began to sway. He looked up into the dimness then to see who was
swaying the rope; and for a long time, as it seemed to him lying gripping his Castilian sword on the floor he saw
nothing clearly. And then he saw mine host coming down the rope, hand over hand quite nimbly, as though he
lived by this business. In his right hand he held a poniard of exceptional length, yet he managed to clutch the
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