A Book of Ghosts: 4
Author: Various authors
Date: 1884-12-31T15:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Ghost Stories; Supernatural Fiction; Weird Fiction; Horror
Description: A collection of ten stories of the supernatural and the macabre by various authors, compiled by ECM.
Publisher: MobileRead.com
Rights: Public domain where copyright is “Life+70” or less, and in the USA

A  BOOK  OF  GHOSTS
– 4 –

THINGS THAT GO BUMP
IN THE NIGHT

MobileRead Edition
2021

A collection of ten stories of the supernatural and the macabre by various authors, compiled by ECM. Contents were originally published 1896 ~ 1917. This book is in the public domain where copyright is “Life+70” or less, and in the USA.

CONTENTS:

- The Villa Lucienne
by Ella D’Arcy
(1857–1937)

- The Shadows of the Dead
by Louis Becke
(1855–1913)

- The Haunted Chair
by Richard Marsh
(1857–1915)

- The Wind in the Rose-Bush
by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
(1852–1930)

- Through the Ivory Gate
by Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
(1860–1936)

- Thurnley Abbey
by Perceval Landon
(1869–1927)

- The Lodger
by Marie Belloc Lowndes
(1868–1947)

- The Man in the Mirror
by Lillian B. Hunt
(? – ?)

- The Black Pool
by Frederick Stuart Greene
(1870–1939)

- The Day of Daheimus
by Vance Thompson
(1863–1925)

THE VILLA LUCIENNE

Ella D’Arcy

1896

Madame Coetlegon told the story, and told it so well, that her audience seemed to know the sombre alley, the neglected garden, the shuttered house, as intimately as though they had visited it themselves; seemed to feel a faint reverberation of the incommunicable thrill which she had felt, – which the surly guardian, the torn rag of lace, the closed pavilion had made her feel. And yet, as you will see, there is in reality no story at all; it is merely an account of how, when in the Riviera two winters ago, she went with some friends to look over a furnished villa, which one of them thought of taking.

It was afternoon when we started on our expedition, Madame de M———, Cécile her widowed daughter-in-law, and I. Cécile’s little girl Renée, the nurse, and Médor, the boarhound of which poor Guy had been so inordinately fond, dawdled after us up the steep and sunny road.

The December day was deliciously blue and warm. Cécile took off her furs and carried them over her arm. We only put down our sunshades when a screen of olive-trees on the left interposed their grey-green foliage between the sunshine and us.

Up in these trees barefooted men armed with bamboos were beating the branches to knock down the fruit; and three generations of women, grandmothers, wives, and children, knelt in the grass, gathering up the little purplish olives into baskets. All paused to follow us with black persistent eyes, as we passed by; only the men went on working unmoved. The tap-tapping, swish-swishing, of their light sticks against the boughs played a characteristically southern accompaniment to our desultory talk.

We were reasonably happy, pleasantly exhilarated by the beauty of the weather and the scene. Renée and Médor, with shrill laughter and deep-mouthed joy-notes, played together the whole way. And when the garden wall, which now replaced the olive-trees upon our right, gave place to a couple of iron gates standing open upon a broad straight drive, and we, looking up between the overarching palm-trees and cocoanuts, saw a white, elegant, sun-bathed house at the end, Cecile jumped to the conclusion that here was the Villa Lucienne, and that nowhere else could she find a house which on the face of it would suit her better.

But the woman who came to greet us, the jocund, brown-faced young woman, with the superb abundance of bosom beneath her crossed neckkerchief of orange-coloured wool, told us no; this was the Villa Soleil (appropriate name!) and belonged to Monsieur Morgera, the deputy who was now in Paris. The Villa Lucienne was higher up; she pointed vaguely behind her through the house: a long walk round by the road. But if these ladies did not mind a path which was a trifle damp perhaps, owing to Monday’s rain, they would find themselves in five minutes at the Villa, for the two houses in reality were not more than a stone’s-throw apart.

She conducted us across a spacious garden golden with sunshine, lyric with bird-song, brilliant with flowers, where eucalyptus, mimosa, and tea-roses interwove their strong and subtle perfumes through the air, to an angle in a remote laurel hedge. Here she stooped to pull aside some ancient pine-boughs which ineffectually closed the entrance to a dark and trellised walk. Peering up it, it seemed to stretch away interminably into green gloom, the ground rising a little all the while, and the steepness of the ascent being modified every here and there by a couple of rotting wooden steps.

We were to go up this alley, our guide told us, and we would be sure to find Laurent at the top. Laurent, she explained to us, was the gardener who lived at the Villa Lucienne and showed it to visitors. But there were not many who came, although it had been to let an immense time, ever since the death of old Madame Gray, and that had occurred before she, the speaker, had come south with the Morgeras. We were to explain to Laurent that we had been sent up from the Villa Soleil, and then it would be all right. For he sometimes used the alley himself, as it gave him a short cut into Antibes; but the passage had been blocked up many years ago, to prevent the Morgera children running into it.

Oh, Madame was very kind, it was no trouble at all, and of course if these ladies liked they could return by the alley also; but once they found themselves at the Villa they would be close to the upper road, which they would probably prefer. Then came her cordial voice calling after Cécile, “Madame had best put on her furs again, it is cold in there.”

It was cold, and damp, too, with the damp coldness of places where sun and wind never penetrate. It was so narrow that we had to walk in single file. The walls close on either hand, the low roof above our heads, were formed of trellised woodwork now dropping into complete decay. But these might have been removed altogether, and the alley would still have retained its form; for the creepers which overgrew it had with time developed gnarled trunks and branches, which formed a second natural tunnelling outside. Through the broken places in the woodwork we could see the thick, inextricably twisted stems; and outside again was a tangled matting of greenery that suffered no drop of sunlight to trickle through. The ground was covered with lichens, deathstool, and a spongy moss exuding water beneath the foot, and one had the consciousness that the whole place, floor, walls, and roof, must creep with the repulsive, slimy, running life which pullulates in dark and solitary places.

The change from the gay and scented garden to this dark alley, heavy with the smells of moisture and decay, was curiously depressing. We followed each other in silence; first Cécile; then Renée clinging to her nurse’s hand, with Médor pressing close against them; Madame di M——— next; and I brought up the rear.

One would have pronounced it impossible to find in any southern garden so sombre a place, but that, after all, it is only in the south that such extraordinary contrasts of gaiety and gloom ever present themselves.

The sudden tearing away of a portion of one of the wooden steps beneath my tread startled us all, and the circular scatter of an immense colony of wood-lice that had formed its habitat in the crevices of the wood filled me with shivering disgust. I was exceedingly glad when we emerged from the tunnel upon daylight again and the Villa.

Upon daylight, but not upon sunlight, for the small garden in which we found ourselves was ringed round by the compact tops of the umbrella-pines which climbed the hill on every side. The site had been chosen of course on account of the magnificent view which we knew must be obtainable from the Villa windows, though from where we stood we could see nothing but the dark trees, the wild garden, the overshadowed house. And we saw none of these things very distinctly, for our attention was focussed on the man standing stolidly there in the middle of the garden, and evidently knee-deep in the grass, awaiting us.

He was a short, thick-set peasant, dressed in the immensely wide blue velveteen trousers, the broad crimson sash, and the flannel shirt, open at the throat, which are customary in these parts. He was strong-necked as a bull, dark as a mulatto, and his curling, grizzled hair was thickly matted over head and face and breast. He wore a flat knitted cap, and held the inevitable cigarette between his lips, but he made no attempt to remove one or the other at our approach. He stood motionless, silent, his hands thrust deep into his pockets, staring at us, and shifting from one to another his suspicious and truculent little eyes.

So far as I was concerned, and though the Villa had proved a palace, I should have preferred abandoning the quest at once to going over it in his company ; but Cécile addressed him with intrepid politeness.

“We had been permitted to come up from the Villa Soleil. We understood that the Villa Lucienne was to let furnished; if so, might we look over it?”

From his heavy, expressionless expression, one might have supposed that the very last thing he expected or desired was to find a tenant for the Villa, and I thought with relief that he was going to refuse Cécile’s request. But, after a longish pause:

“Yes, you can see it,” he said, grudgingly, and turned from us, to disappear into the lower part of the house.

We looked into each other’s disconcerted faces, then round the grey and shadowy garden in which we stood: a garden long since gone to ruin, with paths and flower-beds inextricably mingled, with docks and nettles choking up the rose-trees run wild, with wind-planted weeds growing from the stone vases on the terrace, with grasses pushing between the marble steps leading up to the hall door.

In the middle of the garden a terra-cotta faun, tumbled from his pedestal, grinned sardonically up from amidst the tangled greenery, and Madame di M——— began to quote:

“Un vieux faune en terre-cuite

Rit au centre des boulingrins,

Présageant sans doute une fuite

De ces instants sereins

Qui m’ont conduit et t’ont conduite …”

The Villa itself was as dilapidated, as mournful-looking as the garden. The ground-floor alone gave signs of occupation, in a checked shirt spread out upon a window-ledge to dry, in a worn besom, an earthenware pipkin, and a pewter jug, ranged against the wall. But the upper part, with the yellow plaster crumbling from the walls, the grey-painted persiennes all monotonously closed, said with a thousand voices it was never opened, never entered, had not been lived in for years.

Our surly gardener reappeared, carrying some keys. He led the way up the steps. We exchanged mute questions; all desire to inspect the Villa was gone. But Cécile is a woman of character: she devoted herself.

“I’ll just run up and see what it is like,” she said; “it’s not worth while you should tire yourself too, Mamma. You, all, wait here.”

We stood at the foot of the steps; Laurent was already at the top. Cécile began to mount lightly towards him, but before she was half-way she turned, and to our surprise, “I wish you would come up all of you,” she said, and stopped there until we joined her.

Laurent fitted a key to the door, and it opened with a shriek of rusty hinges. As he followed us, pulling it to behind him, we found ourselves in total darkness. I assure you I went through a bad quarter of a minute. Then we heard the turning of a handle, an inner door was opened, and in the semi-daylight of closed shutters we saw the man’s squat figure going from us down a long, old-fashioned, vacant drawing-room towards two windows at the further end.

At the same instant Renee burst into tears:

“Oh, I don’t like it. Oh, I’m frightened!” she sobbed.

“Little goosie!” said her grandmother, “see, it’s quite light now!” for Laurent had pushed back the persiennes, and a magical panorama had sprung into view; the whole range of the mountains behind Nice, their snow-caps suffused with a heavenly rose colour by the setting sun.

But Renée only clutched tighter at Madame di M———’s gown, and wept:

“Oh, I don’t like it, Bonnemaman! She is looking at me still. I want to go home!”

“No one is looking at you,” her grandmother told her, “talk to your friend Médor. He’ll take care of you.”

But Renée whispered:

“He wouldn’t come in; he’s frightened too.”

And, listening, we heard the dog’s impatient and complaining bark calling to us from the garden.

Cécile sent Renée and the nurse to join him, and while Laurent let them out, we stepped on to the terrace, and for a moment our hearts were eased by the incomparable beauty of the view, for raised now above the tree-tops, we looked over the admirable bay, the illimitable sky; we feasted our eyes upon unimaginable colour, upon matchless form. We were almost prepared to declare that the possession of the Villa was a piece of good fortune not to be let slip, when we heard a step behind us, and turned to see Laurent surveying us morosely from the window threshold, and again to experience the oppression of his ungenial personality.

Under his guidance we now inspected the century-old furniture, the faded silks, the tarnished gilt, the ragged brocades, which had once embellished the room. The oval mirrors were dim with mildew, the parquet floor might have been a mere piece of grey drugget, so thick was the overlying dust. Curtains, yellowish, ropey, of undeterminable material, hung forlornly where once they had draped windows and doors. Originally they may have been of rose satin, for there were traces of rose colour still on the walls and the ceiling, painted in gay southern fashion with loves and doves, festoons of flowers, and knots of ribbons. But these paintings were all fragmentary, indistinct, seeming to lose sequence and outline the more diligently you tried to decipher them.

Yet you could not fail to see that when first furnished the room must have been charming and coquettish. I wondered for whom it had been thus arranged, why it had been thus abandoned. For there grew upon me, I cannot tell you why, the curious conviction that the last inhabitant of the room having casually left it, had, from some unexpected obstacle, never again returned. They were but the merest trifles that created this idea; the tiny heaps of brown ash which lay on a marble gueridon, the few withered twigs in the vase beside it, spoke of the last rose plucked from the garden; the big berceuse chair drawn out beside the sculptured mantelpiece seemed to retain the impression of the last occupant; and in the dark recesses of the unclosed hearth my fancy detected smouldering heat in the half-charred logs of wood.

The other rooms in the villa resembled the salon , each time our surly guide opened the shutters we saw a repetition of the ancient furniture, of the faded decoration; everything dust-covered and time-decayed. Nor in these other rooms was any sign of former occupation to be seen, until, caught upon the girandole of a pier-glass, a long ragged fragment of lace seized my eye; an exquisitely fine and cobwebby piece of lace, as though caught and torn from some gala shawl or flounce, as the wearer had hurried by.

It was odd perhaps to see this piece of lace caught thus, but not odd enough surely to account for the strange emotion which seized hold of me: an overwhelming pity, succeeded by an overwhelming fear. I had had a momentary intention to point the lace out to the others, but a glance at Laurent froze the words on my lips. Never in my life have I experienced such a paralysing fear. I was filled with an intense desire to get away from the man and from the Villa.

But Madame di M——— looking from the window, had noticed a pavilion standing isolated in the garden. She inquired if it were to be let with the house. Then she supposed we could visit it. No, said the man, that was impossible. But she insisted it was only right that tenants should see the whole of the premises for which they would have to pay, but he refused this time with such rudeness, his little brutish eyes narrowed with such malignancy, that the panic which I had just experienced now seized the others, and it was a sauve-qui-peut.

We gathered up Renée, nurse, and Médor in our hasty passage through the garden, and found our way unguided to the gate upon the upper road.

And once at large beneath the serene evening sky, winding slowly westward down the olive bordered ways: “What an odious old ruffian!” said one; “What an eerie, uncanny place!” said another. We compared notes. We found that each of us had been conscious of the same immense, the same inexplicable sense of fear.

Cécile, the least nervous of women, had felt it the first. It had laid hold of her when going up the steps to the door, and it had been so real a terror, she explained to us, that if we had not joined her she would have turned back. Nothing could have induced her to enter the Villa alone.

Madame di M———’s account was that her mind had been more or less troubled from the first moment of entering the garden, but that when the man refused us access to the pavilion, it had been suddenly invaded by a most intolerable sense of something wrong. Being very imaginative (poor Guy undoubtedly derived his extraordinary gifts from her), Madame di M——— was convinced that the gardener had murdered someone and buried the body inside the pavilion.

But for me it was not so much the personality of the man – although I admitted he was unprepossessing enough – as the Villa itself which inspired fear. Fear seemed to exude from the walls, to dim the mirrors with its clammy breath, to stir shudderingly among the tattered draperies, to impregnate the whole atmosphere as with an essence, a gas, a contagious disease. You fought it off for a shorter or longer time, according to your powers of resistance, but you were bound to succumb to it at last. The oppressive and invisible fumes had laid hold of us one after the other, and the incident of the closed pavilion had raised our terrors to a ludicrous pitch.

Nurse’s experiences, which she gave us a day or two later, supported this view. For she told us that when Renée began to cry, and she took her hand to lead her out, all at once she felt quite nervous and uncomfortable too, as though the little one’s trouble had passed by touch into her.

“And what is strange too,” said she, “when we reached the garden, there was Médor, his forepaws planted firmly on the ground, his whole body rigid, and his hair bristling all along his backbone from end to end.”

Nurse was convinced that both the child and the dog had seen something we others could not see.

This reminded us of a word of Renée’s, a very curious word:

“I don’t like it, she is looking at me still,” – and Cecile undertook to question her.

“You remember, Renée, when mother took you the other day to look over the pretty Villa—”

Renée opened wide, mute eyes.

“Why did you cry?”

“I was frightened of the lady,” she whispered.

“Where was the lady?” asked Cécile.

“She was in the drawing-room, sitting in the big chair.”

“Was she an old lady like grandmamma, or a young lady like mother?”

“She was like Bonnemaman,” said Renée, and her little mouth began to quiver.

“And what did she do?”

“She got up and began to – to come—”

But here Renée burst into tears again. And as she is a very nervous, excitable child, we had to drop the subject.

But what it all meant, whether there was anything in the history of the house or of its guardian which could account for our sensations, we never knew. We made inquiries of course concerning Laurent and the Villa Lucienne, but we learned very little, and that little was so vague, so remote, so irrelevant, that it does not seem worth while repeating.

The indisputable fact is the overwhelming fear which the adventure awoke in each and all of us; and this effect is impossible to describe, being just the crystallisation of one of those subtle, unformulated emotions in which only poor Guy himself could have hoped to succeed.

THE SHADOWS OF THE DEAD

Louis Becke

1897

“It is bad to speak of the ghosts of the dead when their shadows may be near,” said Tulpé, the professed Christian, but pure, unsophisticated heathen at heart; “no one but a fool – or a careless white man such as thee, Tenisoni – would do that.”

Denison laughed, but Kusis, the stalwart husband of black-browed Tulpé, looked at him with grave reproval, and said in English, as he struck his paddle into the water –

“My wife Tulpé speak true, Mr. Denison. This place is a bad place at night-time, suppose you no make fire before you sleep. Plenty men – white men – been die here, and now us native people only come here when plenty of us come together. Then we not feel much afraid. Oh, yes, these two little island very bad places; long time ago many white men die here in the night. And sometimes, if any man come here and sleep by himself, he hear the dead white men walk about and cry out.”

•   •   •   •   •

They – Denison, the supercargo of the Leonora; Kusis, the head man of the village nearby; and Tulpé, his wife; and little Kinia, their daughter – had been out fishing on the reef. They had met with scant success, for in the deep coral pools that lay between the inner and outer reefs of the main island were hundreds of huge blue and gold striped leatherjackets, which broke their hooks and bit their lines. So they had ceased awhile, that they might rest till nightfall upon one of two little islets of palms, that like floating gardens raised their verdured heights from the deep waters of the slumbering lagoon.

Slowly they paddled over the glassy surface, and as the little craft cut her way noiselessly through the water, the dying sun turned the slopes of vivid green on Mont Buache to changing shades of gold and purple light, and the dark blue of the water of the reef-bound lagoon paled and shallowed and turned to bright transparent green with a bottom of shining snow-white sand – over which swift black shadows swept as startled fish fled seaward in affright beneath the slender hull of the light canoe. Then as the last booming notes of the great grey-plumaged mountain-pigeons echoed through the forest aisles, the sun touched the western sea-rim in a flood of misty golden haze, and plunging their paddles together in a last stroke, they grounded upon the beach of a lovely little bay, scarce a hundred feet in curve from point to point; and whilst Kusis and Tulpé lit a fire to cook some fish for the white man, Denison clambered to the summit of the island and looked shoreward upon the purpling outline of the mainland a league away.

Half a mile distant he could see the sharp peaks of the grey-thatched houses in Leassé village still standing out plainly in the clear atmosphere, and from every house a slender streak of pale blue smoke rose straight up skywards, for the land-breeze had not yet risen, and the smoky haze of the rollers thundering westward hung like a filmy mantle of white over long, long lines of curving reef. Far inland, the great southern spur of the mountain that the Frenchman Duperrey had named Buache had cloaked its sides in the shadows of the night, though its summit yet blazed with the last red shafts of gold from the sunken sun. And over the tops of the drooping palms of the little isle, Denison heard the low cries and homeward flight of ocean-roving birds as they sped shoreward to their rookeries among the dense mangrove shrubs behind Leassé. Some pure white, red-footed boatswain birds, whose home was among the foliage of the two islets, muttered softly about as they sank like flakes of falling snow among the branches of the palms and bread-fruit trees around him. All day long had they hovered high in air above the sweeping roll of the wide Pacific, and one by one they were coming back to rest, and Denison could see their white forms settling down on the drooping palm-branches, to rise with flapping wing and sharp, fretful croak as some belated wanderer fluttered noiselessly down and pushed his way to a perch amidst his companions, to nestle together till the bright rays of sunlight lit up the ocean blue once more.

At a little distance from the beach stood a tiny thatch-roofed house with sides open to welcome the cooling breath of the land-breeze that, as the myriad stars came out, stole down from the mountains to the islet trees and then rippled the waters of the shining lagoon.

The house had been built by the people of Leassé, who used it as a rest-house when engaged in fishing in the vicinity of the village. Rolled up and placed over the cross-beams were a number of soft mats, and as Denison returned, Kusis took these down and placed them upon the ground, which was covered with a thick layer of pebbles. Throwing himself down on the mats, Denison filled his pipe and smoked, while Tulpé and the child made an oven of heated stones to cook the fish they had caught. Kusis had already plucked some young drinking coconuts, and Denison heard their heavy fall as he threw them to the ground. Kusis had brave blood in his veins, or they would have had nothing to drink that night, for no Strong’s Islander would ascend a coconut tree there after dark, for devils, fiends, goblins, the ghosts of men long dead, and evil spirits flitted to and fro amid the boscage of the islet once night had fallen. And even Kusis, despite the long years he had spent among white men in his cruises in American whale-ships in his younger days, chided his wife and child sharply for not hastening to him and carrying the nuts away as they fell.

Then, as Denison and Kusis waited for the oven to be opened, Tulpé and Kinia came inside the hut and sat down beside them, and listened to Kusis telling the white man of a deep, sandy-bottomed pool, near to the islets, which, when the tide came in over the reef at night-time, became filled with big fish, which preyed upon the swarms of minnows that made the pool their home.

“’Tis there, Tenisoni, that we shall go when we have eaten,” he said, and he dropped his voice to a whisper, “and there shall we tell thee the story of the dead white men.”

So, when the fish was cooked, Tulpé and Kinia hurriedly took it from the oven and carried to the canoe, in which they all sat and ate, and then pushing out into the lagoon again, they paddled slowly along in shallow water till Denison saw the white sandy sides of a deep, dark pool glimmering under the starlight of the island night. Softly the girl Kinia lowered the stone anchor down till it touched bottom two fathoms below, on the very edge, and then played out the kellick line whilst her father backed the canoe out from the quickly shelving sides into the center, where it lay head-on to the gentle current.

For many hours they fished, and soon the canoe was half-filled with great pink- and pearly-hued groper and blue-backed, silver-sided sea salmon, and then Denison, wearying of the sport, stretched himself upon the outrigger and smoked whilst Tulpé told him of the tale of the white men who had once lived and died on the little islets.

•   •   •   •   •

’Twas long before the time that the two French fighting-ships came here and anchored in this harbour of Leassé. Other ships had come to Kusaie [1] , and white men had come ashore at Lêla and spoken with the king and chiefs, and made presents of friendship to them, and been given turtles and hogs in return. This was long before my mother was married, and then this place of Leassé, which is now so poor, and hath but so few people in it, was a great town, the houses of which covered all the flat land between the two points of the bay. She, too, was named as I am – Tulpé – and came from a family that lived under the strong arm of the king at Lêla, where they had houses and many plantations. In those days, there were three great chiefs on Kusaie, one at Lêla – from where my mother came – one at Utwe, and one here at Leassé. Peace had been between them all for nearly two years, so, when the news came here that there were two ships at anchor in the king’s harbour, many of the people of Leassé went thither in their canoes to see the strangers, for these ships were the first the people had seen for it may have been twenty years. Among those that went from Leassé was a young man named Kasi-lak – Kasi the big or strong – for he was the tallest and strongest man on this side of the island, and a great wrestler. There were in all nearly two hundred men and women went from Leassé, and when they reached the narrow passage to Lêla, they saw that the harbor was covered with canoes full of the people from the great town there. These clustered about the ships so thickly that those that came from Leassé could not draw near enough to them to look at the white men, so they rested on their paddles and waited awhile. Presently there came out upon a high part of the ship a chief whose name was Malik. He was the king’s foster-brother, and a great fighting-man, and was hated by the people of Leassé for having ravaged all the low-lying country from the mountains to the shore ten years before, slaying women and children as well as men, and casting their bodies into the flames of their burning houses.

But now, because of the peace that was between Leassé and Lêla, he showed his white teeth in a smile of welcome, and, standing upon the high stern part of the ship, he called out, “Welcome, O friends!” and bade them paddle their canoes to the shore, to the great houses of the king, his brother, where they would be made welcome, and where food would be prepared for them to eat.

So, much as they desired to go on board the ships, they durst not offend such a man as Malik, and paddled to the shore, where they were met by the king’s slaves, who drew their canoes high up on the beach, and covered them with mats to protect them from the sun, and then the king himself came to meet them with fair words and smiles of friendship.

“Welcome, O men of Leassé,” he said. “See, my people have covered thy canoes with mats from the sun, for now that there is no hate between us. Ye shall remain here at Lêla with me for many days. And so that there shall be no more blood-letting between my people and thine, shall I give every young man among ye that is yet unmarried a wife from these people of mine. Come, now, and eat and drink.”

So all the two hundred sat down in one of the king’s houses, and while they ate and drank there came boats from the ships, and the white men, whom Malik led ashore, came into the house where they sat, and spoke to them. In those days there were but three or four of the Kusaie men who understood English, and these Malik kept by him, so that he could put words into their mouths when he desired to speak to the white strangers. These white men, so my mother said, wore short, broad-bladed swords in sheaths made of thick black skins, and pistols were thrust through belts of skin around their waists. Their hair, too, was dressed like that of the men of Kusaie – it hung down in a short, thick roll, and was tied at the end. [2]

Kasi, who was the father of this my husband, Kusis, sat a little apart from the rest of the Leassé people. Beside him was a young girl named Nehi, his cousin. She had never before left her home, and the strange faces of the men of Lêla made her so frightened that she clung to Kasi’s arm in fear, and when the white men came into the house she flung her arms around her cousin’s neck and laid her face against his naked chest. Presently, as the white men walked to and fro among the people, they stopped in front of Kasi and Nehi, and one of them, who was the captain of the largest of the two ships, desired Kasi to stand up so that he might see his great stature the better. So he stood up, and Nehi the girl, still clinging to his arm, stood up with him.

“He is a brave-looking man,” said the white officer to Malik. “Such men as he are few and far between. Only this man here,” and he touched a young white man who stood beside him on the arm, “is his equal in strength and fine looks.” And with that the young white man, who was an officer of the smaller of the two ships, laughed, and held out his hand to Kasi, and then his eyes, blue, like the deep sea, fell upon the face of Nehi, whose dark ones looked wonderingly into his.

“Who is this girl? Is she the big man’s sister?” he asked of Malik. Then Malik told him, through the mouth of one of the three Kusaie men, who spoke English, that the girl’s name was Nehi, and that with many of her people she had come from Leassé to see the fighting-ships.

By and by the white men with Malik went away to talk and eat, and drank kava in the house of the king, his brother; but presently the younger white man came back with Rijon, a native who spoke English, and sat down beside Kasi and his cousin Nehi, and talked with them for a long time. And this he told them of himself. That he was the second chief of the little ship, that with but two masts; and because of the long months they had spent upon the sea, and of the bad blood between the common sailor men and the captain, he was wearied of the ship, and desired to leave it. Ten others were there on his own ship of a like mind, and more than a score on the larger ship, which had twenty-and-two great cannons on her deck. And then he and Rijon and Kasi talked earnestly together, and Kasi promised to aid him; and so that Rijon should not betray them to Malik or the two captains, the young white man promised to give him that night a musket and a pistol as an earnest of greater gifts when he and others with him had escaped from the ships, and were under the roofs of the men of Leassé. So then he pressed the hand of Kasi, and again his eyes sought those of Nehi, the girl, as he turned away.

Then Rijon, who stayed, drew near to Kasi, and said –

“What shall be mine if I tell thee of a plan that is in the mind of a great man here to put thee and all those of Leassé with thee to death?”

“Who is the man? Is it Malik?”

“It is Malik.”

“Then,” said Kasi, “help me to escape from this trap, and thou shalt be to me as mine own brother; of all that I possess half shall be thine.”

And then Rijon, who was a man who hated bloodshed, and thought it hard and cruel that Malik should slay so many unarmed people who came to him in peace-time, swore to help Kasi in his need. And the girl Nehi took his hand and kissed it, and wept.

By and by, when Rijon had gone, there came into the big house where the people of Leassé were assembled a young girl named Tulpé – she who afterwards became my mother. And coming over to where Kasi and his cousin sat, she told them she brought a message from the king. That night, she said, there was to be a great feast, so that the white men from the ships might see the dancing and wrestling that were to follow; and the king had sent her to say that he much desired the people from Leassé to join in the feasting and dancing; and with the message he sent further gifts of baked fish and turtle meat and many baskets of fruit.

Kasi, though he knew well that the king and Malik, his brother, meant to murder him and all his people, smiled at the girl, and said, “It is good; we shall come, and I shall wrestle with the best man ye have here.”

Then he struck the palm of his hand on the mat upon which he sat, and said to the girl Tulpé, “Sit thou here, and eat with us,” for he was taken with her looks, and wanted speech with her.

“Nay,” she said, with a smile, though her voice trembled strangely, and her eyes filled with tears as she spoke. “Why ask me to sit with thee when thou hast so handsome a wife?” And she pointed to Nehi, whose hand lay upon her cousin’s arm.

“’Tis but my sister Nehi, my father’s brother’s child,” he answered. “No wife have I, and none do I want but thee. What is thy name?”

“I am Tulpé, the daughter of Malik.”

Then Kasi was troubled in his mind; for now he hated Malik, but yet was he determined to make Tulpé his wife, first because he desired her for her soft voice and gentle ways, and then because she might be a shield for the people of Leassé against her father’s vengeance. So drawing her down beside him, he and Nehi made much of her; and Tulpé’s heart went out to him; for he was a man whose deeds as a wrestler were known in every village on the island. But still as she tried to eat and drink and to smile at his words of love, the tears fell one by one, and she became very silent and sad; and presently, putting aside her food, she leaned her face on Nehi’s shoulder and sobbed.

“Why dost thou weep, little one?” said Kasi tenderly.

She made no answer awhile, but then turned her face to him.

“Because, O Kasi the Wrestler, of an evil dream which came to me in the night as I lay in my father’s house.”

“Tell me thy dream,” said Kasi.

First looking around her to see that none but themselves could hear her, she took his hand in hers, and whispered –

“Aye, Kasi, I will tell thee. This, then, was my dream: I saw the bodies of men and women and children, whose waists were girt about with red and yellow girdles of oap, floating upon a pool of blood. Strange faces were they all to me in my dream, but now two of them are not. And it is for this I weep; for those two faces were thine own and that of this girl by my side.”

Then Kasi knew that she meant to warn him of her father’s cruel plot, for only the people of Leassé wore girdles of the bark of the plant called oap. So then he told her of that which Rijon had spoken, and Tulpé wept again.

“It is true,” she said, “and I did but seek to warn thee, for no dream came to me in the night; yet do I know that even now my father is planning with his brother the king how that they may slaughter thee all tonight when ye sleep after the dance. What can I do to help thee?”

They talked together again, and planned what should be done; and then Tulpé went quietly away lest Malik should grow suspicious of her. And Kasi went quickly about among his people telling them of the treachery of Malik, and bade them do what he should bid them when the time came. And then Rijon went to and fro between Kasi and the big white man, carrying messages and settling what was to be done.

When darkness came, great fires were lit in the dance-house and the town square, and the great feast began. And the king and Malik made much of Kasi and his people, and placed more food before them than even was given to their own people. Then when the feast was finished the two ship captains came on shore, and sat on a mat beside the king, and the women danced and the men wrestled. And Kasi, whose heart was bursting with rage though his lips smiled, was praised by Malik and the king for his great strength and skill, for he overcame all who stood up to wrestle with him.

When the night was far gone, Kasi told Malik that he and his people were weary, and asked that they might sleep. And Malik, who only waited till they slept, said, “Go, and sleep in peace.”

But as soon as Kasi and those with him were away out of sight from the great swarm of people who still danced and wrestled in the open square, they ran quickly to the beach where their canoes were lying, and Kasi lit a torch and waved it thrice in the air towards the black shadows of the two ships. Then he waited.

Suddenly on the ships there arose a great commotion and loud cries, and in a little time there came the sound of boats rowing quickly to the shore. And then came a great flash of light from the side of one of the ships and the thunder of a cannon’s voice.

“Quick,” cried Kasi; “launch the canoes, lest we be slain here on the beach!” And ere the echoes of the cannon-shot had died away in the mountain caves of Lêla, the men of Leassé had launched their canoes and paddled swiftly out to meet the boats.

As the boats and canoes drew near, Rijon stood up in the bows of the foremost boat, and the white sailors ceased rowing so that he and Kasi might talk. But there was but little time, for already the sound of the cannon and the cries and struggling on board the ships had brought a great many of the Lêla people to the beach; fires were lit, and conch shells were blown, and Malik and his men began to fire their muskets at the escaping canoes. Presently, too, the white men in the boats began to handle their muskets and fire back in return, when their leader bade them cease, telling them that it was but Malik’s men firing at Kasi’s people.

“Now,” said he to Rijon, “tell this man Kasi to lead the way with his canoes to the passage, and we in the boats shall follow closely, so that if Malik’s canoes pursue and overtake us, we white men shall beat them back with our musket-fire.”

So then Kasi turned his canoes seaward, and the boats followed; and as they rowed and paddled, all keeping closely together, the great cannons of the two ships flashed and thundered and the shot roared above them in the darkness. But yet was no one hurt, for the night was very dark; and soon they reached the deep waters of the passage, and rose and fell to the ocean swell, and still the iron cannon-shot hummed about them, and now and again struck the water near; and on the left-hand shore ran Malik’s men with cries of rage, and firing as they ran, till at last they came to the point and could pursue no farther; and soon their cries grew fainter and fainter as the canoes and boats reached the open ocean. Then it happened that one of the white sailors, vexed that a last bullet had whistled near his head, raised his musket and fired into the dark shore whence it came.

“Thou fool!” cried his leader, and he struck the man senseless with the boat’s tiller, and then told Rijon to call out to Kasi and his people to pull to the left for their lives, for the flash of the musket would be seen from the ships. Ah, he was a clever white man, for scarce had the canoes and boats turned to the left more than fifty fathoms, when there came a burst of flame from all the cannons on the ships, and a great storm of great iron shot and small leaden bullets lashed the black water into white foam just behind them. After that the firing ceased, and Rijon called out that there was no more danger; for the cunning white man had told him that they could not be pursued – he had broken holes in all the boats that remained on the ships.

When daylight came, the boats and canoes were far down the coast towards Leassé. Then, as the sun rose from the sea, the men in the boats ceased rowing, and the big white man stood up and beckoned to Kasi to bring his canoe alongside. And when the canoe lay beside the boat, the white man laughed and held out his hand to Kasi and asked for Nehi; and as Nehi rose from the bottom of Kasi’s canoe, where she had been sleeping, and stood up beside her cousin, so did Tulpé, the daughter of Malik, stand up beside the white man in his boat, and the two girls threw their arms around each other’s necks and wept glad tears. Then as the canoes and boats hoisted their sails to the wind of sunrise, the people saw that Tulpé sat beside Kasi in his canoe, and Nehi, his cousin, sat beside the white man in his boat, with her face covered with her hands so that no one should see her eyes.

As they sailed along the coast Tulpé told Kasi how she and Rijon had gone on board the smaller of the two ships, and seen the tall young white man whispering to some of the sailors. Then, when they saw the flash of Kasi’s torch, how these sailors sprang upon the others and bound them hand and foot while a boat was lowered, and muskets and food and water put in. Then she and Rijon and the young white leader and some of the sailors got in, and Rijon stood in the bows and guided them to the shore to where Kasi and his people awaited them on the beach.

II

For nearly three months these white men lived at Leassé, and the father of Kasi, who was chief of the town, made much of them, because they had muskets, and bullets, and powder in plenty, and this made him strong against Malik and the people of Lêla. The ships had sailed away soon after the night of the dance, but the two captains had given the king and Malik many muskets and much powder, and a small cannon, and urged him to pursue and kill all the white men who had deserted the ships.

“By and by, I will kill them,” said Malik.

The young white man took Nehi to wife, and was given a tract of land near Leassé, and Kasi became husband to Tulpé, and there grew a great friendship between the two men. Then came warfare with Lêla again, and of the twenty and two white men, ten were killed in a great fight at Utwé with Malik’s people, who surprised them as they were building a vessel, for some of them were already weary of Kusaic, and wished to sail away to other lands.

Soon those that were left began to quarrel among themselves and kill each other, till only seven, beside the husband of Nehi, were left. These, who lived in a village at the south point, seldom came to Leassé, for the big white man would have none of them, and naught but bitter words had passed between them for many months, for he hated their wild, dissolute ways, and their foul manners. Then, too, they had learned to make grog from coconut toddy, and sometimes, when they were drunken with it, would stagger about from house to house, musket or sword in hand, and frighten the women and children.

One day it came about that a girl named Luan, who was a blood relation of Nehi, and wife to one of these white men, was walking along a mountain-path, carrying her infant child, when her foot slipped, and she and the infant fell a great distance. When she came to she found that the child had a great wound in its forehead, and was cold and stiff in death. She lifted it up, and when she came to her husband’s house she found him lying asleep, drunken with toddy, and when she roused him with her grief, he did but curse her.

Then Luan, with bitter scorn, pointed to the body of the babe and said, “Oh, thou wicked and drunken father, dost thou not see that thy child is dead?”

Then in his passion he seized his pistol and struck her on the head, so that she was stunned and fell as if dead.

That night the people of Leassé saw the seven white men, with their wives and children, paddling over towards the two little islands, carrying all their goods with them, for the people had risen against them by reason of the cruelty of the husband of Luan, and driven them away.

So there they lived for many weeks, making grog from the coconut trees, and drinking and fighting among themselves all day, and sleeping the sleep of the drunken at night. Their wives toiled for them all day, fishing on the reef, and bringing them taro, yams, and fruit from the mainland. But Luan alone could not work, for she grew weaker and weaker, and one day she died. Then her white husband went to the village from whence they were driven, and seizing the wife of a young man, bore her away to the two islets.

The next day he whose wife had been stolen came to the husband of Nehi, and said, “O white man, help me to get back my wife; help me for the sake of Luan, whom this dog slew, and whose blood cries out to thee for vengeance, for was she not a blood relation to Nehi, thy wife?”

But though the husband of Nehi shook his head and denied the man the musket he asked for, he said naught when at night-time a hundred men, carrying knives and clubs in their hands, gathered together in the council-house, and talked of the evil lives of the seven white men, and agreed that the time had come for them to die.

So in silence they rose up from the mats in the council-house and walked down to the beach, and launching their canoes, paddled across to the islands under cover of the darkness. It so happened that one woman was awake, but all the rest with the white men and their children slept. This woman belonged to Leassé, and had come to the beach to bathe, for the night was hot and windless. Suddenly the canoes surrounded her, and, fearing danger to her white husband, she sought to escape, but a strong hand caught her by the hair, and a voice bade her be silent.

Now, the man who held her by the hair was her own sister’s husband, and he desired to save her life, so he and two others seized and bound her, and quickly tied a waist-girdle over her mouth so that she could not cry out. But she was strong, and struggled so that the girdle slipped off, and she gave a loud cry. And then her sister’s husband, lest his chief might say he had failed in his duty, and the white men escape, seized her throat in his hands and pressed it so that she all but died.

Then the avengers of the blood of Luan sprang out upon the beach, and ran through the palm grove to where the white men’s house stood. It was a big house, for they all lived together, and in the middle of the floor a lamp of coconut oil burned, and showed where the seven white men lay.

And there as they slept were they speared and stabbed to death, although their wives threw their arms around the slayers and besought them to spare their husbands’ lives. And long before dawn the canoes returned to Leassé with the wives and children of the slain men, and only the big white man, the husband of Nehi, was left alive out of the twenty and two who came from the ships at Lêla. So that is the story of the two islets, and of the evil men who dwelt there.

•   •   •   •   •

Denison rose and stretched himself. “And what of the big white man – the husband of Nehi?” he asked; “doth his spirit, too, wander about at night?”

“Nay,” said Tulpé, “why should it? There was no innocent blood upon his hand. Both he and Nehi lived and died among us; and tomorrow it may be that Kinia shalt show thee the place whereon their house stood in the far-back years. And true are the words in the Book of Life – ‘He that sheddeth blood, by man shall his blood be shed.’”

[1]  Strong’s Island.

[1]  Several English and French privateers cruised through the Caroline Islands between 1804 and 1819. Fifteen men belonging to one of them were cut off by the Strong’s Islanders.

THE HAUNTED CHAIR

Richard Marsh

1902

CHAPTER I

“Well, that’s the most staggering thing I’ve ever known!”

As Mr. Philpotts entered the smoking-room, these were the words – with additions – which fell upon his, not unnaturally, startled ears. Since Mr. Bloxham was the only person in the room, it seemed only too probable that the extraordinary language had been uttered by him – and, indeed, his demeanour went far to confirm the probability. He was standing in front of his chair, staring about him in a manner which suggested considerable mental perturbation, apparently unconscious of the fact that his cigar had dropped either from his lips or his fingers and was smoking merrily away on the brand-new carpet which the committee had just laid down. He turned to Mr. Philpotts in a state of what seemed really curious agitation.

“I say, Philpotts, did you see him?”

Mr. Philpotts looked at him in silence for a moment, before he drily said, “I heard you.”

But Mr. Bloxham was in no mood to be put off in this manner. He seemed, for some cause, to have lost the air of serene indifference for which he was famed – he was in a state of excitement, which, for him, was quite phenomenal.

“No nonsense, Philpotts – did you see him?”

“See whom?” Mr. Philpotts was selecting a paper from a side table. “I see your cigar is burning a hole in the carpet.”

“Confound my cigar!” Mr. Bloxham stamped on it with an angry tread. “Did Geoff Fleming pass you as you came in?”

Mr. Philpotts looked round with an air of evident surprise.

“Geoff Fleming! – Why, surely he’s in Ceylon by now.”

“Not a bit of it. A minute ago he was in that chair talking to me.”

“Bloxham!” Mr. Philpotts’ air of surprise became distinctly more pronounced, a fact which Mr. Bloxham apparently resented.

“What are you looking at me like that for pray? I tell you I was glancing through the Field, when I felt someone touch me on the shoulder. I looked round – there was Fleming standing just behind me. ‘Geoff,’ I cried, ‘I thought you were on the other side of the world – what are you doing here?’ ‘I’ve come to have a peep at you,’ he said. He drew a chair up close to mine – this chair – and sat in it. I turned round to reach for a match on the table, it scarcely took me a second, but when I looked his way again hanged if he weren’t gone.”

Mr. Philpotts continued his selection of a paper – in a manner which was rather marked.

“Which way did he go?”

“Didn’t you meet him as you came in?”

“I did not – I met no one. What’s the matter now?”

The question was inspired by the fact that a fresh volley of expletives came from Mr. Bloxham’s lips. That gentleman was standing with his hands thrust deep into his trouser pockets, his legs wide open, and his eyes and mouth almost as wide open as his legs.

“Hang me,” he exclaimed, when, as it appeared, he had temporarily come to the end of his stock of adjectives, “if I don’t believe he’s boned my purse.”

“Boned your purse!” Mr. Philpotts laid a not altogether flattering emphasis upon the “boned!” “Bloxham! What do you mean?”

Mr. Bloxham did not immediately explain. He dropped into the chair behind him. His hands were still in his trouser pockets, his legs were stretched out in front of him, and on his face there was not only an expression of amazement, but also of the most unequivocal bewilderment. He was staring at the vacant air as if he were trying his hardest to read some riddle.

“This is a queer start, upon my word, Philpotts,” he spoke in what, for him, were tones of unwonted earnestness. “When I was reaching for the matches on the table, what made me turn round so suddenly was because I thought I felt someone tugging at my purse – it was in the pocket next to Fleming. As I told you, when I did turn round Fleming was gone – and, by Jove, it looks as though my purse went with him.”

“Have you lost your purse? – is that what you mean?”

“I’ll swear that it was in my pocket five minutes ago, and that it’s not there now; that’s what I mean.”

Mr. Philpotts looked at Mr. Bloxham as if, although he was too polite to say so, he could not make him out at all. He resumed his selection of a paper.

“One is liable to make mistakes about one’s purse; perhaps you’ll find it when you get home.”

Mr. Bloxham sat in silence for some moments. Then, rising, he shook himself as a dog does when he quits the water.

“I say, Philpotts, don’t ladle out this yarn of mine to the other fellows, there’s a good chap. As you say, one is apt to get into a muddle about one’s purse, and I dare say I shall come across it when I get home. And perhaps I’m not very well this afternoon; I am feeling out of sorts, and that’s a fact. I think I’ll just toddle home and take a seidlitz, or a pill, or something. Ta ta!”

When Mr. Philpotts was left alone he smiled to himself, that superior smile which we are apt to smile when conscious that a man has been making a conspicuous ass of himself on lines which may be his, but which, we thank Providence, are emphatically not ours. With not one, but half a dozen papers in his hand, he seated himself in the chair which Mr. Bloxham had recently relinquished. Retaining a single paper, he placed the rest on the small round table on his left – the table on which wore the matches for which Mr. Bloxham declared he had reached. Taking out his case, he selected a cigar almost with the same care which he had shewn in selecting his literature, smiling to himself all the time that superior smile. Lighting the cigar he had chosen with a match from the table, he settled himself at his ease to read.

Scarcely had he done so than he was conscious of a hand laid gently on his shoulder from behind.

“What! Back again?”

“Hullo, Phil!”

He had taken it for granted, without troubling to look round, that Mr. Bloxham had returned, and that it was he who touched him on the shoulder. But the voice which replied to him, so far from being Mr. Bloxham’s was one the mere sound of which caused him not only to lose his bearing of indifference but to spring from his seat with the agility almost of a jack-in-the-box. When he saw who it was had touched him on the shoulder, he stared.

“Fleming! Then Bloxham was right, after all. May I ask what brings you here?”

The man at whom he was looking was tall and well-built, in age about five and thirty. There were black cavities beneath his eyes; the man’s whole face was redolent, to a trained perception, of something which was, at least, slightly unsavoury. He was dressed from head to foot in white duck – a somewhat singular costume for Pall Mall, even on a summer afternoon.

Before Mr. Philpotts’ gaze, his own eyes sank. Murmuring something which was almost inaudible, he moved to the chair next to the one which Mr. Philpotts had been occupying, the chair of which Mr. Bloxham had spoken.

As he seated himself, Mr. Philpotts eyed him in a fashion which was certainly not too friendly.

“What did you mean by disappearing just now in that extraordinary manner, frightening Bloxham half out of his wits? Where did you get to?”

The newcomer was stroking his heavy moustache with a hand which, for a man of his size and build, was unusually small and white. He spoke in a lazy, almost inaudible, drawl.

“I just popped outside.”

“Just popped outside! I must have been coming in just when you went out. I saw nothing of you; you’ve put Bloxham into a pretty state of mind.”

Re-seating himself, Mr. Philpotts turned to put the paper he was holding on to the little table. “I don’t want to make myself a brute, but it strikes me that your presence here at all requires explanation. When several fellows club together to give another fellow a fresh start on the other side of the world—”

Mr. Philpotts stopped short. Having settled the paper on the table to his perfect satisfaction, he turned round again towards the man he was addressing – and as he did so he ceased to address him, and that for the sufficiently simple reason that he was not there to address – the man had gone! The chair at Mr. Philpotts’ side was empty; without a sign or a sound its occupant had vanished, it would almost seem, into space.

CHAPTER II

Under the really remarkable circumstances of the case, Mr. Philpotts preserved his composure to a singular degree. He looked round the room; there was no one there. He again fixedly regarded the chair at his side; there could be no doubt that it was empty. To make quite sure, he passed his hand two or three times over the seat; it met with not the slightest opposition. Where could the man have got to? Mr. Philpotts had not, consciously, heard the slightest sound; there had not been time for him to have reached the door. Mr. Philpotts knocked the ash off his cigar. He stood up. He paced leisurely two or three times up and down the room.

“If Bloxham is ill, I am not. I was never better in my life. And the man who tells me that I have been the victim of an optical delusion is talking of what he knows nothing. I am prepared to swear that it was Geoffrey Fleming who touched me on the shoulder; that he spoke to me; and that he seated himself upon that chair. Where he came from, or where he has gone to, are other questions entirely.” He critically examined his fingernails.

“If those Psychical Research people have an address in town, I think I’ll have a talk with them. I suppose it’s three or four minutes since the man vanished. What’s the time now? Whatever has become of my watch?”

He might well ask – it had gone, both watch and chain – vanished, with Mr. Fleming, into air. Mr. Philpotts stared at his waistcoat, too astonished for speech. Then he gave a little gasp.

“This comes of playing Didymus! The brute has stolen it! I must apologise to Bloxham. As he himself said, this is a queer start, upon my honour! Now, if you like, I do feel a little out of sorts; this sort of thing is enough to make one. Before I go, I think I’ll have a drop of brandy.”

As he was hesitating, the smoking-room door opened to admit Frank Osborne. Mr. Osborne nodded to Mr. Philpotts as he crossed the room.

“You’re not looking quite yourself, Philpotts.”

Mr. Philpotts seemed to regard the observation almost in the light of an impertinence.

“Am I not? I was not aware that there was anything in my appearance to call for remark.” Smiling, Mr. Osborne seated himself in the chair which the other had not long ago vacated. Mr. Philpotts regarded him attentively. “You’re not looking quite yourself, either.”

The smile vanished from Mr. Osborne’s face.

“I’m not feeling myself! – I’m not! I’m worried about Geoff Fleming.”

Mr. Philpotts slightly started.

“About Geoff Fleming? – what about Fleming?”

“I’m afraid – well, Phil, the truth is that I’m afraid that Geoff’s a hopeless case.”

Mr. Philpotts was once more busying himself with the papers which were on the side table.

“What do you mean?”

“As you know, he and I have been very thick in our time, and when he came a cropper it was I who suggested that we who were at school with him might have a whip round among ourselves to get the old chap a fresh start elsewhere. You all of you behaved like bricks, and when I told him what you had done, poor Geoff was quite knocked over. He promised voluntarily that he would never touch a card again, or make another bet, until he had paid you fellows off with thumping interest. Well, he doesn’t seem to have kept his promise long.”

“How do you know he hasn’t?”

“I’ve heard from Deecie.”

“From Deecie? – where’s Fleming?”

“In Ceylon – they’d both got there before Deecie’s letter left.”

“In Ceylon!” exclaimed Mr. Philpotts excitedly, staring hard at Mr. Osborne. “You are sure he isn’t back in town?”

In his turn, Mr. Osborne was staring at Mr. Philpotts.

“Not unless he came back by the same boat which brought Deecie’s letter. What made you ask?”

“I only wondered.”

Mr. Philpotts turned again to the paper. The other went on.

“It seems that a lot of Australian sporting men were on the boat on which they went out. Fleming got in with them. They played – he played too. Deecie remonstrated – but he says that it only seemed to make bad worse. At first Geoff won – you know the usual sort of thing; he wound up by losing all he had, and about four hundred pounds beside. He had the cheek to ask Deecie for the money.” Mr. Osborne paused. Mr. Philpotts uttered a sound which might have been indicative of contempt – or anything. “Deecie says that when the winners found out that he couldn’t pay, there was a regular row. Geoff swore, in that wild way of his, that if he couldn’t pay them before he died, he would rise from the dead to get the money.”

Mr. Philpotts looked round with a show of added interest.

“What was that he said?”

“Oh, it was only his wild way of speaking – you know that way of his. If they don’t get their money before he dies, and I fancy that it’s rather more than even betting that they won’t, I don’t think that there’s much chance of his rising from his grave to get it for them. He’ll break that promise, as he has broken so many more. Poor Geoff! It seems that we might as well have kept our money in our pockets; it doesn’t seem to have done him much good. His prospects don’t look very rosy – without money, and with a bad name to start with.”

“As I fancy you have more than once suspected, Frank, I never have had a high opinion of Mr. Geoffrey Fleming. I am not in the least surprised at what you tell me, any more than I was surprised when he came his cropper. I have always felt that, at a pinch, he would do anything to save his own skin.” Mr. Osborne said nothing, but he shook his head. “Did you see anything of Bloxham when you came in?”

“I saw him going along the street in a cab.”

“I want to speak to him! I think I’ll just go and see if I can find him in his rooms.”

CHAPTER III

Mr. Frank Osborne scarcely seemed to be enjoying his own society when Mr. Philpotts had left him. As all the world knows, he is a man of sentiment – of the true sort, not the false. He has had one great passion in his life – Geoffrey Fleming. They began when they were at Chilchester together, when he was big, and Fleming still little. He did his work for him, fought for him, took his scrapes upon himself, believed in him, almost worshipped him. The thing continued when Fleming joined him at the University. Perhaps the fact that they both were orphans had something to do with it; neither of them had kith nor kin. The odd part of the business was that Osborne was not only a clear-sighted, he was a hard-headed man. It could not have been long before it dawned upon him that the man with whom he fraternised was a naturally bad egg. Fleming was continually coming to grief; he would have come to eternal grief at the very commencement of his career if it had not been for Osborne at his back. He went through his own money; he went through as much of his friend’s as his friend would let him. Then came the final smash. There were features about the thing which made it clear, even to Frank Osborne, that in England, at least, for some years to come, Geoffrey Fleming had run his course right out. He strained all his already strained resources in his efforts to extricate the man from the mire. When he found that he himself was insufficient, going to his old schoolfellows, he begged them, for his sake – if not for Fleming’s – to join hands with him in giving the scapegrace still another start. As a result, interest was made for him in a Ceylon plantation, and Mr. Fleming with, under the circumstances, well-lined pockets, was despatched over the seas to turn over a new leaf in a sunnier clime.

How he had vowed that he would turn over a new leaf, actually with tears upon his knees! And this was how he had done it; before he had reached his journey’s end, he had gambled away the money which was not his, and was in debt besides. Frank Osborne must have been fashioned something like the dog which loves its master the more, the more he ill-treats it. His heart went out in pity to the scamp across the seas. He had no delusions; he had long been conscious that the man was hopeless. And yet he knew very well that if he could have had his way he would have gone at once to comfort him. Poor Geoff! What an all-round mess he seemed to have made of things – and he had had the ball at his feet when he started – poor, dear old Geoff! With his knuckles Mr. Osborne wiped a suspicious moisture from his eyes. Geoff was all right – if he had only been able to prevent money from slipping from between his fingers, had been gifted with a sense of meum et tuum – not a nicer fellow in the world!

Mr. Osborne sat trying to persuade himself into the belief that the man was an injured paragon though he knew very well that he was an irredeemable scamp. He endeavoured to see only his good qualities, which was a task of exceeding difficulty – they were hidden in such a cloud of blackness. At least, whatever might be said against Geoff – and Mr. Osborne admitted to himself that there might be something – it was certain that Geoff loved him almost as much as he loved Geoff. Mr. Osborne declared to himself – putting pressure on himself to prevent his making a single mental reservation – that Geoff Fleming, in spite of all his faults, was the only person in the wide, wide world who did love him. And he was a stranger in a strange land, and in trouble again – poor dear old Geoff! Once more Mr. Osborne’s knuckles went up to wipe that suspicious moisture from his eyes.

While he was engaged in doing this, a hand was laid gently on his shoulder from behind. It was, perhaps, because he was unwilling to be detected in such an act that, at the touch, he rose from his seat with a start – which became so to speak, a start of petrified amazement when he perceived who it was who had touched him. It was the man of whom he had been thinking, the friend of his boyhood – Geoffrey Fleming.

“Geoff!” he gasped. “Dear old Geoff!” He paused, seemingly in doubt whether to laugh or cry. “I thought you were in Ceylon!”

Mr. Fleming did exactly what he had done when he came so unexpectedly on Mr. Philpotts – he moved to the chair at Mr. Osborne’s side. His manner was in contrast to his friend’s – it was emphatically not emotional.

“I’ve just dropped in,” he drawled.

“My dear old boy!” Mr. Osborne, as he surveyed his friend, seemed to become more and more torn by conflicting emotions. “Of course I’m very glad to see you Geoff, but how did you get in here? I thought that they had taken your name off the books of the club.” He was perfectly aware that Mr. Fleming’s name had been taken off the books of the club, and in a manner the reverse of complimentary. Mr. Fleming offered no remark. He sat looking down at the carpet stroking his moustache. Mr. Osborne went stammeringly on—

“As I say, Geoff – and as, of course you know, – I am very glad to see you, anywhere; but – we don’t want any unpleasantness, do we? If some of the fellows came in and found you here, they might make themselves nasty. Come round to my rooms; we shall be a lot more comfortable there, old man.”

Mr. Fleming raised his eyes. He looked his friend full in the face. As he met his glance, Mr. Osborne was conscious of a curious sort of shiver. It was not only because the man’s glance was, to say the least, less friendly than it might have been – it was because of something else, something which Mr. Osborne could scarcely have defined.

“I want some money.”

Mr. Osborne smiled, rather fatuously.

“Ah, Geoff, the same old tale! Deecie has told me all about it. I won’t reproach you; you know, if I had some, you should have it; but I’m not sure that it isn’t just as well for both ourselves that I haven’t, Geoff.”

“You have some money in your pocket now.”

Mr. Osborne’s amazement grew apace – his friend’s manner was so very strange.

“What a nose you always have for money; however did you find that out? But it isn’t mine. You know Jim Baker left me guardian to that boy of his, and I’ve been drawing the youngster’s dividends – it’s only seventy pounds, Geoff.”

Mr. Fleming stretched out his hand – his reply was brief and to the point.

“Give it to me!”

“Give it to you! – Geoff! – young Baker’s money!”

Mr. Fleming reiterated his demand.

“Give it to me!”

His manner was not only distinctly threatening, it had a peculiar effect upon his friend. Although Mr. Osborne had never before shewn fear of any living man, and had, in that respect, proved his superiority over Fleming many a time, there was something at that moment in the speaker’s voice, or words, or bearing, or in all three together, which set him shivering, as if with fear, from head to foot.

“Geoff! – you are mad! I’ll see what I can find for you, but I can’t give you young Baker’s dividends.”

Mr. Osborne was not quite clear as to exactly what it was that happened. He only knew that the friend of his boyhood – the man for whom he had done so much – the only person in the world who loved him – rose and took him by the throat, and, forcing him backwards, began to rifle the pocket which contained the seventy pounds. He was so taken by surprise, so overwhelmed by a feeling of utter horror, against which he was unable even to struggle, that it was only when he felt the money being actually withdrawn from his pocket that he made an attempt at self-defence. Then, when he made a frantic clutch at his assailant’s felonious arm, all he succeeded in grasping was the empty air. The pressure was removed from his throat. He was able to look about him. Mr. Fleming was gone. He thrust a trembling hand into his pocket – the seventy pounds had vanished too.

“Geoff! Geoff!” he cried, the tears streaming from his eyes. “Don’t play tricks with me! Give me back young Baker’s dividends!”

When no one answered and there seemed no one to hear, he began to searching round and round the room with his eyes, as if he suspected Mr. Fleming of concealing himself behind some article of furniture.

“Geoff! Geoff!” he continued crying. “Dear old boy! – give me back young Baker’s dividends!”

“Hullo!” exclaimed a voice – which certainly was not Mr. Fleming’s. Mr. Osborne turned. Colonel Lanyon was standing with the handle of the open door in his hand. “Frank, are you rehearsing for a five-act tragedy?”

Mr. Osborne replied to the Colonel’s question with another.

“Lanyon, did Geoffrey Fleming pass you as you came in?”

“Geoffrey Fleming!” The Colonel wheeled round on his heels like a teetotum. He glanced behind him. “What the deuce do you mean, Frank? If I catch that thief under the roof which covers me, I’ll make a case for the police of him.”

Then Mr. Osborne remembered what, in his agitation, he had momentarily forgotten, that Geoffrey Fleming had had no bitterer, more out-spoken, and, it may be added, more well-merited an opponent than Colonel Lanyon in the Climax Club. The Colonel advanced towards Mr. Osborne.

“Do you know that that’s the blackguard’s chair you’re standing by?”

“His chair!”

Mr. Osborne was leaning with one hand on the chair on which Mr. Fleming had, not long ago, been sitting.

“That’s what he used to call it himself, – with his usual impudence. He used to sit in it whenever he took a hand. The men would give it up to him – you know how you gave everything up to him, all the lot of you. If he couldn’t get it he’d turn nasty – wouldn’t play. It seems that he had the cheek to cut his initials on the chair – I only heard of it the other day, or there’d have been a clearance of him long ago. Look here – what do you think of that for a piece of rowdiness?”

The Colonel turned the chair upside down. Sure enough in the woodwork underneath the seat were the letters, cut in good-sized characters – “G. F.”

“You know that rubbishing way in which he used to talk. When men questioned his exclusive right to the chair, I’ve heard him say he’d prove his right by coming and sitting in it after he was dead and buried – he swore he’d haunt the chair. Idiot! – What is the matter with you Frank? You look as if you’d been in a rough and tumble – your necktie’s all anyhow.”

“I think I must have dropped asleep, and dreamed – yes, I fancy I’ve been dreaming.”

Mr. Osborne staggered, rather than walked, to the door, keeping one hand in the inside pocket of his coat. The Colonel followed him with his eyes.

“Frank’s ageing fast,” was his mental comment as Mr. Osborne disappeared. “He’ll be an old man yet before I am.”

He seated himself in Geoffrey Fleming’s chair.

It was, perhaps, ten minutes afterwards that Edward Jackson went into the smoking room – “Scientific” Jackson, as they call him, because of the sort of catch phrase he is always using – “Give me science!” He had scarcely been in the room a minute before he came rushing to the door shouting—

“Help, help!”

Men came hurrying from all parts of the building. Mr. Griffin came from the billiard-room, where he is always to be found. He had a cue in one hand, and a piece of chalk in the other. He was the first to address the vociferous gentleman standing at the smoking-room door.

“Jackson! – What’s the matter?”

Mr. Jackson was in such a condition of fluster and excitement that it was a little difficult to make out, from his own statement, what was the matter.

“Lanyon’s dead! Have any of you seen Geoff Fleming? Stop him if you do – he’s stolen my pocket-book!” He began mopping his brow with his bandanna handkerchief, “God bless my soul! An awful thing! – I’ve been robbed – and old Lanyon’s dead!”

One thing was quickly made clear – as they saw for themselves when they went crowding into the smoking-room – Lanyon was dead. He was kneeling in front of Geoffrey Fleming’s chair, clutching at either side of it with a tenacity which suggested some sort of convulsion. His head was thrown back, his eyes were still staring wide open, his face was distorted by a something which was half fear, half horror – as if, as those who saw him afterwards agreed, he had seen sudden, certain death approaching him, in a form which even he, a seasoned soldier, had found too horrible for contemplation.

Mr. Jackson’s story, in one sense, was plain enough, though it was odd enough in another. He told it to an audience which evinced unmistakable interest in every word uttered.

“I often come in for a smoke about this time, because generally the place is empty, so that you get it all to yourself.”

He cast a somewhat aggressive look upon his hearers – a look which could hardly be said to convey a flattering suggestion.

“When I first came in I thought that the room was empty. It was only when I was half-way across that something caused me to look round. I saw that someone was kneeling on the floor. I looked to see who it was. It was Lanyon. ‘Lanyon!’ I cried. ‘Whatever are you doing there?’ He didn’t answer. Wondering what was up with him and why he didn’t speak, I went closer to where he was. When I got there I didn’t like the look of him at all. I thought he was in some sort of a fit. I was hesitating whether to pick him up, or at once to summon assistance, when—”

Mr. Jackson paused. He looked about him with an obvious shiver.

“By George! When I think of it now, it makes me go quite creepy. Cathcart, would you mind ringing for another drop of brandy?”

The brandy was rung for. Mr. Jackson went on.

“All of a sudden, as I was stooping over Lanyon, someone touched me on the shoulder. You know, there hadn’t been a sound – I hadn’t heard the door open, not a thing which could suggest that anyone was approaching. Finding Lanyon like that had make me go quite queer, and when I felt that touch on my shoulder it so startled me that I fairly screeched. I jumped up to see who it was, And when I saw” – Mr. Jackson’s bandanna came into play – “who it was, I thought my eyes would have started out of my head. It was Geoff Fleming.”

“Who?” came in chorus from his auditors.

“It was Geoffrey Fleming. ‘Good God! – Fleming!’ I cried. ‘Where did you come from? I never heard you. Anyhow, you’re just in the nick of time. Lanyon’s come to grief – lend me a hand with him.’ I bent down, to take hold of one side of poor old Lanyon, meaning Fleming to take hold of the other. Before I had a chance of touching Lanyon, Fleming, catching me by the shoulder, whirled me round – I had had no idea the fellow was so strong, he gripped me like a vice. I was just going to ask what the dickens he meant by handling me like that, when, before I could say Jack Robinson, or even had time to get my mouth open, Fleming, darting his hand into my coat pocket, snatched my pocket-book clean out of it.”

He stopped, apparently to gasp for breath. “And, pray, what were you doing while Mr. Fleming behaved in this exceedingly peculiar way – even for Mr. Fleming?” inquired Mr. Cathcart.

“Doing!” Mr. Jackson was indignant. “Don’t I tell you I was doing nothing? There was no time to do anything – it all happened in a flash. I had just come from my bankers – there were a hundred and thirty pounds in that pocket-book. When I realised that the fellow had taken it, I made a grab at him. And” – again Mr. Jackson looked furtively about him, and once more the bandanna came into active play – “directly I did so, I don’t know where he went to, but it seemed to me that he vanished into air – he was gone, like a flash of lightning. I told myself I was mad – stark mad! But when I felt for my pocketbook, and found that that was also gone, I ran yelling to the door.”

CHAPTER IV

It was, as the old-time novelists used to phrase it, about three weeks after the events transpired which we have recorded in the previous chapter. Evening – after dinner. There was a goodly company assembled in the smoking room at the Climax Club. Conversation was general. They were talking of some of the curious circumstances which had attended the death of Colonel Lanyon. The medical evidence at the inquest had gone to shew that the Colonel had died of one of the numerous, and, indeed, almost innumerable, varieties of heart disease. The finding had been in accordance with the medical evidence. It seemed to be felt, by some of the speakers, that such a finding scarcely met the case.

“It’s all very well,” observed Mr. Cathcart, who seemed disposed to side with the coroner’s jury, “for you fellows to talk, but in such a case, you must bring in some sort of verdict – and what other verdict could they bring? There was not a trace of any mark of violence to be found upon the man.”

“It’s my belief that he saw Fleming, and that Fleming frightened him to death.”

It was Mr. Jackson who said this. Mr. Cathcart smiled a rather provoking smile.

“So far as I observed, you did not drop any hint of your belief when you were before the coroner.”

“No, because I didn’t want to be treated as a laughing-stock by a lot of idiots.”

“Quite so; I can understand your natural objection to that, but still I don’t see your line of argument. I should not have cared to question Lanyon’s courage to Lanyon’s face while he was living. Why should you suppose that such a man as Geoffrey Fleming was capable of such a thing as, as you put it, actually frightening him to death? I should say it was rather the other way about. I have seen Fleming turn green, with what looked very much like funk, at the sight of Lanyon.”

Mr. Jackson for some moments smoked in silence.

“If you had seen Geoffrey Fleming under the circumstances in which I did, you would understand better what it is I mean.”

“But, my dear Jackson, if you will forgive my saying so, it seems to me that you don’t shew to great advantage in your own story. Have you communicated the fact of your having been robbed to the police?”

“I have.”

“And have you furnished them with the numbers of the notes which were taken?”

“I have.”

“Then, in that case, I shouldn’t be surprised if Mr. Fleming were brought to book any hour of any day. You’ll find he has been lying close in London all the time – he soon had enough of Ceylon.”

A newcomer joined the group of talkers – Frank Osborne. They noticed, as he seated himself, how much he seemed to have aged of late and how particularly shabby he seemed just then. The first remark which he made took them all aback.

“Geoff Fleming’s dead.”

“Dead!” cried Mr. Philpotts, who was sitting next to Mr. Osborne.

“Yes – dead. I’ve heard from Deecie. He died three weeks ago.”

“Three weeks ago!”

“On the day on which Lanyon died.”

Mr. Cathcart turned to Mr. Jackson, with a smile.

“Then that knocks on the head your theory about his having frightened Lanyon to death; and how about your interview with him – eh Jackson?”

Mr. Jackson did not answer. He suddenly went white. An intervention came from an unexpected quarter – from Mr. Philpotts.

“It seems to me that you are rather taking things for granted, Cathcart. I take leave to inform you that I saw Geoffrey Fleming, perhaps less than half-an-hour before Jackson did.”

Mr. Cathcart stared.

“You saw him! – Philpotts!”

Then Mr. Bloxham arose and spoke.

“Yes, and I saw him, too – didn’t I, Philpott’s?”

Any tendency on the part of the auditors to smile was checked by the tone of exceeding bitterness in which Frank Osborne was also moved to testify.

“And I – I saw him, too! – Geoff! – dear old boy!”

“Deecie says that there were two strange things about Geoff’s death. He was struck by a fit of apoplexy. He was dead within the hour. Soon after he died, the servant came running to say that the bed was empty on which the body had been lying. Deecie went to see. He says that, when he got into the room, Geoff was back again upon the bed, but it was plain enough that he had moved. His clothes and hair were in disorder, his fists were clenched, and there was a look upon his face which had not been there at the moment of his death, and which, Deecie says, seemed a look partly of rage and partly of triumph.

“I have been calculating the difference between Cingalese and Greenwich time. It must have been between three and four o’clock when the servant went running to say that Geoff’s body was not upon the bed – it was about that time that Lanyon died.”

He paused – and then continued—

“The other strange thing that happened was this. Deecie says that the day after Geoff died a telegram came for him, which, of course, he opened. It was an Australian wire, and purported to come from the Melbourne sporting man of whom I told you.” He turned to Mr. Philpotts. “It ran, ‘Remittance to hand. It comes in rather a miscellaneous form. Thanks all the same.’ Deecie can only suppose that Geoff had managed, in some way, to procure the four hundred pounds which he had lost and couldn’t pay, and had also managed, in some way, to send it on to Melbourne.”

There was silence when Frank Osborne ceased to speak – silence which was broken in a somewhat startling fashion.

“Who’s that touched me?” suddenly exclaimed Mr. Cathcart, springing from his seat.

They stared.

“Touched you!” said someone. “No one’s within half a mile of you. You’re dreaming, my dear fellow.”

Considering the provocation was so slight, Mr. Cathcart seemed strangely moved.

“Don’t tell me that I’m dreaming – someone touched me on the shoulder! – What’s that?”

“That” was the sound of laughter proceeding from the, apparently, vacant seat. As if inspired by a common impulse, the listeners simultaneously moved back.

“That’s Fleming’s chair,” said Mr. Philpotts, beneath his breath.

THE WIND IN THE ROSE-BUSH

Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

1902

Ford village has no railroad station, being on the other side of the river from Porter’s Falls, and accessible only by the ford which gives it its name, and a ferry line.

The ferry-boat was waiting when Rebecca Flint got off the train with her bag and lunch basket. When she and her small trunk were safely embarked she sat stiff and straight and calm in the ferry-boat as it shot swiftly and smoothly across stream. There was a horse attached to a light country wagon on board, and he pawed the deck uneasily. His owner stood near, with a wary eye upon him, although he was chewing, with as dully reflective an expression as a cow. Beside Rebecca sat a woman of about her own age, who kept looking at her with furtive curiosity; her husband, short and stout and saturnine, stood near her. Rebecca paid no attention to either of them. She was tall and spare and pale, the type of a spinster, yet with rudimentary lines and expressions of matronhood. She all unconsciously held her shawl, rolled up in a canvas bag, on her left hip, as if it had been a child. She wore a settled frown of dissent at life, but it was the frown of a mother who regarded life as a froward child, rather than as an overwhelming fate.

The other woman continued staring at her; she was mildly stupid, except for an overdeveloped curiosity which made her at times sharp beyond belief. Her eyes glittered, red spots came on her flaccid cheeks; she kept opening her mouth to speak, making little abortive motions. Finally she could endure it no longer; she nudged Rebecca boldly.

“A pleasant day,” said she.

Rebecca looked at her and nodded coldly.

“Yes, very,” she assented.

“Have you come far?”

“I have come from Michigan.”

“Oh!” said the woman, with awe. “It’s a long way,” she remarked, presently.

“Yes, it is,” replied Rebecca, conclusively.

Still the other woman was not daunted; there was something which she determined to know, possibly roused thereto by a vague sense of incongruity in the other’s appearance. “It’s a long ways to come and leave a family,” she remarked with painful slyness.

“I ain’t got any family to leave,” returned Rebecca, shortly.

“Then you ain’t—”

“No, I ain’t.”

“Oh!” said the woman.

Rebecca looked straight ahead at the race of the river.

It was a long ferry. Finally Rebecca herself waxed unexpectedly loquacious. She turned to the older woman and inquired if she knew John Dent’s widow who lived in Ford Village. “Her husband died about three years ago,” said she, by way of detail.

The woman started violently. She turned pale, then she flushed; she cast a strange glance at her husband, who was regarding both women with a sort of stolid keenness.

“Yes, I guess I do,” faltered the woman, finally.

“Well, his first wife was my sister,” said Rebecca with the air of one imparting important intelligence.

“Was she?” responded the other woman, feebly. She glanced at her husband with an expression of doubt and terror, and he shook his head forbiddingly.

“I’m going to see her and take my niece Agnes home with me,” said Rebecca.

Then the woman gave such a violent start that she noticed it.

“What is the matter?” she asked.

“Nothin’, I guess,” replied the woman, with eyes on her husband, who was slowly shaking his head, like a Chinese toy.

“Is my niece sick?” asked Rebecca with quick suspicion.

“No, she ain’t sick,” replied the woman with alacrity, then she caught her breath with a gasp.

“When did you see her?”

“Let me see; I ain’t seen her for some little time,” replied the woman. Then she caught her breath again.

“She ought to have grown up real pretty, if she takes after my sister. She was a real pretty woman,” Rebecca said, wistfully.

“Yes, I guess she did grow up pretty,” replied the woman in a trembling voice.

“What kind of a woman is the second wife?”

The woman glanced at her husband’s warning face. She continued to gaze at him while she replied in a choking voice to Rebecca:

“I – guess she’s a nice woman,” she replied. “I – don’t know, I guess so. I – don’t see much of her.”

“I felt kind of hurt that John married again so quick,” said Rebecca; “but I suppose he wanted his house kept, and Agnes wanted care. I wasn’t so situated that I could take her when her mother died. I had my own mother to care for, and I was school-teaching. Now mother has gone, and my uncle died six months ago and left me quite a little property, and I’ve given up my school and I’ve come for Agnes. I guess she’ll be glad to go with me, though I suppose her stepmother is a good woman and has always done for her.”

The man’s warning shake at his wife was fairly portentous.

“I guess so,” said she.

“John always wrote that she was a beautiful woman,” said Rebecca.

Then the ferry-boat grated on the shore.

John Dent’s widow had sent a horse and wagon to meet her sister-in-law. When the woman and her husband went down the road, on which Rebecca in the wagon with her trunk soon passed them, she said, reproachfully:

“Seems as if I’d ought to have told her, Thomas.”

“Let her find it out herself,” replied the man. “Don’t you go to burnin’ your fingers in other folks’ puddin’, Maria.”

“Do you s’pose she’ll see anything?” asked the woman with a spasmodic shudder and a terrified roll of her eyes.

“See!” returned her husband with stolid scorn. “Better be sure there’s anything to see.”

“Oh, Thomas, they say—”

“Lord, ain’t you found out that what they say is mostly lies?”

“But if it should be true, and she’s a nervous woman, she might be scared enough to lose her wits,” said his wife, staring uneasily after Rebecca’s erect figure in the wagon disappearing over the crest of the hilly road.

“Wits that’s so easy upset ain’t worth much,” declared the man. “You keep out of it, Maria.”

Rebecca in the meantime rode on in the wagon, beside a flaxen-headed boy, who looked, to her understanding, not very bright. She asked him a question, and he paid no attention. She repeated it, and he responded with a bewildered and incoherent grunt. Then she let him alone, after making sure that he knew how to drive straight.

They had traveled about half a mile, passed the village square, and gone a short distance beyond, when the boy drew up with a sudden Whoa! before a very prosperous-looking house. It had been one of the aboriginal cottages of the vicinity, small and white, with a roof extending on one side over a piazza, and a tiny “L” jutting out in the rear, on the right hand. Now the cottage was transformed by dormer windows, a bay window on the piazzaless side, a carved railing down the front steps, and a modern hardwood door.

“Is this John Dent’s house?” asked Rebecca.

The boy was as sparing of speech as a philosopher. His only response was in flinging the reins over the horse’s back, stretching out one foot to the shaft, and leaping out of the wagon, then going around to the rear for the trunk. Rebecca got out and went toward the house. Its white paint had a new gloss; its blinds were an immaculate apple green; the lawn was trimmed as smooth as velvet, and it was dotted with scrupulous groups of hydrangeas and cannas.

“I always understood that John Dent was well-to-do,” Rebecca reflected, comfortably. “I guess Agnes will have considerable. I’ve got enough, but it will come in handy for her schooling. She can have advantages.”

The boy dragged the trunk up the fine gravel walk, but before he reached the steps leading up to the piazza, for the house stood on a terrace, the front door opened and a fair, frizzled head of a very large and handsome woman appeared. She held up her black silk skirt, disclosing voluminous ruffles of starched embroidery, and waited for Rebecca. She smiled placidly, her pink, double-chinned face widened and dimpled, but her blue eyes were wary and calculating. She extended her hand as Rebecca climbed the steps.

“This is Miss Flint, I suppose,” said she.

“Yes, ma’am,” replied Rebecca, noticing with bewilderment a curious expression compounded of fear and defiance on the other’s face.

“Your letter only arrived this morning,” said Mrs. Dent, in a steady voice. Her great face was a uniform pink, and her china-blue eyes were at once aggressive and veiled with secrecy.

“Yes, I hardly thought you’d get my letter,” replied Rebecca. “I felt as if I could not wait to hear from you before I came. I supposed you would be so situated that you could have me a little while without putting you out too much, from what John used to write me about his circumstances, and when I had that money so unexpected I felt as if I must come for Agnes. I suppose you will be willing to give her up. You know she’s my own blood, and of course she’s no relation to you, though you must have got attached to her. I know from her picture what a sweet girl she must be, and John always said she looked like her own mother, and Grace was a beautiful woman, if she was my sister.”

Rebecca stopped and stared at the other woman in amazement and alarm. The great handsome blonde creature stood speechless, livid, gasping, with her hand to her heart, her lips parted in a horrible caricature of a smile.

“Are you sick!” cried Rebecca, drawing near. “Don’t you want me to get you some water!”

Then Mrs. Dent recovered herself with a great effort. “It is nothing,” she said. “I am subject to – spells. I am over it now. Won’t you come in, Miss Flint?”

As she spoke, the beautiful deep-rose color suffused her face, her blue eyes met her visitor’s with the opaqueness of turquoise – with a revelation of blue, but a concealment of all behind.

Rebecca followed her hostess in, and the boy, who had waited quiescently, climbed the steps with the trunk. But before they entered the door a strange thing happened. On the upper terrace, close to the piazza post, grew a great rose-bush, and on it, late in the season though it was, one small red, perfect rose.

Rebecca looked at it, and the other woman extended her hand with a quick gesture. “Don’t you pick that rose!” she brusquely cried.

Rebecca drew herself up with stiff dignity.

“I ain’t in the habit of picking other folks’ roses without leave,” said she.

As Rebecca spoke she started violently and lost sight of her resentment, for something singular happened. Suddenly the rosebush was agitated violently as if by a gust of wind, yet it was a remarkably still day. Not a leaf of the hydrangea standing on the terrace close to the rose trembled.

“What on earth—” began Rebecca; then she stopped with a gasp at the sight of the other woman’s face. Although a face, it gave somehow the impression of a desperately clutched hand of secrecy.

“Come in!” said she in a harsh voice, which seemed to come forth from her chest with no intervention of the organs of speech. “Come into the house. I’m getting cold out here.”

“What makes that rose-bush blow so when there isn’t any wind?” asked Rebecca, trembling with vague horror, yet resolute.

“I don’t see as it is blowing,” returned the woman, calmly. And as she spoke, indeed, the bush was quiet.

“It was blowing,” declared Rebecca.

“It isn’t now,” said Mrs. Dent. “I can’t try to account for everything that blows out-of-doors. I have too much to do.”

She spoke scornfully and confidently, with defiant, unflinching eyes, first on the bush, then on Rebecca, and led the way into the house.

“It looked queer,” persisted Rebecca, but she followed, and also the boy with the trunk.

Rebecca entered an interior, prosperous, even elegant, according to her simple ideas. There were Brussels carpets, lace curtains, and plenty of brilliant upholstery and polished wood.

“You’re real nicely situated,” remarked Rebecca after she had become a little accustomed to her new surroundings and the two women were seated at the tea-table.

Mrs. Dent stared with a hard complacency from behind her silver-plated service. “Yes, I be,” said she.

“You got all the things new?” said Rebecca, hesitatingly, with a jealous memory of her dead sister’s bridal furnishings.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Dent. “I was never one to want dead folks’ things, and I had money enough of my own, so I wasn’t beholden to John. I had the old duds put up at auction. They didn’t bring much.”

“I suppose you saved some for Agnes. She’ll want some of her poor mother’s things when she is grown up,” said Rebecca with some indignation.

The defiant stare of Mrs. Dent’s blue eyes waxed more intense. “There’s a few things up garret,” said she.

“She’ll be likely to value them,” remarked Rebecca. As she spoke she glanced at the window. “Isn’t it ’most time for her to be coming home?” she asked.

“’Most time,” answered Mrs. Dent, carelessly; “but when she gets over to Addie Slocum’s she never knows when to come home.”

“Is Addie Slocum her intimate friend?”

“Intimate as any.”

“Maybe we can have her come out to see Agnes when she’s living with me,” said Rebecca, wistfully. “I suppose she’ll be likely to be homesick at first.”

“Most likely,” answered Mrs. Dent.

“Does she call you mother?” Rebecca asked.

“No, she calls me Aunt Emeline,” replied the other woman, shortly. “When did you say you were going home?”

“In about a week, I thought, if she can be ready to go so soon,” answered Rebecca with a surprised look.

She reflected that she would not remain a day longer than she could help after such an inhospitable look and question.

“Oh, as far as that goes,” said Mrs. Dent, “it wouldn’t make any difference about her being ready. You could go home whenever you felt that you must, and she could come afterward.”

“Alone?”

“Why not? She’s a big girl now, and you don’t have to change cars.”

“My niece will go home when I do, and not travel alone; and if I can’t wait here for her, in the house that used to be her mother’s and my sister’s home, I’ll go and board somewhere,” returned Rebecca with warmth.

“Oh, you can stay here as long as you want to. You’re welcome,” said Mrs. Dent.

Then Rebecca started. “There she is!” she declared in a trembling, exultant voice. Nobody knew how she longed to see the girl.

“She isn’t as late as I thought she’d be,” said Mrs. Dent, and again that curious, subtle change passed over her face, and again it settled into that stony impassiveness.

Rebecca stared at the door, waiting for it to open. “Where is she?” she asked, presently.

“I guess she’s stopped to take off her hat in the entry,” suggested Mrs. Dent.

Rebecca waited. “Why don’t she come? It can’t take her all this time to take off her hat.”

For answer Mrs. Dent rose with a stiff jerk and threw open the door.

“Agnes!” she called. “Agnes!” Then she turned and eyed Rebecca. “She ain’t there.”

“I saw her pass the window,” said Rebecca in bewilderment.

“You must have been mistaken.”

“I know I did,” persisted Rebecca.

“You couldn’t have.”

“I did. I saw first a shadow go over the ceiling, then I saw her in the glass there” – she pointed to a mirror over the sideboard opposite – “and then the shadow passed the window.”

“How did she look in the glass?”

“Little and light-haired, with the light hair kind of tossing over her forehead.”

“You couldn’t have seen her.”

“Was that like Agnes?”

“Like enough; but of course you didn’t see her. You’ve been thinking so much about her that you thought you did.”

“You thought you did.”

“I thought I saw a shadow pass the window, but I must have been mistaken. She didn’t come in, or we would have seen her before now. I knew it was too early for her to get home from Addie Slocum’s, anyhow.”

When Rebecca went to bed Agnes had not returned. Rebecca had resolved that she would not retire until the girl came, but she was very tired, and she reasoned with herself that she was foolish. Besides, Mrs. Dent suggested that Agnes might go to the church social with Addie Slocum. When Rebecca suggested that she be sent for and told that her aunt had come, Mrs. Dent laughed meaningly.

“I guess you’ll find out that a young girl ain’t so ready to leave a sociable, where there’s boys, to see her aunt,” said she.

“She’s too young,” said Rebecca, incredulously and indignantly.

“She’s sixteen,” replied Mrs. Dent; “and she’s always been great for the boys.”

“She’s going to school four years after I get her before she thinks of boys,” declared Rebecca.

“We’ll see,” laughed the other woman.

After Rebecca went to bed, she lay awake a long time listening for the sound of girlish laughter and a boy’s voice under her window; then she fell asleep.

The next morning she was down early. Mrs. Dent, who kept no servants, was busily preparing breakfast.

“Don’t Agnes help you about breakfast?” asked Rebecca. “No, I let her lay,” replied Mrs. Dent, shortly.

“What time did she get home last night?”

“She didn’t get home.”

“What?”

“She didn’t get home. She stayed with Addie. She often does.”

“Without sending you word?”

“Oh, she knew I wouldn’t worry.”

“When will she be home?”

“Oh, I guess she’ll be along pretty soon.”

Rebecca was uneasy, but she tried to conceal it, for she knew of no good reason for uneasiness. What was there to occasion alarm in the fact of one young girl staying overnight with another? She could not eat much breakfast. Afterward she went out on the little piazza, although her hostess strove furtively to stop her.

“Why don’t you go out back of the house? It’s real pretty – a view over the river,” she said.

“I guess I’ll go out here,” replied Rebecca. She had a purpose – to watch for the absent girl.

Presently Rebecca came hustling into the house through the sitting room, into the kitchen where Mrs. Dent was cooking.

“That rose-bush!” she gasped.

Mrs. Dent turned and faced her.

“What of it?”

“It’s a-blowing.”

“What of it?”

“There isn’t a mite of wind this morning.”

Mrs. Dent turned with an inimitable toss of her fair head. “If you think I can spend my time puzzling over such nonsense as—” she began, but Rebecca interrupted her with a cry and a rush to the door.

“There she is now!” she cried.

She flung the door wide open, and curiously enough a breeze came in and her own gray hair tossed, and a paper blew off the table to the floor with a loud rustle, but there was nobody in sight.

“There’s nobody here,” Rebecca said.

She looked blankly at the other woman, who brought her rolling-pin down on a slab of pie crust with a thud.

“I didn’t hear anybody,” she said, calmly.

“I saw somebody pass that window!”

“You were mistaken again.”

“I know I saw somebody.”

“You couldn’t have. Please shut that door.”

Rebecca shut the door. She sat down beside the window and looked out on the autumnal yard, with its little curve of footpath to the kitchen door.

“What smells so strong of roses in this room?” she said, presently. She sniffed hard.

“I don’t smell anything but these nutmegs.”

“It is not nutmeg.”

“I don’t smell anything else.”

“Where do you suppose Agnes is?”

“Oh, perhaps she has gone over the ferry to Porter’s Falls with Addie. She often does. Addie’s got an aunt over there, and Addie’s got a cousin, a real pretty boy.”

“You suppose she’s gone over there?”

“Mebbe. I shouldn’t wonder.”

“When should she be home?”

“Oh, not before afternoon.”

Rebecca waited with all the patience she could muster. She kept reassuring herself, telling herself that it was all natural, that the other woman could not help it, but she made up her mind that if Agnes did not return that afternoon she should be sent for.

When it was four o’clock she started up with resolution. She had been furtively watching the onyx clock on the sitting-room mantel; she had timed herself. She had said that if Agnes was not home by that time she should demand that she be sent for. She rose and stood before Mrs. Dent, who looked up coolly from her embroidery.

“I’ve waited just as long as I’m going to,” she said. “I’ve come ’way from Michigan to see my own sister’s daughter and take her home with me. I’ve been here ever since yesterday – twenty-four hours – and I haven’t seen her. Now I’m going to. I want her sent for.”

Mrs. Dent folded her embroidery and rose.

“Well, I don’t blame you,” she said. “It is high time she came home. I’ll go right over and get her myself.”

Rebecca heaved a sigh of relief. She hardly knew what she had suspected or feared, but she knew that her position had been one of antagonism if not accusation, and she was sensible of relief.

“I wish you would,” she said, gratefully, and went back to her chair, while Mrs. Dent got her shawl and her little white head-tie. “I wouldn’t trouble you, but I do feel as if I couldn’t wait any longer to see her,” she remarked, apologetically.

“Oh, it ain’t any trouble at all,” said Mrs. Dent as she went out. “I don’t blame you; you have waited long enough.”

Rebecca sat at the window watching breathlessly until Mrs. Dent came stepping through the yard alone. She ran to the door and saw, hardly noticing it this time, that the rose-bush was again violently agitated, yet with no wind evident elsewhere.

“Where is she?” she cried.

Mrs. Dent laughed with stiff lips as she came up the steps over the terrace. “Girls will be girls,” said she. “She’s gone with Addie to Lincoln. Addie’s got an uncle who’s conductor on the train, and lives there, and he got ’em passes, and they’re goin’ to stay to Addie’s Aunt Margaret’s a few days Mrs. Slocum said Agnes didn’t have time to come over and ask me before the train went, but she took it on herself to say it would be all right, and—”

“Why hadn’t she been over to tell you?” Rebecca was angry, though not suspicious. She even saw no reason for her anger.

“Oh, she was putting up grapes. She was coming over just as soon as she got the black off her hands. She heard I had company, and her hands were a sight. She was holding them over sulphur matches.”

“You say she’s going to stay a few days?” repeated Rebecca, dazedly.

“Yes; till Thursday, Mrs. Slocum said.”

“How far is Lincoln from here?”

“About fifty miles. It’ll be a real treat to her. Mrs. Slocum’s sister is a real nice woman.”

“It is goin’ to make it pretty late about my goin’ home.”

“If you don’t feel as if you could wait, I’ll get her ready and send her on just as soon as I can,” Mrs. Dent said, sweetly.

“I’m going to wait,” said Rebecca, grimly.

The two women sat down again, and Mrs. Dent took up her embroidery.

“Is there any sewing I can do for her?” Rebecca asked, finally, in a desperate way. “If I can get her sewing along some—”

Mrs. Dent arose with alacrity and fetched a mass of white from the closet. “Here,” she said, “if you want to sew the lace on this nightgown. I was going to put her to it, but she’ll be glad enough to get rid of it. She ought to have this and one more before she goes. I don’t like to send her away without some good underclothing.”

Rebecca snatched at the little white garment and sewed feverishly.

That night she wakened from a deep sleep a little after midnight and lay a minute trying to collect her faculties and explain to herself what she was listening to. At last she discovered that it was the then popular strains of “The Maiden’s Prayer” floating up through the floor from the piano in the sitting room below. She jumped up, threw a shawl over her nightgown, and hurried downstairs trembling. There was nobody in the sitting room: the piano was silent. She ran to Mrs. Dent’s bedroom and called hysterically:

“Emeline! Emeline!”

“What is it?” asked Mrs. Dent’s voice from the bed. The voice was stern, but had a note of consciousness in it.

“Who – who was that playing ‘The Maiden’s Prayer’ in the sitting room, on the piano?”

“I didn’t hear anybody.”

“There was someone.”

“I didn’t hear anything.”

“I tell you there was someone. But – there ain’t anybody there.”

“I didn’t hear anything.”

“I did – somebody playing ‘The Maiden’s Prayer’ on the piano. Has Agnes got home? I want to know.”

“Of course Agnes hasn’t got home,” answered Mrs. Dent with rising inflection. “Be you gone crazy over that girl? The last boat from Porter’s Falls was in before we went to bed. Of course she ain’t come.”

“I heard—”

“You were dreaming.”

“I wasn’t; I was broad awake.”

Rebecca went back to her chamber and kept her lamp burning all night.

The next morning her eyes upon Mrs. Dent were wary and blazing with suppressed excitement. She kept opening her mouth as if to speak, then frowning, and setting her lips hard. After breakfast she went upstairs, and came down presently with her coat and bonnet.

“Now, Emeline,” she said, “I want to know where the Slocums live.”

Mrs. Dent gave a strange, long, half-lidded glance at her. She was finishing her coffee.

“Why?” she asked.

“I’m going over there and find out if they have heard anything from her daughter and Agnes since they went away. I don’t like what I heard last night.”

“You must have been dreaming.”

“It don’t make any odds whether I was or not. Does she play ‘The Maiden’s Prayer’ on the piano? I want to know.”

“What if she does? She plays it a little, I believe. I don’t know. She don’t half play it, anyhow; she ain’t got an ear.”

“That wasn’t half played last night. I don’t like such things happening. I ain’t superstitious, but I don’t like it. I’m going. Where do the Slocums live?”

“You go down the road over the bridge past the old grist mill, then you turn to the left; it’s the only house for half a mile. You can’t miss it. It has a barn with a ship in full sail on the cupola.”

“Well, I’m going. I don’t feel easy.”

About two hours later Rebecca returned. There were red spots on her cheeks. She looked wild. “I’ve been there,” she said, “and there isn’t a soul at home. Something has happened.”

“What has happened?”

“I don’t know. Something. I had a warning last night. There wasn’t a soul there. They’ve been sent for to Lincoln.”

“Did you see anybody to ask?” asked Mrs. Dent with thinly concealed anxiety.

“I asked the woman that lives on the turn of the road. She’s stone deaf. I suppose you know. She listened while I screamed at her to know where the Slocums were, and then she said, ‘Mrs. Smith don’t live here.’ I didn’t see anybody on the road, and that’s the only house. What do you suppose it means?”

“I don’t suppose it means much of anything,” replied Mrs. Dent, coolly. “Mr. Slocum is conductor on the railroad, and he’d be away, anyway, and Mrs. Slocum often goes early when he does, to spend the day with her sister in Porter’s Falls. She’d be more likely to go away than Addie.”

“And you don’t think anything has happened?” Rebecca asked with diminishing distrust before the reasonableness of it.

“Land, no!”

Rebecca went upstairs to lay aside her coat and bonnet. But she came hurrying back with them still on.

“Who’s been in my room?” she gasped. Her face was pale as ashes.

Mrs. Dent also paled as she regarded her.

“What do you mean?” she asked, slowly.

“I found when I went upstairs that – little nightgown of – Agnes’s on – the bed, laid out. It was – laid out. The sleeves were folded across the bosom, and there was that little red rose between them. Emeline, what is it? Emeline, what’s the matter? Oh!”

Mrs. Dent was struggling for breath in great, choking gasps. She clung to the back of a chair. Rebecca, trembling herself so she could scarcely keep on her feet, got her some water.

As soon as she recovered herself Mrs. Dent regarded her with eyes full of the strangest mixture of fear and horror and hostility. “What do you mean talking so?” she said in a hard voice.

“It is there.”

“Nonsense. You threw it down and it fell that way.”

“It was folded in my bureau drawer.”

“It couldn’t have been.”

“Who picked that red rose?”

“Look on the bush,” Mrs. Dent replied shortly.

Rebecca looked at her; her mouth gaped. She hurried out of the room. When she came back her eyes seemed to protrude. (She had in the meantime hastened upstairs, and come down with tottering steps, clinging to the banister.)

“Now I want to know what all this means?” she demanded.

“What what means?”

“The rose is on the bush, and it’s gone from the bed in my room! Is this house haunted, or what?”

“I don’t know anything about a house being haunted. I don’t believe in such things. Be you crazy?” Mrs. Dent spoke with gathering force. The color flashed back to her cheeks.

“No,” said Rebecca, shortly, “I ain’t crazy yet, but I shall be if this keeps on much longer. I’m going to find out where that girl is before night.”

Mrs. Dent eyed her. “What be you going to do?”

“I’m going to Lincoln.”

A faint triumphant smile overspread Mrs. Dent’s large face.

“You can’t,” said she; “there ain’t any train.”

“No train?”

“No; there ain’t any afternoon train from the Falls to Lincoln.”

“Then I’m going over to the Slocums’ again tonight.”

However, Rebecca did not go; such a rain came up as deterred even her resolution, and she had only her best dresses with her. Then in the evening came the letter from the Michigan village which she had left nearly a week ago. It was from her cousin, a single woman, who had come to keep her house while she was away. It was a pleasant unexciting letter enough, all the first of it, and related mostly how she missed Rebecca; how she hoped she was having pleasant weather and kept her health; and how her friend, Mrs. Greenaway, had come to stay with her since she had felt lonesome the first night in the house; how she hoped Rebecca would have no objections to this, although nothing had been said about it, since she had not realized that she might be nervous alone. The cousin was painfully conscientious, hence the letter. Rebecca smiled in spite of her disturbed mind as she read it; then her eye caught the postscript. That was in a different hand, purporting to be written by the friend, Mrs. Hannah Greenaway, informing her that the cousin had fallen down the cellar stairs and broken her hip, and was in a dangerous condition, and begging Rebecca to return at once, as she herself was rheumatic and unable to nurse her properly, and no one else could be obtained.

Rebecca looked at Mrs. Dent, who had come to her room with the letter quite late; it was half-past nine, and she had gone upstairs for the night.

“Where did this come from?” she asked.

“Mr. Amblecrom brought it,” she replied.

“Who’s he?”

“The postmaster. He often brings the letters that come on the late mail. He knows I ain’t anybody to send. He brought yours about your coming. He said he and his wife came over on the ferry-boat with you.”

“I remember him,” Rebecca replied, shortly. “There’s bad news in this letter.”

Mrs. Dent’s face took on an expression of serious inquiry.

“Yes, my Cousin Harriet has fallen down the cellar stairs – they were always dangerous – and she’s broken her hip, and I’ve got to take the first train home tomorrow.”

“You don’t say so. I’m dreadfully sorry.”

“No, you ain’t sorry!” said Rebecca with a look as if she leaped. “You’re glad. I don’t know why, but you’re glad. You’ve wanted to get rid of me for some reason ever since I came. I don’t know why. You’re a strange woman. Now you’ve got your way, and I hope you’re satisfied.”

“How you talk.”

Mrs. Dent spoke in a faintly injured voice, but there was a light in her eyes.

“I talk the way it is. Well, I’m going tomorrow morning, and I want you, just as soon as Agnes Dent comes home, to send her out to me. Don’t you wait for anything. You pack what clothes she’s got, and don’t wait even to mend them, and you buy her ticket. I’ll leave the money, and you send her along. She don’t have to change cars. You start her off, when she gets home, on the next train!”

“Very well,” replied the other woman. She had an expression of covert amusement.

“Mind you do it.”

“Very well, Rebecca.”

•   •   •   •   •

Rebecca started on her journey the next morning. When she arrived, two days later, she found her cousin in perfect health. She found, moreover, that the friend had not written the postscript in the cousin’s letter. Rebecca would have returned to Ford Village the next morning, but the fatigue and nervous strain had been too much for her. She was not able to move from her bed. She had a species of low fever induced by anxiety and fatigue. But she could write, and she did, to the Slocums, and she received no answer. She also wrote to Mrs. Dent; she even sent numerous telegrams, with no response. Finally she wrote to the postmaster, and an answer arrived by the first possible mail. The letter was short, curt, and to the purpose. Mr. Amblecrom, the post-master, was a man of few words, and especially wary as to his expressions in a letter.

“Dear madam,” he wrote, “your favour rec’ed. No Slocums in Ford’s Village. All dead. Addie ten years ago, her mother two years later, her father five. House vacant. Mrs. John Dent said to have neglected stepdaughter. Girl was sick. Medicine not given. Talk of taking action. Not enough evidence. House said to be haunted. Strange sights and sounds. Your niece, Agnes Dent, died a year ago, about this time.

Yours truly,

“THOMAS AMBLECROM.”

THROUGH THE IVORY GATE

Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews

1905

A breeze filtered through shuffling leafage, the June morning sunlight came in at the open window by the boy’s bed, under the green shades, across the shadowy, white room, and danced a noiseless dance of youth and freshness and springtime against the wall opposite. The boy’s head stirred on his pillow. He spoke a quick word from out of his dream. “The key?” he said inquiringly, and the sound of his own voice awoke him. Dark, drowsy eyes opened, and he stared half-seeing, at the picture that hung facing him. Was it the play of mischievous sunlight, was it the dream that still held his brain? He knew the picture line by line, and there was no such figure in it. It was a large photograph of Fairfield, the southern home of his mother’s people, and the boy remembered it always hanging there, opposite his bed, the first sight to meet his eyes every morning since his babyhood. So he was certain there was no figure in it, more than all one so remarkable as this strapping little chap in his queer clothes, his dress of conspicuous plaid with large black velvet squares sewed on it, who stood now in front of the old manor house. Could it be only a dream? Could it be that a little ghost, wandering childlike in dim, heavenly fields, had joined the gay troop of his boyish visions and slipped in with them through the ivory gate of pleasant dreams? The boy put his fists to his eyes and rubbed them and looked again. The little fellow was still there, standing with sturdy legs wide apart as if owning the scene; he laughed as he held toward the boy a key – a small key tied with a scarlet ribbon. There was no doubt in the boy’s mind that the key was for him, and out of the dim world of sleep he stretched his young arm for it; to reach it he sat up in bed. Then he was awake and knew himself alone in the peace of his own little room, and laughed shamefacedly at the reality of the vision which had followed him from dreamland into the very boundaries of consciousness, which held him even now with gentle tenacity, which drew him back through the day, from his studies, from his play, into the strong current of its fascination.

The first time Philip Beckwith had this dream, he was only twelve years old, and, withheld by the deep reserve of childhood, he told not even his mother about it, though he lived in its atmosphere all day and remembered it vividly days longer. A year after it came again; and again it was a June morning, and as his eyes opened the little boy came once more out of the picture toward him, laughing and holding out the key on its scarlet string. The dream was a pleasant one, and Philip welcomed it eagerly from his sleep as a friend. There seemed something sweet and familiar in the child’s presence beyond the one memory of him, as again the boy, with eyes half-open to everyday life, saw him standing, small but masterful, in the garden of that old house where the Fairfields had lived for more than a century. Half-consciously he tried to prolong the vision, tried not to wake entirely for fear of losing it; but the picture faded surely from the curtain of his mind as the tangible world painted there its heavier outlines. It was as if a happy little spirit had tried to follow him, for love of him, from a country Iying close, yet separated; it was as if the common childhood of the two made it almost possible for them to meet; as if a message that might not be spoken, were yet almost delivered.

The third time the dream came it was a December morning of the year when Philip was fifteen, and falling snow made wavering light and shadow on the wall where hung the picture. This time, with eyes wide open, yet with the possession of the dream strongly on him, he lay subconsciously alert and gazed, as in the odd unmistakable dress that Philip knew now in detail, the bright-faced child swung toward him, always from the garden of that old place, always trying with loving, merry efforts to reach Philip from out of it – always holding to him the red ribboned key. Like a wary hunter the big boy lay – knowing it unreal, yet living it keenly – and watched his chance. As the little figure glided close to him, he put out his hand suddenly, swiftly for the key – he was awake. As always, the dream was gone; the little ghost was baffled again; the two worlds might not meet.

That day Mrs. Beckwith, puffing in order an old mahogany secretary, showed him a drawer full of photographs, daguerreotypes. The boy and his gay young mother were the best of friends, for, only nineteen when he was born, she had never let the distance widen between them; had held the freshness of her youth sacred against the time when he should share it. Year by year, living in his enthusiasms, drawing him to hers, she had grown young in his childhood, which year by year came closer to her maturity. Until now there was between the tall, athletic lad and the still young and attractive woman, an equal friendship, a common youth, which gave charm and elasticity to the natural tie between them. Yet even to this comrade-mother the boy had not told his dream, for the difficulty of putting into words the atmosphere, the compelling power of it. So that when she opened one of the old-fashioned black cases which held the early sun-pictures, and showed him the portrait within, he startled her by a sudden exclamation. From the frame of red velvet and tarnished gilt there laughed up at him the little boy of his dream. There was no mistaking him, and if there were doubt about the face, there was the peculiar dress – the black and white plaid with large squares of black velvet sewed here and there as decoration. Philip stared in astonishment at the sturdy figure; the childish face with its wide forehead and level, strong brows; its dark eyes straight-gazing and smiling.

“Mother – who is he? Who is he?” he demanded.

“Why, my lamb, don’t you know? It’s your little uncle Philip – my brother, for whom you were named – Philip Fairfield the sixth. There was always a Philip Fairfield at Fairfield since 1790. This one was the last, poor baby! And he died when he was five. Unless you go back there someday – that’s my hope, but it’s not likely to come true. You are a Yankee, except for the big half of you that’s me. That’s southern, every inch.” She laughed and kissed his fresh cheek impulsively. “But what made you so excited over this picture, Phil?”

Philip gazed down, serious, a little embarrassed, at the open case in his hand. “Mother,” he said after a moment, “you’ll laugh at me, but I’ve seen this chap in a dream three times now.”

“Oh!” She did laugh at him. “Oh, Philip! What have you been eating for dinner, I’d like to know? I can’t have you seeing visions of your ancestors at fifteen – it’s unhealthy.”

The boy, reddening, insisted. “But, Mother, really, don’t you think it was queer? I saw him as plainly as I do now – and I’ve never seen this picture before.”

“Oh, yes, you have – you must have seen it,” his mother threw back lightly. “You’ve forgotten, but the image of it was tucked away in some dark corner of your mind, and when you were asleep it stole out and played tricks on you. That’s the way forgotten ideas do: they get even with you in dreams for having forgotten them.”

“Mother, only listen—” But Mrs. Beckwith, her eyes lighting with a swift turn of thought, interrupted him – laid her finger on his lips.

“No – you listen, boy dear – quick, before I forget it! I’ve never told you about this, and it’s very interesting.”

And the youngster, used to these willful ways-of his sister-mother, laughed and put his fair head against her shoulder and listened.

“It’s quite a romance,” she began, “only there isn’t any end to it; it’s all unfinished and disappointing. It’s about this little Philip here, whose name you have – my brother. He died when he was five, as I said, but even then he had a bit of dramatic history in his life. He was born just before wartime in 1859, and he was a beautiful and wonderful baby; I can remember all about it, for I was six years older. He was incarnate sunshine, the happiest child that ever lived, but far too quick and clever for his years. The servants used to ask him, ‘Who is you, Marse Philip, sah?’ to hear him answer, before he could speak it plainly, ‘I’m Philip Fairfield of Fairfield’; he seemed to realize that, and his responsibility to them and to the place, as soon as he could breathe. He wouldn’t have a darky scolded in his presence, and every morning my father put him in front of him in the saddle, and they rode together about the plantation. My father adored him, and little Philip’s sunshiny way of taking possession of the slaves and the property pleased him more deeply, I think, than anything in his life. But the war came before this time, when the child was about a year old, and my father went off, of course, as every southern man went who could walk, and for a year we did not see him. Then he was badly wounded at the battle of Malvern Hill; and came home to get well. However, it was more serious than he knew, and he did not get well. Twice he went off again to join our army, and each time he was sent back within a month, too ill to be of any use. He chafed constantly, of course, because he must stay at home and farm, when his whole soul ached to be fighting for his flag; but finally in December 1863, he thought he was well enough at last for service. He was to join General John Morgan, who had just made his wonderful escape from prison at Columbus, and it was planned that my mother should take lithe Philip and me to England to live there till the war was over and we could all be together at Fairfield again. With that in view my father drew all of his ready money – it was ten thousand dollars in gold – from the banks in Lexington, for my mother’s use in the years they might be separated. When suddenly, the day before he was to have gone, the old wound broke out again, and he was helplessly ill in bed at the hour when he should have been on his horse riding toward Tennessee. We were fifteen miles out from Lexington, yet it might be rumored that father had drawn a large sum of money, and, of course, he was well known as a Southern officer. Because of the Northern soldiers, who held the city, he feared very much to have the money in the house, yet he hoped still to join Morgan a lithe later, and then it would be needed as he had planned. Christmas morning my father was so much better that my mother went to church, taking me, and leaving lithe Philip, then four years old, to amuse him. What happened that morning was the point of all this rambling; so now listen hard, my precious thing.”

The boy, sitting erect now, caught his mother’s hand silently, and his eyes stared into hers as he drank in every word:

“Mammy, who was, of course, little Philip’s nurse, told my mother afterward that she was sent away before my father and the boy went into the garden, but she saw them go and saw that my father had a tin box – a box about twelve inches long, which seemed very heavy – in his arms, and on his finger swung a long red ribbon with a little key strung on it. Mother knew it as the key of the box, and she had tied the ribbon on it herself.

“It was a bright, crisp Christmas day, pleasant in the garden – the box hedges were green and fragrant, aromatic in the sunshine. You don’t even know the smell of box in sunshine, you poor child! But I remember that day, for I was ten years old, a right big girl, and it was a beautiful morning for an invalid to take the air. Mammy said she was proud to see how her ‘handsome boy’ kept step with his father, and she watched the two until they got away down by the rose garden, and then she couldn’t see little Philip behind the three-foot hedge, so she turned away. But somewhere in that big garden, or under the trees beside it, my father buried the box that held the money – ten thousand dollars. It shows how he trusted that baby, that he took him with him, and you’ll see how his trust was only too well justified. For that evening, Christmas night, very suddenly my father died – before he had time to tell my mother where he had hidden the box. He tried; when consciousness came a few minutes before the end he gasped out, ‘I buried the money’ – and then he choked. Once again he whispered just two words: ‘Philip knows.’ And my mother said, ‘Yes, dearest – Philip and I will find it – don’t worry, dearest,’ and that quieted him. She told me about it so many times.

“After the funeral she took little Philip and explained to him as well as she could that he must tell Mother where he and Father had put the box, and – this is the point of it all, Philip – he wouldn’t tell. She went over and over it all, again and again, but it was no use. He had given his word to my father never to tell, and he was too much of a baby to understand how death had dissolved that promise. My mother tried every way, of course, explanations and reasoning first, then pleading, and finally severity; she even punished the poor lithe martyr, for it was awfully important to us all. But the four-year-old baby was absolutely incorruptible. He cried bitterly and sobbed out:

“‘Farver said I mustn’t never tell anybody – never! Farver said Philip Fairfield of Fairfield mustn’t never bweak his words,’ and that was all.

“Nothing could induce him to give the least hint. Of course there was great search for it, but it was well hidden and it was never found. Finally, Mother took her obdurate son and me and came to New York with us, and we lived on the little income which she had of her own. Her hope was that as soon as Philip was old enough she could make him understand, and go back with him and get that large sum Iying underground – lying there yet, perhaps. But in less than a year the little boy was dead and the secret was gone with him.”

Philip Beckwith’s eyes were intense and wide. The Fairfield eyes, brown and brilliant, their young fire was concentrated on his mother’s face.

“Do you mean that money is buried down there, yet, mother?” he asked solemnly.

Mrs. Beckwith caught at the big fellow’s sleeve with slim fingers. “Don’t go today, Phil – wait till after lunch, anyway!”

“Please don’t make fun, Mother – I want to know about it. Think of it lying there in the ground!”

“Greedy boy! We don’t need money now, Phil. And the old place will be yours when I am dead—” The lad’s arm went about his mother’s shoulders. “Oh, but I’m not going to die for ages! Not till I’m a toothless old person with side curls, hobbling along on a stick. Like this!” – she sprang to her feet and the boy laughed a great peal at the haglike effect as his young mother threw herself into the part. She dropped on the divan again at his side.

“What I meant to tell you was that your father thinks it very unlikely that the money is there yet, and almost impossible that we could find it in any case. But someday when the place is yours you can have it put through a sieve if you choose. I wish I could think you would ever live there, Phil; but I can’t imagine any chance by which you should. I should hate to have you sell it – it has belonged to a Philip Fairfield so many years.”

A week later the boy left his childhood by the side of his mother’s grave. His history for the next seven years may go in a few lines. School days, vacations, the four years at college, outwardly the commonplace of an even and prosperous development, inwardly the infinite variety of experience by which each soul is a person; the result of the two so wholesome a product of young manhood that no one realized under the frank and open manner a deep reticence, an intensity, a sensitiveness to impressions, a tendency toward mysticism which made the fiber of his being as delicate as it was strong.

Suddenly, in a turn of the wheel, all the externals of his life changed. His rich father died penniless and he found himself on his own hands, and within a month the boy who had owned five polo ponies was a hard-working reporter on a great daily. The same quick-wittedness and energy which had made him a good polo player made him a good reporter. Promotion came fast and, as those who are busiest have the most time to spare, he fell to writing stories. When the editor of a large magazine took one, Philip first lost respect for that dignified person, then felt ashamed to have imposed on him, then rejoiced utterly over the check. After that editors fell into the habit; the people he ran against knew about his books; the checks grew better reading all the time; a point came where it was more profitable to stay at home and imagine events than to go out and report them. He had been too busy as the days marched to generalize; but suddenly he knew that he was a successful writer, that if he kept his head and worked, a future was before him. So he soberly put his own English by the side of that of a master or two from his bookshelves, to keep his perspective clear, and then he worked harder. And it came to be five years after his father’s death.

At the end of those years three things happened at once. The young man suddenly was very tired and knew that he needed the vacation he had gone without; a check came in large enough to make a vacation easy; and he had his old dream. His fagged brain had found it but another worry to decide where he should go to rest, but the dream settled the vexed question offhand – he would go to Kentucky. The very thought of it brought rest to him, for like a memory of childhood, like a bit of his own soul, he knew the country – the “God’s Country” of its people – which he had never seen. He caught his breath as he thought of warm, sweet air that held no hurry or nerve strain; of lingering sunny days whose hours are longer than in other places; of the soft speech, the serene and kindly ways of the people; of the royal welcome waiting for him as for everyone, heartfelt and heart-warming; he knew it all from a daughter of Kentucky – his mother. It was May now, and he remembered she had told him that the land was filled with roses at the end of May – he would go then. He owned the old place, Fairfield, and he had never seen it. Perhaps it had fallen to pieces; perhaps his mother had painted it in colors too bright; but it was his, the bit of the earth that belonged to him. The Anglo-Saxon joy of landowning stirred for the first time within him – he would go to his own place. Buoyant with the new thought, he sat down and wrote a letter. A cousin of the family, of a younger branch, a certain John Fairfield, lived yet upon the land. Not in the great house, for that had been closed many years, but in a small house almost as old, called Westerly. Philip had corresponded with him once or twice about affairs of the estate, and each letter of the older man’s had brought a simple and urgent invitation to come South and visit him. So, pleased as a child with the plan, he wrote that he was coming on a certain Thursday, late in May. The letter sent, he went about in a dream of the South, and when its answer, delighted and hospitable, came simultaneously with one of those bleak and windy turns of weather which make New York, even in May, a marvelously fitting place to leave, he could not wait. Almost a week ahead of his time he packed his bag and took the Southwestern Limited, and on a bright Sunday morning he awoke in the old Phoenix Hotel in Lexington. He had arrived too late the night before to make the fifteen miles to Fairfield, but he had looked over the horses in the livery stable and chosen the one he wanted, for he meant to go on horseback, as a southern gentleman should, to his domain. That he meant to go alone, that no one, not even John Fairfield, knew of his coming, was not the least of his satisfactions, for the sight of the place of his forefathers, so long neglected, was becoming suddenly a sacred thing to him. The old house and its young owner should meet each other like sweethearts, with no eyes to watch their greeting, their slow and sweet acquainting; with no living voices to drown the sound of the ghostly voices that must greet his homecoming from those walls – voices of his people who had lived there, voices gone long since into eternal silence.

A little crowd of loungers stared with frank admiration at the young fellow who came out smiling from the door of the Phoenix Hotel, big and handsome in his riding clothes, his eyes taking in the details of girths and bits and straps with the keenness of a horseman.

Philip laughed as he swung into the saddle and looked down at the friendly faces, most of them black faces, below. “Goodbye,” he said. “Wish me good luck, won’t you?” and a willing chorus of “Good luck, boss,” came flying after him as the horse’s hoofs clattered down the street.

Through the bright drowsiness of the little city he rode in the early Sunday morning, and his heart sang for joy to feel himself again across a horse, and for the love of the place that warmed him already. The sun shone hotly, but he liked it; he felt his whole being slipping into place, fitting to its environment; surely, in spite of birth and breeding, he was southern born and bred, for this felt like home more than any home he had known!

As he drew away from the city, every little while, through stately woodlands, a dignified sturdy mansion peeped down its long vista of trees at the passing cavalier, and, enchanted with its beautiful setting, with its air of proud unconsciousness, he hoped each time that Fairfield would look like that. If he might live here – and go to New York, to be sure, two or three times a year to keep the edge of his brain sharpened – but if he might live his life as these people lived, in this unhurried atmosphere, in this perfect climate, with the best things in his reach for everyday use; with horses and dogs, with out-of-doors and a great, lovely country to breathe in; with – he smiled vaguely – with sometime perhaps a wife who loved it as he did – he would ask from earth no better life than that. He could write, he felt certain, better and larger things in such surroundings.

But he pulled himself up sharply as he thought how idle a daydream it was. As a fact, he was a struggling young author, he had come South for two weeks’ vacation, and on the first morning he was planning to live here – he must be lightheaded. With a touch of his heel and a word and a quick pull on the curb, his good horse broke into a canter, and then, under the loosened rein, into a rousing gallop, and Philip went dashing down the country road, past the soft, rolling landscape, and under cool caves of foliage, vivid with emerald greens of May, thoughts and dreams all dissolved in exhilaration of the glorious movement, the nearest thing to flying that the wingless animal, man, may achieve.

He opened his coat as the blood rushed faster through him, and a paper fluttered from his pocket. He caught it, and as he pulled the horse to a trot, he saw that it was his cousin’s letter. So, walking now along the brown shadows and golden sunlight of the long white pike, he fell to wondering about the family he was going to visit. He opened the folded letter and read:

“My dear Cousin,” it said – the kinship was the first thought in John Fairfield’s mind – “I received your welcome letter on the 14th. I am delighted that you are coming at last to Kentucky, and I consider that it is high time you paid Fairfield, which has been the cradle of your stock for many generations, the compliment of looking at it. We closed our house in Lexington three weeks ago, and are settled out here now for the summer, and find it lovelier than ever. My family consists only of myself and Shelby, my one child, who is now twenty-two years of age. We are both ready to give you an old-time Kentucky welcome, and Westerly is ready to receive you at any moment you wish to come.”

The rest was merely arrangements for meeting the traveler, all of which were done away with by his earlier arrival.

“A prim old party, with an exalted idea of the family,” commented Philip mentally. “Well-to-do, apparently, or he wouldn’t be having a winter house in the city. I wonder what the boy Shelby is like. At twenty-two he should be doing something more profitable than spending an entire summer out here, I should say.”

The questions faded into the general content of his mind at the glimpse of another stately old pillared homestead, white and deep down its avenue of locusts. At length he stopped his horse to wait for a ragged Negro trudging cheerfully down the road.

“Do you know a place around here called Fairfield?” he asked.

“Yessah. I does that, sah. It’s that ar’ place right hyeh, sah, by yo’ hoss. That ar’s Fahfiel’. Shall I open the gate fo’ you, boss?” and Philip turned to see a hingeless ruin of boards held together by the persuasion of rusty wire.

“The home of my fathers looks down in the mouth,” he reflected aloud.

The old Negro’s eyes, gleaming from under shaggy sheds of eyebrows, watched him, and he caught the words.

“Is you a Fahfiel’, boss?” he asked eagerly. “Is you my young marse?” He jumped at the conclusion promptly. “You favors de fam’ly mightily, sah. I heerd you was comin”’; the rag of a hat went off and he bowed low. “Hit’s cert’nly good news fo’ Fahfiel’, Marse Philip, hit’s mighty good news fo’ us niggers, sah. I’se btlonged to the Fahfiel’ fam’ly a hundred years, Marse – me and my folks, and I wishes yo’ a welcome home, sah – welcome home, Marse Philip.”

Philip bent with a quick movement from his horse and gripped the twisted old black hand, speechless. This humble welcome on the highway caught at his heart deep down, and the appeal of the colored people to southerners, who know them, the thrilling appeal of a gentle, loyal race, doomed to live forever behind a veil and hopeless without bitterness, stirred for the first time his manhood. It touched him to be taken for granted as the child of his people; it pleased him that he should be “Marse Philip” as a matter of course, because there had always been a Marse Philip at the place. It was bred deeper in the bone of him than he knew, to understand the soul of the black man; the stuff he was made of had been southern two hundred years.

The old man went off down the white limestone road singing to himself, and Philip rode slowly under the locusts and beeches up the long drive, grass-grown and lost in places, that wound through the woodland three-quarters of a mile to his house. And as he moved through the park, through sunlight and shadow of these great trees that were his, he felt like a knight of King Arthur, like some young knight long exiled, at last coming to his own. He longed with an unreasonable seizure of desire to come here to live, to take care of it, beautify it, fill it with life and prosperity as it had once been filled, surround it with cheerful faces of colored people whom he might make happy and comfortable. If only he had money to pay off the mortgage, to put the place once in order, it would be the ideal setting for the life that seemed marked out for him – the life of a writer.

The horse turned a corner and broke into a canter up the slope, and as the shoulder of the hill fell away there stood before him the picture of his childhood come to life, smiling drowsily in the morning sunlight with shuttered windows that were its sleeping eyes – the great white house of Fairfield. Its high pillars reached to the roof; its big wings stretched away at either side; the flicker of the shadow of the leaves played over it tenderly and hid broken bits of woodwork, patches of paint cracked away, windowpanes gone here and there. It stood as if too proud to apologize or to look sad for such small matters, as serene, as stately as in its prime. And its master, looking at it for the first time, loved it.

He rode around to the side and tied his mount to an old horse-rack, and then walked up the wide front steps as if each lift were an event. He turned the handle of the big door without much hope that it would yield, but it opened willingly, and he stood inside. A broom lay in a corner, windows were open – his cousin had been making ready for him. There was the huge mahogany sofa, horsehair-covered, in the window under the stairs, where his mother had read Ivanhoe and The Talisman. Philip stepped softly across the wide hall and laid his head where must have rested the brown hair of the little girl who had come to be, first all of his life, and then its dearest memory. Half an hour he spent in the old house, and its walls echoed to his footsteps as if in ready homage, and each empty room whose door he opened met him with a sweet half-familiarity. The whole place was filled with the presence of the child who had loved it and left it, and for whom this tall man, her child, longed now as if for a little sister who should be here, and whom he missed. With her memory came the thought of the five-year-old uncle who had made history for the family so disastrously. He must see the garden where that other Philip had gone with his father to hide the money on the fated Christmas morning. He closed the house door behind him carefully, as if he would not disturb a little girl reading in the window, a little boy sleeping perhaps in the nursery above. Then he walked down the broad sweep of the driveway, the gravel crunching under the grass, and across what had been a bit of velvet lawn, and stood for a moment with his hand on a broken vase, weed-filled, which capped the stone post of a gateway.

All the garden was misty with memories. Where a tall golden flower nodded alone from out of the tangled thicket of an old flowerbed a bright-haired child might have laughed with just that air of starred, gay naughtiness, from the forbidden center of the blossoms. In the molded tan-bark of the path was a vague print, like the ghost of a footprint that had passed down the way a lifetime ago. The box, half-dead, half-sprouted into high unkempt growth, still stood stiffly against the riotous overflow of weeds as if it yet held loyally to its business of guarding the borders. Philip shifted his gaze slowly, lingering over the dim contours, the shadowy shape of what the garden had been. Suddenly his eyes opened wide. How was this? There was a hedge as neat, as clipped, as any of Southampton in midseason, and over it a glory of roses, red and white and pink and yellow, waved gay banners to him in trim luxuriance. He swung toward them, and the breeze brought him for the first time in his life the fragrance of box in sunshine.

Three feet tall, shaven and thick and shining, the old hedge stood, and the garnered sweetness of a hundred years’ slow growth breathed delicately from it toward the great-great-grandson of the man who planted it. A box hedge takes as long in the making as a gentleman, and when they are done the two are much of a sort. No plant in all the garden has so subtle an air of breeding, so gentle a reserve, yet so gracious a message of sweetness for all of the world who will stop to learn it. It keeps a firm dignity under the stress of tempest when lighter growths are tossed and torn; it shines bright through the snow; it has a well-bred willingness to be background, with the well-bred gift of presence, whether as background or foreground. The soul of the box tree is an aristocrat, and the sap that runs through it is the blue blood of vegetation.

Saluting him bravely in the hot sunshine with its myriad shining sword points, the old hedge sent out to Philip on the May breeze its ancient welcome of aromatic fragrance, and the tall roses crowded gaily to look over its edge at the new master. Slowly, a little dazed at this oasis of shining order in the neglected garden, he walked to the opening and stepped inside the hedge. The rose garden! The famous rose garden of Fairfield, and as his mother had described it, in full splendor of cared-for, orderly bloom. Across the paths he stepped swiftly till he stood amid the roses, giant bushes of Jacqueminot and Marechal Niel; of pink and white and red and yellow blooms in thick array. The glory of them intoxicated him. That he should own all of this beauty seemed too good to be true, and instantly he wanted to taste his ownership. The thought came to him that he would enter into his heritage with strong hands here in the rose garden; he caught a deep-red Jacqueminot almost roughly by its gorgeous head and broke off the stem. He would gather a bunch, a huge, unreasonable bunch of his own flowers. Hungrily he broke one after another; his shoulders bent over them, he was deep in the bushes.

“I reckon I shall have to ask you not to pick any more of those roses,” a voice said.

Philip threw up his head as if he had been shot; he turned sharply with a great thrill, for he thought his mother spoke to him. Perhaps it was only the southern inflection so long unheard, perhaps the sunlight that shone in his eyes dazzled him, but, as he stared, the white figure before him seemed to him to look exactly as his mother had looked long ago. Stumbling over his words, he caught at the first that came.

“I – I think it’s all right,” he said.

The girl smiled frankly, yet with a dignity in her puzzled air. “I’m afraid I shall have to be right decided,” she said. “These roses are private property and I mustn’t let you have them.”

“Oh!” Philip dropped the great bunch of gorgeous color guiltily by his side, but still held tightly the prickly mass of stems, knowing his right, yet half-wondering if he could have made a mistake. He stammered:

“I thought – to whom do they belong?”

“They belong to my cousin, Mr. Philip Fairfield Beckwith” – the sound of his own name was pleasant as the falling voice strayed through it. “He is coming home in a few days, so I want them to look their prettiest for him – for his first sight of them. I take care of this rose garden,” she said, and laid a motherly hand on the nearest flower. Then she smiled. “It doesn’t seem right hospitable to stop you, but if you will come over to Westerly, to our house, Father will be glad to see you, and I will certainly give you all the flowers you want.” The sweet and masterful apparition looked with a gracious certainty of obedience straight into Philip’s bewildered eyes.

“The boy Shelby!” Many a time in the months after, Philip Beckwith smiled to himself reminiscently, tenderly, as he thought of “the boy Shelby” whom he had read into John Fairfield’s letter; “the boy Shelby” who was twenty-two years old and the only child; “the boy Shelby” whom he had blamed with such easy severity for idling at Fairfield; “the boy Shelby” who was no boy at all, but this white flower of girlhood, called – after the quaint and reasonable southern way – as a boy is called, by the surname of her mother’s people.

Toward Westerly, out of the garden of the old time, out of the dimness of a forgotten past, the two took their radiant youth and the brightness of today. But a breeze blew across the tangle of weeds and flowers as they wandered away, and whispered a hope, perhaps a promise; for as it touched them each tall stalk nodded gaily and the box hedges rustled delicately an answering undertone. And just at the edge of the woodland, before they were out of sight, the girl turned and threw a kiss back to the roses and the box.

“I always do that,” she said. “I love them so!”

Two weeks later a great train rolled into the Grand Central Station of New York at half-past six at night, and from it stepped a monstrosity – a young man without a heart. He had left all of it, more than he had thought he owned, in Kentucky. But he had brought back with him a store of memories which gave him more joy than ever the heart had done, to his best knowledge, in all the years. They were memories of long and sunshiny days; of afternoons spent in the saddle, rushing through grassy lanes where trumpet flowers flamed over gray farm fences, or trotting slowly down white roads; of whole mornings only an hour long, passed in the enchanted stillness of an old garden; of gay, desultory searches through its length and breadth, and in the park that held it, for buried treasure; of moonlit nights; of roses and June and Kentucky – and always, through all the memories, the presence that made them what they were, that of a girl he loved.

No word of love had been spoken, but the two weeks had made over his life; and he went back to his work with a definite object, a hope stronger than ambition, and, set to it as music to words, came insistently another hope, a dream that he did not let himself dwell on – a longing to make enough money to pay off the mortgage and put Fairfield in order, and live and work there all his life – with Shelby. That was where the thrill of the thought came in, but the place was very dear to him in itself.

The months went, and the point of living now was the mail from the South, and the feast days were the days that brought letters from Fairfield. He had promised to go back for a week at Christmas, and he worked and hoarded all the months between with a thought which he did not formulate, but which ruled his down-sitting and his up-rising, the thought that if he did well and his bank account grew enough to justify it he might, when he saw her at Christmas, tell her what he hoped; ask her – he finished the thought with a jump of his heart. He never worked harder or better, and each check that came in meant a step toward the promised land; and each seemed for the joy that was in it to quicken his pace, to lengthen his stride, to strengthen his touch. Early in November he found one night when he came to his rooms two letters waiting for him with the welcome Kentucky postmark. They were in John Fairfield’s handwriting and in his daughter’s, and “place aux dames” ruled rather than respect to age, for he opened Shelby’s first. His eyes smiling, he read it.

“I am knitting you a diamond necklace for Christmas,” she wrote. “Will you like that? Or be sure to write me if you’d rather have me hunt in the garden and dig you up a box of money. I’ll tell you – there ought to be luck in the day, for it was hidden on Christmas and it should be found on Christmas; so on Christmas morning we’ll have another look, and if you find it I’ll catch you ‘Christmas gif’ as the darkies do, and you’ll have to give it to me, and if I find it I’ll give it to you; so that’s fair, isn’t it? Anyway—” and Philip’s eyes jumped from line to line, devouring the clear, running writing. “So bring a little present with you, please – just a tiny something for me,” she ended, “for I’m certainly going to catch you ‘Christmas gif’.”

Philip folded the letter back into its envelope and put it in his pocket, and his heart felt warmer for the scrap of paper over it. Then he cut John Fairfield’s open dreamily, his mind still on the words he had read, on the threat – “I’m going to catch you ‘Christmas gif’.” What was there good enough to give her? Himself, he thought humbly, very far from good enough for the girl, the lily of the world. With a sigh that was not sad he dismissed the question and began to read the other letter. He stood reading it by the fading light from the window, his hat thrown by him on a chair, his overcoat still on, and, as he read, the smile died from his face. With drawn brows he read on to the end, and then the-letter dropped from his fingers to the floor and he did not notice; his eyes stared widely at the high building across the street, the endless rows of windows, the lights flashing into them here and there. But he saw none of it. He saw a stretch of quiet woodland, an old house with great white pillars, a silent, neglected garden, with box hedges sweet and ragged, all waiting for him to come and take care of them – the honor of his fathers, the home he had meant, had expected – he knew it now – would be someday his own, the home he had lost! John Fairfield’s letter was to tell him that the mortgage on the place, running now so many years, was suddenly to be foreclosed; that, property not being worth much in the neighborhood, no one would take it up; that on January 2nd, Fairfield, the house and land, were to be sold at auction. It was a hard blow to Philip Beckwith, With his hands in his overcoat pockets he began to walk up and down the room, trying to plan, to see if by any chance he might save this place he loved. It would mean eight thousand dollars to pay the mortgage. One or two thousand more would put the estate in order, but that might wait if he could only tide over this danger, save the house and land. An hour he walked so, forgetting dinner, forgetting the heavy coat which he still wore, and then he gave it up. With all he had saved – and it was a fair and promising beginning – he could not much more than half-pay the mortgage, and there was no way, which he would consider, by which he could get the money. Fairfield would have to go, and he set his teeth and clenched his fists as he thought how much he wanted to keep it. A year ago it had meant nothing to him, a year from now if things went his way he could have paid the mortgage. That it should happen just this year – just now! He could not go down at Christmas; it would break his heart to see the place again as his own when it was just slipping from his grasp. He would wait until it was all over, and go, perhaps, in the spring. The great hope of his life was still his own, but Fairfield had been the setting of that hope; he must readjust his world before he saw Shelby again. So he wrote them that he would not come at present, and then tried to dull the ache of his loss with hard work.

But three days before Christmas, out of the unknown forces beyond his reasoning swept a wave of desire to go South, which took him off his feet. Trained to trust his brain and deny his impulse as he was, yet there was a vein of sentiment, almost of superstition, in him which the thought of the old place pricked sharply to life. This longing was something beyond him – he must go – and he had thrown his decisions to the winds and was feverish until he could get away.

As before, he rode out from the Phoenix Hotel, and at ten o’clock in the morning he turned into Fairfield. It was a still, bright Christmas morning, crisp and cool, and the air like wine. The house stood bravely in the sunlight, but the branches above it were bare and no softening leafage hid the marks of time; it looked old and sad and deserted today, and its master gazed at it with a pang in his heart. It was his, and he could not save it. He turned away and walked slowly to the garden, and stood a moment as he had stood last May, with his hand on the stone gateway. It was very silent and lonely here, in the hush of winter; nothing stirred; even the shadows of the interlaced branches above lay almost motionless across the walks.

Something moved to his left, down the pathway – he turned to look. Had his heart stopped, that he felt this strange, cold feeling in his breast? Were his eyes – could he be seeing? Was this insanity? Fifty feet down the path, half in the weaving shadows, half in clear sunlight, stood the little boy of his lifelong vision, in the dress with the black velvet squares, his little uncle, dead forty years ago. As he gazed, his breath stopping, the child smiled and held up to him, as of old, a key on a scarlet string, and turned and flitted as if a flower had taken wing, away between the box hedges. Philip, his feet moving as if without his will, followed him. Again the baby face turned its smiling dark eyes toward him, and Philip knew that the child was calling him, though there was no sound; and again without volition of his own his feet took him where it led. He felt his breath coming difficulty, and suddenly a gasp shook him – there was no footprint on the unfrozen earth where the vision had passed. Yet there before him, moving through the deep sunlit silence of the garden, was the familiar, sturdy little form in its Old-World dress. Philip’s eyes were open; he was awake, walking; he saw it. Across the neglected tangle it glided, and into the trim order of Shelby’s rose garden; in the opening between the box walls it wheeled again, and the sun shone clear on the bronze hair and fresh face, and the scarlet string flashed and the key glinted at the end of it. Philip’s fascinated eyes saw all of that. Then the apparition slipped into the shadow of the beech trees and Philip quickened his step breathlessly, for it seemed that life and death hung on the sight. In and out through the trees it moved; once more the face turned toward him; he caught the quick brightness of a smile. The little chap had disappeared behind the broad tree trunk, and Philip, catching his breath, hurried to see him appear again. He was gone. The little spirit that had strayed from over the border of a world – who can say how far, how near? – unafraid in this earth-corner once its home, had slipped away into eternity through the white gate of ghosts and dreams.

Philip’s heart was pumping painfully as he came, dazed and staring, to the place where the apparition had vanished. It was a giant-beech tree, all of two hundred and fifty years old, and around its base ran a broken wooden bench, where pretty girls of Fairfield had listened to their sweethearts, where children destined to be generals and judges had played with their black mammies, where gray-haired judges and generals had come back to think over the fights that were fought out. There were letters carved into the strong bark, the branches swung down whisperingly, the green tent of the forest seemed filled with the memory of those who had camped there and gone on. Philip’s feet stumbled over the roots as he circled the veteran; he peered this way and that, but the woodland was hushed and empty; the birds whistled above, the grasses rustled below, unconscious, casual, as if they knew nothing of a child-soul that had wandered back on Christmas day with a Christmas message, perhaps, of goodwill to its own.

As he stood on the farther side of the tree where the little ghost had faded from him, at his feet lay, open and conspicuous, a fresh, deep hole. He looked down absent-mindedly. Some animal – a dog, a rabbit – had scratched far into the earth. A bar of sunlight struck a golden arm through the branches above, and as he gazed at the upturned, brown dirt the rays that were its fingers reached into the hollow and touched a square corner, a rusty edge of tin. In a second the young fellow was down on his knees digging as if for his life, and in less than dive minutes he had loosened the earth which had guarded it so many years, and staggering with it to his feet had lifted to the bench a heavy tin box. In its lock was the key, and dangling from it a long bit of no-colored silk, that yet, as he untwisted it, showed a scarlet thread in the crease. He opened the box with the little key; it turned scrapingly, and the ribbon crumbled in his fingers, its long duty done. Then, as he tilted the heavy weight, the double eagles, packed closely, slipped against each other with a soft clink of sliding metal. The young man stared at the mass of gold pieces as if he could not trust his eyesight; he half thought even then that he dreamed it. With a quick memory of the mortgage he began to count. It was all there – ten thousand dollars in gold! He lifted his head and gazed at the quiet woodland, the open shadowwork of the bare branches, the fields beyond Iying in the calm sunlit rest of a southern winter. Then he put his hand deep into the gold pieces, and drew a long breath. It was impossible to believe, but it was true. The lost treasure was found. It meant to him Shelby and home; as he realized what it meant, his heart felt as if it would break with the joy of it. He would give her this for his Christmas gift, this legacy of his people and hers, and then he would give her himself It was all easy now – life seemed not to hold a difficulty. And the two would keep tenderly, always, the thought of a child who had loved his home and his people and who had tried so hard, so long, to bring them together. He knew the dream-child would not visit him again – the little ghost was laid that had followed him all his life. From over the border whence it had come with so many loving efforts it would never come again. Slowly, with the heavy weight in his arms, with the eyes of a man who had seen a solemn thing, he walked back to the garden sleeping in the sunshine, and the box hedges met him with a wave of fragrance, the sweetness of a century ago; and as he passed through their shining door, looking beyond, he saw Shelby. The girl’s figure stood by the stone column of the garden entrance. The light shone on her bare head, and she had stopped, surprised, as she saw him. Philip lifted his hat high, and his pace quickened with his heartthrob as he looked at her and thought of the little ghostly hands that had brought theirs together; and as he looked the smile that meant his welcome and his happiness broke over her face, and with the sound of her voice all the shades of this world and the next dissolved in light.

“‘Christmas gif’,’ Marse Philip!” called Shelby.

THURNLEY ABBEY

Perceval Landon

1907

Three years ago I was on my way out to the East, and as an extra day in London was of some importance, I took the Friday evening mail-train to Brindisi instead of the usual Thursday morning Marseilles express. Many people shrink from the long forty-eight-hour train journey through Europe, and the subsequent rush across the Mediterranean on the nineteen-knot Isis or Osiris; but there is really very little discomfort on either the train or the mail-boat, and unless there is actually nothing for me to do, I always like to save the extra day and a half in London before I say goodbye to her for one of my longer tramps. This time – it was early, I remember, in the shipping season, probably about the beginning of September – there were few passengers, and I had a compartment in the P. & O. Indian express to myself all the way from Calais. All Sunday I watched the blue waves dimpling the Adriatic, and the pale rosemary along the cuttings; the plain white towns, with their flat roofs and their bold “duomos,” and the grey-green gnarled olive orchards of Apulia. The journey was just like any other. We ate in the dining-car as often and as long as we decently could. We slept after luncheon; we dawdled the afternoon away with yellow-backed novels; sometimes we exchanged platitudes in the smoking-room, and it was there that I met Alastair Colvin.

Colvin was a man of middle height, with a resolute, well-cut jaw; his hair was turning grey; his moustache was sun-whitened, otherwise he was clean-shaven – obviously a gentleman, and obviously also a preoccupied man. He had no great wit. When spoken to, he made the usual remarks in the right way, and I dare say he refrained from banalities only because he spoke less than the rest of us; most of the time he buried himself in the Wagon-lit Company’s time-table, but seemed unable to concentrate his attention on any one page of it. He found that I had been over the Siberian railway, and for a quarter of an hour he discussed it with me. Then he lost interest in it, and rose to go to his compartment. But he came back again very soon, and seemed glad to pick up the conversation again.

Of course this did not seem to me to be of any importance. Most travelers by train become a trifle infirm of purpose after thirty-six hours’ rattling. But Colvin’s restless way I noticed in somewhat marked contrast with the man’s personal importance and dignity; especially ill suited was it to his finely made large hand with strong, broad, regular nails and its few lines. As I looked at his hand I noticed a long, deep, and recent scar of ragged shape. However, it is absurd to pretend that I thought anything was unusual. I went off at five o’clock on Sunday afternoon to sleep away the hour or two that had still to be got through before we arrived at Brindisi.

Once there, we few passengers transhipped our hand baggage, verified our berths – there were only a score of us in all – and then, after an aimless ramble of half an hour in Brindisi, we returned to dinner at the Hotel International, not wholly surprised that the town had been the death of Virgil. If I remember rightly, there is a gaily painted hall at the International – I do not wish to advertise anything, but there is no other place in Brindisi at which to await the coming of the mails – and after dinner I was looking with awe at a trellis overgrown with blue vines, when Colvin moved across the room to my table. He picked up Il Secolo, but almost immediately gave up the pretence of reading it. He turned squarely to me and said:

“Would you do me a favour?”

One doesn’t do favours to stray acquaintances on Continental expresses without knowing something more of them than I knew of Colvin. But I smiled in a noncommittal way, and asked him what he wanted. I wasn’t wrong in part of my estimate of him; he said bluntly:

“Will you let me sleep in your cabin on the Osiris?” And he colored a little as he said it.

Now, there is nothing more tiresome than having to put up with a stable-companion at sea, and I asked him rather pointedly:

“Surely there is room for all of us?” I thought that perhaps he had been partnered off with some mangy Levantine, and wanted to escape from him at all hazards.

Colvin, still somewhat confused, said: “Yes; I am in a cabin by myself. But you would do me the greatest favour if you would allow me to share yours.”

This was all very well, but, besides the fact that I always sleep better when alone, there had been some recent thefts on board English liners, and I hesitated, frank and honest and self-conscious as Colvin was. Just then the mail-train came in with a clatter and a rush of escaping steam, and I asked him to see me again about it on the boat when we started. He answered me curtly – I suppose he saw the mistrust in my manner – “I am a member of White’s. I smiled to myself as he said it, but I remembered in a moment that the man – if he were really what he claimed to be, and I make no doubt that he was – must have been sorely put to it before he urged the fact as a guarantee of his respectability to a total stranger at a Brindisi hotel.

That evening, as we cleared the red and green harbor-lights of Brindisi, Colvin explained. This is his story in his own words.

•   •   •   •   •

When I was travelling in India some years ago, I made the acquaintance of a youngish man in the Woods and Forests. We camped out together for a week, and I found him a pleasant companion. John Broughton was a light-hearted soul when off duty, but a steady and capable man in any of the small emergencies that continually arise in that department. He was liked and trusted by the natives, and though a trifle over-pleased with himself when he escaped to civilization at Simla or Calcutta, Broughton’s future was well assured in Government service, when a fair-sized estate was unexpectedly left to him, and he joyfully shook the dust of the Indian plains from his feet and returned to England. For five years he drifted about London. I saw him now and then. We dined together about every eighteen months, and I could trace pretty exactly the gradual sickening of Broughton with a merely idle life. He then set out on a couple of long voyages, returned as restless as before, and at last told me that he had decided to marry and settle down at his place, Thurnley Abbey, which had long been empty. He spoke about looking after the property and standing for his constituency in the usual way. Vivien Wilde, his fiancée, had, I suppose, begun to take him in hand. She was a pretty girl with a deal of fair hair and rather an exclusive manner; deeply religious in a narrow school, she was still kindly and high-spirited, and I thought that Broughton was in luck. He was quite happy and full of information about his future.

Among other things, I asked him about Thurnley Abbey. He confessed that he hardly knew the place. The last tenant, a man called Clarke, had lived in one wing for fifteen years and seen no one. He had been a miser and a hermit. It was the rarest thing for a light to be seen at the Abbey after dark. Only the barest necessities of life were ordered, and the tenant himself received them at the side-door. His one half-caste manservant, after a month’s stay in the house, had abruptly left without warning, and had returned to the Southern States. One thing Broughton complained bitterly about: Clarke had willfully spread the rumor among the villagers that the Abbey was haunted, and had even condescended to play childish tricks with spirit-lamps and salt in order to scare trespassers away at night. He had been detected in the act of this tomfoolery, but the story spread, and no one, said Broughton, would venture near the house except in broad daylight. The hauntedness of Thurnley Abbey was now, he said with a grin, part of the gospel of the countryside, but he and his young wife were going to change all that. Would I propose myself any time I liked? I, of course, said I would, and equally, of course, intended to do nothing of the sort without a definite invitation.

The house was put in thorough repair, though not a stick of the old furniture and tapestry were removed. Floors and ceilings were re-laid: the roof was made watertight again, and the dust of half a century was scoured out. He showed me some photographs of the place. It was called an Abbey, though as a matter of fact it had been only the infirmary of the long-vanished Abbey of Clouster some five miles away. The larger part of the building remained as it had been in pre-Reformation days, but a wing had been added in Jacobean times, and that part of the house had been kept in something like repair by Mr. Clarke. He had in both the ground and first floors set a heavy timber door, strongly barred with iron, in the passage between the earlier and the Jacobean parts of the house, and had entirely neglected the former. So there had been a good deal of work to be done.

Broughton, whom I saw in London two or three times about this period, made a deal of fun over the positive refusal of the workmen to remain after sundown. Even after the electric light had been put into every room, nothing would induce them to remain, though, as Broughton observed, electric light was death on ghosts. The legend of the Abbey’s ghosts had gone far and wide, and the men would take no risks. They went home in batches of five and six, and even during the daylight hours there was an inordinate amount of talking between one and another, if either happened to be out of sight of his companion. On the whole, though nothing of any sort or kind had been conjured up even by their heated imaginations during their five months’ work upon the Abbey, the belief in the ghosts was rather strengthened than otherwise in Thurnley because of the men’s confessed nervousness, and local tradition declared itself in favour of the ghost of an immured nun.

“Good old nun!” said Broughton.

I asked him whether in general he believed in the possibility of ghosts, and, rather to my surprise, he said that he couldn’t say he entirely disbelieved in them. A man in India had told him one morning in camp that he believed that his mother was dead in England, as her vision had come to his tent the night before. He had not been alarmed, but had said nothing, and the figure vanished again. As a matter of fact, the next possible dak-walla brought on a telegram announcing the mother’s death. “There the thing was,” said Broughton. But at Thurnley he was practical enough. He roundly cursed the idiotic selfishness of Clarke, whose silly antics had caused all the inconvenience. At the same time, he couldn’t refuse to sympathize to some extent with the ignorant workmen. “My own idea,” said he, “is that if a ghost ever does come in one’s way, one ought to speak to it.”

I agreed. Little as I knew of the ghost world and its conventions, I had always remembered that a spook was in honour bound to wait to be spoken to. It didn’t seem much to do, and I felt that the sound of one’s own voice would at any rate reassure oneself as to one’s wakefulness. But there are few ghosts outside Europe – few, that is, that a white man can see – and I had never been troubled with any. However, as I have said, I told Broughton that I agreed.

So the wedding took place, and I went to it in a tall hat which I bought for the occasion, and the new Mrs. Broughton smiled very nicely at me afterwards. As it had to happen, I took the Orient Express that evening and was not in England again for nearly six months. Just before I came back I got a letter from Broughton. He asked if I could see him in London or come to Thurnley, as he thought I should be better able to help him than anyone else he knew. His wife sent a nice message to me at the end, so I was reassured about at least one thing. I wrote from Budapest that I would come and see him at Thurnley two days after my arrival in London, and as I sauntered out of the Pannonia into the Kerepesi Utcza to post my letters, I wondered of what earthly service I could be to Broughton. I had been out with him after tiger on foot, and I could imagine few men better able at a pinch to manage their own business. However, I had nothing to do, so after dealing with some small accumulations of business during my absence, I packed a kit-bag and departed to Euston.

I was met by Broughton’s great limousine at Thurnley Road station, and after a drive of nearly seven miles we echoed through the sleepy streets of Thurnley village, into which the main gates of the park thrust themselves, splendid with pillars and spread-eagles and tom-cats rampant atop of them. I never was a herald, but I know that the Broughtons have the right to supporters – Heaven knows why! From the gates a quadruple avenue of beech-trees led inwards for a quarter of a mile. Beneath them a neat strip of fine turf edged the road and ran back until the poison of the dead beech-leaves killed it under the trees. There were many wheel-tracks on the road, and a comfortable little pony trap jogged past me laden with a country parson and his wife and daughter. Evidently there was some garden party going on at the Abbey. The road dropped away to the right at the end of the avenue, and I could see the Abbey across a wide pasturage and a broad lawn thickly dotted with guests.

The end of the building was plain. It must have been almost mercilessly austere when it was first built, but time had crumbled the edges and toned the stone down to an orange-lichened grey wherever it showed behind its curtain of magnolia, jasmine, and ivy. Farther on was the three-storied Jacobean house, tall and handsome. There had not been the slightest attempt to adapt the one to the other, but the kindly ivy had glossed over the touching-point. There was a tall flèche in the middle of the building, surmounting a small bell tower. Behind the house there rose the mountainous verdure of Spanish chestnuts all the way up the hill.

Broughton had seen me coming from afar, and walked across from his other guests to welcome me before turning me over to the butler’s care. This man was sandy-haired and rather inclined to be talkative. He could, however, answer hardly any questions about the house; he had, he said, only been there three weeks. Mindful of what Broughton had told me, I made no inquiries about ghosts, though the room into which I was shown might have justified anything. It was a very large low room with oak beams projecting from the white ceiling. Every inch of the walls, including the doors, was covered with tapestry, and a remarkably fine Italian fourpost bedstead, heavily draped, added to the darkness and dignity of the place. All the furniture was old, well made, and dark. Underfoot there was a plain green pile carpet, the only new thing about the room except the electric light fittings and the jugs and basins. Even the looking-glass on the dressing-table was an old pyramidal Venetian glass set in heavy repoussi frame of tarnished silver.

After a few minutes’ cleaning up, I went downstairs and out upon the lawn, where I greeted my hostess. The people gathered there were of the usual country type, all anxious to be pleased and roundly curious as to the new master of the Abbey. Rather to my surprise, and quite to my pleasure, I rediscovered Glenham, whom I had known well in old days in Barotseland: he lived quite close, as, he remarked with a grin, I ought to have known. “But,” he added, “I don’t live in a place like this.” He swept his hand to the long, low lines of the Abbey in obvious admiration, and then, to my intense interest, muttered beneath his breath, “Thank God!” He saw that I had overheard him, and turning to me said decidedly, “Yes, ‘thank God’” I said, and I meant it. I wouldn’t live at the Abbey for all Broughton’s money.

“But surely,” I demurred, “you know that old Clarke was discovered in the very act of setting light on his bug-a-boos?”

Glenham shrugged his shoulders. “Yes, I know about that. But there is something wrong with the place still. All I can say is that Broughton is a different man since he has lived there. I don’t believe that he will remain much longer. But – you’re staying here? – well, you’ll hear all about it tonight. There’s a big dinner, I understand.” The conversation turned off to old reminiscences, and Glenham soon after had to go.

Before I went to dress that evening I had twenty minutes’ talk with Broughton in his library. There was no doubt that the man was altered, gravely altered. He was nervous and fidgety, and I found him looking at me only when my eye was off him. I naturally asked him what he wanted of me. I told him I would do anything I could, but that I couldn’t conceive what he lacked that I could provide. He said with a lusterless smile that there was, however, something, and that he would tell me the following morning. It struck me that he was somehow ashamed of himself, and perhaps ashamed of the part he was asking me to play. However, I dismissed the subject from my mind and went up to dress in my palatial room. As I shut the door a draught blew out the Queen of Sheba from the wall, and I noticed that the tapestries were not fastened to the wall at the bottom. I have always held very practical views about spooks, and it has often seemed to me that the slow waving in firelight of loose tapestry upon a wall would account for ninety-nine percent of the stories one hears. Certainly the dignified undulation of this lady with her attendants and huntsmen – one of whom was untidily cutting the throat of a fallow deer upon the very steps on which King Solomon, a grey-faced Flemish nobleman with the order of the Golden Fleece, awaited his fair visitor – gave color to my hypothesis.

Nothing much happened at dinner. The people were very much like those of the garden party. A young woman next me seemed anxious to know what was being read in London. As she was far more familiar than I with the most recent magazines and literary supplements, I found salvation in being myself instructed in the tendencies of modern fiction. All true art, she said, was shot through and through with melancholy. How vulgar were the attempts at wit that marked so many modern books! From the beginning of literature it had always been tragedy that embodied the highest attainment of every age. To call such works morbid merely begged the question. No thoughtful man – she looked sternly at me through the steel rim of her glasses – could fail to agree with me. Of course, as one would, I immediately and properly said that I slept with Pett Ridge and Jacobs under my pillow at night, and that if Jorrocks weren’t quite so large and cornery, I would add him to the company. She hadn’t read any of them, so I was saved – for a time. But I remember grimly that she said that the dearest wish of her life was to be in some awful and soul-freezing situation of horror, and I remember that she dealt hardly with the hero of Nat Paynter’s vampire story, between nibbles at her brown-bread ice. She was a cheerless soul, and I couldn’t help thinking that if there were many such in the neighborhood, it was not surprising that old Glenham had been stuffed with some nonsense or other about the Abbey. Yet nothing could well have been less creepy than the glitter of silver and glass, and the subdued lights and cackle of conversation all round the dinner-table.

After the ladies had gone I found myself talking to the rural dean. He was a thin, earnest man, who at once turned the conversation to old Clarke’s buffooneries. But, he said, Mr. Broughton had introduced such a new and cheerful spirit, not only into the Abbey, but, he might say, into the whole neighborhood, that he had great hopes that the ignorant superstitions of the past were from henceforth destined to oblivion. Thereupon his other neighbor, a portly gentleman of independent means and position, audibly remarked “Amen,” which damped the rural dean, and we talked to partridges past, partridges present, and pheasants to come. At the other end of the table Broughton sat with a couple of his friends, red-faced hunting men. Once I noticed that they were discussing me, but I paid no attention to it at the time. I remembered it a few hours later.

By eleven all the guests were gone, and Broughton, his wife, and I were alone together under the fine plaster ceiling of the Jacobean drawing-room. Mrs. Broughton talked about one or two of the neighbors, and then, with a smile, said that she knew I would excuse her, shook hands with me, and went off to bed. I am not very good at analyzing things, but I felt that she talked a little uncomfortably and with a suspicion of effort, smiled rather conventionally, and was obviously glad to go. These things seem trifling enough to repeat, but I had throughout the faint feeling that everything was not quite square. Under the circumstances, this was enough to set me wondering what on earth the service could be that I was to render – wondering also whether the whole business were not some ill-advised jest in order to make me come down from London for a mere shooting-party.

Broughton said little after she had gone. But he was evidently laboring to bring the conversation round to the so-called haunting of the Abbey. As soon as I saw this, of course I asked him directly about it. He then seemed at once to lose interest in the matter. There was no doubt about it: Broughton was somehow a changed man, and to my mind he had changed in no way for the better. Mrs. Broughton seemed no sufficient cause. He was clearly very fond of her, and she of him. I reminded him that he was going to tell me what I could do for him in the morning, pleaded my journey, lighted a candle, and went upstairs with him. At the end of the passage leading into the old house he grinned weakly and said, “Mind, if you see a ghost, do talk to it; you said you would.” He stood irresolutely a moment and then turned away. At the door of his dressing-room he paused once more: “I’m here,” he called out, “if you should want anything. Good night,” and he shut the door.

I went along the passage to my room, undressed, switched on a lamp beside my bed, read a few pages of The Jungle Book, and then, more than ready for sleep, turned the light off and went fast asleep.

•   •   •   •   •

Three hours later I woke up. There was not a breath of wind outside. There was not even a flicker of light from the fireplace. As I lay there, an ash tinkled slightly as it cooled, but there was hardly a gleam of the dullest red in the grate. An owl cried among the silent Spanish chestnuts on the slope outside. I idly reviewed the events of the day, hoping that I should fall off to sleep again before I reached dinner. But at the end I seemed as wakeful as ever. There was no help for it. I must read my Jungle Book again till I felt ready to go off, so I fumbled for the pear at the end of the cord that hung down inside the bed, and I switched on the bedside lamp. The sudden glory dazzled me for a moment. I felt under my pillow for my book with half-shut eyes. Then, growing used to the light, I happened to look down to the foot of my bed.

I can never tell you really when happened then. Nothing I could ever confess in the most abject words could even faintly picture to you what I felt. I know that my heart stopped dead, and my throat shut automatically. In one instinctive movement I crouched back up against the head-boards of the bed, staring at the horror. The movement set my heart going again, and the sweat dripped from every pore. I am not a particularly religious man, but I had always believed that God would never allow any supernatural appearance to present itself to man in such a guise and in such circumstances that harm, either bodily or mental, could result to him. I can only tell you that at the moment both my life and my reason rocked unsteadily on their seats.

–   –   –

The other Osiris passengers had gone to bed. Only he and I remained leaning over the starboard railing, which rattled uneasily now and then under the fierce vibration of the over-engined mail-boat. Far over, there were the lights of a few fishing-smacks riding out the night, and a great rush of white combing and seething water fell out and away from us overside.

At last Colvin went on:

–   –   –

Leaning over the foot of my bed, looking at me, was a figure swathed in a rotten and tattered veiling. This shroud passed over the head, but left both eyes and the right side of the face bare. It then followed the line of the arm down to where the hand grasped the bed-end. The face was not entirely that of a skull, though the eyes and the flesh of the face were totally gone. There was a thin, dry skin drawn tightly over the features, and there was some skin left on the hand. One wisp of hair crossed the forehead. It was perfectly still. I looked at it, and it looked at me, and my brains turned dry and hot in my head. I had still got the pear of the electric lamp in my hand, and I played idly with it; only I dared not turn the light out again. I shut my eyes, only to open them in a hideous terror the same second. The thing had not moved. My heart was thumping, and the sweat cooled me as it evaporated. Another cinder tinkled in the grate, and a panel creaked in the wall.

My reason failed me. For twenty minutes, or twenty seconds, I was able to think of nothing else but this awful figure, till there came, hurtling through the empty channels of my senses, the remembrances that Broughton and his friends had discussed me furtively at dinner. The dim possibility of its being a hoax stole gratefully into my unhappy mind, and once there, one’s pluck came creeping back along a thousand tiny veins. My first sensation was one of blind unreasoning thankfulness that my brain was going to stand the trial. I am not a timid man, but the best of us needs some human handle to steady him in time of extremity, and in this faint but growing hope that after all it might be only a brutal hoax, I found the fulcrum that I needed. At last I moved.

How I managed to do it I cannot tell you, but with one spring towards the foot of the bed I got within arm’s-length and struck out one fearful blow with my fist at the thing. It crumbled under it, and my hand was cut to the bone. With a sickening revulsion after my terror, I dropped half-fainting across the end of the bed. So it was merely a foul trick after all. No doubt the trick had been played many a time before: no doubt Broughton and his friends had had some large bet among themselves as to what I should do when I discovered the gruesome thing. From my state of abject terror I found myself transported into an insensate anger. I shouted curses upon Broughton. I dived rather than climbed over the bed-end of the sofa. I tore at the robed skeleton – how well the whole thing had been carried out, I thought – I broke the skull against the floor, and stamped upon its dry bones. I flung the head away under the bed, and rent the brittle bones of the trunk in pieces. I snapped the thin thigh-bones across my knee, and flung them in different directions. The shin-bones I set up against a stool and broke with my heel. I raged like a Berserker against the loathly thing, and stripped the ribs from the backbone and slung the breastbone against the cupboard. My fury increased as the work of destruction went on. I tore the frail rotten veil into twenty pieces, and the dust went up over everything, over the clean blotting-paper and the silver inkstand. At last my work was done. There was but a raffle of broken bones and strips of parchment and crumbling wool. Then, picking up a piece of the skull – it was the cheek and temple bone of the right side, I remember – I opened the door and went down the passage to Broughton’s dressing-room. I remember still how my sweat-dripping pajamas clung to me as I walked. At the door I kicked and entered.

Broughton was in bed. He had already turned the light on and seemed shrunken and horrified. For a moment he could hardly pull himself together. Then I spoke. I don’t know what I said. Only I know that from a heart full and over-full with hatred and contempt, spurred on by shame of my own recent cowardice, I let my tongue run on. He answered nothing. I was amazed at my own fluency. My hair still clung lankily to my wet temples, my hand was bleeding profusely, and I must have looked a strange sight. Broughton huddled himself up at the head of the bed just as I had. Still he made no answer, no defense. He seemed preoccupied with something besides my reproaches, and once or twice moistened his lips with his tongue. But he could say nothing though he moved his hands now and then, just as a baby who cannot speak moves its hands.

At last the door into Mrs. Broughton’s rooms opened and she came in, white and terrified. “What is it? What is it? Oh, in God’s name! What is it?” she cried again and again, and then she went up to her husband and sat on the bed in her night-dress, and the two faced me. I told her what the matter was. I spared her husband not a word for her presence there. Yet he seemed hardly to understand. I told the pair that I had spoiled their cowardly joke for them. Broughton looked up.

“I have smashed the foul thing into a hundred pieces,” I said. Broughton licked his lips again and his mouth worked. “By God!” I shouted, “it would serve you right if I thrashed you within an inch of your life. I will take care that not a decent man or woman of my acquaintance ever speaks to you again. And there,” I added, throwing the broken piece of the skull upon the floor beside his bed, “there is a souvenir for you, of your damned work tonight!”

Broughton saw the bone, and in a moment it was his turn to frighten me. He squealed like a hare caught in a trap. He screamed and screamed till Mrs. Broughton, almost as bewildered as myself, held on to him and coaxed him like a child to be quiet. But Broughton – and as he moved I thought that ten minutes ago I perhaps looked as terribly ill as he did – thrust her from him, and scrambled out of bed on to the floor, and still screaming put out his hand to the bone. It had blood on it from my hand. He paid no attention to me whatever. In truth I said nothing. This was a new turn indeed to the horrors of the evening. He rose from the floor with the bone in his hand and stood silent. He seemed to be listening. “Time, time, perhaps,” he muttered, and almost at the same moment fell at full length on the carpet, cutting his head against the fender. The bone flew from his hand and came to rest near the door. I picked Broughton up, haggard and broken, with blood over his face. He whispered hoarsely and quickly, “Listen, listen!” We listened.

After ten seconds’ utter quiet, I seemed to hear something. I could not be sure, but at last there was no doubt. There was a quiet sound as one moving along the passage. Little regular steps came towards us over the hard oak flooring. Broughton moved to where his wife sat, white and speechless, on the bed, and pressed her face into his shoulder.

Then, the last thing that I could see as he turned the light out, he fell forward with his own head pressed into the pillow of the bed. Something in their company, something in their cowardice, helped me, and I faced the open doorway of the room, which was outlined fairly clearly against the dimly lighted passage. I put out one hand and touched Mrs. Broughton’s shoulder in the darkness. But at the last moment I too failed. I sank on my knees and put my face in the bed. Only we all heard. The footsteps came to the door and there they stopped. The piece of bone was lying a yard inside the door. There was a rustle of moving stuff, and the thing was in the room. Mrs. Broughton was silent: I could hear Broughton’s voice praying, muffled in the pillow: I was cursing my own cowardice. Then the steps moved out again on the oak boards of the passage, and I heard the sounds dying away. In a flash of remorse I went to the door and looked out. At the end of the corridor I thought I saw something that moved away. A moment later the passage was empty. I stood with my forehead against the jamb of the door almost physically sick.

“You can turn the light on,” I said, and there was an answering flare. There was no bone at my feet. Mrs. Broughton had fainted. Broughton was almost useless, and it took me ten minutes to bring her to. Broughton only said one thing worth remembering. For the most part he went on muttering prayers. But I was glad afterwards to recollect that he had said that thing. He said in a colorless voice, half as a question, half as a reproach, “You didn’t speak to her.”

We spent the remainder of the night together. Mrs. Broughton actually fell off into a kind of sleep before dawn, but she suffered so horribly in her dreams that I shook her into consciousness again. Never was dawn so long in coming. Three or four times Broughton spoke to himself. Mrs. Broughton would then just tighten her hold on his arm, but she could say nothing. As for me, I can honestly say that I grew worse as the hours passed and the light strengthened. The two violent reactions had battered down my steadiness of view, and I felt that the foundations of my life had been built upon the sand. I said nothing, and after binding up my hand with a towel, I did not move. It was better so. They helped me and I helped them, and we all three knew that our reason had gone very near to ruin that night. At last, when the light came in pretty strongly, and the birds outside were chattering and singing, we felt that we must do something. Yet we never moved. You might have thought that we should particularly dislike being found as we were by the servants: yet nothing of that kind mattered a straw, and an overpowering listlessness bound us as we sat, until Chapman, Broughton’s man, actually knocked and opened the door. None of us moved. Broughton, speaking hardly and stiffly, said, “Chapman you can come back in five minutes.” Chapman, was a discreet man, but it would have made no difference to us if he had carried his news to the “room” at once.

We looked at each other and I said I must go back. I meant to wait outside till Chapman returned. I simply dared not re-enter my bedroom alone. Broughton roused himself and said that he would come with me. Mrs. Broughton agreed to remain in her own room for five minutes if the blinds were drawn up and all the doors left open.

So Broughton and I, leaning stiffly one against the other, went down to my room. By the morning light that filtered past the blinds we could see our way, and I released the blinds. There was nothing wrong with the room from end to end, except smears of my own blood on the end of the bed, on the sofa, and on the carpet where I had torn the thing to pieces.

•   •   •   •   •

Colvin had finished his story. There was nothing to say. Seven bells stuttered out from the fo’c’sle, and the answering cry wailed through the darkness. I took him downstairs.

“Of course I am much better now, but it is a kindness of you to let me sleep in your cabin.”

THE LODGER

Marie Belloc Lowndes

1911

“There he is at last, and I’m glad of it, Ellen. ’Tain’t a night you would wish a dog to be out in.”

Mr. Bunting’s voice was full of unmistakable relief. He was close to the fire, sitting back in a deep leather armchair – a clean-shaven, dapper man, still in outward appearance what he had been so long, and now no longer was – a self-respecting butler.

“You needn’t feel so nervous about him; Mr. Sleuth can look out for himself, all right.” Mrs. Bunting spoke in a dry, rather tart tone. She was less emotional, better balanced, than was her husband. On her the marks of past servitude were less apparent, but they were there all the same – especially in her neat black stuff dress and scrupulously clean, plain collar and cuffs. Mrs. Bunting, as a single woman, had been for long years what is known as a useful maid.

“I can’t think why he wants to go out in such weather. He did it in last week’s fog, too,” Bunting went on complainingly.

“Well, it’s none of your business – now, is it?”

“No; that’s true enough. Still, ’twould be a very bad thing for us if anything happened to him. This lodger’s the first bit of luck we’ve had for a very long time.”

Mrs. Bunting made no answer to this remark. It was too obviously true to be worth answering. Also she was listening – following in imagination her lodger’s quick, singularly quiet – “stealthy,” she called it to herself – progress through the dark, fog-filled hall and up the staircase.

“It isn’t safe for decent folk to be out in such weather – not unless they have something to do that won’t wait till tomorrow.” Bunting had at last turned round. He was now looking straight into his wife’s narrow, colorless face; he was an obstinate man, and liked to prove himself right. “I read you out the accidents in Lloyd’s yesterday – shocking, they were, and all brought about by the fog! And then, that ’orrid monster at his work again—”

“Monster?” repeated Mrs. Bunting absently. She was trying to hear the lodger’s footsteps overhead; but her husband went on as if there had been no interruption:

“It wouldn’t be very pleasant to run up against such a party as that in the fog, eh?”

“What stuff you do talk!” she said sharply; and then she got up suddenly. Her husband’s remark had disturbed her. She hated to think of such things as the terrible series of murders that were just then horrifying and exciting the nether world of London. Though she enjoyed pathos and sentiment, – Mrs. Bunting would listen with mild amusement to the details of a breach-of-promise action, – she shrank from stories of either immorality or physical violence.

Mrs. Bunting got up from the straight-backed chair on which she had been sitting. It would soon be time for supper.

She moved about the sitting-room, flecking off an imperceptible touch of dust here, straightening a piece of furniture there.

Bunting looked around once or twice. He would have liked to ask Ellen to leave off fidgeting, but he was mild and fond of peace, so he refrained. However, she soon gave over what irritated him of her own accord. But even then Mrs. Bunting did not at once go down to the cold kitchen, where everything was in readiness for her simple cooking. Instead, she opened the door leading into the bedroom behind, and there, closing the door quietly, stepped back into the darkness and stood motionless, listening.

At first she heard nothing, but gradually there came the sound of someone moving about in the room just overhead; try as she might, however, it was impossible for her to guess what her lodger was doing. At last she heard him open the door leading out on the landing. That meant that he would spend the rest of the evening in the rather cheerless room above the drawing-room floor – oddly enough, he liked sitting there best, though the only warmth obtainable was from a gas-stove fed by a shilling-in-the-slot arrangement.

It was indeed true that Mr. Sleuth had brought the Buntings luck, for at the time he had taken their rooms it had been touch and go with them.

After having each separately led the sheltered, impersonal, and, above all, the financially easy existence that is the compensation life offers to those men and women who deliberately take upon themselves the yoke of domestic service, these two, butler and useful maid, had suddenly, in middle age, determined to join their fortunes and savings.

Bunting was a widower; he had one pretty daughter, a girl of seventeen, who now lived, as had been the case ever since the death of her mother, with a prosperous aunt. His second wife had been reared in the Foundling Hospital, but she had gradually worked her way up into the higher ranks of the servant class, and as useful maid she had saved quite a tidy sum of money.

Unluckily, misfortune had dogged Mr. and Mrs. Bunting from the very first. The seaside place where they had begun by taking a lodging-house became the scene of an epidemic. Then had followed a business experiment which had proved disastrous. But before going back into service, either together or separately, they had made up their minds to make one last effort, and, with the little money that remained to them, they had taken over the lease of a small house in the Marylebone Road.

Bunting, whose appearance was very good, had retained a connection with old employers and their friends, so he occasionally got a good job as waiter. During this last month his jobs had perceptibly increased in number and in profit; Mrs. Bunting was not superstitious, but it seemed that in this matter, as in everything else, Mr. Sleuth, their new lodger, had brought them luck.

As she stood there, still listening intently in the darkness of the bedroom, she told herself, not for the first time, what Mr. Sleuth’s departure would mean to her and Bunting. It would almost certainly mean ruin.

Luckily, the lodger seemed entirely pleased both with the rooms and with his landlady. There was really no reason why he should ever leave such nice lodgings. Mrs. Bunting shook off her vague sense of apprehension and unease. She turned round, took a step forward, and, feeling for the handle of the door giving into the passage, she opened it, and went down with light, firm steps into the kitchen.

She lit the gas and put a frying-pan on the stove, and then once more her mind reverted, as if in spite of herself, to her lodger, and there came back to Mrs. Bunting, very vividly, the memory of all that had happened the day Mr. Sleuth had taken her rooms.

The date of this excellent lodger’s coming had been the twenty-ninth of December, and the time late afternoon. She and Bunting had been sitting, gloomily enough, over their small banked-up fire. They had dined in the middle of the day – he on a couple of sausages, she on a little cold ham. They were utterly out of heart, each trying to pluck up courage to tell the other that it was no use trying any more. The two had also had a little tiff on that dreary afternoon. A newspaper-seller had come yelling down the Marylebone Road, shouting out, “’Orrible murder in Whitechapel!” and just because Bunting had an old uncle living in the East End he had gone out and bought a paper, and at a time, too, when every penny, nay, every halfpenny, had its full value! Mrs. Bunting remembered the circumstance because that murder in Whitechapel had been the first of these terrible crimes – there had been four since – which she would never allow Bunting to discuss in her presence, and yet which had of late begun to interest curiously, uncomfortably, even her refined mind.

But, to return to the lodger. It was then, on that dreary afternoon, that suddenly there had come to the front door a tremulous, uncertain double knock.

Bunting ought to have got up, but he had gone on reading the paper; and so Mrs. Bunting, with the woman’s greater courage, had gone out into the passage, turned up the gas, and opened the door to see who it could be. She remembered, as if it were yesterday instead of nigh on a month ago, Mr. Sleuth’s peculiar appearance. Tall, dark, lanky, an old-fashioned top hat concealing his high bald forehead, he had stood there, an odd figure of a man, blinking at her.

“I believe – is it not a fact that you let lodgings?” he had asked in a hesitating, whistling voice, a voice that she had known in a moment to be that of an educated man – of a gentleman. As he had stepped into the hall, she had noticed that in his right hand he held a narrow bag – a quite new bag of strong brown, leather.

Everything had been settled in less than a quarter of an hour. Mr. Sleuth had at once “taken” to the drawing-room floor, and then, as Mrs. Bunting eagerly lit the gas in the front room above, he had looked round him and said, rubbing his hands with a nervous movement, “Capital – capital! This is just what I’ve been looking for!”

The sink had specially pleased him – the sink and the gas-stove. “This is quite first-rate!” he had exclaimed, “for I make all sorts of experiments. I am, you must understand, Mrs. – er – Bunting, a man of science.” Then he had sat down – suddenly. “I’m very tired,” he had said in a low tone, “very tired indeed! I have been walking about all day.”

From the very first the lodger’s manner had been odd, sometimes distant and abrupt, and then, for no reason at all that she could see, confidential and plaintively confiding. But Mrs. Bunting was aware that eccentricity has always been a perquisite, as it were the special luxury, of the well born and well educated. Scholars and such-like are never quite like other people.

And then, this particular gentleman had proved himself so eminently satisfactory as to the one thing that really matters to those who let lodgings. “My name is Sleuth,” he said, “S-l-e-u-t-h. Think of a hound, Mrs. Bunting, and you’ll never forget my name. I could give you references,” he had added, giving her, as she now remembered, a funny sidewise look, “but I prefer to dispense with them. How much did you say? Twenty-three shillings a week, with attendance? Yes, that will suit me perfectly; and I’ll begin by paying my first month’s rent in advance. Now, four times twenty-three shillings is” – he looked at Mrs. Bunting, and for the first time he smiled, a queer, wry smile – “ninety-two shillings.”

He had taken a handful of sovereigns out of his pocket and put them down on the table. “Look here,” he had said, “there’s five pounds; and you can keep the change, for I shall want you to do a little shopping for me tomorrow.”

After he had been in the house about an hour, the bell had rung, and the new lodger had asked Mrs. Bunting if she could oblige him with the loan of a Bible. She brought up to him her best Bible, the one that had been given to her as a wedding present by a lady with whose mother she had lived for several years. This Bible and one other book, of which the odd name was Cruden’s Concordance, formed Mr. Sleuth’s only reading: he spent hours each day poring over the Old Testament and over the volume which Mrs. Bunting had at last decided to be a queer kind of index to the Book.

However, to return to the lodger’s first arrival. He had had no luggage with him, barring the small brown bag, but very soon parcels had begun to arrive addressed to Mr. Sleuth, and it was then that Mrs. Bunting first became curious. These parcels were full of clothes; but it was quite clear to the landlady’s feminine eye that none of those clothes had been made for Mr. Sleuth. They were, in fact, second-hand clothes, bought at good second-hand places, each marked, when marked at all, with a different name. And the really extraordinary thing was that occasionally a complete suit disappeared – became, as it were, obliterated from the lodger’s wardrobe.

As for the bag he had brought with him, Mrs. Bunting had never caught sight of it again. And this also was certainly very strange.

Mrs. Bunting thought a great deal about that bag. She often wondered what had been in it; not a night-shirt and comb and brush, as she had at first supposed, for Mr. Sleuth had asked her to go out and buy him a brush and comb and tooth-brush the morning after his arrival. That fact was specially impressed on her memory, for at the little shop, a barber’s, where she had purchased the brush and comb, the foreigner who had served her had insisted on telling her some of the horrible details of the murder that had taken place the day before in Whitechapel, and it had upset her very much.

As to where the bag was now, it was probably locked up in the lower part of a chiffonnier in the front sitting-room. Mr. Sleuth evidently always carried the key of the little cupboard on his person, for Mrs. Bunting, though she looked well for it, had never been able to find it.

And yet, never was there a more confiding or trusting gentleman. The first four days that he had been with them he had allowed his money – the considerable sum of one hundred and eighty-four pounds in gold – to lie about wrapped up in pieces of paper on his dressing-table. This was a very foolish, indeed a wrong thing to do, as she had allowed herself respectfully to point out to him; but as only answer he had laughed, a loud, discordant shout of laughter.

Mr. Sleuth had many other odd ways; but Mrs. Bunting, a true woman in spite of her prim manner and love of order, had an infinite patience with masculine vagaries.

On the first morning of Mr. Sleuth’s stay in the Buntings’ house, while Mrs. Bunting was out buying things for him, the new lodger had turned most of the pictures and photographs hanging in his sitting-room with their faces to the wall! But this queer action on Mr. Sleuth’s part had not surprised Mrs. Bunting as much as it might have done; it recalled an incident of her long-past youth – something that had happened a matter of twenty years ago, at a time when Mrs. Bunting, then the still youthful Ellen Cottrell, had been maid to an old lady. The old lady had a favorite nephew, a bright, jolly young gentleman who had been learning to paint animals in Paris; and it was he who had had the impudence, early one summer morning, to turn to the wall six beautiful engravings of paintings done by the famous Mr. Landseer! The old lady thought the world of those pictures, but her nephew, as only excuse for the extraordinary thing he had done, had observed that “they put his eye out.”

Mr. Sleuth’s excuse had been much the same; for, when Mrs. Bunting had come into his sitting-room and found all her pictures, or at any rate all those of her pictures that happened to be portraits of ladies, with their faces to the wall, he had offered as only explanation, “Those women’s eyes follow me about.”

Mrs. Bunting had gradually become aware that Mr. Sleuth had a fear and dislike of women. When she was “doing” the staircase and landing, she often heard him reading bits of the Bible aloud to himself, and in the majority of instances the texts he chose contained uncomplimentary reference to her own sex. Only today she had stopped and listened while he uttered threateningly the awful words, “A strange woman is a narrow pit. She also lieth in wait as for a prey, and increaseth the transgressors among men.” There had been a pause, and then had come, in a high singsong, “Her house is the way to hell, going down to the chambers of death.” It had made Mrs. Bunting feel quite queer.

The lodger’s daily habits were also peculiar. He stayed in bed all the morning, and sometimes part of the afternoon, and he never went out before the street lamps were alight. Then, there was his dislike of an open fire; he generally sat in the top front room, and while there he always used the large gas-stove, not only for his experiments, which he carried on at night, but also in the daytime, for warmth.

But there! Where was the use of worrying about the lodger’s funny ways? Of course, Mr. Sleuth was eccentric; if he hadn’t been “just a leetle ‘touched’ upstairs” – as Bunting had once described it – he wouldn’t be their lodger now; he would be living in a quite different sort of way with some of his relations, or with a friend of his own class.

Mrs. Bunting, while these thoughts galloped disconnectedly through her brain, went on with her cooking, doing everything with a certain delicate and cleanly precision.

While in the middle of making the toast on which was to be poured some melted cheese, she suddenly heard a noise, or rather a series of noises. Shuffling, hesitating steps were creaking down the house above. She looked up and listened. Surely Mr. Sleuth was not going out again into the cold, foggy night? But no; for the sounds did not continue down the passage leading to the front door.

The heavy steps were coming slowly down the kitchen stairs. Nearer and nearer came the thudding sounds, and Mrs. Bunting’s heart began to beat as if in response. She put out the gas-stove, unheedful of the fact that the cheese would stiffen and spoil in the cold air; and then she turned and faced the door. There was a fumbling at the handle, and a moment later the door opened and revealed, as she had known it would, her lodger.

Mr. Sleuth was clad in a plaid dressing-gown, and in his hand was a candle. When he saw the lit-up kitchen, and the woman standing in it, he looked inexplicably taken aback, almost aghast.

“Yes, sir? What can I do for you, sir? I hope you didn’t ring, sir?” Mrs. Bunting did not come forward to meet her lodger; instead, she held her ground in front of the stove. Mr. Sleuth had no business to come down like this into her kitchen.

“No, I – I didn’t ring,” he stammered; “I didn’t know you were down Here, Mrs. Bunting. Please excuse my costume. The truth is, my gas-stove has gone wrong, or, rather, that shilling-in-the-slot arrangement has done so. I came down to see if you had a gas-stove. I am going to ask leave to use it tonight for an experiment I want to make.”

Mrs. Bunting felt troubled – oddly, unnaturally troubled. Why couldn’t the lodger’s experiment wait till tomorrow? “Oh, certainly, sir; but you will find it very cold down here.” She looked round her dubiously.

“It seems most pleasantly warm,” he observed, “warm and cozy after my cold room upstairs.”

“Won’t you let me make you a fire?” Mrs. Bunting’s housewifely instincts were roused. “Do let me make you a fire in your bedroom, sir; I’m sure you ought to have one there these cold nights.”

“By no means – I mean, I would prefer not. I do not like an open fire, Mrs. Bunting.” He frowned, and still stood, a strange-looking figure, just inside the kitchen door.

“Do you want to use this stove now, sir? Is there anything I can do to help you?”

“No, not now – thank you all the same, Mrs. Bunting. I shall come down later, altogether later – probably after you and your husband have gone to bed. But I should be much obliged if you would see that the gas people come tomorrow and put my stove in order.”

“Perhaps Bunting could put it right for you, sir. I’ll ask him to go up.”

“No, no – I don’t want anything of that sort done tonight. Besides, he couldn’t put it right. The cause of the trouble is quite simple. The machine is choked up with shillings; a foolish plan, so I have always felt it to be.”

Mr. Sleuth spoke very pettishly, with far more heat than he was wont to speak; but Mrs. Bunting sympathized with him. She had always suspected those slot-machines to be as dishonest as if they were human. It was dreadful, the way they swallowed up the shillings!

As if he were divining her thoughts, Mr. Sleuth, walking forward, stared up at the kitchen slot-machine. “Is it nearly full?” he asked abruptly. “I expect my experiment will take some time, Mrs. Bunting.”

“Oh, no, sir; there’s plenty of room for shillings there still. We don’t use our stove as much as you do yours, sir. I’m never in the kitchen a minute longer than I can help this cold weather.”

And then, with him preceding her, Mrs. Bunting and her lodger made a slow progress to the ground floor. There Mr. Sleuth courteously bade his landlady good night, and proceeded upstairs to his own apartments.

Mrs. Bunting again went down into her kitchen, again she lit the stove, and again she cooked the toasted cheese. But she felt unnerved, afraid of she knew not what. The place seemed to her alive with alien presences, and once she caught herself listening, which was absurd, for of course she could not hope to hear what her lodger was doing two, if not three, flights upstairs. She had never been able to discover what Mr. Sleuth’s experiments really were; all she knew was that they required a very high degree of heat.

The Buntings went to bed early that night. But Mrs. Bunting intended to stay awake. She wanted to know at what hour of the night her lodger would come down into the kitchen, and, above all, she was anxious as to how long he would stay there. But she had had a long day, and presently she fell asleep.

The church clock hard by struck two in the morning, and suddenly Mrs. Bunting awoke. She felt sharply annoyed with herself. How could she have dropped off like that? Mr. Sleuth must have been down and up again hours ago!

Then, gradually, she became aware of a faint acrid odor; elusive, almost intangible, it yet seemed to encompass her and the snoring man by her side almost as a vapor might have done.

Mrs. Bunting sat up in bed and sniffed; and then, in spite of the cold, she quietly crept out of the nice, warm bedclothes and crawled along to the bottom of the bed. There Mr. Sleuth’s landlady did a very curious thing; she leaned over the brass rail and put her face close to the hinge of the door. Yes, it was from there that this strange, horrible odor was coming; the smell must be very strong in the passage. Mrs. Bunting thought she knew now what became of those suits of clothes of Mr. Sleuth’s that disappeared.

As she crept back, shivering, under the bedclothes, she longed to give her sleeping husband a good shake, and in fancy she heard herself saying: “Bunting, get up! There is something strange going on downstairs that we ought to know about.”

But Mr. Sleuth’s landlady, as she lay by her husband’s side, listening with painful intentness, knew very well that she would do nothing of the sort. The lodger had a right to destroy his clothes by burning if the fancy took him. What if he did make a certain amount of mess, a certain amount of smell, in her nice kitchen? Was he not – was he not such a good lodger! If they did anything to upset him, where could they ever hope to get another like him?

Three o’clock struck before Mrs. Bunting heard stow, heavy steps creaking up her kitchen stairs. But Mr. Sleuth did not go straight up to his own quarters, as she expected him to do. Instead, he went to the front door, and, opening it, put it on the chain. At the end of ten minutes or so he closed the front door, and by that time Mrs. Bunting had divined why the lodger had behaved in this strange fashion – it must have been to get the strong acrid smell of burning wool out of the passage. But Mrs. Bunting felt as if she herself would never get rid of the horrible odor. She felt herself to be all smell.

At last the unhappy woman fell into a deep, troubled sleep; and then she dreamed a most terrible and unnatural dream; hoarse voices seemed to be shouting in her ear, “’Orrible murder off the Edgeware Road!” Then three words, indistinctly uttered, followed by “ – – at his work again! Awful details!”

Even in her dream Mrs. Bunting felt angered and impatient; she knew so well why she was being disturbed by this horrid nightmare, it was because of Bunting – Bunting, who insisted on talking to her of those frightful murders, in which only morbid, vulgar-minded people took any interest. Why, even now, in her dream, she could hear her husband speaking to her about it.

“Ellen,”-so she heard Bunting say in her ear, – “Ellen, my dear, I am just going to get up to get a paper. It’s after seven o’clock.”

Mrs. Bunting sat up in bed. The shouting, nay, worse, the sound of tramping, hurrying feet smote on her ears. It had been no nightmare, then, but something, infinitely worse – reality. Why couldn’t Bunting have lain quietly in bed awhile longer, and let his poor wife go on dreaming? The most awful dream would have been easier to bear than this awakening.

She heard her husband go to the front door, and, as he bought the paper, exchange a few excited words with the newspaper boy. Then he came back and began silently moving about the room.

“Well!” she cried. “Why don’t you tell me about it?”

“I thought you’d rather not hear.”

“Of course I like to know what happens close to our own front door!” she snapped out.

And then he read out a piece of the newspaper – only a few lines, after all – telling in brief, unemotional language that the body of a woman, apparently done to death in a peculiarly atrocious fashion some hours before, had been found in a passage leading to a disused warehouse off the Marylebone Road.

“It serves that sort of hussy right!” was Mrs. Bunting’s only comment.

When Mrs. Bunting went down into the kitchen, everything there looked just as she had left it, and there was no trace of. the acrid smell she had expected to find there. Instead, the cavernous whitewashed room was fall of fog, and she noticed that, though the shutters were bolted and barred as she had left them, the windows behind them had been widely opened to the air. She, of course, had left them shut.

She stooped and flung open the oven door of her gas-stove. Yes, it was as she had expected; a fierce heat had been generated there since she had last used the oven, and a mass of black, gluey soot had fallen through to the stone floor below.

Mrs. Bunting took the ham and eggs that she had bought the previous day for her own and Bunting’s breakfast, and broiled them over the gas-ring in their sitting-room. Her husband watched her in surprised silence. She had never done such a thing before.

“I couldn’t stay down there,” she said, “it was so cold and foggy. I thought I’d make breakfast up here, just for today.”

“Yes,” he said kindly; “that’s quite right, Ellen. I think you’ve done quite right, my dear.”

But, when it came to the point, his wife could not eat any of the nice breakfast she had got ready; she only had another cup of tea.

“Are you ill?” Bunting asked solicitously.

“No,” she said shortly; “of course I’m not ill. Don’t be silly! The thought of that horrible thing happening so close by has upset me. Just hark to them, now!”

Through their closed windows penetrated the sound of scurrying feet and loud, ribald laughter. A crowd, nay, a mob, hastened to and from the scene of the murder.

Mrs. Bunting made her husband lock the front gate. “I don’t want any of those ghouls in here!” she exclaimed angrily. And then, “What a lot of idle people there must be in the world,” she said.

The coming and going went on all day. Mrs. Bunting stayed indoors; Bunting went out. After all, the ex-butler was human – it was natural that he should feel thrilled and excited. All their neighbors were the same. His wife wasn’t reasonable about such things. She quarreled with him when he didn’t tell her anything, and yet he was sure she would have been angry with him if he had said very much about it.

The lodger’s bell rang about two o’clock, and Mrs. Bunting prepared the simple luncheon that was also his breakfast. As she rested the tray a minute on the drawing-room floor landing, she heard Mr. Sleuth’s high, quavering voice reading aloud the words:

“She saith to him. Stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant. But he knoweth not that the dead are there; and that her guests are in the depths of hell.”

The landlady turned the handle of the door and walked in with the tray. Mr. Sleuth was sitting close by the window, and Mrs. Bunting’s Bible lay open before him. As she came in he hastily closed the Bible and looked down at the crowd walking along the Marylebone Road.

“There seem a great many people out today,” he observed, without looking round.

“Yes, sir, there do.” Mrs. Bunting said nothing more, and offered no other explanation; and the lodger, as he at last turned to his landlady, smiled pleasantly. He had acquired a great liking and respect for this well-behaved, taciturn woman; she was the first person for whom he had felt any such feeling for many years past.

He took a half sovereign out of his waistcoat pocket; Mrs. Bunting noticed that it was not the same waistcoat Mr. Sleuth had been wearing the day before. “Will you please accept this half sovereign for the use of your kitchen last night?” he said. “I made as little mess as I could, but I was carrying on a rather elaborate experiment.”

She held out her hand, hesitated, and then took the coin.

As she walked down the stairs, the winter sun, a yellow ball hanging in the smoky sky, glinted in on Mrs. Bunting, and lent blood-red gleams, or so it seemed to her, to the piece of gold she was holding in her hand.

II

It was a very cold night – so cold, so windy, so snow-laden the atmosphere, that every one who could do so stayed indoors. Bunting, however, was on his way home from what had proved a very pleasant job; he had been acting as waiter at a young lady’s birthday party, and a remarkable piece of luck had come his way. The young lady had come into a fortune that day, and she had had the gracious, the surprising thought of presenting each of the hired waiters with a sovereign.

This birthday treat had put him in mind of another birthday. His daughter Daisy would be eighteen the following Saturday. Why shouldn’t he send her a postal order for half a sovereign, so that she might come up and spend her birthday in London?

Having Daisy for three or four days would cheer up Ellen. Mr. Bunting, slackening his footsteps, began to think with puzzled concern of how queer his wife had seemed lately. She had become so nervous, so “jumpy,” that he didn’t know what to make of her sometimes. She had never been a really good-tempered woman, – your capable, self-respecting woman seldom is, – but she had never been like what she was now. Of late she sometimes got quite hysterical; he had let fall a sharp word to her the other day, and she had sat down on a chair, thrown her black apron over her face, and burst out sobbing violently.

During the last ten days Ellen had taken to talking in her sleep. “No, no, no!” she had cried out, only the night before. “It isn’t true! I won’t have it said! It’s a lie!” And there had been a wail of horrible fear and revolt in her usually quiet, mincing voice. Yes, it would certainly be a good thing for her to have Daisy’s company for a bit. Whew! it was cold; and Bunting had stupidly forgotten his gloves. He put his hands in his pockets to keep them warm.

Suddenly he became aware that Mr. Sleuth, the lodger who seemed to have “turned their luck,” as it were, was walking along on the opposite side of the solitary street.

Mr. Sleuth’s tall, thin figure was rather bowed, his head bent toward the ground. His right arm was thrust into his long Inverness cape; the other occasionally sawed the air, doubtless in order to help him keep warm. He was walking rather quickly. It was clear that he had not yet become aware of the proximity of his landlord.

Bunting felt pleased to see his lodger; it increased his feeling of general satisfaction. Strange, was it not, that that odd, peculiar-looking figure should have made all the difference to his (Bunting’s) and Mrs, Bunting’s happiness and comfort in life?

Naturally, Bunting saw far less of the lodger than did Mrs. Bunting. Their gentleman had made it very clear that he did not like either the husband or wife to come up to his rooms without being definitely asked to do so, and Bunting had been up there only once since Mr. Sleuth’s arrival five weeks before. This seemed to be a good opportunity for a little genial conversation.

Bunting, still an active man for his years, crossed the road, and, stepping briskly forward, tried to overtake Mr. Sleuth; but the more he hurried, the more the other hastened, and that without even turning to see whose steps he heard echoing behind him on the now freezing pavement.

Mr. Sleuth’s own footsteps were quite inaudible – an odd circumstance, when you came to think of it, as Bunting did think of it later, lying awake by Ellen’s side in the pitch-darkness. What it meant was, of course, that the lodger had rubber soles on his shoes.

The two men, the pursued and the pursuer, at last turned into the Marylebone Road. They were now within a hundred yards of home; and so, plucking up courage. Bunting called out, his voice echoing freshly on the still air:

“Mr. Sleuth, sir! Mr. Sleuth!”

The lodger stopped and turned round. He had been walking so quickly, and he was in so poor a physical condition, that the sweat was pouring down his face.

“Ah! So it’s you, Mr. Bunting? I heard footsteps behind me, and I hurried on. I wish I’d known that it was only you; there are so many queer characters about at night in London.”

“Not on a night like this, sir. Only honest folk who have business out of doors would be out such a night as this. It’s cold, sir!” And then into Bunting’s slow and honest mind there suddenly crept the query as to what Mr. Sleuth’s own business out could be on this cold, bitter night.

“Cold?” the lodger repeated. “I can’t say that I find it cold, Mr. Bunting. When the snow falls the air always becomes milder.”

“Yes, sir; but tonight there’s such a sharp east wind. Why, it freezes the very marrow in one’s bones!”

Bunting noticed that Mr. Sleuth kept his distance in a rather strange way: he walked at the edge of the pavement, leaving the rest of it, on the wall side, to his landlord.

“I lost my way,” he said abruptly. “I’ve been over Primrose Hill to see a friend of mine, and then, coming back, I lost my way.”

Bunting could well believe that, for when he had first noticed Mr. Sleuth he was coming from the east, and not, as he should have done if walking home from Primrose Hill, from the north.

They had now reached the little gate that gave on to the shabby, paved court in front of the house. Mr. Sleuth was walking up the flagged path, when, with a “By your leave, sir,” the ex-butler, stepping aside, slipped in front of his lodger, in order to open the front door for him.

As he passed by Mr. Sleuth, the back of Bunting’s bare left hand brushed lightly against the long Inverness cape the other man was wearing, and, to his surprise, the stretch of cloth against which his hand lay for a moment was not only damp, damp from the flakes of snow that had settled upon it, but wet – wet and gluey.

Bunting thrust his left hand into his pocket; it was with the other that he placed the key in the lock of the door.

The two men passed into the hall together. The house seemed blackly dark in comparison with the lighted up road outside; and then, quite suddenly, there came over Bunting a feeling of mortal terror, an instinctive knowledge that some terrible and immediate danger was near him. A voice – the voice of his first wife, the long-dead girl to whom his mind so seldom reverted nowadays – uttered in his ear the words, “Take care!”

“I’m afraid, Mr. Bunting, that you must have felt something dirty, foul, on my coat? It’s too long a story to tell you now, but I brushed up against a dead animal – a dead rabbit lying across a bench on Primrose Hill.”

Mr. Sleuth spoke in a very quiet voice, almost in a whisper.

“No, sir; no, I didn’t notice nothing. I scarcely touched you, sir.” It seemed as if a power outside himself compelled Bunting to utter these lying words. “And now, sir, I’ll be saying good night to you,” he added.

He waited until the lodger had gone upstairs, and then he turned into his own sitting-room. There he sat down, for he felt very queer. He did not draw his left hand out of his pocket till he heard the other man moving about in the room above. Then he lit the gas and held up his left hand; he put it close to his face. It was flecked, streaked with blood.

He took off his boots, and then, very quietly, he went into the room where his wife lay asleep. Stealthily he walked across to the toilet-table, and dipped his hand into the water-jug.

The next morning Mr. Sleuth’s landlord awoke with a start; he felt curiously heavy about the limbs and tired about the eyes. Drawing his watch from under his pillow, he saw that it was nearly nine o’clock. He and Ellen had overslept. Without waking her, he got out of bed and pulled up the blind. It was snowing heavily, and, as is the way when it snows, even in London, it was strangely, curiously still.

After he had dressed he went out into the passage. A newspaper and a letter were lying on the mat. Fancy having slept through the postman’s knock! He picked them both up and went into the sitting-room; then he carefully shut the door behind him, and, tossing the letter aside, spread the newspaper wide open on the table and bent over it.

As Bunting at last looked up and straightened himself, a look of inexpressible relief shone upon his stolid face. The item of news he had felt certain would be there, printed in big type on the middle sheet, was not there.

He folded the paper and laid it on a chair, and then eagerly took up his letter.

Dear Father [it ran]: I hope this finds you as well as it leaves me. Mrs. Puddle’s youngest child has got scarlet fever, and aunt thinks I had better come away at once, just to stay with you for a few days. Please tell Ellen I won’t give her no trouble.

Your loving daughter,? Daisy.

Bunting felt amazingly light-hearted; and, as he walked into the next room, he smiled broadly.

“Ellen,” he cried out, “here’s news! Daisy’s coming today. There’s scarlet fever in their house, and Martha thinks she had better come away for a few days. She’ll be here for her birthday!”

Mrs. Bunting listened in silence; she did not even open her eyes. “I can’t have the girl here lust now,” she said shortly; “I’ve got just as much as I can manage to do.”

But Bunting felt pugnacious, and so cheerful as to be almost light-headed. Deep down in his heart he looked back to last night with a feeling of shame and self-rebuke. Whatever had made such horrible thoughts and suspicions come into his head?

“Of course Daisy will come here,” he said shortly. “If it comes to that, she’ll be able to help you with the work, and she’ll brisk us both up a bit.”

Rather to his surprise, Mrs. Bunting said nothing in answer to this, and he changed the subject abruptly. “The lodger and me came in together last night,” he observed. “He’s certainly a funny kind of gentleman. It wasn’t the sort of night one would choose to go for a walk over Primrose Hill, and yet that was what he had been doing – so he said.”

It stopped snowing about ten o’clock, and the morning wore itself away.

Just as twelve was striking, a four-wheeler drew up to the gate. It was Daisy – pink-cheeked, excited, laughing-eyed Daisy, a sight to gladden any father’s heart. “Aunt said I was to have a cab if the weather was bad,” she said.

There was a bit of a wrangle over the fare. King’s Cross, as all the world knows, is nothing like two miles from the Marylebone Road, but the man clamored for one-and-sixpence, and hinted darkly that he had done the young lady a favor in bringing her at all.

While he and Bunting were having words, Daisy, leaving them to it, walked up the path to the door where her stepmother was awaiting her.

Suddenly there fell loud shouts on the still air. They sounded strangely eerie, breaking sharply across the muffled, snowy air.

“What’s that?” said Bunting, with a look of startled fear. “Why, whatever’s that?”

The cabman lowered his voice: “Them are crying out that ’orrible affair at King’s Cross. He’s done for two of ’em this time! That’s what I meant when I said I might have got a better fare; I wouldn’t say anything before Missy there, but folk ’ave been coming from all over London – like a fire; plenty of toffs, too. But there – there’s nothing to see now!”

“What! Another woman murdered last night?” Bunting felt and looked convulsed with horror.

The cabman stared at him, surprised. “Two of ’em, I tell yer – within a few yards of one another. He ’ave got a nerve—”

“Have they caught him?” asked Bunting perfunctorily.

“Lord, no! They’ll never catch ’im! It must ’ave happened hours and hours ago – they was both stone-cold. One each end of an archway. That’s why they didn’t see ’em before.”

The hoarse cries were coming nearer and nearer – two news-venders trying to outshout each other.

“’Orrible discovery near King’s Cross!” they yelled exultantly. And as Bunting, with his daughter’s bag in his hand, hurried up the path and passed through his front door, the words pursued him like a dreadful threat.

Angrily he shut out the hoarse, insistent cries. No, he had no wish to buy a paper. That kind of crime wasn’t fit reading for a young girt, such a girl as was his Daisy, brought up as carefully as if she had been a young lady by her strict Methody aunt.

As he stood in his little hall, trying to feel “all right” again, he could hear Daisy’s voice – high, voluble, excited – giving her stepmother a long account of the scarlet-fever case to which she owed her presence in London. But, as Bunting pushed open the door of the sitting-room, there came a note of sharp alarm in his daughter’s voice, and he heard her say;

“Why, Ellen! Whatever is the matter? You do look bad!” and his wife’s muffled answer: “Open the window – do.”

Rushing across the room, Bunting pushed up the sash. The newspaper-sellers were now just outside the house. “Horrible discovery near King’s Cross – a clue to the murderer!” they yelled. And then, helplessly, Mrs. Bunting began to laugh. She laughed and laughed and laughed, rocking herself to and fro as if in an ecstasy of mirth.

“Why, father, whatever’s the matter with her?” Daisy looked quite scared.

“She’s in ’sterics – that’s what it is,” he said shortly. “I’ll just get the water-jug. Wait a minute.”

Bunting felt very put out, and yet glad, too, for this queer seizure of Ellen’s almost made him forget the sick terror with which he had been possessed a moment before. That he and his wife should be obsessed by the same fear, the same terror, never crossed his simple, slow-working mind.

The lodger’s bell rang. That, or the threat of the water-jug, had a magical effect on Mrs. Bunting. She rose to her feet, still trembling, but composed.

As Mrs. Bunting went upstairs she felt her legs trembling under her, and put out a shaking hand to clutch at the bannister for support. She waited a few minutes on the landing, and then knocked at the door of her lodger’s parlor.

But Mr. Sleuth’s voice answered her from the bedroom. “I’m not well,” he called out querulously; “I think I caught a chill going out to see a friend last night. I’ll be obliged if you’ll bring me up a cup of tea and put it outside my door, Mrs. Bunting.”

“Very well, sir.”

Mrs. Bunting went downstairs and made her lodger a cup of tea over the gas-ring. Bunting watching her the while in heavy silence.

During their midday dinner the husband and wife had a little discussion as to where Daisy should sleep. It had already been settled that a bed should be made up for her in the sitting-room, but Bunting saw reason to change this plan. As the two women were clearing away the dishes, he looked up and said shortly: “I think ’twould be better if Daisy were to sleep with you, Ellen, and I were to sleep in the sitting-room.”

Ellen acquiesced quietly.

Daisy was a good-natured girl; she liked London, and wanted to make herself useful to her stepmother. “I’ll wash up; don’t you bother to come downstairs,” she said.

Bunting began to walk up and down the room. His wife gave him a furtive glance; she wondered what he was thinking about.

“Didn’t you get a paper?” she said at last.

“There’s the paper,” he said crossly, “the paper we always do take in, the Telegraph.” His look challenged her to a further question.

“I thought they was shouting something in the street – I mean just before I was took bad.”

But he made no answer; instead, he went to the top of the staircase and called out sharply: “Daisy! Daisy, child, are you there?”

“Yes, father,” she answered from below.

“Better come upstairs out of that cold kitchen.”

He came back into the sitting-room again.

“Ellen, is the lodger in? I haven’t heard him moving about. I don’t want Daisy to be mixed up with him.”

“Mr. Sleuth is not well today,” his wife answered; “he is remaining in bed a bit. Daisy needn’t have anything to do with him. She’ll have her work cut out looking after things down here. That’s where I want her to help me.”

“Agreed,” he said.

When it grew dark, Bunting went out and bought an evening paper. He read it out of doors in the biting cold, standing beneath a street lamp. He wanted to see what was the clue to the murderer.

The clue proved to be a very slender one – merely the imprint in the snowy slush of a halfworn rubber sole; and it was, of course, by no means certain that the sole belonged to the boot or shoe of the murderer of the two doomed women who had met so swift and awful a death in the arch near King’s Cross station. The paper’s special investigator pointed out that there were thousands of such soles being worn in London. Bunting found comfort in that obvious fact. He felt grateful to the special investigator for having stated it so clearly.

As he approached his house, he heard curious sounds coming from the inner side of the low wall that shut off the courtyard from the pavement. Under ordinary circumstances Bunting would have gone at once to drive whoever was there out into the roadway. Now he stayed outside, sick with suspense and anxiety. Was it possible that their place was being watched – already?

But it was only Mr. Sleuth. To Bunting’s astonishment, the lodger suddenly stepped forward from behind the wall on to the flagged path. He was carrying a brown-paper parcel, and, as he walked along, the new boots he was wearing creaked and the tap-tap of wooden heels rang out on the stones.

Bunting, still hidden outside the gate, suddenly understood what his lodger had been doing the other side of the wall. Mr. Sleuth had been out to buy himself a pair of boots, and had gone inside the gate to put them on, placing his old footgear in the paper in which the new boots had been wrapped.

Bunting waited until Mr. Sleuth had let himself into the house; then he also walked up the flagged pathway, and put his latch-key in the door.

In the next three days each of Bunting’s waking hours held its meed of aching fear and suspense. From his point of view, almost any alternative would be preferable to that which to most people would have seemed the only one open to him. He told himself that it would be ruin for him and for his Ellen to be mixed up publicly in such a terrible affair. It would track them to their dying day.

Bunting was also always debating within himself as to whether he should tell Ellen of his frightful suspicion. He could not believe that what had become so plain to himself could long be concealed from all the world, and yet he did not credit his wife with the same intelligence. He did not even notice that, although she waited on Mr. Sleuth as assiduously as ever, Mrs. Bunting never mentioned the lodger.

Mr. Sleuth, meanwhile, kept upstairs; he had given up going out altogether. He still felt, so he assured his landlady, far from well.

Daisy was another complication, the more so that the girl, whom her father longed to send away and whom he would hardly let out of his sight, showed herself inconveniently inquisitive concerning the lodger.

“Whatever does he do with himself all day?” she asked her stepmother.

“Well, just now he’s reading the Bible,” Mrs. Bunting had answered, very shortly and dryly.

“Well, I never! That’s a funny thing for a gentleman to do!” Such had been Daisy’s pert remark, and her stepmother had snubbed her well for it.

III

Daisy’s eighteenth birthday dawned uneventfully. Her father gave her what he had always promised she should have on her eighteenth birthday – a watch. It was a pretty little silver watch, which Bunting had bought secondhand on the last day he had been happy; it seemed a long time ago now.

Mrs. Bunting thought a silver watch a very extravagant present, but she had always had the good sense not to interfere between her husband and his child. Besides, her mind was now full of other things. She was beginning to fear that Bunting suspected something, and she was filled with watchful anxiety and unease. What if he were to do anything silly – mix them up with the police, for instance? It certainly would,be ruination to them both. But there – one never knew, with men! Her husband, however, kept his own counsel absolutely.

Daisy’s birthday was on Saturday. In the middle of the morning Ellen and Daisy went down into the kitchen. Bunting didn’t like the feeling that there was only one flight of stairs between Mr. Sleuth and himself, so he quietly slipped out of the house and went to buy himself an ounce of tobacco.

In the last four days Bunting had avoided his usual haunts. But today the unfortunate man had a curious longing for human companionship – companionship, that is, other than that of Ellen and Daisy. This feeling led him into a small, populous thoroughfare hard by the Edgeware Road. There were more people there than usual, for the housewives of the neighborhood were doing their marketing for Sunday.

Bunting passed the time of day with the tobacconist, and the two fell into desultory talk. To the ex-butler’s surprise, the man said nothing at all to him on the subject of which all the neighborhood must still be talking.

And then, quite suddenly, while still standing by the counter, and before he had paid for the packet of tobacco he held in his hand, Bunting, through the open door, saw, with horrified surprise, that his wife was standing outside a greengrocer’s shop just opposite. Muttering a word of apology, he rushed out of the shop and across the road.

“Ellen!” he gasped hoarsely. “You’ve never gone and left my little girl alone in the house?”

Mrs. Bunting’s face went chalky white. “I thought you were indoors,” she said. “You were indoors. Whatever made you come out for, without first making sure I was there?”

Bunting made no answer; but, as they stared at each other in exasperated silence, each knew that the other knew.

They turned and scurried down the street.

“Don’t run,” he said suddenly; “we shall get there just as quickly if we walk fast. People are noticing you, Ellen. Don’t run.”

He spoke breathlessly, but it was breathlessness induced by fear and excitement, not by the quick pace at which they were walking.

At last they reached their own gate. Bunting pushed past in front of his wife. After all, Daisy was his child – Ellen couldn’t know how he was feeling. He made the path almost in one leap, and fumbled for a moment with his latch-key. The door opened.

“Daisy!” he called out in a wailing voice. “Daisy, my dear, where are you?”

“Here I am, father; what is it?”

“She’s all right!” Bunting turned his gray face to his wife. “She’s all right, Ellen!” Then he waited a moment, leaning against the wall of the passage. “It did give me a turn,” he said; and then, warningly, “Don’t frighten the girl, Ellen.”

Daisy was standing before the fire in the sitting-room, admiring herself in the glass. “Oh, father,” she said, without turning round, “I’ve seen the lodger! He’s quite a nice gentleman – though, to be sure, he does look a cure! He came down to ask Ellen for something, and we had quite a nice little chat. I told him it was my birthday, and he asked me to go to Madame Tussaud’s with him this afternoon.” She laughed a little self-consciously. “Of course I could see he was ’centric, and then at first he spoke so funnily. ‘And who be you?’ he says, threatening-like. And I says to him, ‘I’m Mr. Bunting’s daughter, sir.’ ‘Then you’re a very fortunate girl’ – that’s what he said, Ellen – ‘to ’ave such a nice stepmother as you’ve got. That’s why,’ he says, ‘you look such a good, innocent girl.’ And then he quoted a bit of the prayer-book at me. ‘Keep innocency,’ he says, wagging his head at me. Lor’! It made me feel as if I was with aunt again.”

“I won’t have you going out with the lodger – that’s flat.” Bunting spoke in a muffled, angry tone. He was wiping his forehead with one hand, while with the other he mechanically squeezed the little packet of tobacco, for which, as he now remembered, he had forgotten to pay.

Daisy pouted. “Oh, father, I think you might let me have a treat on my birthday! I told him Saturday wasn’t a very good day – at least, so I’d heard – for Madame Tussaud’s. Then he said we could go early, while the fine folk are still having their dinners. He wants you to come, too.” She turned to her stepmother, then giggled happily. “The lodger has a wonderful fancy for you, Ellen; if I was father, I’d feel quite jealous!”

Her last words were cut across by a loud knock on the door. Bunting and his wife looked at each other apprehensively.

Both felt a curious thrill of relief when they saw that it was only Mr. Sleuth – Mr, Sleuth dressed to go out: the tall hat he had worn when he first came to them was in his hand, and he was wearing a heavy overcoat.

“I saw you had come in,” – he addressed Mrs. Bunting in his high, whistling, hesitating voice, – “and so I’ve come down to ask if you and Miss Bunting will come to Madame Tussaud’s now. I have never seen these famous waxworks, though I’ve heard of the place all my life.”

As Bunting forced himself to look fixedly at his lodger, a sudden doubt, bringing with it a sense of immeasurable relief, came to him. Surely it was inconceivable that this gentle, mild-mannered gentleman could be the monster of cruelty and cunning that Bunting had but a moment ago believed him to be!

“You’re very kind, sir, I’m sure.” He tried to catch his wife’s eye, but Mrs. Bunting was looking away, staring into vacancy. She still, of course, wore the bonnet and cloak in which she had just been out to do her marketing. Daisy was already putting on her hat and coat.

Madame Tussaud’s had hitherto held pleasant memories for Mrs. Bunting. In the days when she and Bunting were courting they often spent part of their “afternoon out” there. The butler had an acquaintance, a man named Hopkins, who was one of the waxworks’ staff, and this man had sometimes given him passes for “self and lady.” But this was the first time Mrs. Bunting had been inside the place since she had come to live almost next door, as it were, to the big building.

The ill-sorted trio walked up the great staircase and into the first gallery; and there Mr. Sleuth suddenly stopped short. The presence of those curious, still figures, suggesting death in life, seemed to surprise and affright him.

Daisy took quick advantage of the lodger’s hesitation and unease,

“Oh, Ellen,” she cried, “do let us begin by going into the Chamber of Horrors! I’ve never been in there. Aunt made father promise he wouldn’t take me, the only time I’ve ever been here. But now that I’m eighteen I can do just as I like; besides, aunt will never know!”

Mr. Sleuth looked down at her.

“Yes,” he said, “let us go into the Chamber of Horrors; that’s a good idea, Miss Bunting.”

They turned into the great room in which the Napoleonic relics are kept, and which leads into the curious, vault-like chamber where waxen effigies of dead criminals stand grouped in wooden docks. Mrs. Bunting was at once disturbed and relieved to see her husband’s old acquaintance, Mr. Hopkins, in charge of the turnstile admitting the public to the Chamber of Horrors.

“Well, you are a stranger,” the man observed genially. “I do believe this is the very first time I’ve seen you in here, Mrs. Bunting, since you married!”

“Yes,” she said; “that is so. And this is my husband’s daughter, Daisy; I expect you’ve heard of her, Mr. Hopkins. And this” – she hesitated a moment – “is our lodger, Mr. Sleuth.”

But Mr. Sleuth frowned and shuffled away Daisy, leaving her stepmother’s side, joined him.

Mrs. Bunting put down three sixpences.

“Wait a minute,” said Hopkins; “you can’t go into the Chamber of Horrors just yet. But you won’t have to wait more than four or five minutes, Mrs. Bunting. It’s this way, you see; our boss is in there, showing a party round.” He lowered his voice. “It’s Sir John Burney – I suppose you know who Sir John Burney is?”

“No,” she answered indifferently; “I don’t know that I ever heard of him.” She felt slightly – oh, slightly – uneasy about Daisy. She would like her stepdaughter to keep well within sight and sound. Mr. Sleuth was taking the girl to the other end of the room.

“Well, I hope you never will know him – not in any personal sense, Mrs. Bunting.” The man chuckled. “He’s the Head Commissioner of Police – that’s what Sir John Burney is. One of the gentlemen he’s showing round our place is the Paris Prefect of Police, whose job is on all fours, so to speak, with Sir John’s. The Frenchy has brought his daughter with him, and there are several other ladies. Ladies always like ’orrors, Mrs. Bunting; that’s our experience here. ‘Oh, take me to the Chamber of ’Orrors!’ – that’s what they say the minute they gets into the building.”

A group of people, all talking and laughing together, were advancing from within toward the turnstile.

Mrs. Bunting stared at them nervously. She wondered which of them was the gentleman with whom Mr. Hopkins had hoped she would never be brought into personal contact. She quickly picked him out. He was a tall, powerful, nice-looking gentleman with a commanding manner. Just now he was smiling down into the face of a young lady. “Monsieur Barberoux is quite right,” he was saying; “the English law is too kind to the criminal, especially to the murderer. If we conducted our trials in the French fashion, the place we have just left would be very much fuller than it is today! A man of whose guilt we are absolutely assured is oftener than not acquitted, and then the public taunt us with ‘another undiscovered crime’!”

“D’you mean, Sir John, that murderers sometimes escape scot-free? Take the man who has been committing all those awful murders this last month. Of course, I don’t know much about it, for father won’t let me read about it, but I can’t help being interested!” Her girlish voice rang out, and Mrs. Bunting heard every word distinctly.

The party gathered round, listening eagerly to Hear what the Head Commissioner would say next.

“Yes.” He spoke very deliberately. “I think we may say – now, don’t give me away to a newspaper fellow, Miss Rose – that we do know perfectly well who the murderer in question is—”

Several of those standing near by uttered expressions of surprise and incredulity.

“Then why don’t you catch him?” cried the girl indignantly.

“I didn’t say we know where he is; I only said we know who he is; or, rather, perhaps I ought to say that we have a very strong suspicion of his identity.”

Sir John’s French colleague looked up quickly. “The Hamburg and Liverpool man?” he said interrogatively.

The other nodded. “Yes; I suppose you’ve had the case turned up?”

Then, speaking very quickly, as if he wished to dismiss the subject from his own mind and from that of his auditors, he went on:

“Two murders of the kind were committed eight years ago – one in Hamburg, the other just afterward in Liverpool, and there were certain peculiarities connected with the crimes which made it clear they were committed by the same hand. The perpetrator was caught, fortunately for us red-handed, just as he was leaving the house of his victim, for in Liverpool the murder was committed in a house. I myself saw the unhappy man – I say unhappy, for there is no doubt at all that he was mad,” – he hesitated, and added in a lower tone, – “suffering from an acute form of religious mania. I myself saw him, at some length. But now comes the really interesting point. Just a month ago this criminal lunatic, as we must regard him, made his escape from the asylum where he was confined. He arranged the whole thing with extraordinary cunning and intelligence, and we should probably have caught him long ago were it not that he managed, when on his way out of the place, to annex a considerable sum of money in gold with which the wages of the staff were about to be paid.”

The Frenchman again spoke. “Why have you not circulated a description?” he asked.

“We did that at once,” – -Sir John Burney smiled a little grimly, – “but only among our own people. We dare not circulate the man’s description among the general public. You see, we may be mistaken, after all.”

“That is not very probable!” The Frenchman smiled a satirical little smile.

A moment later the party were walking in Indian file through the turnstile. Sir John Burney leading the way.

Mrs. Bunting looked straight before her. Even had she wished to do so, she had neither time nor power to warn her lodger of his danger.

Daisy and her companion were now coming down the room., bearing straight for the Head Commissioner of Police. In another moment Mr. Sleuth and Sir John Burney would be face to face.

Suddenly Mr. Sleuth swerved to one side. A terrible change came over his pale, narrow face; it became discomposed, livid with rage and terror.

But, to Mrs. Bunting’s relief, – yes, to her inexpressible relief, – Sir John Burney and his friends swept on. They passed by Mr. Sleuth unconcernedly, unaware, or so it seemed to her that there was anyone else in the room but themselves.

“Hurry up, Mrs. Bunting,” said the turnstile-keeper; “you and your friends will have the place all to yourselves.” From an official he had become a man, and it was the man in Mr. Hopkins that gallantly addressed pretty Daisy Bunting. “It seems strange that a young lady like you should want to go in and see all those ’orrible frights,” he said jestingly.

“Mrs. Bunting, may I trouble you to come over here for a moment?” The words were hissed rather than spoken by Mr. Sleuth’s lips.

His landlady took a doubtful step forward.

“A last word with you, Mrs. Bunting.” The lodger’s face was still distorted with fear and passion. “Do not think to escape the consequences of your hideous treachery. I trusted you, Mrs. Bunting, and you betrayed me! But I am protected by a higher power, for I still have work to do. Your end will be bitter as wormwood and sharp as a two-edged sword. Your feet shall go down to death, and your steps take hold on hell.” Even while Mr. Sleuth was uttering these strange, dreadful words, he was looking around, his eyes glancing this way and that, seeking a way of escape.

At last his eyes became fixed on a small placard placed above a curtain. “Emergency Exit” was written there. Leaving his landlady’s side, he walked over to the turnstile. He fumbled in his pocket for a moment, and then touched the man on the arm. “I feel ill,” he said, speaking very rapidly; “very ill indeed! It’s the atmosphere of this place. I want you to let me out by the quickest way. It would be a pity for me to faint here – especially with ladies about.” His left hand shot put and placed what he had been fumbling for in his pocket on the other’s bare palm. “I see there’s an emergency exit over there. Would it be possible for me to get out that way?”

“Well, yes, sir; I think so.” The man hesitated; he felt a slight, a very slight, feeling of misgiving. He looked at Daisy, flushed and smiling, happy and unconcerned, and then at Mrs. Bunting. She was very pale; but surely her lodger’s sudden seizure was enough to make her feel worried. Hopkins felt the half sovereign pleasantly tickling his palm. The Prefect of Police had given him only half a crown – mean, shabby foreigner!

“Yes, I can let you out that way,” he said at last, “and perhaps when you’re standing out in the air on the iron balcony you’ll feel better. But then, you know, sir, you’ll have to come round to the front if you want to come in again, for those emergency doors only open outward.”

“Yes, yes,” said Mr. Sleuth hurriedly; “I quite understand! If I feel better I’ll come in by the front way, and pay another shilling – that’s only fair.”

“You needn’t do that if you’ll just explain what happened here.”

The man went and pulled the curtain aside, and put his shoulder against the door. It burst open, and the light for a moment blinded Mr. Sleuth. He passed his hand over his eyes.

“Thank you,” he said; “thank you. I shall get all right here.”

Five days later Bunting identified the body of a man found drowned in the Regent’s Canal as that of his late lodger; and, the morning following, a gardener working in the Regent’s Park, found a newspaper in which were wrapped, together with a half-worn pair of rubber-soled shoes, two surgical knives. This fact was not chronicled in any newspaper; but a very pretty and picturesque paragraph went the round of the press, about the same time, concerning a small box filled with sovereigns which had been forwarded anonymously to the Governor of the Foundling Hospital.

Mr. and Mrs. Bunting are now in the service of an old lady, by whom they are feared as well as respected, and whom they make very comfortable.

THE MAN IN THE MIRROR

Lillian B. Hunt

1916

In the twinkling of an eye, he shot past me. The reception-hall was shaded, but the massive gilt mirror at the far end, scintillating under twin clusters of light, caught his image and held it for an instant.

A clean-cut fellow he was, an artist in appearance, slender and agile – a young man with a face at once fascinating and repellent. The features showed the ravages of dissipation, of poverty, and unfulfilled ambition. The cheeks were hollow and of a bluish pallor; the eyes wildly startled, like those of the hunted deer.

Under the rembrandt [cap], banded with black, hung straight, wet wisps of hair whose tawny glint harmonized well with the stains of modeling clay on hands and sculptor’s apron. But what startled me most in that brief glimpse of him was a great wound in the center of his forehead, seared and livid, like the brand of a murderer.

For a quarter hour at least I had been pacing the open conservatory in the right wing of the reception-hall which, in the form of a broad balcony, overlooks the boxwood shrubbery and terrace-gardens. The heavy fragrance of blossoms with the drowsy damp of the river air had gone to my head like a drug.

I felt unsteady, uncertain. The studio garments I wore actually burdened my brain and clogged my steps, for I seemed to be searching, searching everywhere – for what? Well, I hardly knew. For some time my memory had played the knave with me. It was simply that nature had turned Shylock and was exacting from the prodigal even more than her rightful pound.

There were times of late when, without warning, my head would spin and seethe, and my body quiver in a frenzy. Such attacks invariably left my nerves in shreds, and made the dread of the future unspeakably terrifying. Tonight I seemed both unnerved and fearful. The perfumed air of the balcony oppressed me, the shrubbery below haunted me.

Thus, in striding up and down, I felt that something extraordinary had happened. The very atmosphere in its heaviness breathed mystery. I peered over the trim lawns set with flower-beds and cone-cut bays, and back again at the dense wall of shrubbery barely distinguishable in the wan starlight.

I stared inside the reception-hall, shadowed save for the clusters of light over the mirror at the far end, and, staring, I stumbled; something crackled and shivered under my feet.

Perhaps you know the shock of stumbling when the nerves are keyed to a certain tension. Perhaps you have heard that sharp, crunching sound that tingles through your tense body like a sword-thrust, and leaves you weak and trembling!

Well, I found myself tottering in a mass of broken porcelain, and, looking down, noticed hundreds of fragments scattered about the tiled pavement. At first I was puzzled, and yet I should have known.

With no feeling other than sadness, I bent and gathered a few of the fragments in my shaking hands. They startled me with a fiendish suggestion. Even as I handled them, they flashed in my eyes wicked as witch-fires, they darted serpents’ fangs at me and glowed a vivid scarlet. I flung them over the balustrade in a quick revulsion of feeling, and they fell, sparkling and clinking, on the concrete path below.

At that very instant there came to me the muffled sound of voices and the slow tramp of feet. I counted five silhouettes in the group, and the foremost carried a large-sized pocket flash-light which revolved persistently at every step.

Naturally I was curious to learn their errand, and in my eagerness groped my way over heaps of broken plants, earth, and pottery to a long gap in the floral ranks where I could lean over the balustrade with ease.

The men paused directly beneath me and, as I had surmised, pounced headlong on the brilliant bits of porcelain, jabbering and gesticulating like true natives of the jungle. Of course, I laughed aloud – it was so absurd, so contemptible, their clawing over those atoms in their puny efforts at deduction. And as I laughed the glare of the electric lantern shot upward – full in my face.

The smile froze on my lips. I was blinded, alarmed, too; but what of that? I merely dropped to my knees and huddled there in the darkness.

This incident happened directly before I saw the strange man in the mirror – I rushed quickly back into the house just in time to see him pass. He startled me, too, because he was so close to me, not more than an arm’s length away.

I sprang back from him in momentary fright – and suddenly he was gone. There wasn’t the faintest trace of him anywhere; yet his image was still clear and distinct in my mind – the wild, protruding eyes, the haggard face, the scarlet mark on the forehead.

For ten minutes, perhaps, I moved about that portion of the hall where he had been, watching and listening for another sign of his presence. Then, impelled by the wariness of his footfall and the weird terror in his face, I began to explore the adjoining parlors and library.

But he had vanished.

Certainly, then, he was the criminal! Why did I think so? I didn’t know. All that concerned me was that a suspicious young man lurked beneath my brother’s roof.

I leaned against the newel-post and considered. It still lacked two hours of midnight, and Harmon had hosts of friends whom I had never met and who would be likely to drop in after dinner for a round of cards or billiards. Yet, I felt this visitor was no ordinary one, and decided to lose no time in rallying the servants and running him down.

I whirled around toward the nearest push-bell, but before I could place a finger upon it there came to my ears the noise of loud thumping and the prolonged buzzing of an electric bell. By intent listening I concluded that the well-spring of sound was the main front door which opened upon the verandas. Evidently, then, my visitors of the terrace had decided to go further into the heart of things.

I stood quiet for a moment. I hardly knew where to go or what to do. If the refugee was to be caught in my brother’s house, should not the glory of the capture be mine? I had found him first; to me belonged the praise and the reward.

However, as I shifted from one foot to the other in nervous uncertainty, I was again amazed. In the midst of the ringing and rapping the parlor portieres swayed violently, and the man of the mirror stood before me. He was ghastly, and when he saw me he shivered and raised his hand to hide the scar on his forehead.

“What is it?” I shrilled at him. “What have you done?”

He said nothing; his dry lips moved, but made no sound. I was quick to see the mockery of his attitude, and I reached for him in a fury. But hardly had my fist swung out than he vanished as before, even as a specter might have dissolved in air.

All I remember is that I crashed into a great gilt frame, and that the mirror went swaying and straining like a thing bewitched. When I regained my footing there was nothing for me to see save the portieres still swinging in his wake.

This time I did not even try to follow him. My one impulse was to compose myself and tidy my person before opening the door. I rushed into the coat-room, tore off my outer garments, and threw them on the floor. Then, quietly and with a dignity befitting my Vaughan ancestors, I opened the door, which by this time was well-nigh parted from its hinges.

“‘Diana’ is not here!” I explained hastily to the five men without. “She is gone! A strange man with a strange scar stole her. I tried to catch him, but failed. He is still here. Search every room! Guard every door!”

After that my memory is a blank. But it seems I must have remained in the reception-room to await developments. On a leather couch I huddled, sick and very weak. My brain was throbbing, and my fingers plucked the cushions in a semidelirium.

Finally I heard the tramp of returning feet, and felt a strong hand on my shoulder. Raising my head, I instantly encountered the searching eyes of Detective Robesart, a man of high standing in the profession. I bowed socially, and while doing so, recognized in his four associates, the servants of the house, including Dombey, the chauffeur.

“Have you found him?” I questioned feverishly.

“Not yet,” answered Robesart. “At least, no one answering his description. Were you alone when you saw him?”

I nodded. Robesart fastened his magnetic gaze upon me, examining me from head to heel. He was a short man and stout, with eyes like ebony pin-points and a jaw of grim power. He was a man to be feared, and I feared him.

Quietly he swung about and stepped outside on the veranda, the four attendants and myself in close file behind him. Once there, he paused abruptly and turned to me.

“Go first, Mr. Vaughan,” he said.

I asked no questions, but in a dim way understood his request. I took the flashlight from his hand and walked a straight course to the shrubbery. Then, as the servants crowded breathlessly about me, my courage failed, and I slipped behind, hoping they might be the first to make the discovery.

But they carried me with them, every step, and forced me to level my light full at the piteous object. I shrieked at the bare glimpse of it, and tried to beat my way back through the shrubbery. Failing in this, I stood quietly aside and looked at it, timidly at first, then boldly, then sorrowfully.

It was the white marble torso of Harmon’s masterpiece – “Diana in Flight,” valued at a hundred thousand – the “Diana” I had always worshiped and coveted, had tried for years to imitate in my humble attic workshop. It was crushed to atoms.

Robesart knelt for examination. And as I dropped beside him and placed my hand on a portion of the fair young head, so piteously mutilated, a sudden, sharp grief convulsed me, and I moaned and wept uncontrollably.

Who – oh, who could have done this damnable act?

But Robesart cut short my ravings. With kindly patience and stern practicability, he drew my attention to the exquisite hands twined with the roots and foliage of rare plants, the crumbled hair, and the enfolding studio-curtain of sea-green velvet glittering with flecks of rainbow porcelain.

Beyond all question, she had been thrown from a height – from the balcony – after first being stolen from the drawing-room!

Again I screamed, and lurched forward. Two of the servants lifted me to a standing position and stood on either side for support.

“How did this happen?” Robesart asked abruptly. “Tell us, Mr. Vaughan.”

Thus suddenly addressed, I must have swooned. The shock had completely wrecked my nerves. My tongue was stiff; my head seemed to pound with a sledgehammer’s precision.

“I do not know,” I heard myself saying in an unfamiliar voice. “This is the first I have seen her since my brother Harmon left for New York at four o’clock.”

“How, then, did you know of her destruction and the place?” Robesart continued.

His eyes were gleaming at me with an intensity that roused my fury. I felt in his glance and in the tone of his blunt questioning all the shafts and spear-points of accusation.

I glanced at him with stubborn defiance, but said nothing.

“When you opened the door to us, a halfhour ago, you stated that ‘Diana was gone,’ and you brought us here where she lies,” the detective explained patiently. “Therefore, the natural question to ask you is, how did you learn of all this?”

“I surmised it!” I replied, cautioned by the brutal menace in his tone. “I didn’t know positively!”

Robesart turned to Lunston, the butler. “When did you last see this statue in its accustomed place, Lunston?”

“Directly after tea, sir!” was the answer. “I was carrying the silver tray, sir, and I saw she had been moved to the conservatory.”

“Was there anyone else in the house beside the servants?”

“No one, sir!”

“Certainly no enemy, no suspicious stranger?”

Lunston denied such a possibility.

“But there was a strange man!” I shouted, enraged. “I know there was, for I saw him. I met him face to face – I talked with him. If these hirelings here had tended their duties and taken charge of the house instead of crying ‘Thief!’ and racing away four strong, they might have caught him easily.”

“I assure you, Mr. Vaughan,” Robesart declared earnestly, “if any human being besides yourself was inside the house when these men left it, he has not yet escaped. Every door, every window from roof to cellar was locked, and locked on the inside – excepting the front door which has been constantly guarded; every door, every window is still locked on the inside according to last investigation. The chef, Pierre, had the presence of mind to order all this done before giving the alarm—

“Perhaps you’d care to hear their version of the affair, Mr. Vaughan,” he continued. “According to their joint testimony, the four servants were gathered in the kitchen at dusk previous to the serving of dinner. While there they were terrified by a series of crashes that came from the open conservatory where they had last seen you at work on a small clay model of the ‘Diana.’

“Pierre and Lunston ventured immediately into the reception-hall. The front door stood wide open, and as they passed they heard a heavy thud outside as of a mass of stone falling from a height. Together they examined the conservatory. There was no sign of human presence, though they had every reason to believe you were hiding there.”

“They lie!” I screamed, but the detective raised his hand imperatively and I held my breath.

“They found the conservatory much disturbed. Plants had been knocked down and trampled upon; jardinieres and flower-pots lay crushed among heaps of black earth. There had been a struggle, a fight to a finish, but the principals were missing. ‘Diana’ was gone from her pedestal; even the velvet draperies of her niche were gone. They searched every room and as they went along closed every door and window.

“Lunston hastened to the telephone and Dombey to the garage that he might run out the car and pick up the first policeman he met. The car, however, had gone wrong. It could not be started till a quarter-hour later when, with the greatest possible despatch, they brought me here. And,” he added, rising, “here I stay till I find my man.”

“He was in the house!” I exclaimed in shrill treble. “I saw him, studio-togs and all!” Robesart stared at my blanched face. “You’re not well, Mr. Vaughan!” he said with sudden concern.

Immediately the terrific pains in my forehead returned. They were carrying her in from the terrace – reverently as though she were human dead, and I shrieked like a maniac and tore the air with clawlike fingers.

However, they grappled with me and poured a stimulant down my throat, and in time the agony passed. I recognized Robesart beside me.

“The man in the mirror!” I cried.

“Have you found him?”

He shook his head thoughtfully.

“No person, strange or otherwise, has been in the house, save ourselves,” he replied. “The place has been thoroughly searched. However, I wish you to describe the fellow7 in detail. You say he wore studio-clothes?”

“Yes, yes.” I replied in eager haste, and then I frankly met his gaze and told him all I remembered. During the recital Robesart stood motionless, staring at me till I was fully conscious of the great, silent question in his piercing gaze.

“But there was no mysterious vandal!” he blurted out. “There was no strange man in the whole affair from start to finish! He is merely a creature of your imagination.”

“What?” I roared, leaping to my feet, snarling with anger. “Do you mean—”

“Candidly now, Mr. Vaughan, why did you steal and destroy the famous ‘Diana’?” Robesart asked forcefully.

“Destroy the ‘Diana’!” I howled. “How dare you—”

“Your forehead – the brand on your forehead!” he cried dramatically, “Your victim was marble, but she put the murderer’s mark upon you that all men may see and beware!”

I clapped my hand to my head, bewildered, fearful. A wound! A great wound where the flesh had been broken! I could actually feel it. The pain of it was almost intolerable – how odd that I had not noticed it before. Small wonder that Robesart suspected me—

Again I lost consciousness and for a long time lay like one dead. At last Robesart roused me.

“Mr. Vaughan,” he said with great solemnity, “while you were sleeping I phoned your brother and physician in New York. Dr. Rossmore has known your family for generations and your own personal history from the day of your birth, and I may add that neither are surprised at tonight’s affair!”

“You mean,” I raved, “that hey have been expecting this thing of me?”

“They have imagined such an outcome!”

“What would be my motive?”

“Jealousy.” His lips were rigid. “You have failed in your chosen art – failed miserably. What more natural than you should be jealous of your brother Harmon’s success, and resenting his most valuable work—”

“Just so!” I exclaimed, shifting easily into the thread of the argument. “Why shouldn’t Harmon divide with me? He has fame and money and I’m a – a nobody!”

“That’s exactly the motive!” was the quiet answer. “Are you ready to make your confession?”

“I have no confession!” I told him fiercely. “I deny the charge. I know you believe me insane – you believe my story of the real criminal in the mirror a fabrication. Of course the strange mark on my head is damning evidence, but—”

Robesart smiled whimsically. My teeth began chattering and my shoulders shook.

“Lunston,” he called to one of the men, “Go to the coat-closet and bring Mr. Vaughan’s wraps!”

I grasped his sleeve and he turned toward me expectantly.

“You must find that man in the mirror!” I chattered. “There is a man and you must be convinced of it! You must insist upon his being found!”

The detective nodded earnestly. As the servant stepped forward with my belongings, Robesart took the long, full, sculptor’s apron in his hand. “This is yours, Mr. Vaughan?”

“It is mine!” I answered, ramming my arms in the sleeves.

“And this?” He held a brown rembrandt in his hand which I recognized at once by the shabby black velvet stretched around its band.

“Yes, mine!” I exclaimed.

I put on the cap and apron, not that I felt the need of them, but because I firmly believed I could convince him of my innocence and make him my friend for life – if only we might find the man—

Suddenly a subtle change swept over his stern face and manner.

“I have news for you, Vaughan,” his great voice boomed. “Our investigation is now ended! We have found the criminal – the man of the mirror! Come inside! We need you for identification!” I tried to cry out my relief, my joy. But I couldn’t.

“Come inside with us,” Robesart whispered. “Show us the man in the mirror!”

I could only babble incoherent words of delight. But even before I reached the threshold the wound on my forehead seethed and agonies unspeakable crashed through my brain.

The columns of the veranda spun about me and I clung to both men for support. But through it all I was conscious only that my innocence and veracity were proved at last beyond all question, and that I was about to see my brother’s enemy again face to face.

“Your story is a plausible one, after all!” Robesart was saying in a cool, monotonous tone as we stumbled into the vestibule.

The electrolier had been turned out, the reception-hall was shaded save for the twin clusters of light twinkling over the great gilt mirror at the far end. As Robesart walked beside me, his face showed a perceptible triumph, his eyes glittered suspiciously.

We traversed the hallway in silence, and then I paused directly in front of the mirror, and my heart ceased its beat.

I simply stared straight ahead, and there he stood – the vandal – the same haunted face, the same bulging eyes, heavy cap, black band, tawny hair, and apron with its stains of modeling clay, the brand in the center of the forehead.

“Yes, yes, it’s he!” I screamed. “It’s he! It’s he!”

The torments of the inferno fairly riddled me. I threw out my arms and sprang forward to throttle him. Before the men could interfere, I had crashed into the mirror, reeled, and fallen with the unwieldy mass of it upon me.

And then – at last – I knew – it was I – I—

But I can say no more.

THE BLACK POOL

Frederick Stuart Greene

1917

The heavy, wrought-iron gates of the Van Norden estate stand now grimly closed. The driveway leading to the deserted house on the hill stretches weed-grown and unused between the double row of blight-killed chestnuts. But it is not the dead trees, towering bark-stripped and bleached, that halt the trespasser; in the glen to the right, hidden from the road, lies the dread spot of the neighbourhood. Here, shut in by crowded locust trees, their scraggy tops thrust high above a thicket of underbrush and tangled cat-briar, gleams the sombre surface of Black Pool.

The Van Norden family had tried for years to have their lake called Mirror Pool. But the native Long Islander frowned; Black Pool it had been in his grandfather’s time, and Black Pool it must stay. And yet the word “mirror” fits well this long, narrow pond. The trees on its banks meet with scarcely a break above the still water, the growing leaves on the spread branches throw always a dense shade across the dark surface; the dead leaves, falling season after season, sink to the bottom, and, rotting, build up an ever-thickening mould of inky blackness which makes the clear water reflect distinctly every object on the shores.

A black pool it is, and a black mirror as well – a mirror into which none now care to gaze. In winter the skater’s laughter sounds no more on the pond; the voices of those once eager to use its frozen surface, no longer stir the silence of the fatal place. After nightfall, winter or summer, the passer-by turns far aside to avoid its dismal banks.

The once fine bath house stands now at crazy angles, its sagging walls, paint-scaled and blotched, buckle under the burden of its leaking roof. Black Fool, once the pride of the Van Nordens, now lies a deserted tarn amid the neglected grounds of a desolate estate.

In the grey stone house, a half-mile away through the woods, lived, fifty odd years ago, the chief actors in the tragedy that gave Black Pool its blacker history. To the master and mistress of this ill-fated home twins had come, boys, such striking duplicates that only their mother could instantly tell them apart; acquaintances, even old friends, were forced to wait, uncertain, until one or the other had spoken. Speech lessened the difficulty of recognition, for the Van Norden brothers had escaped one drawback of twin life: individual personalities had been granted them. Schuyler Van Norden was quick in speech, action and temper; Allan Van Norden was thoughtful, slow-speaking, slow to wrath. But the one sure sign that distinguished them was the difference in their laughs. Schuyler, amused, would draw his brows to a swift frown, then throw his head far back and break into a big, full laugh. Allan’s appreciation of humour was more quiet, his laugh never started with the contradictory frown nor was followed by the thrown back head. Schuyler was the nervous, dashing leader, Allan the steady, strong wheel-horse of the tandem.

During their school years the twins were for the Judge and Mrs. Van Norden an unending subject for friendly debate. Their mother, a contented smile lighting her face, would declare:

“Schuyler will distinguish himself at the bar. Those quick changes in voice would make a famous actor – not, of course, that such a career is fitting.” And her handsome head would nod confidently.

The Judge, taking long pulls at his meerschaum, would open for his client.

“Allan is steady; long making up his mind, but once made – still water, my dear, still water.”

The old saw that brothers must fight, seemed doomed to fail with the Van Norden twins. As the years sped past, the threads of their lives knitted ever to a closer mesh.

When the last examination at the preparatory school was passed, Judge Van Norden laughed contentedly behind his white beard.

“Haven’t I held for Allan all along? Not first in his class, but where was your Schuyler?”

Mrs. Van Norden fanned placidly, her smile unclouded.

“Who was given the leading part in the school play?”

The Judge, smoking in thoughtful silence, conceded her point. Across the many acres of their land, the contented mother and father watched the setting sun drop into the hills beyond the far shore of the red-tinted Sound.

Then again Mrs. Van Norden’s pleasant voice:

“Just wait, college will be the real test; friends count.”

The line between the Judge’s brows deepened.

“I surprised the scamps today, caught them smoking those new-fangled cigarettes. Schuyler burnt his hand.” His frown eased. “Allan, the rascal, only laughed: ‘Caught me fair that time, your Honour.’”

In their senior year at college an incident occurred that would have scored a point for the Judge had any whisper of it reached Black Pool, but the brothers never spoke of the affair, and the few other witnesses were sworn to silence by Nicholas Porter, the most intimate friend Allan had made at the university. During this last year of their college life Schuyler’s evenings were not always spent with his more studious brother. On a night shortly before finals, Allan, tired of waiting, closed his book and paced the floor uneasily. When the college clock struck the single note of the new morning, he frowned, and going to the window peered through the rain-splashed glass. The row of lights, bordering the wet walks, flickered dimly above a deserted campus.

Schuyler rushed into the room and threw himself on a chair.

“Say something!” he cried. “Speak to me, Allan!”

“What’s the trouble, Schuyler; lost heavily tonight? I’m ahead of my allowance, you know.” The wish to aid gave a deeper tone to Allan’s slow voice.

For long no word came. The rain lashing against the windows made the only sound in the room.

Allan took his brother’s head between both hands and forced Schuyler to meet his eyes. Their two faces, one drawn by despair, the other furrowed by anxiety, were as like as a face before a mirror and the reflection in the glass.

“Now tell me, Schuy.”

“It was—” Schuyler’s eyes dropped before Allan’s steady look. “I’ve been accused of cheating!”

“Hell!” Allan sprang back, his face white for the instant before the blood surged up to his temples. “Who accused you?”

“Foley.”

“And you’ve killed him.” Allan’s words were spoken slowly.

“No! No! Not that!”

“Then what did you do?”

“I – why, I – I didn’t do anything.”

“Are you telling me that you let John Foley accuse you of cheating and get off scot-free?” The question came in slower dismay.

“I was so – so Oh, Allan, I didn’t know what to do!” Schuyler crouched lower in the chair and covered his eyes.

Wonder held Allan silent. Was this shrinking man before him his brother? The muscles at his throat tightened; slowly the colour left his face. Could it be possible that – ? No! The thought shamed him. It was sheer amazement – that was it – amazement! A Van Norden accused of cheating at cards! It was the absurdity of it that had stunned Schuyler beyond action.

“I understand, Schuyler,” Allan’s arm was about his brother’s shoulder, “it’ s all right. This is my affair now.”

The look in Schuyler’s eyes made Allan turn hastily away. He crossed the room and taking up a heavy cane hurried down the hall to halt before a room from which came the sound of loud voices.

Allan threw the door open. Instantly silence fell, the men about the card-table stood, each holding the pose Allan’s coming had caught.

“I’m Allan Van Norden!”

The announcement eased the tension. Allan looked deliberately from one excited face to the other, to end, at last, at a heavy-eyed, heavily built man across the table from him.

“My brother, Schuyler, tells me that Foley, here, has accused him of cheating. Does any other man in the room back this accusation?” Again he searched each face. “I see that none of you do; and for the good reason that Foley lied!” He wheeled upon the heavy-eyed man. “Now, Mr. Foley, you’ll tell these gentlemen that my brother did not cheat, and that you lied when you said that he did!”

Foley stepped back, dragging a chair clear from the table.

“Like hell, I will! I said he cheated and I say so again!”

Allan sprang for him. The chair fell hard against his shoulder, he wrenched it from Foley’s grasp and sent it flying across the room. At the same instant he brought the heavy cane crashing to the man’s head. Before anyone could close in, Allan, holding Foley to his feet, struck again. The second blow split the man’s scalp, opening a long gash.

Nicholas Porter was the first to reach the struggling pair. He threw his arms about Allan and dragged him back. Someone seized Foley and the fighting men were finally torn apart.

“Stop! You crazy man!” Allan heard Porter yell over his shoulder. “You’ll kill him!”

“That’s what I’m going to do,” Allan panted. “He said my brother cheated! Let me go, damn you!”

Foley had sunk to the floor.

“Allan, what in Heaven’s name has come over you? The man’s down! You can’t hit him. He’s out, I tell you!”

Porter’s words steadied Allan; after a moment he turned from the fallen man and let his friend take him back to his rooms.

But during the few hours still left of that night no sleep came to Allan; he passed them in after thoughts of his act. His friends, he knew, had been surprised at the outburst; but he felt more than surprise, he was amazed to know for the first time the whirlwind force of his passion.

•   •   •   •   •

The Van Norden twins began the real work of life in the law office of their father. Here, as at college, Allan was the sure plodder. It was nearly a year after Schuyler’s maiden speech at the bar, that Allan felt himself competent to address a jury. When, however, he had done so, speaking in his slow, distinct manner, the Court complimented the young attorney on his handling of the case.

It was but a short time after this success of Allan’s that the first blow was struck at the happiness of the family at Black Pool; Judge Van Norden’s long life came to an honoured end. Both the boys felt keenly their loss, but realising their mother’s greater sorrow, did all they could to comfort her. It was Allan, however, who remembered that a cushion adds to the comfort of elderly ladies; that open windows behind his mother’s chair were not safe. When, after a time, the stately old lady took again her place in her world, esquired by her tall sons, Schuyler was the first of her knights to talk or dance with some pretty girl.

There came a day, about a year after the Judge’s death, when Schuyler failed to meet his brother for the one afternoon train that ran in those times. That night was the first the twins had ever spent under separate roofs.

When Allan reached home he told his mother all the news the papers had furnished for the day, hoping his talk would cause her to think lightly of Schuyler’s absence. When the stock of press items ran short, he turned to local affairs. He had heard they were to have a neighbour; the place next to Black Pool had been rented by a Mr. Reid, a widower with an only daughter.

The first Sunday after these new neighbours were established in their home, Mrs. Van Norden ordered the carriage, and in spite of her sons’ pleadings to be let off, insisted that they go with her for this duty call.

Mr. Reid welcomed his visitors. His daughter, he explained, had gone to the stables to look over a newly arrived saddle horse, but would be with them presently.

“We must reopen the gate between our places,” Mrs. Van Norden said graciously; “it has been nailed up for two years now. It’s about half a mile through the woods to our house, you know.”

They were in the midst of one of those general locality descriptions usual to first calls; Schuyler was fluently sketching the neighbourhood, when he stopped abruptly.

Marion Reid had come through the door.

Schuyler sprang forward; and Allan thought he held the offered hand longer than necessary.

As the girl greeted his mother her profile was turned to Allan. Could her full face be lovelier? Certainly the line of her strong chin, the delicate curve of her throat, were unmatched by any he had seen. When his turn came and he had his first look straight into her brown eyes, he was conscious of his quick indrawn breath, as his hand closed about hers.

Later, while Marion was giving them tea, Allan saw how often her look turned from Schuyler to him, then back again.

“I know,” he said in his slow way, “you’re thinking you’ll never be able to tell us apart. Now confess?”

“No, you’re wrong,” though she smiled, Marion took his question gravely, “but you are near the truth. I was thinking that I would never fail to know that you are Mr. Allan, and you,” she turned to his brother, “are Mr. Schuyler Van Norden.”

“If you can do that, you will be the only person, except Mother, who can.”

They were all listening to Allan; his tone was unusually earnest.

Schuyler laughed. “Of course Miss Reid can see that I’m lots handsomer than old Allan.”

“It’s not a question of looks at all,” Marion did not return Schuyler’s laugh, “but you are different. I can’t tell just how – but you are different,” she repeated confidently.

When time for leave-taking came, Marion walked with Mrs. Van Norden to the carriage and stood waving from the terrace, as it drove away. The sunlight fell on her uncovered head, giving a brighter glow to her copper hair. Allan, silent, begrudged each turn of the wheels that widened the distance between them.

“They are both delightful,” Mrs. Van Norden said contentedly. “Undoubtedly cultured; quite an acquisition, I should say.”

“Old Reid will do nicely; and that girl,” Schuyler waved an appreciative hand toward heaven, “did anyone ever see such a complexion?”

When they reached home Allan turned to his brother.

“Come into the billiard room, Schuyler, I’ve something I want to say.”

He put his arm through Schuyler’s, and led him from the hall.

“We’ve never had a secret from each other,” he began.

“I plead not guilty, Allan. I haven’t any secret.”

“And I don’t intend to have one from you. We’ve shared in everything, but I have known that sooner or later a time must come when we could not share.” He paused. Schuyler’s smile did not make it easy. “You’ll think me a fool, but the girl we have just seen is the girl I’m going to marry, if I can persuade her to have me.”

Looking straight into Schuyler’s eyes, he watched him frown in his characteristic way, then throw his head far back and laugh. “Well, if Brother hasn’t woke up all of a sudden! But why so solemn, with wedding bells ringing in your ears?”

“Because, Schuyler,” Allan was not smiling, “I saw your face when Miss Reid joined us; you never looked that way before at any woman.”

Again the quick frown and the laugh.

“Why, man, if you’re jealous already, you must be hard hit.”

“No, I’m not jealous; but I want you to know, Schuyler, that I was never more serious in my life. If you care as I do – as I think you care, or will care – it must be a fair field, an open game. Otherwise all that has been so much in our lives will turn bitter. If you win, I don’t say it will not hurt, but I do say I’ll stand the gaff and be glad it’s not some other man.”

Schuyler rose.

“Old boy, you’re a wonder! Miss Reid’s a fine girl, the prettiest I’ve seen in a dog’s age; but I’m not so quick on the trigger. When I fall in love with her I’ll tell you all about it.”

A smile drove the serious look from Allan’s face.

“That’s all I ask.” He held out his hand, but Schuyler, reaching for a billiard cue, did not see it.

“Come on, Allan, we have still time for one game before dinner.”

•   •   •   •   •

The neighbourhood opened its arms to the Reids, the welcome a trifle heartier, perhaps, that it had begun with Mrs. Van Norden. As for Marion, she was liked on sight by every man, and better, by every girl she met. Wherever she went Allan watched her success in a happy glow; a success of which the girl was as unconscious as is a child of its good health. Of the many admirers drawn within the range of her charm, the Van Norden twins caught the light of her smile the oftenest. The hinges of the reopened gate between the estates were free now from rust. The path through the woods of the Reid place was used daily by one brother or the other, often by both together.

On an evening some months after the coming of the Reids, when Allan was alone with his mother, she smiled up at him from her needlework.

“I hope, Allan, we shall have to do over the old farmhouse on the other side of the Pool before very long. But I do wish I knew which of my boys will need it.”

“I’d give anything in the world, Mother, to be the one who will. Schuyler promised he would tell me if he cared for Marion; he hasn’t said so yet.”

Mrs. Van Norden was silent for some moments before she spoke.

“It would be hard for Schuyler to do that now. He’s not as frank as you, Allan.”

It was only a few days after this talk that Allan came into the room where his mother and Schuyler were playing a last game of cribbage for the evening. His face was like sunrise above the edge of a June sea.

“I have wonderful news!” He crossed to his mother and kissed her. “Mother, I’m the happiest—” He stopped abruptly. “Yes, I know they all say that, but it’s such a big thing in a man’s life we don’t know what else to say.”

He held out a hand to his brother. Looking only at his mother he did not see that Schuyler’s mouth had closed to a bitter line. The pulse of his own happiness beating high, hid the tremor in the hand he caught.

His mother returned Allan’s kiss.

“I’m so happy, so glad for you, my son.” And Allan knew, in spite of the break in her voice, that she meant it.

“Splendid, old man!” If Schuyler’s hearty tone was forced, he pounded Allan’s shoulder vigorously enough.

“Mother, I can’t believe it yet – it seems impossible that a girl like her should—” Allan turned to his brother: “Schuyler, there is only one thing now; you said you would tell me; but I can’t believe any man could know Marion and—”

“All lovers think that, don’t they, Allan?” Schuyler paused. Then with a quick change of voice: “I suppose you’ll have your friend, Nicholas Porter, for best man?” Allan looked at him in surprise. “Why, of course not! I haven’t thought of a best man, but you are the only one I would ever choose for that service.”

There followed, for Allan and Marion, those days that no cloud can dim, no storm drench the joy of them. Every hour was crowded by great planning. There was the Dutch farmhouse to be remodelled, and together they discussed every line of the new plans; watched each day the building of this lodging for their happiness.

To Allan the big mystery, why Marion had chosen him, was yet unsolved; why him, instead of Schuyler.

“Tell me, Marion,” he asked when as usual they had met at her gate and were walking under the trees, “why did you care for me with Schuyler about; and how do you always tell us apart?”

Marion looked up at him through the gathering darkness, and smiled at his serious tone.

“Lower your head and I’ll whisper.”

After a moment she fulfilled her promise.

“It’s your slow, nice voice, your less sure manner, the gentle dear way of you, that always tells me; that makes me love my Allan. But most of all it’s your voice.”

The alterations to the farmhouse were to be completed during the last weeks of April and Marion selected the first of May for the wedding. Three nights before that day, a sudden storm swept in from the sea, on a wind so violent that telegraph wires were torn down throughout the length of the Island.

The evening following the storm, a messenger from the railroad station rode up to the Van Norden house. The brothers had just reached home.

“We’ve got one wire working,” he explained as he swung out of the saddle. “So I brought this telegram up for Mr. Allan.”

Allan read the message, then frowned as he crumpled it in his hand.

“What’s wrong, Allan?”

“It’s from Nick Porter. Hanged if he hasn’t been arrested. Wants me to come to town at once.”

“Well, if you hurry, you can catch the evening town train.”

“And not see Marion? Why, man, you forget that day after tomorrow is May the first! Schuy, you’ll have to go—” Allan stopped short; Schuyler was frowning. There had been no friendship between Porter and Allan’s brother since that night of the card party.

“Of course I can’t let Nick spend the night in jail,” Allan hurried to say. “But Marion will come to meet me.” He stood for a moment silent. “Will you go to our gate at the edge of the woods, Schuy, at eight sharp, and tell her why I can’t come?”

“Certainly, I will. You run to the stable before the horses are unhitched; take the back road; you’ve just nine minutes, but you’ll make it.”

Schuyler watched from the porch as Allan raced away. When his brother had turned a corner of the drive, Schuyler’s brows drew to their quick frown; then he threw his head far back, and laughed. On the way to his room he stopped before a bronze cupid, whose outstretched hands held torches to light the great hallway.

“Will you go to our gate at the edge of the woods,” Schuyler’s smile took on a bitter twist, “and tell her why I can’t come?” The words were spoken aloud, in Allan’s slow voice. He laughed softly and hurried up the wide stairs.

Later, before leaving his room to join his mother, he paused, and behind the closed door once again rehearsed his brother’s parting words to him.

•   •   •   •   •

Allan found that his friend, Porter, while driving a spirited horse through a crowded side street, had struck a child. Though the accident was due solely to the heedlessness of the injured boy, it required work and time to find a magistrate and persuade him to accept bail. Porter was finally released, but at an hour too late for Allan to return to Black Pool; and the whole of the next day was wasted in tiresome court proceedings connected with the case. Allan tried to telegraph Marion, but the company, due to the still crippled service, would accept only messages of grave importance.

It was long after the usual hour when Allan reached home. He hurried at once to the trysting place. Marion was not at the gate to meet him. Impatient, urged by a great longing on this last night before she was to be with him always, he began running beneath the trees. After a time, he made out her figure far ahead. He called to her and ran on faster to cut the seconds of their separation. For the first time her pace had not quickened at his voice. He slowed to a walk. Through the growing darkness he saw, with eyes that could miss no change in her, that tonight her step lagged. Allan stopped dead and watched the girl’s slow approach in vague alarm. There was in the poise of her head, about her shoulders, an indefinable something, a droop, he had never seen before.

Allan called again to her, hoping she had not heard his first cry. Sudden dread gripped him; the quick response he longed to see, had not come; Marion was walking as before, slowly toward him, her head still bowed.

“Marion, dear one, it’s your Allan!” he pleaded.

There was no sign that she had heard.

“Marion!” He called louder and held out his arms.

Only a few paces separated them now. She raised her head for an instant; then with a cry that cut to his deepest nerve, she sprang forward and buried her face on his breast. She clung to him quivering.

“Why, Marion, precious one, what – ?”

“Don’t speak! Don’t speak to me yet, Allan!”

At the distress in her voice Allan’s heart tightened. He held her in strong, tender arms, silently stroking her trembling shoulder while long minutes dragged by.

“Precious, may I speak now? What has hurt you?” His struggle to steady his voice did not show in the gentle tone so dear to her.

They stood there together, long silent, in the gloom; Allan holding the quivering girl hard against him. When at last her sobbing eased, he dared speak again:

“Dear one,” he pleaded, “ let me look into your eyes.”

She pressed her face harder against his breast.

“Not yet, Allan! I can’t! I can’t!”

He lifted her face. But she fought against him, hiding her eyes again.

He bent down until his lips pressed her forehead.

“Now, Marion, tell me. I cannot wait longer.”

Faintly her broken, frightened words reached him: “Oh, Allan, how could you? You – we must have been mad last night!”

Within his breast something shattered to bits as freezing water shivers glass. Her words turned his heart to ice, deadening every nerve; only his brain withstood the numbing chill. Then rage reared its blinded head and beat sledge strokes against his temples. Slowly, above his turmoil of torture one sane thought rose, crying to him through his misery: She must never know! He must hide his wrath; no trace of his horror must show. For a moment he stood, his teeth clenched to hold silent the outraged cry straining his throat. He could not trust himself to speak, but crushed her close within his protecting arms. Not daring now to meet her eyes, he bent low over the drooped head and pressed his lips against her hair, longing, yet fearing to kiss her trembling lips, lest his frozen ones betray the secret horror they must not speak.

She must never know!

•   •   •   •   •

Allan and his bride returned to Black Pool during the early days of June; their homecoming hastened by a message from Schuyler that business called him from town and office affairs made it necessary for Allan to be on hand.

Mr. Reid had started, immediately after his daughter’s wedding, on an indefinite trip to the far East. So it fell that Mrs. Van Norden was the only one to welcome back the husband and wife. As she led them into the big living-room of the new house she smiled happily and turned to Marion:

“I shall do all I can for my two children to offset your disappointment that Schuyler is not here. I know, Allan, not having him with us makes your homecoming incomplete.”

Allan crossed to a window and lowered a shade.

Schuyler’s absence was lengthened by one excuse or another into weeks. When, at last, he returned, Allan and Marion were quite settled in the new home, and their lives, Mrs. Van Norden declared, lay all before them, a broad path, smoothed ready for work and happiness. Happiness! The very word was a mockery to Allan, but he had managed to hide even from his mother’s discerning eyes the smouldering rage that poisoned his life.

Schuyler reached home one Saturday night, too late to see the people at the farmhouse. He made amends by writing them a note which was delivered early Sun day morning. Allan had just finished his answer when Marion joined him in the breakfast-room.

“Schuyler has come back.” Allan looked toward her.

Marion was standing where the morning light fell full, the sun glistening her copper hair. To Allan’s eyes, God had made her finer than any other thing. There was in his wife’s face a beauty so exquisite, that looking at her suddenly, brought always to him a sensation near kin to pain. This sense of her beauty strengthened, today, his determination to carry through the plan his disturbed brain had worked out.

Marion crossed to him, and looking over his shoulder, read the note.

“Dear Schuyler,” it began, “to have you home again is my only wish left unfulfilled. You are coming over for lunch, of course, but let’s have a swim first. I’ll meet you at the pool at eleven. We haven’t held the test this year – today will be just right for a try. I’m anxious to see if that sign-post is still far away.

“Ever your affectionate brother,

“Allan.”

As Marion finished reading, she leaned down and kissed Allan.

“I don’t believe that two brothers ever lived whose love was as perfect as yours and Schuyler’s.”

The pen Allan still held snapped in two parts.

“But come now, Allan,” Marion had not seen his closed hands, – “come to breakfast, and then you can tell me about that test you wrote of.”

“It’s only a boy’s game; each year Schuyler and I have made the swim from the diving float around the grey stone, at the end of the pool, and back again.”

“Is that all! You do that nearly every time you go in.”

“But not for a record. The year we started to college Schuyler suggested that we time our swims; each year after that we have held the test, and each year we have bettered our record.”

“My Allan won, of course, and now he expects me to award the prize.”

“I’ll take the reward before telling you.” Then after a moment: “I really deserve it; it’s pretty even, but I lead Schuyler by two victories. He says the year our time fails to improve, will show we’re at the sign-post that points out the middle-age road.”

“I’ll hold the watch for you today.”

“No,” Allan answered. “The test is strictly private. I’d hate to let anyone know, even you, dear, that we had reached that sign-post.”

“Very well, then. But even if you win you get no prize this time.”

“I shall not fail today, Marion.”

“Then don’t be so serious about it. Your look doesn’t go well with victory.” She rose and, standing behind him, joined her hands under his chin. “If you’ll smile again, perhaps I’ll let you discount your winning now.”

After breakfast they went together out into the sunshine.

Walking among the flowers of their old-fashioned garden he watched the joy she took in them with eyes that grew more serious as the minutes passed. He had trouble, when she looked suddenly at him, to call up a smile in time to meet her glances.

Allan purposely reached the pool some minutes after the appointed time. Schuyler was in one of the compartments of the large bath house, so their greetings were carried on by calls over the top of the partition between their rooms. When Allan, ready for swimming, came out to the float, Schuyler was in the water; no handclasp had been exchanged between the brothers at the end of their longest separation.

“I’m feeling uncommonly well today,” Schuyler called. “I’ll bet you any part of a hundred that I lower the record.”

“Just for boasting, Schuyler, you’ll have to start first. Climb out, I have the watch.”

Schuyler gained the float and stood beside his brother. Upon the smooth surface of Black Pool, lay two mirrored portraits, every curve of the muscular bodies alike, every line of the handsome faces identical. In expression only was there a difference; Schuyler’s face was lighted by the excitement of the coming test. Allan’s face was white, his jaw set.

“Ready, Allan, give the word!” Schuyler balanced himself at the edge of the float, his arms uplifted, his muscles tense for the spring.

Allan’s eyes dropped from his brother’s smiling face to the watch; his tongue moved across dry lips.

“Go!” he called.

Schuyler split the water by a clean, shallow dive. He began at once to use a fast side stroke, his body surging forward without halts between the sweeps of his powerful arms.

Rounding the grey stone at the pool’ s end, Schuyler was hidden for a moment; another passed before he splashed into view. He speeded up for the last half of the swim. Behind him stretched a wake of ever-widening ripples, breaking the dark surface of the pool.

Allan dropped to his knees at the edge of the float, the flesh of his body quivering beneath his sweating skin.

Schuyler came plunging on. Only a few strokes now to the finish. Allan caught the sound of his brother’s heavy breathing.

“Time!” he called as Schuyler flashed past.

Schuyler eased his stroke and turning, swam slowly back. “How about it?” he panted. “Did I lower the record?”

Allan reached far out over the water. “What the devil!” Surprise, quick fear, showed in Schuyler’s face. “Let go my shoulders, Allan.”

Allan tightened his grip. “Yes, Schuyler,” he spoke with deadly calm, “you’ve lowered the record of all manhood!” On his face was the same grim look that had settled there the night he had so nearly killed a man in his brother’s behalf.

“Let go, damn you! Let go!” Schuyler cried, between the gasps of his heaving lungs.

Allan’s lips were a sealed line against further useless words. He dragged his brother through the water, closer to the float.

The coward’s brand showed plain in Schuyler’s terror-widened eyes, but gathering every ounce of his spent strength, he drew his knees quickly up and gaining a foot-purchase against the floating stage, strained to push free from Allan’s hold.

But the long swim had taken its toll. Allan jerked Schuyler half out of the water, and plunging him down, cut short the cry that started from his throat. Then steadying his merciless grip, Allan held his brother’s head beneath the surface, glaring without pity down through the water at the appalled face. With unshifting gaze he watched the muscles of Schuyler’s jaws tighten as he strained to hold in his breath; watched until the jaws dropped and the trail of bubbles spurted to the surface. Just at the end, hate flashed in his brother’s eyes before the death-glaze shut out consciousness.

When the last feeble quiver ran through the drowned body, Allan dragged his eyes away from the ghastly face. After a moment to steady himself, he slid silently from the float into the pool. Clutching a handful of wet hair, he towed the dead man halfway to the grey stone. When directly in the line of Schuyler’s swim he let go. He waited, treading water, while the body slowly sank. As it drifted downward it turned. Again the glaring eyes stared full at Allan. Shuddering, he swam swiftly to the float, frantic to leave the water that held the dead thing he had made.

But, on land again, Allan walked without haste through the quarter-mile of woods between the pool and the open lawn about his mother’s house. Reaching the end of the wood, he broke into a run, and began calling for help.

•   •   •   •   •

When the body of Schuyler Van Norden had been lifted from the bottom of Black Pool, it was unmarked. The doctors agreed that death had been caused by the violent effort of the test swim. Where it was found the pool was some thirty feet deep; no wonder that Allan’s diving had been useless. Even had he reached the exhausted man before he sank, it would have been to no purpose. When the heart once stops, as the doctors said, it stops forever.

After a time, life fell again into adjustment in the two houses at Black Pool. A new interest arose to dull the edge of Mrs. Van Norden’s grief. An interest that caused Allan to show gladness when with Marion or his mother; to lie in wakeful thought, hour after hour during the night when darkness hid the frown of doubt that ploughed his forehead. When, in daylight, he saw in Marion’s eyes the look of expected joy, he would smile bravely back at her. Seeing her face alight with life’s secret, he would forget for the moment the stare from terror-widened eyes that followed him; and be glad that those eyes no longer lived to see this woman.

Allan did not know the murderer’s remorse; he felt as a man might who had crushed the head of a viper that had poisoned the woman he loves. And yet, alone, the memory would come of eyes, staring up through water; and he would see again the twisted blue-lipped grin on his victim’s mouth. From Marion, he hid all trace of unrest, of doubt; his manner toward his wife grew more gentle, more tender, as the day drew nearer.

“If you are so good to me, Allan, our child will find a spoiled mother to put up with,” she told him.

But in spite of all his caution, she twice caught him off guard. Late one afternoon she came into the library; Allan was staring, vacant-eyed, at the empty fireplace. He lifted the hand she laid on his shoulder and kissed it in silence.

“It’s strange, Allan, we never thought of it before, but if, dear, it’s a man child, I’ll let you call him Schuyler.”

He wondered how he managed to smother the blaze of hate in his eyes before it had burned through the wall of his secret.

His second lapse had been harder to cover. Marion was resting while he made ready for dinner. He had left the door to his dressing-room open that they might call to each other, begrudging the short time that shaving took him from her.

“Allan! Allan!” He heard Marion’s voice as from a distance. “Why don’t you answer? Allan, stop Don’t look that way!” She was beside him, gripping his arm, the fright in her tone brought him to full consciousness. But he had no words to explain why he had stood silent, staring, for how long he did not know, at the reflection in the bowl of clear water before him.

This was the beginning of a dread that grew day by day; from that time, Allan could never again trust himself to look into still water.

The January of that year held dreary throughout its length. The last morning of the dismal month struggled to life beneath a slate-coloured sky. All day steady sleet beat against the soiled surface of a two-weeks-old snow. Allan stayed within the walls of his house, fretting at his helplessness, starting at each sound that came from Marion’s room. It was during the saddest hour of the day that he went through those moments which were a Hell to him, a senseless torture to her he loved. When at last his mother came to him, he cried out at the change in her face.

“For God’s sake, tell me quickly, Mother!”

She put her old arms about his neck and drew down his head until his cheek touched hers.

“You have a daughter, Allan!” She spoke as bravely as she could.

“But Marion?”

He felt her sudden tears wet his cheek. Catching her shoulders he dragged her to where the last grey light lay stagnant against the western window.

“Marion!” he cried. “She is not dead?”

“No; but go to her, Allan. Go to her quickly!”

He tore from the room and ran blindly down the hall. At Marion’s door he stopped, clinging to the knob, while he forced himself to calmness. Then he went swiftly to the bed and fell to his knees beside her; all the longing of life in his look at Marion’s closed lids.

“Precious,” he whispered, “I am here with you.”

Her hand moved feebly toward him. He caught it up and held it against his heart. Her eyes opened; the shadow of a smile crossed her lips.

“My Allan,” she whispered back in answer. Then her eyes closed …

It was his mother who at last broke the grip of Allan’s fingers that held Marion’s cold hand; she who led the dazed man from the room.

•   •   •   •   •

The effect of his loss was a shock to those who loved Allan. That he had cared for Marion with a devotion only short of worship was plain to all who had seen them during the few months of their married life. But it mystified his friends to see this strong, controlled man sink into despair. From the night his mother had taken him from that room where Marion’s life had been torn from his keeping, Allan had been as one numb to all sensation. Now always silent, he wandered aimlessly through his shattered home as if searching, ceaselessly searching. His hopeless steps took him from room to room, from floor to floor, but always he shunned one part of the house.

His mother’s tactful efforts to break his lethargy were unavailing. Often, when she spoke to him he would not answer; then, the question being repeated, he would turn to her bewildered. For two months after Marion’s death Mrs. Van Norden watched in silence, but with growing fear, Allan’s strange manner. Then, unable to bear it longer, she went to him determined to put an end to his brooding at whatever cost. He was, as she now so often found him, sunk back in his chair, looking vacantly at his empty hands.

“Allan, I have something to ask; something you must no longer refuse.” She put all her mother love into her voice.

“Yes. – Yes. – What did you say, Mother?”

She shook him gently.

“I said there is something you must do for me. Grief, Allan, has its place, perhaps its use; but to give way to it utterly is a weakness, unworthy of a boy of mine.”

He offered no answer, meeting her look as if he but dimly heard.

“There is something else, Allan, that is both unworthy and unjust. How can you feel bitterness against – against your baby, your own daughter?”

He turned away from her.

“I beg you, Mother – I can’t. I tell you I can’t!”

“And I say, what you can’t do, is to let this morbid, unnatural thing live and grow in you. It is getting worse every day. Yesterday, when you were in the upper hall, and I opened the nursery door, you fled down the stairs. Do you ever think how that hurts me?” She paused, to end in lower voice: “How it would hurt her?”

He hid his face.

“Allan,” his mother pleaded, “I ask you to break the power this aversion has gained over you. I ask it in Marion’s memory, for your child’s sake.”

For a long time silence, before he answered in smothered voice:

“What do you want me to do, Mother?”

“Come with me to your child.”

“Now?” he whispered.

“Yes, now!”

He shrank from her.

“I promise you, Allan, there will be no one else in the room.”

He sat irresolute for a moment; then got slowly to his feet.

She caught his cold hand and went with him from the room. They were in the nursery, when she spoke again.

“Go to her, Allan,” she said gently, “and see what a beautiful child you have.”

He stood without sound or motion, looking at the white bassinet until his mother had reached the door. Then with a cry he sprang to her.

“Don’t leave me! For God’s sake, don’t leave me alone with it!” Sweat stood in heavy drops on his forehead.

His mother took him by both arms.

“I’m ashamed! I’m ashamed of you, Allan! How can you let go of yourself in this way? Come, ” she commanded peremptorily, “and I will show you the most wonderful thing in the world – a baby – your baby!” She took him to the lace-covered cradle. “Now look!” The white-haired woman was splendid in her anger. “Look, my son, and be a man again!”

Allan stood above the tender thing that lay looking up at him with wide-opened eyes, eyes so like his own – and Schuyler’s.

Something within his grief-deadened heart answered to that look; the lines about his mouth grew less tense.

“See how perfect she is.” His mother lifted the baby in her arms.

Marion’s, child gazed at Allan with the unfocussed eyes of babyhood. He drew nearer. Then from out of that mysterious nothing that makes a baby’s world there came a something to the awakening mind. As Allan leaned forward, the soft brow creased to a minute frown, instantly after, the head was thrown far back, the small mouth opened, and from it came those sounds that pass for baby laughter.

For a second the man stared, his eyes suddenly aflame, his face twitching. Then he cried out a frightful oath and, springing back from his horrified mother, turned and rushed from the room.

Plunging recklessly down the stairs, Allan fled from the house. Not heeding his direction, he went wildly on, feeling no chill from the raw wind that swept past his bared head. His distraught mind held but one thought; he must get far from the house that sheltered the child. In his frenzied haste he stumbled and fell. During the pause after he rose he found that he was on the pathway that ended at a place of terror to him. He could not go to that path’s end. As he stood uncertain, thoughts of the helpless thing, that to live had taken Marion’s life, crowded his brain with fiercer hate. How quickly – how easily – he looked at his hands; the fingers were spreading and closing in eagerness. Cursing aloud, he started running, fleeing straight onward along the path. He did not pause nor slacken his pace until he reached the floating stage at the shore of Black Pool.

No sun rays from the overcast, March sky, cut through the branches of the naked trees; the surface of the pool gleamed a sheet of dull, polished steel, under the lowering clouds.

Allan, panting hard, stood, his eyes upturned. He would not – he swore it he would not look into the black water.

Yet why not look? Why not see once more the very spot where he had rid the world – ? No! – He strove to master the spell that was drawing him closer, always closer, to the water. Inch by inch he moved against his will, until he felt the edge of the float beneath his feet. He struggled a moment longer; then dropped to his knees. His teeth ground hard together. There! There! just beneath him, below the still surface of Black Pool, floated the face of his brother! Not a blue-lipped, dead face now, but a live face distorted by rage. A wind ruffled the surface of the pool, sending shifting, twisted grins across the mouth.

“He’s come back!” Allan screamed. “He’s come back to laugh at his victory!”

The eyes below the water grew wider, wilder; the grin played mockingly about the open mouth.

Screaming an oath, Allan thrust down a gripping hand. His fingers closed in an empty grasp – but it had not gone, that face. It was there, gloating hate at him, just beyond his outstretched hand. It must not escape! Only a little farther and he could seize it! The mocking face sank lower beneath his deeper reach.

“I’ll follow! I’ll follow!” Allan cried. “You shall not escape!” He plunged into the pool.

Groping blindly to catch and throttle the hated throat, Allan forced himself down through the icy water, sinking deeper and deeper at each mad stroke.

His lungs ached for air. “Now! – Now!”

His fingers closed about some unseen thing far below the surface. He would never let go; never loose his grip, – until – until …

Long after its waters were quiet again, Allan’s hands were locked about the rotting snag at the bottom of the tarn – locked long after all was still, on the surface, and below the surface, of Black Pool.

•   •   •   •   •

The heavy, wrought-iron gates of the Van Norden estate stand now grimly closed. The driveway leading to the deserted house on the hill, stretches weed-grown and unused between the double row of blight-killed chestnuts. Hidden from the road, shut in by a thicket of underbrush and tangled cat-briar, desolate, gloomy, bleak, lies the sinister mirror of Black Pool.

THE DAY OF DAHEIMUS

Vance Thompson

1917

It is not strange these things happened – everything happens; what is strange is that they were not hid. They were done in open day, and even now the trail of them lies plain and discernible over the streets and avenues of the city. Murders have been done in ways so dark there was no uncovering them. Mole-murders; they crept so quietly underground there was neither heave nor ripple of the turf to mark their way. These crimes were successful because they were done in the dark. The bullet flew with none to note its flight. The poison struck, and none knew whence it came. The murderer got his vengeance, and found his safety, because he worked alone and in secret, with no witness and no accomplice. In just such a way, for instance, Pere Vanille was killed in that obscure room in the Boulevard Voltaire; pulled down by a vengeance that had hunted him from Tahiti and the Southern seas; it was a crime of mystery; there was nothing but darkness and through it a flash of murder.

Now, the murder of Daheimus was mysterious because it was openly done – with public discussion and doctors and lawyer at the bedside. It was mysterious, I repeat, because it was done in a blaze of light. It was as though the murderer had hid himself in light so dazzling he could not be seen; as though his crime were based on the crowd of witnesses he drew about him. He could not have gone more frankly about his business of revenge and murder, if he had brought Daheimus down Broadway in a gilt wagon drawn by six piebald horses, with outriders and a brass band leading the way; and a police parade following. And just because it was so public, it was mysterious as the arrow that flies by night.

Which is a strange thing.

In this account of the death of Daheimus, I shall not begin with the murder and travel back to the initial cause thereof; it is better to make a beginning the day David Rennich was carried out of the Daheimus brewery, his little leg pulped and broken. David was six years old, possibly seven. Pride was on him that day. For the first time, and also for the last, he carried a tin pail, containing his father’s dinner, down to the engine room in the brewery. Being a small, alert boy, his black eyes quick with curiosity; he prowled into a danger zone, was caught in what interlocking play of steel I know not; and was rescued with a right leg hideously smashed.

Now of this small and broken David, it is probable Daheimus never heard. Fat, and blond, and huge, and happy, the Daheimus rolled through the kind of society such a man can find, seeking food and drink and laughter; and the brewery was merely the hereditary source of the money he wallowed in. Not to him would come word, or wail, of the young David, carted away to the hospital. Had he heard of it, he would have been moved to tears and violent outbursts of generosity; but of that trivial accident he never heard. And of course he was in no way responsible for it, no more than the wind that blew a colour into his fat and smiling face, as he waddled that midday to his club. Had Daheimus been a farseeing man…

Do you remember Holbein’s Dance of Death at Basle? Cardinals and princes, merchants and beggars, women, children – and, as they dance, each is seized upon by his own Death, which is a grim and capering skeleton.

Had Daheimus been a farseeing man the day little David was caught in the interlocking play of steel in the brewery, he would have discerned a capering figure, still a long way off, that started up and moved toward him – a lean piper blowing a tibia – his own Death; but Daheimus, as he waddled clubward, was thinking of other things.

Three months later David was taken back to his home with a shortened right leg that could not be made straight and which bent out at the knee, sideways, and was twisted in at the ankle. He was carried up four pair of stairs, for his home was in a tenement, built of shrewishly clean bricks and steel, that fronted the East River and had a view of Blackwell’s Island – for modernised poverty has pre-empted one of the fairest sites in New York City. David was put in a chair, with another chair as a rest for his stiff and crooked leg; and his mother crooned over him. She was a little dark-visaged woman, who wore a wig made of brown flax, a dreadful, flagrant thing, such as the women of the Polish and Galician Jews of those parts put on with marriage. But Mrs. Rennich was not a Hebrew woman. She belonged to an obscurer and more tragic race. So far as she knew she was a gipsy. Somewhere, kindly Jews had found her – a waif-child in the streets – and given her food, home, nurture, religion; in due season they had married her to old Rennich. After ten years of married life there was no beauty in her, for she was wrinkled like an old woman and her teeth were broken and black; but there was something better than beauty in her as she crooned over her little son – she was radiant with mother love. It was only for this whelp of her tiger-breed she softened. And the whelp, stretched on the blanketed chairs, looked up at her with terror – and adoration. It was the look you have seen in the eyes of a dog, when it seeks godhead in a human face. It was evident that both his fear and his love pleased the woman. She stroked his head and kissed him and smiled. Then she went to the table and poured him out a cup of coffee. (The child had been weaned on coffee.) It was cold, for it had stood a long time; it was dark and full of dregs. She fixed her black eyes on him as he took the cup.

“Is it good?” she asked, “is it warm? Is it sweet for my little son?”

“It’s cold and bitter,” said the child timidly.

She blew her breath on the coffee and little David, staring, saw it bubble and fume with heat; it whitened, under her breath,, as though with milk; and when he tasted the hot liquid it was honey-sweet.

“Now it is sweet and hot,” he said; and drank it slowly.

His mother laughed and sat with her arm round him, crooning; so old Rennich found them when he came in.

All had not gone well with old Rennich since the accident. With East Side promptitude he had demanded compensation for David’s injury. With unanswerable logic, the brewery-folk replied that David had no business in the engine-room, no justifiable interest in the interlocking play of steel; and that not a penny of compensation would be paid. Old Rennich might have been content, but the mother was of harder metal. Many and curious were the curses she laid upon Daheimus – rolling harmlessly in his social world of beer – curses multiple, awful, unprintable. She questioned the Gods of Things that Are to Come to Pass, blowing feathers and reading the scroll of the coffee-grounds; and always she found a fortune of money. At last she made the Test that Does Not Fail. She broke an egg into a plate and dashed boiling water on it and, lo! in lines and curves the yolk and albumen streamed toward her left hand – not her right – promising white silver and yellow gold. Thereupon old Rennich (having thriftily eaten the prophetic egg) went out and hired a lawyer. It was sending good money after a bad leg. The case was hopelessly lost. Thereupon the brewery, the principle of the thing being safe, made the Rennichs a present of two hundred dollars. It was not enough or it was too much; it took old Rennich on a wandering career of drink from which it was not in his destiny to return.

By this time (a year was gone by) little David was able to get about freely with that strange gait, half crawl and half hop, which was to be his way of going through life. The home was still in the high tenement overlooking the river. The mother saw to it they had fire and fuel. There was no lack of money, for now she told the weird fortunes that are in the coffee-grounds and the feathers and the egg on the plate, for those who could pay for knowledge of the Things that Are to Come to Pass. There were many of these folk. And the name of the old woman, for she looked old, was famous as far as Third Avenue. She called herself Zaquah. Moreover she promised to “heal” mysteriously the diseases of that wretched world that lay about her. She used a few drugs and herbs; but in the main she depended upon dark and uncouth mummeries that were far more effective. Often she laughed in derision as her dupes went away happy; then suddenly she would start and tremble lest she had offended the Powers; the dupester was also her own dupe. David, silent in the corner, saw and heard many strange things.

You can see him sitting there, if you will, a diminutive lad of nine, or ten, or eleven, for the years made little change. He was beautiful in an uncanny way, like some dark and deformed flower. His face was narrow and pale and almost perfect in contour; and the black eyes that looked out of it were bright with intelligence; they gleamed with it. His long, white hands were fashioned to wear rings and hold a sceptre. He should have been a king’s son on some perfumed edge of the Orient. And he crouched there in a tenement, while his old mother, withering more and more into a hag, whispered and cursed.

The curses were for Daheimus, but it was into the heart of her little son she poured them, that they might bear fruit.

Almost always David was silent. To his mother he gave only the answers she wished to hear. He would sit for hours, his dark eyes fixed on her, watching every movement of her hands, every grimace of her face, as she played her cheating games of sorcery and “healing” – herself, at last, her greatest dupe. She healed and wondered at her healing; she feared her own witchcraft, though she knew her own cunning had made it. And David sat there, his delicate hands folded, his pallid, pure face bent forward, like some unhappy little prince who had been caught by a hag and carried away to her garret. When the “clients” were gone, she held him to her poor old breasts, stroking his head and “laying love” on him. It was at such times she crooned murder into his ear. The name of Daheimus worked in him like a spell. At night, when she put him in bed, she kissed his warped and twisted leg and whispered that name; with it she woke him in the morning. Had not all her ills, the crooked leg of her son and the drink-harried death of her husband and her dangerous trade, with its fears and penalties, come from Daheimus?

And that foolish, harmless man?

Three or four times a year Daheimus rolled up to his brewery in a purple motor car, a fresh-coloured, smiling, huge man, over-fed and under-healthed. He had no regular time for coming. He came upon impulse, when the fancy touched him. But in some unclean way, warned by the feathers or the clotted egg, old Zaquah knew when he would come. Always she was in the street to see him pass. Always, at her side, stood little David, white and silent, his great eyes blazing blackly at the man who was (even then) his victim. Then home again to the tenement, and the coffee that bubbled, and the “clients” bargaining for hope or health; and the litany of curses for Daheimus.

David had no companions; he could neither run nor play. In time (later than other boys) he was unearthed by an inspector and taken to school. He found a delight in his studies. The man’s brain in his little body hungered for the food of thought. One of his teachers called him a prodigy. It was as though he were not learning and acquiring things; it was as though he were remembering, with amazing rapidity, an old familiar store of knowledge. There was no effort; he did not study; he steadied himself and remembered, so this teacher said.

“He shall be a great man,” she predicted; she patted his curls, for she loved the sad and gentle lad.

He became a great man, but not in the way she thought.

Zaquah’s room was filled daily with disease-riddled folk. Perhaps this was the reason David became a target for disease. When fever-stricken patients came to her, he, too, burned with fever, until she conjured it away. He had many illnesses; possibly they were not real, mere phantom illnesses that played with the sensitive child. They may have been old Zaquah’s experiments. But one of them cannot be explained that way. It was a disease that fastened a fungus growth in his throat one night. That day they had seen (as often before) Daheimus roll by in the big motorcar; but he was a shrunken Daheimus, with a new look of cowardice in his kindly face. Old Zaquah had stared at him with set, clairvoyant eyes, for the few minutes his car had been halted at the street-crossing. When he was borne out of sight, she caught her son’s arm and laughed. And that night the foul thing blossomed poisonously in David’s throat.

This disease was real enough; it nearly put an end to the lad’s life, and her vengeance. (For a moment, too, the lean Death, capering toward the unconscious Daheimus, checked and paused irresolute.) Old Zaquah battled for days and nights, now brewing herbs, now invoking the Powers. Once, the room half-dark with wintry day, David seemed to be dying on the bed, a little tortured, twisted figure, with gaping throat. For a long while his mother stood over him,motionless. Then without haste, calmly, she went to her incantations. She lighted some inflammable liquid, perhaps alcohol, in a tin plate on the table. She fanned the flames with her hands and with her breath, whispering hoarsely, in words older than the Sphinx, the spells of her race. Hour after hour she called upon the Gods of the Things that Must Not Be. Her voice sank to a monotone; the passion went out of it; she became steady, serene, compelling – a dark hag commanding the flames. Suddenly she laughed aloud and went over and opened the door.

A young woman in a raincoat wet with melting snow came in diffidently.

“Does little David Rennich live here?” she asked.

“He is living here,” said Zaquah, and she pointed to the dying lad in the bed.

“Oh, poor David!” the young woman cried and went quickly to the bed and knelt. She was the school-teacher who predicted David would be a great man, perhaps because she loved him. A woman sweet without witchcraft; swiftly competent as women are in the face of death; within an hour she had him taken to a great hospital. Zaquah neither hindered nor thanked her. It was Doctor Gage himself, the great throat specialist, who operated on the boy.

“He will do well enough for a while,” Doctor Gage told the school-teacher, who had come, after her work, for word with him, “but there is nothing can stop it nothing we know. Another operation and another and then death will come, but not as soon as he wishes! How old is he? It’s very sad.”

Still, for the time being, David was saved from the fell disease. He came out of the hospital taller, but still very small for his years. What was strangest was that his voice had wholly changed. It had been a soft and veiled voice; now it was hard, a voice of metal, dominant and clear.

He left the hospital hobbling at the side of the young school-teacher and talking to her in that new strange voice. He was full of gratitude and spoke to her without shyness, like a man. She smiled a little sadly, for the child she had loved was gone.

Then school again.

And now came the day which picked up the threads of his life and knitted them to the thing he was to do in this world.

What Doctor Gage had said came true. Homecoming one day David pushed his mother away when she would have kissed him and pointed to his throat. The foul thing had come back, savager and more vicious than before. David threw himself down on the bed and lay there, silent, his hands clenched over his head. It may be that in those schooldays other ambitions than that of murder had come to him, dreams of the fair things of youth, and now he realised that death was on them and on him; so he lay there, this little prince who had been stolen away from his destiny and tempered and edged for murder.

Old Zaquah bent over him and whispered: “You will sleep, my son.”

“I cannot sleep,” he whispered.

She laid her hands on his temples; and he slept.

In an hour she woke him.

“Now we shall go to the hospital,” she said and got him his hat. The great hospital that dominates that part of the East Side was not far and they went afoot. No one stopped them at the door. No one questioned them as they went up in the hospital lift. They went straight and unhindered to the room where Doctor Gage stood washing his hands after his day’s work, his white blouse cast aside. The great man recognised David at once and pain came into his look.

“So soon!” he exclaimed, “what do you expect me to do now? You must make an appointment. This is not right.”

David’s tragic eyes hurt him; he hid his sympathy in brusque impatience.

“Just look at his throat, Doctor,” the mother begged, “just to see if it is bad – a minute, a little minute, Doctor!”

David did not speak.

“Well, come here!”

Doctor Gage turned on a reflecting light and made a swift examination.

“You must make an appointment as soon as you can. I will speak about it myself. It is very irregular your coming here like this. There – I’ll do what I can.”

Doctor Gage was a tender-hearted man, and in addition David had impressed him in a singular way. The black, hopeless eyes seemed to hold him.

“Is it very bad? ” the old woman asked, “is it as bad as it can be? Is it so bad it cannot be cured?”

“I will do what I can, ” he said.

The eagerness did not die out of Zaquah’s face as she led her son homeward, through the noisy avenue; it was there when they reached their room on the fourth floor of the tenement and it remained while she helped him into his bed. David saw it and fear struck at his heart, but he dared not speak.

“Lie still,” his mother said, “but do not sleep.”

He watched her through half-closed eyes. He heard her call upon her gods, with all the mummery she did not believe in, but feared. And then she wakened the flames in the tin plate on the table and blackened them with incense. Soon the room was thick with fumes; and in the fumes David gasped and sickened. The old woman went to and fro, busily, always chirping and whispering to her gods. Slowly the incense clouds faded; and she fed the flames on the plate with fiery spirits and they leaped up again. David saw that she was holding in the flames a little copper pot with a handle, a sort of ladle, half filled with some reddish fluid that seethed and stank. She held it there a long time, her hand wrapped in her upgathered skirt, as a shield against the heat. Seen in that dancing light she was gruesome and unreal. The flax wig was askew, disclosing wisps of grey hair; her eyes were rimmed with red and water dripped from them; her half-opened mouth showed the broken and discoloured teeth. At last she poured the awful decoction into a cup and carried it to the bedside. David had not moved. She crouched down by the bed and drew him to her, turning his head over on her knee and opening his mouth with her fingers, as though it were a baby’s mouth; then, slowly, she let the reddish fluid drip into his throat. After a few drops had entered his throat he gasped and choked, but she held his mouth shut. Again she let the fluid drip into his mouth; and again. Only when the ladle was empty did she place his head back on the pillow. Then she went to the table and kneeled there, whispering to the dying flames; for hours she did not move.

Now the thing is absurd and impossible; but it is an exact fact that when David stood up, just as day broke, his throat was clear. It was cleaner than it had been after the surgeon’s knife delved in it. There was neither rawness in it nor pain. It was the throat of a hale man who had never known blight nor disease. And the voice had come back with a new and harder ring of metal in it.

These are facts; they are set down here without emphasis or exaggeration; you may attribute that cure (which Doctor Gage himself could not make) to the old woman’s wizardry or to what chance you please; the compelling fact is that David was “healed.”

There are, as you have seen, three important people in this story: Daheimus, who floated like a porpoise in a certain kind of society; the old woman who laid her curse on him; and David. But there are other people, tools of destiny, who come and go in the story. Of these, witnesses of the murder or accomplices, the chief is Doctor Gage, who had been brought into it by the selfless charity of a little school-teacher in a draggled raincoat. And the story has reached Doctor Gage’s house. It is a wide, tall house of brownstone in lower Fifth Avenue. What had once been a spacious salon was now his reception room. Behind it were his offices and a private operating-room. Doctor Gage was a youngish man of fifty, loose-jointed, rather soft, with too much fat, but quick and energetic, a nervous, talkative man, full of gestures. World-famous; he was one of the great surgeons of the day; a man of science with a dangerous, eccentric touch of genius in him; this was and is Doctor Robert Eskelin Gage. For many weeks past one of his patients had been Daheimus. A changed Daheimus; he was older, thinner, and the redness had gone out of his cheeks; in his blue, bulbous eyes was a look of pain and fear. That huge throat down which he had fed such royal food, down which he had poured a flood-tide of burning drink, had rebelled. He rooted no more in the trough of life. All that lay in a dubious past. He was fighting for mere existence. Gladly he had given the brewery as a fee, had there been one to save him. He was Daheimus – the man with a cancer in his throat. His terrors and hopes had driven him to Europe, where the experts had delved and sliced in his throat; and he had come back to Doctor Gage, whom first he had asked to save him. A terrified, flabby man, he crouched in a big chair in the doctor’s private office, waiting. And though he knew it not the thing he was waiting for was coming toward him – a skeleton, piping a tibia – swiftly on dancing feet.

It was three o’clock and David was making ready to leave his dingy home that faced Blackwell’s Island and the river. Note, too, that exactly eleven years had passed since he had been carried out of the Daheimus brewery, with a pulped and broken leg, exactly eleven years since his mother’s gods had begun to dream fitfully of murder. And it was exactly twenty-four hours since he had stood in front of Doctor Gage in his room in the hospital, and shown to him a throat death-poisoned with cancer. Now he stood looking at his mother. The youth had gone out of his face. It was a man’s face, set and steady as a mask. Old Zaquah stared into his eyes.

“David, son of my man,” she said, “after all the years, today is the day.”

And she talked to him of the old vengeance on Daheimus, and of her will, and his will, and the will of her gods; in just such a way she was wont to talk when a new client came to question the Gods of the Things that Are to Come to Pass. She chattered and chirped instructions to him with queer excitement. One had said the very springs of life within her were dancing and bubbling. A kind of youthfulness, gay and malevolent, looked out of her eyes. Her gods had not failed her. They had ripened her vengeance. They had fastened her curse on the throat of her enemy; there it festered and flowered. Surely the eternal Devas of the East had not failed her. And now, for David could not fail her, her vengeance was secure. So she kissed him and sent him on his way, watching him, as he limped down the iron stairs of the tenement.

It was a strange, white-faced little figure in his new suit of black clothes, such as are sold in his highway for a few dollars; too large a hat fell over his brows, and shaded the thin face and the wonderful eyes. Now shuffling along the sidewalk with his queer staccato gait, now carried in a street car, he made his way to Fifth Avenue and the house of Doctor Gage. (A purple motorcar halted at the kerb.)

David did not enter the waiting-room. He went down the hall and opened the door of the private office. Doctor Gage looked up at him impatiently.

“What the deuce do you mean by coming in here?” he asked.

“Listen to what I have to say,” David said quickly, in that new, vibrant and compelling voice of his.

“Oh, it’s you,” Doctor Gage said, recognising the patient who had come to him the day before, “you know, my poor boy, I can do little for you.”

“No, you can do little for anyone, but what I can do, you do not know. I have come here to tell you.”

All this David repeated in a pompous way that might have been ridiculous had it not been for the strength behind the words. The answer the doctor found was rather curious: “You speak as one having authority,” he said; but a moment later he laughed at himself.

“You’re a strange young man,” he added, “but I am a strange old man – so I’ll hear what you have to say, if you can say it in two minutes. You will pardon me, Mr. Daheimus?”

His apology was to the flabby figure in the armchair.

“You looked at my throat yesterday,” said David, “look at it now, and then I will speak.”

Doctor Gage smiled at the air of authority, but for some reason he consented to make the inspection. A moment later he started back and cried, “My God! man,” for the throat he had looked into was that of a hale and healed man.

“What is it?” Daheimus whispered angrily, but Doctor Gage did not even glance at him. He was staring at David Rcnnich, as a bystander may have stared at Lazarus. David sat on the edge of the lacquer chair; he crooked his twisted leg under it, and laid his grotesque hat carefully on the floor.

“What you could not cure in my throat another has cured,” he said in his stilted way, “and I do not ask you to believe me or to believe your own eyes. My purpose is to convince you. You have men, rich men,” David went on, but he did not glance at the crouching bulk of a man in the armchair, “who would give a fortune to be healed as I have been healed. Therefore I must convince you.”

Daheimus was whispering anxiously: “His throat? What was the matter with his throat?” but they paid no heed to him.

“Convince me?” Doctor Gage repeated, “convince me?”

“I will give you the medicine that cured me. And when you have tested it and tried it – please do not interrupt me, let me say what I have to say – for I expect you to make every test you please, in your laboratory or in the hospital. Yes, certainly in the hospital. There are many poor men, as well as rich men, dying of that disease. Take one of those poor men, a man doomed to death, a man for whom all your science can do nothing, a man who must die. He will consent to the trial, and when he is cured—”

“What’s the game?” Daheimus put in querulously.

“A game of life and death; I offer life,” David said, still looking at the doctor, “and you want to know what I will charge? To heal the poor man of cancer, nothing; to heal the rich man ten thousand dollars. Since that man has spoken, I tell you my price. I will give you, for nothing, sufficient medicine to cure one poor man, one hopeless case, in your hospital, or where you please. I will give you enough to cure two such men, if you will, or three. Then the experiments must cease and payment must begin” – and in those last three words, as David spoke them, was the ring of metal and menace; he ended by saying: “I have said what I came to say. Now it is for you to speak.”

And so the story draws close to the edge of murder. There is no need of pausing here over the discussion that fell between Doctor Gage and Daheimus, or over the long examination, whereby Doctor Gage convinced himself of the certain fact that David, his cancerous patient, was wholly healed. Once he was convinced of the reality of the cure, the man of genius that was in the great scientist flashed into enthusiasm. There had still to appear in the transaction Dufayel, the lawyer. His business was to safeguard the man of money, and cancer, lest ten thousand dollars be taken from him. The advice of this shrewd and cynical man of law was this: “You risk nothing. Try this so-called cure on some poor devil, already condemned to death. If it saves him try another. Make sure. I understand your man is willing to supply the medicine for three experiments. When you come to try it on Daheimus I will hold the money. If the young man earns it, I will pay it over; if not, there is no one the poorer; but I hope to heaven I’ll have to pay it.”

“Write me out a paper that the rich man will pay the price when he is healed,” David had said, “and I am content.”

In this way it was settled; such a contract was signed and given to him.

Now after all this talk of poor men, it was upon a poor woman, dying horribly, the first experiment was made. What happened is a matter of public record. David brought the little phial, filled with reddish liquid, to the hospital and gave it to Doctor Gage. The only excuse Doctor Gage has given for the grim fact that the medicine was not analysed is that David Rennich would not permit it. The poor woman, who had been told of the experiment, drank it greedily, for she was drinking of her last hope, greedily as though it had been the wine of life. And it was the elixir of life. At dawn she stood erect, and her throat was clean as the mouth of a bride. For Doctor Gage it was as though the floor of the hospital rocked with miracle, for him and Dufayel, and the little cohort of medical men and surgeons. There is a full and public record of the second experiment, when a speechless, cancered man was dragged up out of the jaws of death. As before, David brought the medicine old Zaquah had brewed in the ladle, to the hospital in a corked phial; as before he had stood by and seen it administered. A third test was made. As the others succeeded, it succeeded.

And the day of Daheimus came.

That tortured man was mad with impatience; hope thrilled and chanted in him; he would have given not ten thousand but a hundred thousand, a half-million, what had he not given? Dufayel, his lawyer, had saner views of the real value of his life. Ten thousand dollars was the sum set down in the contract; and that sum was to be paid to David, when Daheimus was pronounced, by a trinity of experts, to be healed. David had carried this paper home and old Zaquah had hidden it in her breast. How she had chirped and crooned that day! She made the draught for Daheimus, chirping and crooning over a nest of flames in the tin plate on the table! How she fed the flames with fiery fuel and brewed again the reddish liquid that had given life to a youth, to a woman, to two men, who lay in the door of death! Always she called to her gods, who were the Dévas of the East. David had not heeded much, until of a sudden she gave a cry of triumph, malignant and shrill; and looking quickly up he saw she was holding a paper in the fire under the ladle. The paper blackened, blazed up, and was consumed. Then David covered his face with his long, pale hands and was silent. He knew what paper it was she had burned; and if she had destroyed that promise of ten thousand dollars, then what price was Daheimus to pay? And suddenly he saw her vengeance as something formless and black, a cloud filled with venom; and he knew the murder of which she had whispered for so many years was ready to strike. How had he dreamed, or dared to dream, that he was to carry life to Daheimus as to the other three? He was death’s errand-boy. The reddish brew in the phial was old Zaquah’s vengeance, perfected in the years. Who drank it drank death.

Yet when she gave it into his hands, he took it quietly, and made ready to do his errand. She held him for a moment.

“David, son of my man,” she cried, and threw her self down and kissed and stroked his twisted leg and chirped and chuckled to herself, or to her gods, in spasms of frightful merriment; an old hag drunk with the drink of vengeance, and his mother. He looked back at her as he went out, and there was a strange smile on his white face. She should have what she had sought so long; her will and the will of her gods should be done.

It was the day of Daheimus; and David went limping swiftly through the streets, to the house in Fifth Avenue, where the hope-shaken man crouched in the great armchair. By the chair Doctor Gage stood. There were three other surgeons in the room, a doctor of medicine and a white-garbed woman, a nurse. By the window Dufayel, the lawyer, lounged in a lazy attitude, but his eyes were cynical and alert.

“Quite ready,” Doctor Gage said softly; he took the bottle and held it between his eyes and the light. Indeed every eye was on that red-tinted phial, even the blue, protuberant eyes of Daheimus, as the great surgeon held it up to the light; every eye save those of Dufayel, the man of law. He was scrutinising David’s pale, mask-like face. What he saw there he could never explain, not even to himself. It may be he saw nothing; and it may be he caught a fugitive glimpse of a young soul, staring into the blackness of death. For David at that moment stood face to face with his tragedy. His thought was with his old mother; he could see her twisting in frightful merriment, as she dreamed of her vengeance on Daheimus, the fruit of so many years. Even so, she should have her vengeance. That was her due. He would not thrust himself between her and her reward. What she had sown she should reap. And what was he but the sickle in her hand? What must be, must be. Only there was one thing David knew: when vengeance is taken, someone must pay. If old Zaquah won she must lose; for that is the Law of Things. She must pay for what she wanted most with what she held dearest. And thinking thus, David lifted his head, and there was a smile on his white face.

Doctor Gage was speaking to him.

“It is a larger bottle, isn’t it?” he asked.

“Yes, there’s more than is needed,” David answered slowly, “for him.”

Doctor Gage poured the reddish liquid into a measuring-glass, filling it to the exact line that marked the proper dose. A little more than a third of the drug was left in the phial. Still smiling in his strange way David picked up the little bottle and held it to the light.

“A wonderful medicine, Doctor Gage,” he said, “a very wonderful medicine! It has a harsh and evil taste, but you can drink it like milk. It heals and it cannot harm. Like milk,” he repeated, and set the phial to his lips; and drank. Then he straightened up, as best he could, on his crippled leg and folded his thin arms across his heart. And always he smiled, like a brave man among enemies.

Daheimus broke the silence.

“You all keep me waiting,” he croaked angrily, “for weeks and weeks—”

Doctor Gage administered the medicine.

Five minutes. Ten minutes, and the Daheimus heaved himself out of the chair and stood, gasping, but radiant, as though he had indeed quaffed a cup of life. They laid him on the chair again, the doctors in a cluster round him.

David spoke in his hard, metallic voice, again as one having authority:

“Let the experts decide. When the three experts have decided I shall come for the price. And now I shall go.”

No one answered him. The doctors were listening to Daheimus, who was clamoring that he was healed, and would not be still. Even Dufayel was leaning over the nurse’s shoulder, staring at the rich man who had been called back to life and abundant health.

David hobbled out. Once in the avenue, he hurried on at a great pace, and turned into a side street. There he went more slowly, for his crooked leg kept crumpling up under him. At last he fell and rolled over on his side; his head jerked horribly; then his mouth twisted open and, little by little, a glaze crept over his eyes; and David Rennich was dead. Almost at the same time the poor, frightened soul of the Daheimus was wrenched out of his body, in the presence of four great surgeons, a qualified medical man, a trained nurse and a leading lawyer of the New York bar. No mole-murder; Daheimus was done to death in a blaze of light.

What was it the little school-teacher said of the gentle lad she loved?

“David will be a great man someday,” she said. He was a great man, but not in the way she thought.