Hiding

“ Within an hour, I warrant you, there will be spies out in every quarter of the city to try and find your hiding-place. You are safe so long as you remain here. What an advantage it is to have such a reputation for empty-headedness as I have. ”

“ CHAPTER V HARVINGTON, UFTON, AND INGATESTONE
We will now go in search of some of the most curious hiding-places in existence. There are numerous known examples all over the country, and perhaps as many again exist, which will preserve their secret for ever. For more than three hundred years they have remained buried, and unless some accident reveals their locked-up mysteries, they will crumble away with the walls which contain them; unless, indeed, fire, the doom of so many of our ancestral halls, reduces them to ashes and swallows up the weird stories they might have told. ”

“ The eye is lost in all directions among the desolation where the multitude of men and women are hiding, as always and as everywhere.
That is what is. Who will say, "That is what must be!"
I have searched, I have indistinctly seen, I have doubted. Now, I hope. ”

“ Therefore, any who escaped in the attack on the house may have hidden themselves from the first search, and we may possibly come across them at night. They would assuredly never leave their hiding-places until darkness had fallen. ”

“ If they who are hidden can escape the vigilance of the seekers and get home uncaught, they go out to hide again; but so many of them as are caught, on the contrary, become seekers, and those who caught them have the privilege of hiding themselves. ”

“ I'd also played around with the idea of some fantastically obvious hiding place, maybe something that several people could pass back and forth between them, which would mean a conspiracy, and, of course, if you assume a big enough conspiracy, you can explain anything, including the cosmos itself. ”

“ The idea of a hunter disguising himself in the skin of an animal, or even of one animal assuming the disguise of another,11 are familiar in every part of the world, and if that is so, then the step from hiding under the skin of a large animal to that of hiding in a wooden animal is not very great. ”

“ I finally determined to tack my faith to this unknown person who signed "Shadow," and that night took a couple of men to the spot designated, and captured the bond thief after he had taken the bonds from their hiding-place. ”

“ After giving him some three or four minutes in which to hide, the rest of the group go after him. They must go out singly, not even two people being allowed to hunt together. The reason for this is soon apparent. As soon as a hunter finds the one who is hiding, instead of setting up an alarm, he hides with him. ”

“ What lurking temptations to forbidden tenderness find their hiding-places in a woman's dressing-gown, when she is alone in her room at night! ”

“ In one case an old man and his daughter, five months gone in pregnancy, died under the lash. If a suspected man took alarm and fled, his mother or his wife and daughters would be tortured to discover his hiding-place. ”

“ A ghostly visitant dressed in drab would appear and disappear mysteriously, a female figure was often seen to rush through the apartments, and other supernatural occurrences at length became so intolerable that the inmates of the house sought refuge in flight. ”

“ Escape thine hand, or from thy presence rove;
Or hide in secret cells close wrapt in night,
For unto thee the darkness shineth as the light.
Thou dwellest where the curtain'd whirlwinds hide;
Where the arm'd thunder walks his lofty round ”

“ If thou but equal to thyself be found, What gasping numbers then shall press the ground! What human victims stain the feastful floor! How wide the pavements float with guilty gore! It fits thee now to wear a dark disguise, And secret walk unknown to mortal eyes. ”

“ To lie awake at night, listening from hour to hour for the stealthy creeping of the murderer, for the laying of the damned mine! You are all spies! You are all spies! You worst of all—you, my own son! ”

“ As she hastened to don her hat and coat she was almost overwhelmed by a revulsion of feeling. Two days ago the world about her had seemed a carefree, pleasant, even if sometimes boresome place. Now she shudderingly saw it stripped of its mask and revealed for the first time in all its hideousness, a place of murders and spying and secret machinations. People about her were no longer more or less interesting puppets in a play-world. ”

“ A parallel phenomenon to my mind is exhibited in what we know as haunted houses, houses in which, as a rule, some crime or act of extreme emotion or passion has been committed, and in which some echo or re-enactment of the deed is periodically made visible or audible. A murder has been committed, let us say, and the room where it{266} took place is haunted. The figure of the murdered, or less commonly of the murderer, is seen there by sensitives, and cries are heard, or steps run to and fro. ”

“ In such an hour the sordid cares of the secret panel weighed less heavily on his soul, and the things that are not seen came nearer--the house not made with hands, the treasures that rust and moth corrupt not, and which thieves do not break through to steal. ”

“ There had been some sort of bond between them till the vision of death rose before each shrinking soul. Shoulder to shoulder in crime, they fell apart as their doom approached, and rushing, shrieking, each man for himself, they one and all sought to escape by doors, windows, or any outlet which promised release from this fatal spot. ”

“ The thief does not come with strident voice, with thunderous noise, nor in open daylight, but between the midnight and the morn, with shodden feet, silently, softly, and takes the treasure while all in the house are sunken in the depths of sleep. ”

“ Have gather'd up their treasures, and are gone!
—Will the dust tell us where
They that have burst the prison-house are flown?
Rise, nurseling of the Day,
If thou wouldst trace their way!
Earth has no voice to make the secret known! ”

“ Still, even if we could admit the popular superstition that a person who had been either the perpetrator or the victim of dark crimes in life could revisit, as a restless spirit, the scene in which those crimes had been committed, I should observe that the house was infested by strange sights and sounds before the old woman died—you smile—what would you say?"
"I would say this, that I am convinced, if we could get to the bottom of these mysteries, we should find a living human agency."
"What! you believe it is all an imposture? ”

“ I am very excitable, and, though I did not know whose hide was to be warmed, nor why anyone was to be killed, I shot off in front of the howling masses, shouting "Kill him!" and "Warm his hide!" as loudly as the loudest, all the time looking out for the victim. ”

“ Like a thief he stole close and laid his white face against the window-pane, his eyes straining to see every detail, as if most precious things had been wasted from his sight and must be caught at, and all fragments possible rescued, as if he would in this swift vision make amends for all his years of neglect. ”

“ The presence in the room of another than himself was a physical impossibility, unless, indeed, there was, after all, a fourth dimension, into which as a man passes from sunlight into shadow, the intruder had stepped perhaps now regarding him sardonically from that invisible plan: A living ghost!
Absurd! And yet, there was that other fact—he had seen it: the silent, the voiceless, yet moving witness—the positive and irrefutable proof of a presence other than his own. ”

“ None of the gentlemen who had been found drowned had shown any marks of violence on their bodies, so it was not attack I was to fear, but some mysterious, underhanded treachery which would rob me of consciousness and make the precipitation of my body into the water both safe and easy. Perhaps it was in the bottle of brandy that the peril lay; perhaps—but why speculate further! I would watch till midnight and then, if nothing happened, signal my companions to raid the house.
“Meantime a peep into the next room might help me towards solving the mystery. ”

“ Thus the murder and its punishment conspired to make the lonely road a haunted path, ghost-ridden, terrible; where women shivered and hurried on, and little boys, creepy with fear, scampered by, breathless, in the dusk ”

“ Here too, might be found in secret hideouts more than a few fugitives from justice—men who had fled from the long arm of the law and lived the lives of hermits, their hand against all others and compelled by necessity to play the part of desperadoes. ”

“ In the jargon one does not sleep, ‘on pionce.’ Notice with what energy that word expresses the uneasy slumbers of the tracked, tired, suspicious animal called thief, which, as soon as it is in safety, sinks down and rolls into the abysses of deep and necessary sleep, with the powerful wings of suspicion constantly spread over it—an awful repose, comparable to that of the wild beast, which sleeps and snores, but whose ears nevertheless remain ever watchful. ”

“ A greedy Thief was there.
And that ravenous Thief he climbed up even higher,
Till into a chamber small
He crept where lay poor Robin's beauteous Children,
Lovelier in sleep withal.
Oh, fairer was their hair than gold of Goblet,
Beyond Silver their cheeks did shine,
And their little hands that lay upon the linen
Made that Thief's hard heart to pine. ”

“ The inspector looked up from his search of the well, and nodded quietly across at me, with his sudden acknowledgment that our belief was now his belief, the smell in the cellar seemed to grow more dreadful, and to be, as it were, a menace—the material expression that some monstrous thing was there with us, invisible. ”

“ He groped along as stealthily, with as cautious a tread, and as wary an outlook, as a thief entering a chamber where a man lies only half asleep—or, it may be, broad awake—with purpose to steal the very treasure which this man guards as the apple of his eye. ”

“ The curiosity excited, the alarm produced, and the peculiarity of each succeeding discovery of the mangled members of the body, and the seemingly impenetrable mystery in which the circumstances of such a murder were shrouded, all conspired to awaken suspicion, renew inquiry, and incite to fresh exertion, until at last the mystery was developed by the family of the deceased. ”

“ Dark, taciturn, abysmal, he flitted, a casual shadow, through the labyrinthine mysteries of the crime, and could never be said to be here before an echo of his footfall was sounding in the hollows far away. ”

“ I have even known an instance where this type of person has, through trickery, actually gained access to some notoriously haunted house, and from its owners—the family he has long had his eyes on, from a motive anything but psychic—has ferreted out the secret and private history of the haunting. ”

“ It sounds high-flown and absurd, but consider the facts! Why should a thief try to break in at a bedroom window, where there could be no hope of any plunder, and why should he come with a long knife in his hand? ”

“ What secrets have you and I that any prowler should care to watch or listen. The only person of the prowling kind to be apprehended would be a burglar; and as Cheriton has been burglar-free all these years, I see no reason for fear; so, unless your mysterious footfall belonged to one of the servants or a servant’s follower, which is highly improbable on this side of the house, I take it that you must have heard a ghost. ”

“ A variety of strange causes, such as secret murder, acts of treachery, unatoned crime, buried treasures, and such-like incidents belonging to the seamy side of family history, have originated, at one time or another, the ghostly stories connected with so many a house throughout the country. ”

“ In one, there are quiet minds at rest; in the other, a waking conscience that one might think would trouble the very air. In that close corner where the roofs shrink down and cower together as if to hide their secrets from the handsome street hard by, there are such dark crimes, such miseries and horrors, as could be hardly told in whispers. ”

“ That a sneak thief should be caught as he was escaping from a house with a few dollars’ worth of plunder, will attract the average reader much less than the fact that he jumped through a plate-glass window in his effort to escape, or that he gained access to the house by wearing a Salvation Army uniform, or that he carried away a pie as part of his booty. ”

“ Anyone waiting in a dark place and expecting or fearing strongly a certain object will interpret any abrupt sensation to mean that object's presence. The boy playing 'I spy,' the criminal skulking from his pursuers, the superstitious person hurrying through the woods or past the churchyard at midnight, the man lost in the woods, the girl who tremulously has made an evening appointment with her swain, all are subject to illusions of sight and sound which make their hearts beat till they are dispelled. ”

“ As a thief, I acquired much wisdom. I know that the world is dying, and the air is boiling out of it into the sky. I wish to be heard by the council. We must study the words of the ancients and perform their magic, lest our children's children be born to strangle in a dead world. ”

“ The thief, the counterfeiter, the assassin, the robber, the murderer, and the seducer, feel comparatively safe in the midnight darkness, because no human eye can scrutinize their actions. But what if it should turn out that sable night, to speak paradoxically, is an unerring photographist! ”

“ I could not reconcile the former incident with the attributes of man; and yet a secret faith, not to be outrooted or suspended, swayed me, and compelled me to imagine that the detection of this visitant would unveil the thief. ”

“ Here’s a boy comes to that very same house next morning, and because he happens to have his arm tied up, these men lay violent hands upon him; by doing which, they place his life in great danger, and swear he is the thief. ”