A Book of Ghosts: 7
Author: Various authors
Date: 1891-12-31T15:00:00+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
– 7 –

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 1892 ~ 1923. This book is in the public domain where copyright is “Life+70” or less, and in the USA.

CONTENTS:

- The Haunted Cove
by Sir George Douglas
(1856–1935)

- Nissa
by Albert Delpit
(1849–1893)

- The Story of Medhans Lea
by E. Heron [Kate Pritchard]
(1851-1935)
& H. Heron [Hesketh Pritchard]
(1876–1922)

- The Foreigner
by Sarah Orne Jewett
(1849–1909)

- The Readjustment
byMary Austin
(1868–1934)

- The Night Call
by Henry van Dyke
(1852–1933)

- Twilight Zone
by Mary Keegan
(?–?)

- Souls of the Damned
by John D. Swain
(?—?)

- Fear
by Achmed Abdullah
(1881–1945)

- Lucifer
by John D. Swain
(?–?)

THE HAUNTED COVE

Sir George Douglas

1892

Commonplace in itself and showing positive vulgarity in the style in which its pleasure-grounds are laid out, Clyffe, near Berwick-on-Tweed, has yet one delightful feature of its own – to wit, a private bay to which access is obtained by a tunnel seventy or eighty yards long, cut through the soft formation of the cliff from the sloping gardens above. The result is that, if you are a visitor at Clyffe, you have your own private bathing ground, your own private beach where the children may play, without fear of being encroached upon, unless, indeed, a boat should be run in among the rocks from seaward.

In the early nineties of the last century, the only daughter of the house of Clyffe was engaged to be married to a young officer quartered at the military depot at Berwick. They were a blameless but not particularly interesting couple, and one of their hobbies was to meet and promenade on the smooth sands of Clyffe bay in the brilliant autumn moonlight. In order to prevent possible intrusion from the sea, the seaward end of the tunnel was closed by a heavy iron gate, and upon the inner side of this gate the Lieutenant was to wait until his fiancee should steal forth bringing with her the key which should give access to the beach. It was all very foolish and romantic, no doubt, for they might have met just as conveniently in the conservatory of Clyffe House, where their privacy would have been equally respected, and where Miss Alix’s satin shoes and diaphanous draperies would have exposed her to no risk of a chill. Lovers are like that, however, and had they not been so on this occasion, I should have had no story to tell.

Like the exemplary swain he was, Dick arrived early at the rendezvous – that is to say, early in respect to the time agreed upon, though, as a matter of fact, it was nearly eleven o’clock. There he lit a cigarette, and approaching the heavy iron bars of the locked gate, looked forth upon the peaceful scene beyond. It was a perfect night, the harvest moon riding through fleecy cloud aloft, whilst the breaking of the sea between the rocky points to right and left was soothing in its gentle iteration. Dick had been on parade extremely early that morning, and, tell it not in Gath! his eyes involuntarily closed. Starting awake again, he saw with surprise that, though Alix had not yet come forward, he was no longer alone. No! the sacred beach had been invaded, and a female figure clad in light draperies was pacing slowly in the moonlight betwixt himself and the distant rocks. Who on earth could she be, and how had she got there? were the questions he asked himself, his first sensation being one of annoyance at so unexpected and so ill-timed an intrusion. But as the moments passed and the figure came more clearly into view, impatience gave way to curiosity, and curiosity to something like awe.

What he saw was the tall and slender form of a young girl whose hands were clasped in front of her, and whose eyes were fixed on the ground in a pensive, not to say sorrowful, attitude. Clear as was the moonlight, at least in the intervals of the moon’s passage through the broken clouds, her features were not plainly visible; but her every movement was instinct with grace. What could she be doing there? Under other circumstances, possibly Dick might have felt inclined to pass the gate and himself step forth on to the sands. But, besides that the gate was locked, he gradually became conscious of a singular delicacy or unwillingness to intrude upon the privacy of this solitary, inexplicable, and impressive figure. He was content, therefore, to watch her noiseless progress, and, as he did so, even his untrained masculine eye seemed to note something unusual – out of date, it might be – in the fashion of her garments. So perhaps might some old-world portrait have appeared, had it stept down from its frame against the wall. This, however, stirred him little. What he was not prepared for was the gesture of anguish, nay, of positive despair, with which, when about opposite him, the figure threw her head back and her arms aloft, as if in mute and agonised appeal to Heaven. The action was heartrending even to look on; nor, to a male eye, did it lose aught from the fact that, as the moonlight now fell for the first time on her upturned face, it showed it to be deathly pale indeed, but also exquisitely lovely. Another moment or two, and the graceful and appealing form had passed beyond his field of vision, for, as the locked gate stood some little way back from the mouth of the tunnel, his view was restricted.

A short time only, though he knew not exactly how long, had passed when Alix stood beside him.

“I had some difficulty,” she archly explained, “in eluding prying eyes.”

For an ardent lover, Dick’s greetings were perfunctory; after which, being still powerfully under the impression of what he had just seen, he told Alix all about it.

“We shall soon see who she is,” replied that practical young lady, as she placed the heavy key in the cumbrous lock, “and I shall also take leave to inform her that this bit of coast is strictly private.”

And strictly private it appeared to be when they emerged from the tunnel. For though their eyes swept the beach to right and left, and though the moon just then was unobscured, they saw no trace of any living form.

“She must have landed from a boat,” said Alix; but as little trace of a boat could they discover.

Still it was quite possible that she might pass unobserved against the dark rocks, so they turned first to the right, then to the left, keeping a keen look-out for any sign of motion.

They detected nothing.

And by this time I am bound to confess that a slightly uncomplimentary suspicion had more than once crossed the brain of Alix. She knew that, as a rule, her Dick was a pattern of moderation. But even the most prudent may be liable to be occasionally overtaken. And she recalled his having mentioned that this was to be a guest-night at the mess. Indeed, it was chiefly upon that account that the assignation had been fixed so late. This present portentous solemnity was certainly most unlike him. Was it possible that the poor fellow had taken just one more whisky-and-soda than he could conveniently carry? Outspoken by nature, she blurted out her suspicion, which was strengthened rather than the reverse by the great earnestness with which he repelled it.

Less convinced than before, Alix then exclaimed: “Look here, Dick! If, as you say, the young woman passed this way, she must have left tracks on the smooth sand. Where do you say the place was?”

With some uncertainty, Dick then led her to what he took to be the place. No tracks were there. He then tried further back from the mouth of the tunnel, and with as little success. It was true the tide was coming up, but it could scarcely yet have reached footmarks which had been imprinted so far inshore as he supposed these to have been.

In a spirit of levity which jarred on him, Alix now recommended her lover to go back to his quarters and have a good sleep; and then, having again passed through the gate and pushed their way up the tunnel, the two young people parted in something very like a tiff.

Dick did not call at Clyffe House the next day, and when he called on the day following, Alix met him in a complaisant mood. After all, she had no wish to quarrel with him. And very soon she said,

“Going back to what you told me you had seen the other night, Dick, it occurred to me, after you were gone, that it fits in rather curiously with an old story connected with this place.”

And then, at his request, she proceeded to tell him how, some thirty years ago, her grandmother had had a favourite maid, a friendless orphan girl named Barbara, to whom attached a mystery. Barbara was a very lovely creature of refinement and education above her station, and she had of course numerous admirers. Young as she was, her discretion was faultless, with the sole exception that her native amiability and desire to please sometimes betrayed her into conduct which meant less than her admirers wished to think it did. Well, at last Barbara became plighted to a respectable young fisherman, part-owner of a boat sailing from The Greenses, and, though details were vague, it was generally understood that, as a consequence, several hearts were severely damaged. As Barbara had no relatives, it was arranged by her employer that she should remain in her situation until the wedding-day and should be married from Clyffe House.

Considerable preparations had also been made to do honour to the occasion, when – judge of the consternation of the inmates of the house! – upon the morning of the wedding-day Barbara was not to be found. She was believed to have retired to rest on the previous night as usual, yet her bed had not been slept in. Nor, although most of her clothes were packed in anticipation of her change of domicile, had she apparently taken anything with her. Nothing in the least unusual had been observed in her demeanour; nor could the unhappy bridegroom suggest any possible motive for her conduct. Exhaustive inquiries and exhaustive search were made; but, to cut the story short, nothing had ever again been seen or heard of the fair Barbara to that day. Her mistress, who had been sincerely attached to her, had long mourned for her, and in after times would often sing her praises. But, in order to be quite candid, it must be acknowledged that there were others, not a few, who declined to believe that the girl had come to an untimely end; and, who, knowing that she had several suitors, and had sometimes appeared uncertain which to favour, preferred to think that she had changed her mind at the last moment, and, deciding to throw over her fisherman, had made her escape from Clyffe House during the night to join some more eligible swain. This would have been a desperate step indeed; nor could her conduct in withholding subsequent explanations be absolved of heartlessness. But, after all, she was the sort of girl who, where no actual misconduct was involved, might easily allow herself to be over-persuaded. And certainly the tangled skein of love does sometimes present a knot which must be cut rather than untied.

The Lieutenant professed himself profoundly interested in this narrative, which he and Alix then proceeded to discuss in all its bearings, and more particularly, of course, in its relation to the figure seen by him in the cove. It is true that Alix never quite believed in the genuineness of the apparition; but, seeing that Dick really wished to have it taken seriously, she decided tactfully to humour him, and made quite a nine days’ wonder of the mysterious occurrence. Their own wedding-day was, however, fast drawing on, so they soon found other things to talk and think of. To be brief, they were in due course married, and, amid the cares and pleasures of wedded life, the story, though not forgotten, came to be very seldom referred to. So twenty years passed; at the end of which time the Colonel (as he now was), accompanied by his wife and several youngsters, paid one of his not very frequent visits to his wife’s parents at Clyffe House.

On the first night of the visit, after dinner, Alix’s father had significantly recalled the story of the maid Barbara’s disappearance, and, after stating that the mystery had now been finally cleared up, had gone on to relate the following particulars: – A few days previously there had lain at the point of death in the infirmary at Berwick an aged fisherman, who had long been known in the seaport town for his solitary habits and morose and violent ways. As death drew near, it became evident that his mind was sorely troubled, and to one of the nurses or doctors who had sought to comfort him he had been led to make the acknowledgment that a guilty secret weighed upon his soul, making him fearful to confront his Maker. He then told how, as a young man, he had passionately loved a pretty servant-girl employed at Clyffe House. Misled by those smiles and that graciousness of manner which in the guileless amiability of her nature the girl lavished upon all alike, he had for a moment imagined himself her favoured suitor. How bitter, then, was the blow, and how rude the awakening when he learned that a younger brother of his own, a mere boy, was preferred before himself! Nor was it only unrequited love that grieved him. No, he believed, or managed to persuade himself, that an unfair advantage had been taken of him, by which he had been made the lovers’ dupe.

A silent man, he took no one into his confidence, but abode his time until the eve of the wedding-day. On that day he had accidentally intercepted a note from the girl Barbara, addressed to his brother, in which she had agreed to meet her bridegroom of the morrow in the cove below Clyffe House one hour before midnight, to spend a final hour together before the momentous crisis in their lives. Instantly it had occurred to the elder brother to use the knowledge gained from the note in order to make one last desperate appeal on his own account to the sweet girl he loved so madly. Accordingly he kept back the missive, and, to make assurance doubly sure, mixed a soporific drug with his brother’s drink when the latter came in from fishing. Then, whilst the youngster slumbered heavily, he himself embarked in a cockle-boat and, unobserved, rowed quietly round the headland, into Clyffe cove, where he ran his boat into a safe creek he knew of, and jumped ashore. Poor Barbara had come down to the water’s edge to meet the boat, and great was her consternation on finding herself confronted by the wrong brother.

Then an impassioned scene was enacted, in which the seaman used every means of persuasion known to him to get the girl to give up his brother and plight herself to him. But though alternately distressed and terrified, Barbara had stood her ground, and, gentle and yielding though she appeared to be, neither threats nor vows had had the slightest effect upon her constancy. And then, of a sudden, the reckless brother had “seen red.” If he could not have this girl to wife, then neither should another, and a moment later her white form lay stretched upon the dark rocks at his feet.

The sight brought him to himself. There was no room for doubt that life was extinct; and if he was to escape suspicion, he must act at once, for the summer night was short and the dread interview had lasted long. He accordingly placed the body in the boat, and, having collected several heavy stones, proceeded to make use of his seacraft by binding them closely and firmly about the poor girl’s body by means of her clothing. Then he rowed out to sea, some mile or more, and there quietly dropped the body overboard.

Such, in essentials, was the story told by the dying fisherman, and so it had come about that the bride of that fatal morning was never seen or heard of more. Though possibly intended to be regarded as confidential, certain it is that the confession had leaked out, and very soon became public property. For a few days it attracted great attention; and then, like other more important things which had preceded it, it ceased, save very occasionally, to be alluded to at all.

But the Colonel never forgot it, any more than he ever forgot the lovely and inexplicable vision which had appeared to him for so brief an interval, in the moonlight, on the shore below Clyffe House. It is true that he seldom referred to it. Nor did that stately dame, who had once been Miss Alix and who was now believed to command the regiment, encourage him to do so. For she had observed that he was always most ready to tell the story after an exceptionally good dinner. And, with her high sense of what was due to his rank, she fancied that it made him mildly ridiculous. Neither, it might be, had her earliest doubts been ever wholly laid to rest. But members of the fair sex, when they are practical, are apt to be very practical indeed.

THE STORY OF MEDHANS LEA

E. Heron & H. Heron

1899

The following story has been put together from the account of the affair given by Nare-Jones, sometime house-surgeon at Bart’s, of his strange terror and experiences both in Medhans Lea and the pallid avenue between the beeches; of the narrative of Savelsan, of what he saw and heard in the billiard room and afterwards; of the silent and indisputable witness of big, bullnecked Harland himself; and, lastly, of the conversation which subsequently took place between these three men and Mr. Flaxman Low, the noted psychologist.

It was by the merest chance that Harland and his two guests spent that memorable evening of the 18th of January, 1899, in the house of Medhans Lea. The house stands on the slope of a partially-wooded ridge in one of the Midland Counties. It faces south, and overlooks a wide valley bounded by the blue outlines of the Bredon hills. The place is secluded, the nearest dwelling being a small public-house at the cross roads some mile and a half from the lodge gates.

Medhans Lea is famous for its long straight avenue of beeches, and for other things. Harland, when he signed the lease, was thinking of the avenue of beeches; not of the other things, of which he knew nothing till later.

Harland had made his money by running tea plantations in Assam, and he owned all the virtues and faults of a man who has spent most of his life abroad. The first time, he visited the house he weighed seventeen stone and ended most of his sentences with “don’t yer know?” His ideas could hardly be said to travel on the higher planes of thought, and his chief aim in life was to keep himself down to the seventeen stone. He had a red neck and a blue eye, and was a muscular, inoffensive, good-natured man, with courage to spare, and an excellent voice for accompanying the banjo.

After signing the lease, he found that Medhans Lea needed an immense amount of putting in order and decorating. While this was being done, he came backwards and forwards to the nearest provincial town, where he stopped at a hotel, driving out almost daily to superintend the arrangements of his new habitation. Thus, he had been away for the Christmas and New Year, but about the 15th January he returned to the Red Lion, accompanied by his friends Nare-Jones and Savelsan, who proposed to move with him into his new house during the course of the ensuing week.

The immediate cause of their visit to Medhans Lea on the evening of the 18th was the fact that the billiard table at the Red Lion was not fit, as Harland remarked, to play shinty on, while there was an excellent table just put in at Medhans Lea, where the big billiard-room in the left wing had a wide window with a view down a portion of the beech avenue.

“Hang it!” said Harland, “I wish they would hurry up with the house. The painters aren’t out of it yet, and the people don’t come to the Lodge till Monday.”

“It’s a pity, too,” remarked Savelsan regretfully, “when you think of that table.”

Savelsan was an enthusiast in billiards, who spent all the time he could spare from his business, which happened to be teabroking, at the game. He was the more sorry for the delay, since Harland was one of the few men he knew to whom it was not necessary to give points.

“It’s a ripping table,” returned Harland. “Tell you what,” he added, struck by a happy idea, “I’ll send out Thoms to make things straight for us tomorrow, and we’ll put a case of syphons and a bottle of whisky under the seat of the trap, and drive over for a game after dinner.”

The other two agreed to this arrangement, but in the morning Nare-Jones found himself obliged to run up to London to see about securing a berth as ship’s doctor. It was settled, however, that on his return he was to follow Harland and Savelsan to Medhans Lea.

He got back by the 8.30, entirely delighted, because he had booked a steamer bound for the Persian Gulf and Karachi, and had gained the cheering intelligence that a virulent type of cholera was lying in wait for the advent of the Mecca pilgrims in at any rate two of the chief ports of call, which would give him precisely the experience he desired.

Having dined, and the night being fine, he ordered a dogcart to take him out to Medhans Lea. The moon had just risen by the time he reached the entrance to the avenue, and as he was beginning to feel cold he pulled up, intending to walk to the house. Then he dismissed the boy and cart, a carriage having been ordered to come for the whole party after midnight. Nare-Jones stopped to light a cigar before entering the avenue, then he walked past the empty lodge. He moved briskly in the best possible temper with himself and all the world. The night was still, and his collar up, his feet fell silently on the dry carriage road, while his mind was away on blue water forecasting his voyage on the S.S. Sumatra.

He says he was quite halfway up the avenue before he became conscious of anything unusual. Looking up at the sky, he noticed what a bright, clear night it was, and how sharply defined the outline of the beeches stood out against the vault of heaven. The moon was yet low, and threw netted shadows of bare twigs and branches on the road which ran between black lines of trees in an almost straight vista up to the dead grey face of the house now barely two hundred yards away. Altogether it struck him as forming a pallid picture, etched in like a steel engraving in black, and grey, and white.

He was thinking of this when he was aware of words spoken rapidly in his ear, and he turned half expecting to see someone behind him. No one was visible. He had not caught the words, nor could he define the voice; but a vague conviction of some horrible meaning fixed itself in his consciousness.

The night was very still, ahead of him the house glimmered grey and shuttered in the moonlight. He shook himself, and walked on oppressed by a novel sensation compounded of disgust and childish fear; and still, from behind his shoulder, came the evil, voiceless murmuring.

He admits that he passed the end of the avenue at an amble, and was abreast of a semi-circle of shrubbery, when a small object was thrust out from the shadow of the bushes, and lay in the open light. Though the night was peculiarly still, it fluttered and balanced a moment, as if windblown, then came in skimming flights to his feet. He picked it up and made for the door, which yielded to his hand, and he flung it to and bolted it behind him.

Once in the warmly-lit hall his senses returned, and he waited to recover breath and composure before facing the two men whose voices and laughter came from a room on his right. But the door of the room was thrown open, and the burly figure of Harland in his shirt-sleeves appeared on the threshold.

“Hullo, Jones, that you? Come along!” he said genially.

“Bless me!” exclaimed Nare-Jones irritably, “there’s not a light in any of the windows. It might be a house of the dead!”

Harland stared at him, but all he said was: “Have a whisky-and-soda?”

Savelsan, who was leaning over the billiard table, trying side-strokes with his back to Nare-Jones, added:

“Did you expect us to illuminate the place for you? There’s not a soul in the house but ourselves.”

“Say when,” said Harland, poising the bottle over a glass.

Nare-Jones laid down what he held in his hand on the corner of the billiard table, and took up his glass.

“What in creation’s this?” asked Savelsan.

“I don’t know; the wind blew it to my feet just outside,” replied Nare-Jones, between two long pulls at the whisky-and-soda.

“Blown to your feet?” repeated Savelsan, taking up the thing and weighing it in his hand. “It must be blowing a hurricane then.”

“It isn’t blowing at all,” returned Nare-Jones blankly. “The night is dead calm.”

For the object that had fluttered and rolled so lightly across the turf and gravel was a small battered, metal calf, made of some heavy brass amalgam.

Savelsan looked incredulously into Nare-Jones’ face, and laughed.

“What’s wrong with you? You look queer.”

Nare-Jones laughed too; he was already ashamed of the last ten minutes.

Harland was meantime examining the metal calf.

“It’s a Bengali idol,” he said, “It’s been knocked about a good bit, by Jove! You say it blew out of the shrubbery?”

“Like a bit of paper, I give you my word, though there was not a breath of wind going,” admitted Nare-Jones.

“Seems odd, don’t yer know?” remarked Harland carelessly. “Now you two fellows had better begin; I’ll mark.”

Nare-Jones happened to be in form that night, and Savelsan became absorbed in the delightful difficulty of giving him a sound thrashing.

Suddenly Savelsan paused in his stroke.

“What’s the sin’s that?” he asked.

They stood listening. A thin, broken crying could be heard.

“Sounds like green plover,” remarked Nare-Jones chalking his cue.

“It’s a kitten they’ve shut up somewhere,” said Harland. “That’s a child, and in the deuce of a fright, too,” said Savelsan. “You’d better go and tuck it up in its little bed, Harland,” he added, with a laugh.

Harland opened the door. There could no longer be any doubt about the sounds; the stifled shrieks and thin whimpering told of a child in the extremity of pain and fear.

“It’s upstairs,” said Harland. “I’m going to see.”

Nare-Jones picked up a lamp and followed him.

“I stay here,” said Savelsan sitting down by the fire.

In the hall, the two men stopped and listened again. It is hard to locate a noise, but this seemed to come from the upper landing.

“Poor little beggar!” exclaimed Harland, as he bounded up the staircase. The bedroom doors opening on the square central landing above were all locked, the keys being on the outside. But the crying led them into a side passage which ended in a single room.

“It’s in here, and the door’s locked,” said Nare-Jones. “Call out and see who’s there.”

But Harland was set on business. He flung his weight against the panel, and the door burst open, the lock ricocheting noisily into a corner. As they passed in, the crying ceased abruptly.

Harland stood in the centre of the room, while Nare-Jones held up the light to look round.

“The dickens!” exclaimed Harland exhaustively.

The room was entirely empty.

Not so much as a cupboard broke the smooth surface of the walls, only the two low windows and the door by which they had entered.

“This is the room above the billiard-room, isn’t it?” said Nare-Jones at last.

“Yes. This is the only one I have not had furnished yet. I thought I might—”

He stopped short, for behind them burst out a peal of harsh, mocking laughter, that rang and echoed between the bare walls.

Both men swung round simultaneously, and both caught a glimpse of a tall, thin figure in black, rocking with laughter in the doorway, but when they turned it was gone. They dashed out into the passage and landing. No one was to be seen. The doors were locked as before, and the staircase and hall were vacant.

After making a prolonged search through every corner of the house, they went back to Savelsan in the billiard-room.

“What were you laughing about? What is it anyway?” began Savelsan at once.

“It’s nothing. And we didn’t laugh,” replied Nare-Jones definitely.

“But I heard you,” insisted Savelsan. “And where’s the child?”

“I wish you’d go up and find it,” returned Harland grimly, “We heard the laughing and saw, or thought we saw, a man in black—”

“Something like a priest in a cassock,” put in Nare-Jones.

“Yes, like a priest,” assented Harland, “but as we turned he disappeared.”

Savelsan sat down and gazed from one to the other of his companions.

“The house behaves as if it was haunted,” he remarked; “only there is no such thing as an authenticated ghost outside the experiences of the Psychical Research Society. I’d ask the Society down if I were you, Harland. You never can tell what you may find in these old houses.”

“It’s not an old house,” replied Harland. “It was built somewhere about ’40. I certainly saw that man; and, look to it, Savelsan, I’ll find out who or what he is. That I swear! The English law makes no allowance for ghosts – nor will I.”

“You’ll have your hands full, or I’m mistaken,” exclaimed Savelsan, grinning. “A ghost that laughs and cries in a breath, and rolls battered idols about your front door, is not to be trifled with. The night is young yet – not much past eleven. I vote for a peg all round, and then I’ll finish off Jones.”

Harland, sunk in a fit of sullen abstraction, sat on a settee, and watched them. On a sudden, he said: “It’s turned beastly cold.”

“There’s a beastly smell, you mean,” corrected Savelsan crossly, as he went round the table. He had made a break of forty and did not want to be interrupted. “The draught is from the window.”

“I’ve not noticed it before this evening,” said Harland, as he opened the shutters to make sure.

As he did so, the night air rushed in heavy with the smell as of an old well that has not been uncovered for years, a smell of slime and unwholesome wetness. The lower part of the window was wide open and Harland banged it down.

“It’s abominable!” he said, with an angry sniff. “Enough to give us all typhoid.”

“Only dead leaves,” remarked Nare-Jones. “There are the rotten leaves of twenty winters under the trees and outside this window. I noticed them when we came over on Tuesday.”

“I’ll have them cleared away tomorrow. I wonder how Thoms came to leave this window open,” grumbled Harland, as he closed and bolted the shutter. “What do you say – forty-five?” and he went over to mark it up.

The game went on for some time, and Nare-Jones was lying across the table with the cue poised, when he heard a slight sound behind him. Looking round he saw Harland, his face flushed and angry, passing softly – wonderfully softly for so big a man, Nare-Jones remembers thinking – along the angle of the wall towards the window.

All three men unite in declaring that they were watching the shutter, which opened inwards as if thrust by some furtive hand from outside. At the moment Nare-Jones and Savelsan were standing directly opposite to it on the further side of the table, while Harland crouched behind the shutter intent on giving the intruder a lesson.

As the shutter unfolded to its utmost the two men opposite saw a face pressed against the glass, a furrowed evil face, with a wide laugh perched upon its sinister features.

There was a second of absolute stillness, and Nare-Jones’ eyes met those other eyes with the fascinated horror of a mutual understanding, as all the foul fancies that had pursued him in the avenue poured back into his mind.

With an uncontrollable impulse of resentment, he snatched a billiard ball from the table and flung it with all his strength at the face. The ball crashed through the glass and through the face beyond it! The glass fell shattered, but the face remained for an instant peering and grinning at the aperture, then as Harland sprang forward it was gone.

“The ball went clean through it!” said Savelsan with a gasp.

They crowded to the window, and throwing up the sash, leant out. The dank smell clung about the air, a boat-shaped moon glimmered between the bare branches, and on the white drive beyond the shrubbery the billiard ball could be seen a shining spot under the moon. Nothing more.

“What was it?” asked Harland.

“‘Only a face at the window,’” quoted Savelsan with an awkward attempt at making light of his own scare. “Devilish queer face too, eh, Jones?”

“I wish I’d got him!” returned Harland frowning. “I’m not going to put up with any tricks about the place, don’t yer know?”

“You’d bottle any tramp loafing around,” said Nare-Jones.

Harland looked down at his immense arms outlined in his shirt-sleeves.

“I could that,” he answered. “But this chap – did you hit him?”

“Clean through the face! Or, at any rate, it looked like it,” replied Savelsan, as Nare-Jones stood silent.

Harland shut the shutter and poked up the fire.

“It’s a cursed creepy affair!” he said, “I hope the servants won’t get hold of this nonsense. Ghosts play the very mischief with a house. Though I don’t believe in them myself,” he concluded.

Then Savelsan broke out in an unexpected place.

“Nor do I – as a rule,” he said slowly. “Still, you know it is a sickening idea to think of a spirit condemned to haunt the scene of its crime waiting for the world to die.”

Harland and Nare-Jones looked at him.

“Have a whisky neat,” suggested Harland, soothingly. “I never knew you taken that way before.”

Nare-Jones laughed out. He says he does not know why he laughed nor why he said what follows.

“It’s this way,” he said. “The moment of foul satisfaction is gone for ever, yet for all time the guilty spirit must perpetuate its sin – the sin that brought no lasting reward, only a momentary reward experienced, it may be, centuries ago, but to which still clings the punishment of eternally rehearsing in loneliness, and cold, and gloom, the sin of other days. No punishment can be conceived more horrible. Savelsan is right.”

“I think we’ve had enough about ghosts,” said Harland, cheerfully, “let’s go on. Hurry up, Savelsan.”

“There’s the billiard ball,” said Nare-Jones. “Who’ll go fetch?”

“Not I,” replied Savelsan promptly. “When that – was at the window, I felt sick.”

Nare-Jones nodded. “And I wanted to bolt!” he said emphatically.

Harland faced about from the fire.

“And I, though I saw nothing but the shutter, I – hang it! – don’t yer know – so did I! There was panic in the air for a minute. But I’m shot if I’m afraid now,” he concluded doggedly, “I’ll go.”

His heavy animal face was lit with courage and resolution.

“I’ve spent close upon five thousand pounds over this blessed house first and last, and I’m not going to be done out of it by any infernal spiritualism!” he added, as he took down his coat and pulled it on.

“It’s all in view from the window except those few yards through the shrubbery,” said Savelsan. “Take a stick and go. Though, on second thoughts, I bet you a fiver you don’t.”

“I don’t want a stick,” answered Harland. “I’m not afraid – not now – and I’d meet most men with my hands.”

Nare-Jones opened the shutters again; the sash was low and he pushed the window up, and leant far out.

“It’s not much of a drop,” he said, and slung his legs out over the lintel; but the night was full of the smell, and something else. He leapt back into the room. “Don’t go, Harland!”

Harland gave him a look that set his blood burning.

“What is there, after all, to be afraid of in a ghost?” he asked heavily.

Nare-Jones, sick with the sense of his own newly-born cowardice, yet entirely unable to master it, answered feebly: “I can’t say, but don’t go.”

The words seemed inevitable, though he could have kicked himself for hanging back.

There was a forced laugh from Savelsan.

“Give it up and stop at home, little man,” he said.

Harland merely snorted in reply, and laid his great leg over the window ledge. The other two watched his big, tweed-clad figure as it crossed the grass and disappeared into the shrubbery.

“You and I are in a preposterous funk,” said Savelsan, with unpleasant explicitness, as Harland, whistling loudly, passed into the shadow.

But this was a point on which Nare-Jones could not bring himself to speak at the moment. Then they sat on the sill and waited. The moon shone out clearly above the avenue, which now lay white and undimmed between its crowding trees.

“And he’s whistling because he’s afraid,” continued Savelsan.

“He’s not often afraid,” replied Nare-Jones shortly; “besides, he’s doing what neither of us were very keen on.”

The whistling stopped suddenly. Savelsan said afterwards that he fancied he saw Harland’s huge, grey-clad shoulders, with uplifted arms, rise for a second above the bushes.

Then out of the silence came peal upon peal of that infernal laughter, and, following it, the thin pitiful crying of the child. That too ceased, and an absolute stillness seemed to fall upon the place.

They leant out and listened intently. The minutes passed slowly. In the middle of the avenue, the billiard ball glinted on the gravel, but there was no sign of Harland emerging from the shrubbery path.

“He should be there by now,” said Nare-Jones anxiously.

They listened again; everything was quiet. The ticking of Harland’s big watch on the mantelpiece was distinctly audible.

“This is too much,” said Nare-Jones. “I’m going to see where he is.”

He swung himself out on the grass, and Savelsan called to him to wait, as he was coming also. While Nare-Jones stood waiting, there was a sound as of a pig grunting and rooting among the dead leaves in the shrubbery.

They ran forward into the darkness, and found the shrubbery path. A minute later they came upon something that tossed and snorted and rolled under the shrubs.

“Great Heavens!” cried Nare-Jones, “it’s Harland!”

“He’s breaking somebody’s neck,” added Savelsan, peering into the gloom.

Nare-Jones was himself again. The powerful instinct of his profession – the help-giving instinct, possessed him to the exclusion of every other feeling.

“He’s in a fit – just a fit,” he said in matter of fact tones, as he bent over the struggling form; “that’s all.”

With the assistance of Savelsan, he managed to carry Harland out into the open drive. Harland’s eyes were fearful, and froth hung about his blue puffing lips as they laid him down upon the ground. He rolled over, and lay still, while from the shadows broke another shout of laughter.

“It’s apoplexy. We must get him away from here,” said Nare-Jones. “But, first, I’m going to see what is in those bushes.”

He dashed through the shrubbery, backwards and forwards. He seemed to feel the strength of ten men as he wrenched and tore and trampled the branches, letting in the light of the moon to its darkness. At last he paused, exhausted.

“Of course, there’s nothing,” said Savelsan wearily. “What did you expect after the incident of the billiard ball?”

Together, with awful toil, they bore the big man down the narrow avenue, and at the lodge gates they met the carriage.

•   •   •   •   •

Sometime later, the subject of their common experiences at Medhans Lea was discussed amongst the three men. Indeed, for many weeks Harland had not been in a state to discuss any subject at all, but as soon as he was allowed to do so, he invited Nare-Jones and Savelsan to meet Mr. Flaxman Low, the scientist, whose works on psychology and kindred matters are so well known at the Metropole, to thresh out the matter.

Flaxman Low listened with his usual air of gentle abstraction, from time to time making notes on the back of an envelope. He looked at each narrator in turn as he took up the thread of the story. He understood perfectly that the man who stood furthest from the mystery must inevitably have been the self-centred Savelsan; next in order came Nare-Jones, with sympathetic possibilities, but a crowded brain; closest of all would be big, kindly Harland, with more than one strong animal instinct about him, and whose bulk of matter was evidently permeated by a receptive spirit.

When they had ended, Savelsan turned to Flaxman Low.

“There you have the events, Mr. Low. Now, the question is how to deal with them.”

“Classify them,” replied Flaxman Low.

“The crying would seem to indicate a child,” began Savelsan, ticking off the list on his fingers; “the black figure, the face at the window, and the laughter are naturally connected. So far I can go alone. I conclude that we saw the apparition of a man, possibly a priest, who had during his lifetime ill-treated a child, and whose punishment it is to haunt the scene of his crime.”

“Precisely – the punishment being worked out under conditions which admit of human observation,” returned Flaxman Low. “As for the child the sound of crying was merely part of the mise-en-scène. The child was not there.”

“But that explanation stops short of several points. Now about the suggestive thoughts experienced by my friend, Nare-Jones; what brought on the fit in the case of Mr. Harland, who assures us that he was not suffering from fright or other violent emotion; and what connection can be traced between all these things and the Bengali idol?” Savelsan ended.

“Let us take the Bengali idol first,” said Low. “It is just one of those discrepant particulars which, at first sight, seem wholly irreconcilable with the rest of the phenomena, yet these often form a test point, by which our theories are proved or otherwise.” Flaxman Low took up the metal calf from the table as he spoke. “I should be inclined to connect this with the child. Observe it. It has not been roughly used; it is rubbed and dinted as a plaything usually is. I should say the child may have had Anglo-Indian relations.”

At this, Nare-Jones bent forward, and in his turn examined the idol, while Savelsan smiled his thin, incredulous smile.

“These are ingenious theories,” he said; “but we are really no nearer to facts, I am afraid.”

“The only proof would be an inquiry into the former history of Medhans Lea; if events had happened there which would go to support this theory, why, then – But I cannot supply that information since I never heard of Medhans Lea or the ghost until I entered his room.”

“I know something of Medhans Lea,” put in Nare-Jones. “I found out a good deal about it before I left the place. And I must congratulate Mr. Low on his methods, for his theory tallies in a wonderful manner with the facts of the case. The house was long known to be haunted. It seems that many years ago a lady, the widow of an Indian officer, lived there with her only child, a boy, for whom she engaged a tutor, a dark-looking man, who wore a long black coat like a cassock, and was called ‘the Jesuit’ by the country people.

“One evening, the man took the boy out into the shrubbery. Screams were heard, and when the child was brought in he was found to have lost his reason. He used to cry and shriek incessantly, but was never able to tell what had been done to him as long as he lived. As for this idol, the mother probably brought it with her from India, and the child used it as a toy, perhaps, because he was allowed no others. Hullo!” In handling the calf, Nare-Jones had touched some hidden spring, the head opened, disclosing a small cavity, from which dropped a little ring of blue beads, such as children make. He held it up. “This affords good proof.”

“Yes,” admitted Savelsan grudgingly. “But how about your sensations and Harland’s seizure? You must know what was done to the child, Harland – what did you see in the shrubbery?”

Harland’s florid face assumed a queer pallor.

“I saw something,” replied he hesitatingly, “but I can’t recall what it was. I only remember being possessed by a blind terror, and then nothing more until I recovered consciousness at the hotel next day.”

“Can you account for this, Mr. Low?” asked Nare-Jones, “and there was also my strange notion of the whispering in the avenue.”

“I think so,” replied Flaxman Low. “I believe that the theory of atmospheric influences, which includes the power of environment to reproduce certain scenes and also thoughts, would throw light upon your sensations as well as Mr. Harland’s. Such influences play a far larger part in our everyday experience than we have as yet any idea of.”

There was a silence of a few moments; then Harland spoke:

“I fancy that we have said all that there is to be said upon the matter. We are much obliged to you, Mr. Low. I don’t know how it strikes you other fellows, but, speaking for myself, I have seen enough of ghosts to last me for a very long time.”

“And now,” ended Harland wearily, “if you have no objections, we will pass on to pleasanter subjects.”

NISSA

Albert Delpit

1892

Gaston lighted a cigarette, saying,

“It isn’t a long story, but it is dramatic. Confound it! Whenever I think of it, a chill through every vein. You remember that two years ago I was sent on a mission to Persia to study and describe the province of Irak-Adjemi. I began by settling in Ispahan, and completed my studies in three months. But, had I returned at once, my reputation for thorough scholarship would have been lost. I was almost bored to death, when the governor was changed. The Shah sent, in place of the former one, his cousin Malcom-Khan.”

“The one who has been in France?”

“Yes, and you knew one of the heroes of my story, Mehmed-Aga, who was on the staff of the prince. He has the rank of general or rather, as they call it in Persia, sertip.”

“I remember. A man of about thirty, very elegant and clever, who sometimes supped with us?”

“You can understand my pleasure in meeting him there. There is something particularly charming about these Orientals who have become semi-Parisians. Contact with our civilization seems to refine and soften their primitive barbarism. At the end of a week the sertip and I were inseparable.”

“And the drama?”

“You are in too great of a hurry. I haven’t finished the introduction. One morning I was riding on horseback through the city, lost in reverie, and for the hundredth time enjoying its fairy-like charm. Imagine broad avenues, lined on the right and left by arcades, the whole interspersed with huge plane-trees, watered by ever-flowing rills; farther beyond—”

“A description! My dear fellow, you’re not working for the ministry. You promised me a dramatic story; tell it. Above all, don’t wander into descriptions.”

Gaston sighed, and then continued.

“I was approaching the mosque of Tchechel-Sutoun, when at a street corner, I saw a woman in a litter. Usually Persian women in the street look like bundles. They are veiled, of course, or rather they wear on their heads a sort of curtain which covers their faces. This Persian, on the contrary, displayed a slender, graceful figure. Her eyes were large and full of fire. My horse was walking and slowly followed the litter. I fancied that the stranger looked back once or twice, but as flirtations are extremely improbable occurrences in the East, I paid little heed and had nearly forgotten the meeting when, two days later, I again encountered the litter. This time I was not alone. Mehmed Aga was with me. I recognized the veiled lady at a glance, especially her marvellous eyes, whence flashed a beam of lambent flame. As before, she looked back, but for a longer time. I glanced at the sertip, he pretended not to have noticed anything. We moved on in this way for about ten minutes when the litter turned abruptly toward the Djoulffa bridge, one of the finest pieces of architecture in the world. It has thirty huge arches over the Zenderud, a very changeable river. In the summer you may cross it dry-shod; in the month of November, the time when this adventure occurred, its waves were as swift and violent as a torrent leaping from Alpine glaciers. The Djoulffa bridge is a sort of meeting place for people who go out in the cool air of the evening. I hesitated, therefore, to follow my incognita openly, but she had no scruples. Leaning half way out of the litter she dropped her handkerchief. Oh, these Persian women are quick-witted.”

“And did the sertip say nothing?”

“Not at the moment. He kept silent during the rest of our ride, but twisted his moustache as if his thoughts were far away. ‘Come in,’ he said when we reached the palace; and, after we were smoking in his private room, he added:

“‘My dear fellow, I made no comment just now. But instead of keeping that dainty handkerchief pressed close to your heart, you are going to throw it into the fire.’

“‘What do you mean?’

“‘I mean that you are not to be strangled or stabbed, or flung into the Zenderud. I am in charge of the police in this city, and answerable to the French legation.’

“‘But – ’

“‘Not another word. You Parisians are the most amazing fellows! You always imagine yourselves on the Boulevard des Capucines. We are in the East, my dear boy, and in the East, husbands do not jest. Your stranger is no stranger to me. Her name is Nissa.’

“‘Nissa!’

“‘If the name is charming the husband is not. He is a very rich merchant, famous for his violent temper and his jealousy. His mother was of English origin, but he is thoroughly Oriental in character. He’d kill you like a dog.’

“‘And what is this Ispahan Bluebeard’s name?’

“‘Astoulla. I don’t wish you to make his acquaintance. But you know where he lives. His house is just on the river brink at the end of the bridge.’

“‘And Nissa, what do people say of her?’

“‘Oh, true Parisian! People don’t talk about women in our country, or if they do – well, they are sewed up in a sack and flung into the water.’

“‘What an outrage!’

“‘Oh, we are civilized now,’ replied the sertip cooly. ‘Formerly a live cat would have been put into the bag, also. Terrified by the water, the cat would tear the woman’s face. This is no longer done – at least, not frequently. The result of European influence!’

“This little conversation was rather a wet blanket on my enthusiasm. Besides, Mehmed Aga had the good taste not to push the subject further. I dined with him and in the evening he sent for some musicians who played several airs for us in the fashion of the country. But my thoughts were preoccupied. I still saw the graceful figure bending from the litter, and the little hand which dropped from the handkerchief. A persistent voice murmured in my ear like the refrain of a ballad: ‘Nissa! – Nissa.’ All night long I suffered from nightmare, in which a huge cat named Astoulla scratched my face. I woke at eleven o’clock in the morning, completely disenchanted.

•   •   •   •   •

“While sitting on the terrace that evening a hideously ugly old woman entered the low doorway of the house and asked to see me. As soon as we were alone, she said:

“‘Are you a brave man?’

“I smiled with the fatuity peculiar to men who are asked that question.

“‘I have a proposal to make,’ she added. ‘It is dark. No one will see us. You must follow me. When half way, I shall tie a bandage over your eyes, but you must swear not to try to discover where I am taking you.’

“‘I promise.’

“She made a grimace, which rendered her still more frightful. I had consented off hand, urged by an irresistible impulse. Daylight had dispelled my fears, the nightmare had gradually faded from my mind, and I constantly heard the voice murmuring in my ear: ‘Nissa! Nissa!’ The old woman evidently came from her. I went into my room and took a small revolver. Five minutes after we were on our way. It was crazy, utterly absurd, I am perfectly aware of that. But there are some absurdities concerning which we do not reason. The unknown Nissa exerted some mysterious power over me. I had not even seen her, yet I ardently longed for her presence. Her sparkling eyes had fired my heart.

“When we reached the Djoulffa bridge the old woman stopped, and, drawing a handkerchief from her pocket, tied it firmly over my eyes. I could see nothing; then she seized my hand, and I let her lead me. By the cooler air I guessed that we were crossing the river; then I heard the sound of voices at the right and left. It never entered my mind that I might be noticed by these passing pedestrians. I was completely absorbed in my dream, thinking of the young Persian’s graceful figure, delicate little hand, and glowing eyes. After a few minutes’ walk the old woman turned toward the right, but we did not leave the banks of the Zenderud. I heard its tumultuous waves dashing against the arches of the bridge. At last my guide stopped; I heard the creaking of a key, and the old woman said under her breath:

“‘Go up.’

“We mounted only five steps, then my feet pressed a thick, soft carpet. At the same time the bandage was snatched away. I found myself in a somewhat small room, dimly lighted by a copper lamp. Usually, in Persia, the walls are bare. Here, on the contrary, they were draped with yellow cashmere. Perfumes were burning in a brazier – the acrid Oriental perfumes which intoxicate like the fumes of old wine. Against the background of yellow cashmere on the walls hung musical instruments, the nefir which resembles our hautboy, timbals, two kematches, a sort of viol, and, here and there, weapons interspersed with necklaces. Outside was the dull, rhythmic beat of the waves of the river. Drawing aside the portiere, I saw that it washed the very walls of the house. Almost instantly I heard a slight, rustling noise, and turning saw – Nissa. I was fairly dazzled. She was probably seventeen or eighteen. Her thick black hair, falling on her neck and shoulders, reminded one of the raven locks of Regnault’s Salome. Her face, somewhat creamy in tint, resembled mother of pearl, but I was especially struck by the contrast between her dazzling white teeth and very black eyes. The lashes, lids, and lips were painted. She gazed calmly at me with her sparkling eyes, then took my hand and leading me to a sofa, said:

“‘My husband has gone to Teheran; we can have a little fun.’

“She spoke in English, with a marked guttural accent, then tapped with a copper ring on a small drum and coffee was served. Afterwards, she began to talk in low, rapid tones, telling me that she was terribly bored and had noticed me at once. Meanwhile her glances grew more tender, her hand gently pressed mine. Just at that moment there was a noise in the next room. She sprang up, trembling from head to foot. Her graceful advances, the caress, the sudden terror that succeeded each other so rapidly that I had not had time to analyze my own impressions. Still with the same swift, feline grace, she darted to the wall, snatched a small, sharp dagger, and slipped it up her sleeve. Then, turning to me with an energetic gesture, she whispered, ‘Wait!’ and vanished behind the heavy drapery.

•   •   •   •   •

“A vague sense of anxiety stole over me. I remembered the sertips warnings. Perhaps I had been a little imprudent. Suddenly the noise in the next room commenced again; I heard voices, a short struggle – silence followed. All at once the portiere was raised and Nissa appeared again. She was very pale, so pale that the mother of pearl tints in her complexion blended with the pearl necklace she wore. She stood half leaning against the wall, like a white statue relieved against the yellow background of the drapery. Then she advanced a few paces into the apartment, smiling: her hands and the knife were red.

“‘Great Heavens! What has happened?’

“‘Nothing,’ she replied, flung the knife into a corner, and added quietly:

“‘It was my husband. He would have killed us; I preferred to anticipate him. Come and help me throw the body into the water.’

“I stood motionless, gazing at her in horror. She looked at me, but her eyes expressed the most absolute contempt, and I shall never forget the tone in which she said:

“‘Oh! how nervous these Frenchmen are!’

“Shrugging her shoulders, she called a female servant and told her to open the window. Then, as if they were doing the most everyday thing, the two lifted the corpse and flung it into the water, which swept it away. In truth, the adventure was becoming too Oriental for a Parisian. I confess that I was overwhelmed with frantic terror, and waiting for nothing more, rushed off like a madman. How did I go? I have actually no idea. At the end of ten minutes I found myself again in the city, through which I rushed at full speed as if pursued by a legion of fiends.

“On reaching home I double-locked my door, execrating Nissa and all the houris of the Oriental world.

•   •   •   •   •

“What a night I spent! I did not sleep until the morning and then fell into a leaden stupor. When I awoke, the sun, already high in the heavens, was pouring floods of light into my room. I felt overwhelmed by a sort of moral paralysis. A man does not disappear without the interference of justice. Nissa did not even conceal her deed; the servant had seen and helped her. I should be implicated in the affair, and the bare thought of being mixed up with such a crime made my hair bristle with horror. Should I confide the whole matter to the French Minister? Unfortunately he had just obtained leave of absence, and the first Secretary of Legation was too young for me to apply to him. In any case my whole future was destroyed. I remained all day a prey to the keenest anxiety, not daring to leave the house. Evening came before I had formed any plan, and still there was no news of Nissa. Had she been arrested? What had become of her? I went to bed early, but could not sleep. The second day, unable to endure the situation longer, I resolved so visit the sertip. Anything would be preferable to the uncertainty in which I was living. I felt sure that Mehmed-Aga would not go out before breakfast, so I reached the palace at noon. I was told that he was in his office as usual and, after being announced, I entered. The sertip was peacefully smoking his chibouque.

“‘Ah, is it you?’ he said. ‘Are you well?’

“‘Very well. thank you.’

“‘By the way,’ he added, ‘have you heard the news?’

“‘The news – the news? No, I – I don’t know anything.’

“‘You remember the rich merchant, Astoulla?’

“‘Remember As – ’

“‘Why yes, the husband of Nissa, of whom we were speaking.’

“I felt the blood mount to the roots of my hair. It was all over, the crime was known, and I dared not think of the end of the adventure. I stammered an almost unintelligible ‘yes.’

“‘Poor fellow!’ continued the sertip ‘He has suddenly disappeared.’

“I felt a curious choking sensation in the throat but managed to answer:

“‘What! he has – he has disappeared? Why! That’s very – very queer.’

“‘Yes, very queer.’

“And the sertip looked intently at me. I could bear his gaze no longer, and was on the point of confessing everything, when he said:

“‘He was going to Teheran, and all at once he vanished. Nothing more has been heard of him.’

“For the second time the sertip looked intently at me. A brief silence followed. Then, puffing a cloud of smoke from his chibouque, he added with the most peaceful tranquility:

“‘God is great!’”

THE FOREIGNER

Sarah Orne Jewett

1900

CHAPTER 1

One evening, at the end of August, in Dunnet Landing, I heard Mrs. Todd’s firm footstep crossing the small front entry outside my door, and her conventional cough which served as a herald’s trumpet, or a plain New England knock, in the harmony of our fellowship.

“Oh, please come in!” I cried, for it had been so still in the house that I supposed my friend and hostess had gone to see one of her neighbors. The first cold northeasterly storm of the season was blowing hard outside. Now and then there was a dash of great raindrops and a flick of wet lilac leaves against the window, but I could hear that the sea was already stirred to its dark depths, and the great rollers were coming in heavily against the shore. One might well believe that Summer was coming to a sad end that night, in the darkness and rain and sudden access of autumnal cold. It seemed as if there must be danger offshore among the outer islands.

“Oh, there!” exclaimed Mrs. Todd, as she entered. “I know nothing ain’t ever happened out to Green Island since the world began, but I always do worry about mother in these great gales. You know those tidal waves occur sometimes down to the West Indies, and I get dwellin’ on ’em so I can’t set still in my chair, not knit a common row to a stocking. William might get mooning, out in his small bo’t, and not observe how the sea was making, an’ meet with some accident. Yes, I thought i’d come in and set with you if you wa’n’t busy. No, I never feel any concern about ’em in winter ’cause then they’re prepared, and all ashore and everything snug. William ought to keep help, as I tell him; yes, he ought to keep help.”

I hastened to reassure my anxious guest by saying that Elijah Tilley had told me in the afternoon, when I came along the shore past the fish houses, that Johnny Bowden and the Captain were out at Green Island; he had seen them beating up the bay, and thought they must have put into Burnt Island cove, but one of the lobstermen brought word later that he saw them hauling out at Green Island as he came by, and Captain Bowden pointed ashore and shook his head to say that he did not mean to try to get in. “The old Miranda just managed it, but she will have to stay at home a day or two and put new patches in her sail,” I ended, not without pride in so much circumstantial evidence.

Mrs. Todd was alert in a moment. “Then they’ll all have a very pleasant evening,” she assured me, apparently dismissing all fears of tidal waves and other sea-going disasters. “I was urging Alick Bowden to go ashore some day and see mother before cold weather. He’s her own nephew; she sets a great deal by him. And Johnny’s a great chum o’ William’s; don’t you know the first day we had Johnny out ’long of us, he took an’ give William his money to keep for him that he’d been a-savin’, and William showed it to me an’ was so affected, I thought he was goin’ to shed tears? ’Twas a dollar an’ eighty cents; yes, they’ll have a beautiful evenin’ all together, and like’s not the sea’ll be flat as a doorstep come morning.”

I had drawn a large wooden rocking-chair before the fire, and Mrs. Todd was sitting there jogging herself a little, knitting fast, and wonderfully placid of countenance. There came a fresh gust of wind and rain, and we could feel the small wooden house rock and hear it creak as if it were a ship at sea.

“Lord, hear the great breakers!” exclaimed Mrs. Todd. “How they pound! – there, there! I always run of an idea that the sea knows anger these nights and gets full o’ fight. I can hear the rote o’ them old black ledges way down the thoroughfare. Calls up all those stormy verses in the Book o’ Psalms; David he knew how old sea-goin’ folks have to quake at the heart.”

I thought as I had never thought before of such anxieties. The families of sailors and coastwise adventurers by sea must always be worrying about somebody, this side of the world or the other. There was hardly one of Mrs. Todd’s elder acquaintances, men or women, who had not at some time or other made a sea voyage, and there was often no news until the voyagers themselves came back to bring it.

“There’s a roaring high overhead, and a roaring in the deep sea,” said Mrs. Todd solemnly, “and they battle together nights like this. No, I couldn’t sleep; some women folks always goes right to bed an’ to sleep, so’s to forget, but ’taint my way. Well, it’s a blessin’ we don’t all feel alike; there’s hardly any of our folks at sea to worry about, nowadays, but I can’t help my feelin’s, an’ I got thinking of mother all alone, if William had happened to be out lobsterin’ and couldn’t make the cove gettin’ back.”

“They will have a pleasant evening,” I repeated. “Captain Bowden is the best of good company.”

“Mother’ll make him some pancakes for his supper, like’s not,” said Mrs. Todd, clicking her knitting needles and giving a pull at her yarn. Just then the old cat pushed open the unlatched door and came straight toward her mistress’s lap. She was regarded severely as she stepped about and turned on the broad expanse, and then made herself into a round cushion of fur, but was not openly admonished. There was another great blast of wind overhead, and a puff of smoke came down the chimney.

“This makes me think o’ the night Mis’ Cap’n Tolland died,” said Mrs. Todd, half to herself. “Folks used to say these gales only blew when somebody’s a-dyin’, or the devil was a-comin’ for his own, but the worst man I ever knew died a real pretty mornin’ in June.”

“You have never told me any ghost stories,” said I; and such was the gloomy weather and the influence of the night that I was instantly filled with reluctance to have this suggestion followed. I had not chosen the best of moments; just before I spoke we had begun to feel as cheerful as possible. Mrs. Todd glanced doubtfully at the cat and then at me, with a strange absent look, and I was really afraid that she was going to tell me something that would haunt my thoughts on every dark stormy night as long as I lived.

“Never mind now; tell me to-morrow by daylight, Mrs. Todd,” I hastened to say, but she still looked at me full of doubt and deliberation.

“Ghost stories!” she answered. “Yes, I don’t know but I’ve heard a plenty of ’em first an’ last. I was just sayin’ to myself that this is like the night Mis’ Cap’n Tolland died. ’Twas the great line storm in September all of thirty, or maybe forty, year ago. I ain’t one that keeps much account o’ time.”

“Tolland? That’s a name I have never heard in Dunnet,” I said.

“Then you haven’t looked well about the old part o’ the buryin’ ground, no’theast corner,” replied Mrs. Todd. “All their women folks lies there; the sea’s got most o’ the men. They were a known family o’ shipmasters in early times. Mother had a mate, Ellen Tolland, that she mourns to this day; died right in her bloom with quick consumption, but the rest o’ that family was all boys but one, and older than she, an’ they lived hard seafarin’ lives an’ all died hard. They were called very smart seamen. I’ve heard that when the youngest went into one o’ the old shippin’ houses in Boston, the head o’ the firm called out to him: ‘Did you say Tolland from Dunnet? That’s recommendation enough for any vessel!’ There was some o’ them old shipmasters as tough as iron, an’ they had the name o’ usin’ their crews very severe, but there wa’n’t a man that wouldn’t rather sign with ’em an’ take his chances, than with the slack ones that didn’t know how to meet accidents.”

CHAPTER 2

There was so long a pause, and Mrs. Todd still looked so absent-minded, that I was afraid she and the cat were growing drowsy together before the fire, and I should have no reminiscences at all. The wind struck the house again, so that we both started in our chairs and Mrs. Todd gave a curious, startled look at me. The cat lifted her head and listened too, in the silence that followed, while after the wind sank we were more conscious than ever of the awful roar of the sea. The house jarred now and then, in a strange, disturbing way.

“Yes, they’ll have a beautiful evening out to the island,” said Mrs. Todd again; but she did not say it gaily. I had not seen her before in her weaker moments.

“Who was Mrs. Captain Tolland?” I asked eagerly, to change the current of our thoughts.

“I never knew her maiden name; if I ever heard it, I’ve gone an’ forgot; ’twould mean nothing to me,” answered Mrs. Todd.

“She was a foreigner, an’ he met with her out in the Island o’ Jamaica. They said she’d been left a widow with property. Land knows what become of it; she was French born, an’ her first husband was a Portugee, or somethin’.”

I kept silence now, a poor and insufficient question being worse than none.

“Cap’n John Tolland was the least smartest of any of ’em, but he was full smart enough, an’ commanded a good brig at the time, in the sugar trade; he’d taken out a cargo o’ pine lumber to the islands from somewheres up the river, an’ had been headin’ for home in the port o’ Kingston, an’ had gone ashore that afternoon for his papers, an’ remained afterwards ’long of three friends o’ his, all shipmasters. They was havin’ their suppers together in a tavern; ’twas late in the evenin’ an’ they was more lively than usual, an’ felt boyish; and over opposite was another house full o’ company, real bright and pleasant lookin’, with a lot o’ lights, an’ they heard somebody singin’ very pretty to a guitar. They wa’n’t in no go-to-meetin’ condition, an’ one of ’em, he slapped the table an’ said, ‘Le’s go over ’n’ hear that lady sing!’ an’ over they all went, good honest sailors, but three sheets in the wind, and stepped in as if they was invited, an’ made their bows inside the door, an’ asked if they could hear the music; they were all respectable well-dressed men. They saw the woman that had the guitar, an’ there was a company a-listenin’, regular highbinders all of ’em; an’ there was a long table all spread out with big candlesticks like little trees o’ light, and a sight o’ glass an’ silver ware; an’ part o’ the men was young officers in uniform, an’ the colored folks was steppin’ round servin’ ’em, an’ they had the lady singin’. ’Twas a wasteful scene, an’ a loud talkin’ company, an’ though they was three sheets in the wind themselves there wa’n’t one o’ them cap’ns but had sense to perceive it. The others had pushed back their chairs, an’ their decanters an’ glasses was standin’ thick about, an’ they was teasin’ the one that was singin’ as if they’d just got her in to amuse ’em. But they quieted down; one o’ the young officers had beautiful manners, an’ invited the four cap’ns to join ’em, very polite; ’twas a kind of public house, and after they’d all heard another song, he come to consult with ’em whether they wouldn’t git up and dance a hornpipe or somethin’ to the lady’s music.

They was all elderly men an’ shipmasters, and owned property; two of ’em was church members in good standin’,” continued Mrs. Todd loftily, “an’ they wouldn’t lend theirselves to no such kick-shows as that, an’ spite o’ bein’ three sheets in the wind, as I have once observed, they waved aside the tumblers of wine the young officer was pourin’ out for ’em so freehanded, and said they should rather be excused. An’ when they all rose, still very dignified, as I’ve been well informed, and made their partin’ bows and was goin’ out, them young sports got round ’em an’ tried to prevent ’em, and they had to push an’ strive considerable, but out they come. There was this Cap’n Tolland and two Cap’n Bowdens, and the fourth was my own father.” (Mrs. Todd spoke slowly, as if to impress the value of her authority.) “Two of them was very religious, upright men, but they would have their night off sometimes, all o’ them old-fashioned cap’ns, when they was free of business and ready to leave port.

“An’ they went back to their tavern an’ got their bills paid, an’ set down kind o’ mad with everybody by the front window, mistrusting some o’ their tavern charges, like’s not, by that time, an’ when they got tempered down, they watched the house over across, where the party was.

“There was a kind of a grove o’ trees between the house an’ the road, an’ they heard the guitar a-goin’ an’ a-stoppin’ short by turns, and pretty soon somebody began to screech, an’ they saw a white dress come runnin’ out through the bushes, an’ tumbled over each other in their haste to offer help; an’ out she come, with the guitar, cryin’ into the street, and they just walked off four square with her amongst ’em, down toward the wharves where they felt more to home. They couldn’t make out at first what ’twas she spoke, – Cap’n Lorenzo Bowden was well acquainted in Havre an’ Bordeaux, an’ spoke a poor quality o’ French, an’ she knew a little mite o’ English, but not much; and they come somehow or other to discern that she was in real distress. Her husband and her children had died o’ yellow fever; they’d all come up to Kingston from one o’ the far Wind’ard Islands to get passage on a steamer to France, an’ a negro had stole their money off her husband while he lay sick o’ the fever, an’ she had been befriended some, but the folks that knew about her had died too; it had been a dreadful run o’ the fever that season, an’ she fell at last to playin’ an’ singin’ for hire, and for what money they’d throw to her round them harbor houses.

“’Twas a real hard case, an’ when them cap’ns made out about it, there wa’n’t one that meant to take leave without helpin’ of her. They was pretty mellow, an’ whatever they might lack o’ prudence they more’n made up with charity: they didn’t want to see nobody abused, an’ she was sort of a pretty woman, an’ they stopped in the street then an’ there an’ drew lots who should take her aboard, bein’ all bound home. An’ the lot fell to Cap’n Jonathan Bowden who did act discouraged; his vessel had but small accommodations, though he could stow a big freight, an’ she was a dreadful slow sailer through bein’ square as a box, an’ his first wife, that was livin’ then, was a dreadful jealous woman. He threw himself right onto the mercy o’ Cap’n Tolland.”

Mrs. Todd indulged herself for a short time in a season of calm reflection.

“I always thought they’d have done better, and more reasonable, to give her some money to pay her passage home to France, or wherever she may have wanted to go,” she continued.

I nodded and looked for the rest of the story.

“Father told mother,” said Mrs. Todd confidentially, “that Cap’n Jonathan Bowden an’ Cap’n John Tolland had both taken a little more than usual; I wouldn’t have you think, either, that they both wasn’t the best o’ men, an’ they was solemn as owls, and argued the matter between ’em, an’ waved aside the other two when they tried to put their oars in. An’ spite o’ Cap’n Tolland’s bein’ a settled old bachelor they fixed it that he was to take the prize on his brig; she was a fast sailer, and there was a good spare cabin or two where he’d sometimes carried passengers, but he’d filled ’em with bags o’ sugar on his own account an’ was loaded very heavy beside. He said he’d shift the sugar an’ get along somehow, an’ the last the other three cap’ns saw of the party was Cap’n John handing the lady into his bo’t, guitar and all, an’ off they all set tow’ds their ships with their men rowin’ ’em in the bright moonlight down to Port Royal where the anchorage was, an’ where they all lay’ goin’ out with the tide an’ mornin’ wind at break o’ day. An’ the others thought they heard music of the guitar, two o’ the bo’ts kept well together, but it may have come from another source.”

“Well; and then?” I asked eagerly after a pause. Mrs. Todd was almost laughing aloud over her knitting and nodding emphatically. We had forgotten all about the noise of the wind and sea.

“Lord bless you! he come sailing into Portland with his sugar, all in good time, an’ they stepped right afore a justice o’ the peace, and Cap’n John Tolland come paradin’ home to Dunnet Landin’ a married man. He owned one o’ them thin, narrow-lookin’ houses with one room each side o’ the front door, and two slim black spruces spindlin’ up against the front windows to make it gloomy inside. There was no horse nor cattle of course, though he owned pasture land, an’ you could see rifts o’ light right through the barn as you drove by. And there was a good excellent kitchen, but his sister reigned over that; she had a right to two rooms, and took the kitchen an’ a bedroom that led out of it; an’ bein’ given no rights in the kitchen had angered the cap’n so they weren’t on no kind o’ speakin’ terms. He preferred his old brig for comfort, but now and then, between voyages he’d come home for a few days, just to show he was master over his part o’ the house, and show Eliza she couldn’t commit no trespass.

“They stayed a little while; ’twas pretty spring weather, an’ I used to see Cap’n John rollin’ by with his arms full o’ bundles from the store, lookin’ as pleased and important as a boy; an’ then they went right off to sea again, an’ was gone a good many months. Next time he left her to live there alone, after they’d stopped at home together some weeks, an’ they said she suffered from bein’ at sea, but some said that the owners wouldn’t have a woman aboard. ’Twas before father was lost on that last voyage of his, an’ he said mother went up once or twice to see them. Father said there wa’n’t a mite o’ harm in her, but somehow or other a sight o’ prejudice arose; it may have been caused by the remarks of Eliza an’ her feelin’s tow’ds her brother. Even my mother had no regard for Eliza Tolland. But mother asked the cap’n’s wife to come with her one evenin’ to a social circle that was down to the meetin’-house vestry, so she’d get acquainted a little, an’ she appeared very pretty until they started to have some singin’ to the melodeon. Mari’ Harris an’ one o’ the younger Caplin girls undertook to sing a duet, an’ they sort o’ flatted, an’ she put her hands right up to her ears, and give a little squeal, an’ went quick as could be an’ give ’em the right notes, for she could read the music like plain print, an’ made ’em try it over again. She was real willin’ an’ pleasant, but that didn’t suit, an’ she made faces when they got it wrong. An’ then there fell a dead calm, an’ we was all settin’ round prim as dishes, an’ my mother, that never expects ill feelin’, asked her if she wouldn’t sing somethin’, an up she got – poor creatur’, it all seems so different to me now – an’ sung a lovely little song standin’ in the floor; it seemed to have something gay about it that kept a-repeatin’, an’ nobody could help keepin’ time, an’ all of a sudden she looked round at the tables and caught up a tin plate that somebody’d fetched a Washin’ton pie in, an’ she begun to drum on it with her fingers like one o’ them tambourines, an’ went right on singin’ faster an’ faster, and next minute she begun to dance a little pretty dance between the verses, just as light and pleasant as a child. You couldn’t help seein’ how pretty ’twas; we all got to trottin’ a foot, an’ some o’ the men clapped their hands quite loud, a-keepin’ time, ’twas so catchin’, an’ seemed so natural to her. There wa’n’t one of ’em but enjoyed it; she just tried to do her part, an’ some urged her on, till she stopped with a little twirl of her skirts an’ went to her place again by mother. And I can see mother now, reachin’ over an’ smilin’ an’ pattin’ her hand.

“But next day there was an awful scandal goin’ in the parish, an’ Mari’ Harris reproached my mother to her face, an’ I never wanted to see her since, but I’ve had to a good many times. I said Mis’ Tolland didn’t intend no impropriety – I reminded her of David’s dancin’ before the Lord; but she said such a man as David never would have thought o’ dancin’ right there in the Orthodox vestry, and she felt I spoke with irreverence.

“And next sunday Mis’ Tolland come walkin’ into our meeting, but I must say she acted like a cat in a strange garret, and went right out down the aisle with her head in air, from the pew Deacon Caplin had showed her into. ’Twas just in the beginning of the long prayer. I wish she’d stayed through, whatever her reasons were. Whether she’d expected somethin’ different, or misunderstood some o’ the pastor’s remarks, or what ’twas, I don’t really feel able to explain, but she kind o’ declared war, at least folks thought so, an’ war ’twas from that time. I see she was cryin’, or had been, as she passed by me; perhaps bein’ in meetin’ was what had power to make her feel homesick and strange.

“Cap’n John Tolland was away fittin’ out; that next week he come home to see her and say farewell. He was lost with his ship in the Straits of Malacca, and she lived there alone in the old house a few months longer till she died. He left her well off; ’twas said he hid his money about the house and she knew where ’twas. Oh, I expect you’ve heard that story told over an’ over twenty times, since you’ve been here at the Landin’?”

“Never one word,” I insisted.

“It was a good while ago,” explained Mrs. Todd, with reassurance. “Yes, it all happened a great while ago.”

CHAPTER 3

At this moment, with a sudden flaw of the wind, some wet twigs outside blew against the window panes and made a noise like a distressed creature trying to get in. I started with sudden fear, and so did the cat, but Mrs. Todd knitted away and did not even look over her shoulder.

“She was a good-looking woman; yes, I always thought Mis’ Tolland was good-looking, though she had, as was reasonable, a sort of foreign cast, and she spoke very broken English, no better than a child. She was always at work about her house, or settin’ at a front window with her sewing; she was a beautiful hand to embroider. Sometimes, summer evenings, when the windows was open, she’d set an’ drum on her guitar, but I don’t know as I ever heard her sing but once after the cap’n went away. She appeared very happy about havin’ him, and took on dreadful at partin’ when he was down here on the wharf, going back to Portland by boat to take ship for that last v’y’ge. He acted kind of ashamed, Cap’n John did; folks about here ain’t so much accustomed to show their feelings. The whistle had blown an’ they was waitin’ for him to get aboard, an’ he was put to it to know what to do and treated her very affectionate in spite of all impatience; but mother happened to be there and she went an’ spoke, and I remember what a comfort she seemed to be. Mis’ Tolland clung to her then, and she wouldn’t give a glance after the boat when it had started, though the captain was very eager a-wavin’ to her. She wanted mother to come home with her an’ wouldn’t let go her hand, and mother had just come in to stop all night with me an’ had plenty o’ time ashore, which didn’t always happen, so they walked off together, an’ ’twas some considerable time before she got back.

“‘I want you to neighbor with that poor lonesome creatur’,’ says mother to me, lookin’ reproachful. ‘She’s a stranger in a strange land,’ says mother. ‘I want you to make her have a sense that somebody feels kind to her.’

“‘Shy, since that time she flaunted out o’ meetin’, folks have felt she liked other ways better’n our’n,’ says I. I was provoked, because I’d had a nice supper ready, an’ mother’d let it wait so long ’twas spoiled. ‘I hope you’ll like your supper!’ I told her. I was dreadful ashamed afterward of speakin’ so to mother.

“‘What consequence is my supper?’ says she to me; mother can be very stern – ‘or your comfort or mine, beside letting a foreign person an’ a stranger feel so desolate; she’s done the best a woman could do in her lonesome place, and she asks nothing of anybody except a little common kindness. Think if ’twas you in a foreign land!’

“And mother set down to drink her tea, an’ I set down humbled enough over by the wall to wait till she finished. An’ I did think it all over, an’ next day I never said nothin’, but I put on my bonnet, and went to see Mis’ Cap’n Tolland, if ’twas only for mother’s sake. ’Twas about three quarters of a mile up the road here, beyond the schoolhouse. I forgot to tell you that the cap’n had bought out his sister’s right at three or four times what ’twas worth, to save trouble, so they’d got clear o’ her, an’ I went round into the side yard sort o’ friendly an’ sociable, rather than stop an’ deal with the knocker an’ the front door. It looked so pleasant an’ pretty I was glad I come; she had set a little table for supper, though ’twas still early, with a white cloth on it, right out under an old apple tree close by the house. I noticed ’twas same as with me at home, there was only one plate. She was just coming out with a dish; you couldn’t see the door nor the table from the road.

“In the few weeks she’d been there she’d got some bloomin’ pinks an’ other flowers next the doorstep. Somehow it looked as if she’d known how to make it homelike for the cap’n. She asked me to set down; she was very polite, but she looked very mournful, and I spoke of mother, an’ she put down her dish and caught holt o’ me with both hands an’ said my mother was an angel. When I see the tears in her eyes ’twas all right between us, and we were always friendly after that, and mother had us come out and make a little visit that summer; but she come a foreigner and she went a foreigner, and never was anything but a stranger among our folks. She taught me a sight o’ things about herbs I never knew before nor since; she was well acquainted with the virtues o’ plants. She’d act awful secret about some things too, an’ used to work charms for herself sometimes, an’ some o’ the neighbors told to an’ fro after she died that they knew enough not to provoke her, but ’twas all nonsense; ’tis the believin’ in such things that causes ’em to be any harm, an’ so I told ’em,” confided Mrs. Todd contemptuously. “That first night I stopped to tea with her she’d cooked some eggs with some herb or other sprinkled all through, and ’twas she that first led me to discern mushrooms; an’ she went right down on her knees in my garden here when she saw I had my different officious herbs. Yes, ’twas she that learned me the proper use o’ parsley too; she was a beautiful cook.”

Mrs. Todd stopped talking, and rose, putting the cat gently in the chair, while she went away to get another stick of apple-tree wood. It was not an evening when one wished to let the fire go down, and we had a splendid bank of bright coals. I had always wondered where Mrs. Todd had got such an unusual knowledge of cookery, of the varieties of mushrooms, and the use of sorrel as a vegetable, and other blessings of that sort. I had long ago learned that she could vary her omelettes like a child of France, which was indeed a surprise in Dunnet Landing.

CHAPTER 4

All these revelations were of the deepest interest, and I was ready with a question as soon as Mrs. Todd came in and had well settled the fire and herself and the cat again.

“I wonder why she never went back to France, after she was left alone?”

“She come here from the French islands,” explained Mrs. Todd. “I asked her once about her folks, an’ she said they were all dead; ’twas the fever took ’em. She made this her home, lonesome as ’twas; she told me she hadn’t been in France since she was ‘so small,’ and measured me off a child o’ six. She’d lived right out in the country before, so that part wa’n’t unusual to her. Oh yes, there was something very strange about her, and she hadn’t been brought up in high circles nor nothing o’ that kind. I think she’d been really pleased to have the cap’n marry her an’ give her a good home, after all she’d passed through, and leave her free with his money an’ all that. An’ she got over bein’ so strange-looking to me after a while, but ’twas a very singular expression: she wore a fixed smile that wa’n’t a smile; there wa’n’t no light behind it, same’s a lamp can’t shine if it ain’t lit. I don’t know just how to express it, ’twas a sort of made countenance.”

One could not help thinking of Sir Philip Sidney’s phrase, “A made countenance, between simpering and smiling.”

“She took it hard, havin’ the captain go off on that last voyage,” Mrs. Todd went on. “She said somethin’ told her when they was partin’ that he would never come back. He was lucky to speak a home-bound ship this side o’ the Cape o’ Good Hope, an’ got a chance to send her a letter, an’ that cheered her up. You often felt as if you was dealin’ with a child’s mind, for all she had so much information that other folks hadn’t. I was a sight younger than I be now, and she made me imagine new things, and I got interested watchin’ her an’ findin’ out what she had to say, but you couldn’t get to no affectionateness with her. I used to blame me sometimes; we used to be real good comrades goin’ off for an afternoon, but I never give her a kiss till the day she laid in her coffin and it come to my heart there wa’n’t no one else to do it.”

“And Captain Tolland died,” I suggested after a while.

“Yes, the cap’n was lost,” said Mrs. Todd, “and of course word didn’t come for a good while after it happened. The letter come from the owners to my uncle, Cap’n Lorenzo Bowden, who was in charge of Cap’n Tolland’s affairs at home, and he come right up for me an’ said I must go with him to the house. I had known what it was to be a widow, myself, for near a year, an’ there was plenty o’ widow women along this coast that the sea had made desolate, but I never saw a heart break as I did then.

“’Twas this way: we walked together along the road, me an’ uncle Lorenzo. You know how it leads straight from just above the schoolhouse to the brook bridge, and their house was just this side o’ the brook bridge on the left hand; the cellar’s there now, and a couple or three good-sized gray birches growin’ in it. And when we come near enough I saw that the best room, this way, where she most never set, was all lighted up, and the curtains up so that the light shone bright down the road, and as we walked, those lights would dazzle and dazzle in my eyes, and I could hear the guitar a-goin’, an’ she was singin’. She heard our steps with her quick ears and come running to the door with her eyes a-shinin’, an’ all that set look gone out of her face, an’ begun to talk French, gay as a bird, an’ shook hands and behaved very pretty an’ girlish, sayin’ ’twas her fete day. I didn’t know what she meant then. And she had gone an’ put a wreath o’ flowers on her hair an’ wore a handsome gold chain that the cap’n had given her; an’ there she was, poor creatur’, makin’ believe have a party all alone in her best room; ’twas prim enough to discourage a person, with too many chairs set close to the walls, just as the cap’n’s mother had left it, but she had put sort o’ long garlands on the walls, droopin’ very graceful, and a sight of green boughs in the corners, till it looked lovely, and all lit up with a lot o’ candles.”

“Oh dear!” I sighed. “Oh, Mrs. Todd, what did you do?”

“She beheld our countenances,” answered Mrs. Todd solemnly. “I expect they was telling everything plain enough, but Cap’n Lorenzo spoke the sad words to her as if he had been her father; and she wavered a minute and then over she went on the floor before we could catch hold of her, and then we tried to bring her to herself and failed, and at last we carried her upstairs, an’ I told uncle to run down and put out the lights, and then go fast as he could for Mrs. Begg, being very experienced in sickness, an’ he so did. I got off her clothes and her poor wreath, and I cried as I done it. We both stayed there that night, and the doctor said ’twas a shock when he come in the morning; he’d been over to Black Island an’ had to stay all night with a very sick child.”

“You said that she lived alone some time after the news came,” I reminded Mrs. Todd then.

“Oh yes, dear,” answered my friend sadly, “but it wa’n’t what you’d call livin’; no, it was only dyin’, though at a snail’s pace. She never went out again those few months, but for a while she could manage to get about the house a little, and do what was needed, an’ I never let two days go by without seein’ her or hearin’ from her. She never took much notice as I came an’ went except to answer if I asked her anything. Mother was the one who gave her the only comfort.”

“What was that?” I asked softly.

“She said that anybody in such trouble ought to see their minister, mother did, and one day she spoke to Mis’ Tolland, and found that the poor soul had been believin’ all the time that there weren’t any priests here. We’d come to know she was a Catholic by her beads and all, and that had set some narrow minds against her. And mother explained it just as she would to a child; and uncle Lorenzo sent word right off somewheres up river by a packet that was bound up the bay, and the first o’ the week a priest come by the boat, an’ uncle Lorenzo was on the wharf ’tendin’ to some business; so they just come up for me, and I walked with him to show him the house. He was a kind-hearted old man; he looked so benevolent an’ fatherly I could ha’ stopped an’ told him my own troubles; yes, I was satisfied when I first saw his face, an’ when poor Mis’ Tolland beheld him enter the room, she went right down on her knees and clasped her hands together to him as if he’d come to save her life, and he lifted her up and blessed her, an’ I left ’em together, and slipped out into the open field and walked there in sight so if they needed to call me, and I had my own thoughts. At last I saw him at the door; he had to catch the return boat. I meant to walk back with him and offer him some supper, but he said no, and said he was comin’ again if needed, and signed me to go into the house to her, and shook his head in a way that meant he understood everything. I can see him now; he walked with a cane, rather tired and feeble; I wished somebody would come along, so’s to carry him down to the shore.

“Mis’ Tolland looked up at me with a new look when I went in, an’ she even took hold o’ my hand and kept it. He had put some oil on her forehead, but nothing anybody could do would keep her alive very long; ’twas his medicine for the soul rather ’n the body. I helped her to bed, and next morning she couldn’t get up to dress her, and that was Monday, and she began to fail, and ’twas Friday night she died.” (Mrs. Todd spoke with unusual haste and lack of detail.) “Mrs. Begg and I watched with her, and made everything nice and proper, and after all the ill will there was a good number gathered to the funeral. ’Twas in Reverend Mr. Bascom’s day, and he done very well in his prayer, considering he couldn’t fill in with mentioning all the near connections by name as was his habit. He spoke very feeling about her being a stranger and twice widowed, and all he said about her being reared among the heathen was to observe that there might be roads leadin’ up to the New Jerusalem from various points. I says to myself that I guessed quite a number must ha’ reached there that wa’n’t able to set out from Dunnet Landin’!”

Mrs. Todd gave an odd little laugh as she bent toward the firelight to pick up a dropped stitch in her knitting, and then I heard a heartfelt sigh.

“’Twas most forty years ago,” she said; “most everybody’s gone a’ready that was there that day.”

CHAPTER 5

Suddenly Mrs. Todd gave an energetic shrug of her shoulders, and a quick look at me, and I saw that the sails of her narrative were filled with a fresh breeze.

“Uncle Lorenzo, Cap’n Bowden that I have referred to—”

“Certainly!” I agreed with eager expectation.

“He was the one that had been left in charge of Cap’n John Tolland’s affairs, and had now come to be of unforeseen importance.

“Mrs. Begg an’ I had stayed in the house both before an’ after Mis’ Tolland’s decease, and she was now in haste to be gone, having affairs to call her home; but uncle come to me as the exercises was beginning, and said he thought I’d better remain at the house while they went to the buryin’ ground. I couldn’t understand his reasons, an’ I felt disappointed, bein’ as near to her as most anybody; ’twas rough weather, so mother couldn’t get in, and didn’t even hear Mis’ Tolland was gone till next day. I just nodded to satisfy him, ’twa’n’t no time to discuss anything. Uncle seemed flustered; he’d gone out deep-sea fishin’ the day she died, and the storm I told you of rose very sudden, so they got blown off way down the coast beyond Monhegan, and he’d just got back in time to dress himself and come.

“I set there in the house after I’d watched her away down the straight road far’s I could see from the door; ’twas a little short walkin’ funeral an’ a cloudy sky, so everything looked dull an’ gray, an’ it crawled along all in one piece, same’s walking funerals do, an’ I wondered how it ever come to the Lord’s mind to let her begin down among them gay islands all heat and sun, and end up here among the rocks with a north wind blowin’. ’Twas a gale that begun the afternoon before she died, and had kept blowin’ off an’ on ever since. I’d thought more than once how glad I should be to get home an’ out o’ sound o’ them black spruces a-beatin’ an’ scratchin’ at the front windows.

“I set to work pretty soon to put the chairs back, an’ set outdoors some that was borrowed, an’ I went out in the kitchen, an’ I made up a good fire in case somebody come an’ wanted a cup o’ tea; but I didn’t expect any one to travel way back to the house unless ’twas uncle Lorenzo. ’Twas growin’ so chilly that I fetched some kindlin’ wood and made fires in both the fore rooms. Then I set down an’ begun to feel as usual, and I got my knittin’ out of a drawer. You can’t be sorry for a poor creatur’ that’s come to the end o’ all her troubles; my only discomfort was I thought I’d ought to feel worse at losin’ her than I did; I was younger then than I be now. And as I set there, I begun to hear some long notes o’ dronin’ music from upstairs that chilled me to the bone.”

Mrs. Todd gave a hasty glance at me.

“Quick’s I could gather me, I went right upstairs to see what ’twas,” she added eagerly, “an ’twas just what I might ha’ known. She’d always kept her guitar hangin’ right against the wall in her room; ’twas tied by a blue ribbon, and there was a window left wide open; the wind was veerin’ a good deal, an’ it slanted in and searched the room. The strings was jarrin’ yet.

“’Twas growin’ pretty late in the afternoon, an’ I begun to feel lonesome as I shouldn’t now, and I was disappointed at having to stay there, the more I thought it over, but after a while I saw Cap’n Lorenzo polin’ back up the road all alone, and when he come nearer I could see he had a bundle under his arm and had shifted his best black clothes for his every-day ones. I run out and put some tea into the teapot and set it back on the stove to draw, an’ when he come in I reached down a little jug o’ spirits – Cap’n Tolland had left his house well provisioned as if his wife was goin’ to put to sea same’s himself, an’ there she’d gone an’ left it. There was some cake that Mis’ Begg an’ I had made the day before. I thought that uncle an’ me had a good right to the funeral supper, even if there wa’n’t any one to join us. I was lookin’ forward to my cup o’ tea; ’twas beautiful tea out of a green lacquered chest that I’ve got now.”

“You must have felt very tired,” said I, eagerly listening.

“I was ’most beat out, with watchin’ an’ tendin’ and all,” answered Mrs. Todd, with as much sympathy in her voice as if she were speaking of another person. “But I called out to uncle as he came in, ‘Well, I expect it’s all over now, an’ we’ve all done what we could. I thought we’d better have some tea or somethin’ before we go home. Come right out in the kitchen, sir,’ says I, never thinking but we only had to let the fires out and lock up everything safe an’ eat our refreshment, an’ go home.

“‘I want both of us to stop here to-night,’ says uncle, looking at me very important.

“‘Oh, what for?’ says I, kind o’ fretful.

“‘I’ve got my proper reasons,’ says uncle. ‘I’ll see you well satisfied, Almira. Your tongue ain’t so easy-goin’ as some o’ the women folks, an’ there’s property here to take charge of that you don’t know nothin’ at all about.’

“‘What do you mean?’ says I.

“‘Cap’n Tolland acquainted me with his affairs; he hadn’t no sort o’ confidence in nobody but me an’ his wife, after he was tricked into signin’ that Portland note, an’ lost money. An’ she didn’t know nothin’ about business; but what he didn’t take to sea to be sunk with him he’s hid somewhere in this house. I expect Mis’ Tolland may have told you where she kept things?’ said uncle.

“I see he was dependin’ a good deal on my answer,” said Mrs. Todd, “but I had to disappoint him; no, she had never said nothin’ to me.

“‘Well, then, we’ve got to make a search,’ says he, with considerable relish; but he was all tired and worked up, and we set down to the table, an’ he had somethin’, an’ I took my desired cup o’ tea, and then I begun to feel more interested.

“‘Where you goin’ to look first?’ says I, but he give me a short look an’ made no answer, and begun to mix me a very small portion out of the jug, in another glass. I took it to please him; he said I looked tired, speakin’ real fatherly, and I did feel better for it, and we set talkin’ a few minutes, an’ then he started for the cellar, carrying an old ship’s lantern he fetched out o’ the stairway an’ lit.

“‘What are you lookin’ for, some kind of a chist?’ I inquired, and he said yes. All of a sudden it come to me to ask who was the heirs; Eliza Tolland, Cap’n John’s own sister, had never demeaned herself to come near the funeral, and uncle Lorenzo faced right about and begun to laugh, sort o’ pleased. I thought queer of it’ ’twa’n’t what he’d taken, which would be nothin’ to an old weathered sailor like him.

“‘Who’s the heir?’ says I the second time.

“‘Why, it’s you, Almiry,’ says he; and I was so took aback I set right down on the turn o’ the cellar stairs.

“‘Yes, ’tis,’ said uncle Lorenzo. ‘I’m glad of it too. Some thought she didn’t have no sense but foreign sense, an’ a poor stock o’ that, but she said you was friendly to her, an’ one day after she got news of Tolland’s death, an’ I had fetched up his will that left everything to her, she said she was goin’ to make a writin’, so’s you could have things after she was gone, an’ she give five hundred to me for bein’ executor. Square Pease fixed up the paper, an’ she signed it; it’s all accordin’ to law.’ There, I begun to cry,” said Mrs. Todd; “I couldn’t help it. I wished I had her back again to do somethin’ for, an’ to make her know I felt sisterly to her more’n I’d ever showed, an’ it come over me ’twas all too late, an’ I cried the more, till uncle showed impatience, an’ I got up an’ stumbled along down cellar with my apern to my eyes the greater part of the time.

“‘I’m goin’ to have a clean search,’ says he; ‘you hold the light.’ An’ I held it, and he rummaged in the arches an’ under the stairs, an’ over in some old closet where he reached out bottles an’ stone jugs an’ canted some kags an’ one or two casks, an’ chuckled well when he heard there was somethin’ inside – but there wa’n’t nothin’ to find but things usual in a cellar, an’ then the old lantern was givin’ out an’ we come away.

“‘He spoke to me of a chist, Cap’n Tolland did,’ says uncle in a whisper. ‘He said a good sound chist was as safe a bank as there was, an’ I beat him out of such nonsense, ’count o’ fire an’ other risks.’ ‘There’s no chist in the rooms above,’ says I’; ‘no, uncle, there ain’t no sea-chist, for I’ve been here long enough to see what there was to be seen.’ Yet he wouldn’t feel contented till he’d mounted up into the toploft; ’twas one o’ them single, hip-roofed houses that don’t give proper accommodation for a real garret, like Cap’n Littlepage’s down here at the Landin’. There was broken furniture and rubbish, an’ he let down a terrible sight o’ dust into the front entry, but sure enough there wasn’t no chist. I had it all to sweep up next day.

“‘He must have took it away to sea,’ says I to the cap’n, an’ even then he didn’t want to agree, but we was both beat out. I told him where i’d always seen Mis’ Tolland get her money from, and we found much as a hundred dollars there in an old red morocco wallet. Cap’n John had been gone a good while a’ready, and she had spent what she needed. ’Twas in an old desk o’ his in the settin’ room that we found the wallet.”

“At the last minute he may have taken his money to sea,” I suggested.

“Oh yes,” agreed Mrs. Todd. “He did take considerable to make his venture to bring home, as was customary, an’ that was drowned with him as uncle agreed; but he had other property in shipping, and a thousand dollars invested in Portland in a cordage shop, but ’twas about the time shipping begun to decay, and the cordage shop failed, and in the end I wa’n’t so rich as I thought I was goin’ to be for those few minutes on the cellar stairs. There was an auction that accumulated something. Old Mis’ Tolland, the cap’n’s mother, had heired some good furniture from a sister: there was above thirty chairs in all, and they’re apt to sell well. I got over a thousand dollars when we come to settle up, and I made uncle take his five hundred; he was getting along in years and had met with losses in navigation, and he left it back to me when he died, so I had a real good lift. It all lays in the bank over to Rockland, and I draw my interest fall an’ spring, with the little Mr. Todd was able to leave me; but that’s kind o’ sacred money; ’twas earnt and saved with the hope o’ youth, an’ I’m very particular what I spend it for. Oh yes, what with ownin’ my house, I’ve been enabled to get along very well, with prudence!” said Mrs. Todd contentedly.

“But there was the house and land,” I asked – “what became of that part of the property?”

Mrs. Todd looked into the fire, and a shadow of disapproval flitted over her face.

“Poor old uncle!” she said, “he got childish about the matter. I was hoping to sell at first, and I had an offer, but he always run of an idea that there was more money hid away, and kept wanting me to delay; an’ he used to go up there all alone and search, and dig in the cellar, empty an’ bleak as ’twas in winter weather or any time. An’ he’d come and tell me he’d dreamed he found gold behind a stone in the cellar wall, or somethin’. And one night we all see the light o’ fire up that way, an’ the whole Landin’ took the road, and run to look, and the Tolland property was all in a light blaze. I expect the old gentleman had dropped fire about; he said he’d been up there to see if everything was safe in the afternoon. As for the land, ’twas so poor that everybody used to have a joke that the Tolland boys preferred to farm the sea instead. It’s ’most all grown up to bushes now, where it ain’t poor water grass in the low places. There’s some upland that has a pretty view, after you cross the brook bridge. Years an’ years after she died, there was some o’ her flowers used to come up an’ bloom in the door garden. I brought two or three that was unusual down here; they always come up and remind me of her constant as the spring. But I never did want to fetch home that guitar, some way or ’nother; I wouldn’t let it go at the auction, either. It was hangin’ right there in the house when the fire took place. I’ve got some o’ her other little things scattered about the house: that picture on the mantelpiece belonged to her.”

I had often wondered where such a picture had come from, and why Mrs. Todd had chosen it; it was a French print of the statue of the Empress Josephine in the Savane at old Fort Royal, in Martinique.

CHAPTER 6

Mrs. Todd drew her chair closer to mine; she held the cat and her knitting with one hand as she moved, but the cat was so warm and so sound asleep that she only stretched a lazy paw in spite of what must have felt like a slight earthquake. Mrs. Todd began to speak almost in a whisper.

“I ain’t told you all,” she continued; “no, I haven’t spoken of all to but very few. The way it came was this,” she said solemnly, and then stopped to listen to the wind, and sat for a moment in deferential silence, as if she waited for the wind to speak first. The cat suddenly lifted her head with quick excitement and gleaming eyes, and her mistress was leaning forward toward the fire with an arm laid on either knee, as if they were consulting the glowing coals for some augury. Mrs. Todd looked like an old prophetess as she sat there with the firelight shining on her strong face; she was posed for some great painter. The woman with the cat was as unconscious and as mysterious as any sibyl of the Sistine Chapel.

“There, that’s the last struggle o’ the gale,” said Mrs. Todd, nodding her head with impressive certainty and still looking into the bright embers of the fire. “You’ll see!” She gave me another quick glance, and spoke in a low tone as if we might be overheard.

“’Twas such a gale as this the night Mis’ Tolland died. She appeared more comfortable the first o’ the evenin’; and Mrs. Begg was more spent than I, bein’ older, and a beautiful nurse that was the first to see and think of everything, but perfectly quiet an’ never asked a useless question. You remember her funeral when you first come to the Landing? And she consented to goin’ an’ havin’ a good sleep while she could, and left me one o’ those good little pewter lamps that burnt whale oil an’ made plenty o’ light in the room, but not too bright to be disturbin’.

“Poor Mis’ Tolland had been distressed the night before, an’ all that day, but as night come on she grew more and more easy, an’ was layin’ there asleep; ’twas like settin’ by any sleepin’ person, and I had none but usual thoughts. When the wind lulled and the rain, I could hear the seas, though more distant than this, and I don’ know’s I observed any other sound than what the weather made; ’twas a very solemn feelin’ night. I set close by the bed; there was times she looked to find somebody when she was awake. The light was on her face, so I could see her plain; there was always times when she wore a look that made her seem a stranger you’d never set eyes on before. I did think what a world it was that her an’ me should have come together so, and she have nobody but Dunnet Landin’ folks about her in her extremity. ‘You’re one o’ the stray ones, poor creatur’,’ I said. I remember those very words passin’ through my mind, but I saw reason to be glad she had some comforts, and didn’t lack friends at the last, though she’d seen misery an’ pain. I was glad she was quiet; all day she’d been restless, and we couldn’t understand what she wanted from her French speech. We had the window open to give her air, an’ now an’ then a gust would strike that guitar that was on the wall and set it swinging by the blue ribbon, and soundin’ as if somebody begun to play it. I come near takin’ it down, but you never know what’ll fret a sick person an’ put ’em on the rack, an’ that guitar was one o’ the few things she’d brought with her.”

I nodded assent, and Mrs. Todd spoke still lower.

“I set there close by the bed; I’d been through a good deal for some days back, and I thought I might’s well be droppin’ asleep too, bein’ a quick person to wake. She looked to me as if she might last a day longer, certain, now she’d got more comfortable, but I was real tired, an’ sort o’ cramped as watchers will get, an’ a fretful feeling begun to creep over me such as they often do have. If you give way, there ain’t no support for the sick person; they can’t count on no composure o’ their own. Mis’ Tolland moved then, a little restless, an’ I forgot me quick enough, an’ begun to hum out a little part of a hymn tune just to make her feel everything was as usual an’ not wake up into a poor uncertainty. All of a sudden she set right up in bed with her eyes wide open, an’ I stood an’ put my arm behind her; she hadn’t moved like that for days. And she reached out both her arms toward the door, an’ I looked the way she was lookin’, an’ I see some one was standin’ there against the dark. No, ’twa’n’t Mis’ Begg; ’twas somebody a good deal shorter than Mis’ Begg. The lamplight struck across the room between us. I couldn’t tell the shape, but ’twas a woman’s dark face lookin’ right at us; ’twa’n’t but an instant I could see. I felt dreadful cold, and my head begun to swim; I thought the light went out; ’twa’n’t but an instant, as I say, an’ when my sight come back I couldn’t see nothing there. I was one that didn’t know what it was to faint away, no matter what happened; time was I felt above it in others, but ’twas somethin’ that made poor human natur’ quail. I saw very plain while I could see; ’twas a pleasant enough face, shaped somethin’ like Mis’ Tolland’s, and a kind of expectin’ look.

“No, I don’t expect I was asleep,” Mrs. Todd assured me quietly, after a moment’s pause, though I had not spoken. She gave a heavy sigh before she went on. I could see that the recollection moved her in the deepest way.

“I suppose if I hadn’t been so spent an’ quavery with long watchin’, I might have kept my head an’ observed much better,” she added humbly; “but I see all I could bear. I did try to act calm, an’ I laid Mis’ Tolland down on her pillow, an’ I was a-shakin’ as I done it. All she did was to look up to me so satisfied and sort o’ questioning, an I looked back to her.

“‘You saw her, didn’t you?’ she says to me, speakin’ perfectly reasonable. ‘’Tis my mother,’ she says again, very feeble, but lookin’ straight up at me, kind of surprised with the pleasure, and smiling as if she saw I was overcome, an’ would have said more if she could, but we had hold of hands. I see then her change was comin’, but I didn’t call Mis’ Begg, nor make no uproar. I felt calm then, an’ lifted to somethin’ different as I never was since. She opened her eyes just as she was goin’—

“‘You saw her, didn’t you?’ she said the second time, an’ I says, ‘Yes, dear, I did; you ain’t never goin’ to feel strange an’ lonesome no more.’ An’ then in a few quiet minutes ’twas all over. I felt they’d gone away together. No, I wa’n’t alarmed afterward; ’twas just that one moment I couldn’t live under, but I never called it beyond reason I should see the other watcher. I saw plain enough there was somebody there with me in the room.

CHAPTER 7

“’Twas just such a night as this Mis’ Tolland died,” repeated Mrs. Todd, returning to her usual tone and leaning back comfortably in her chair as she took up her knitting. “’Twas just such a night as this. I’ve told the circumstances to but very few; but I don’t call it beyond reason. When folks is goin’ ’tis all natural, and only common things can jar upon the mind. You know plain enough there’s somethin’ beyond this world; the doors stand wide open. ‘There’s somethin’ of us that must still live on; we’ve got to join both worlds together an’ live in one but for the other.’ The doctor said that to me one day, an’ I never could forget it; he said ’twas in one o’ his old doctor’s books.”

We sat together in silence in the warm little room; the rain dropped heavily from the eaves, and the sea still roared, but the high wind had done blowing. We heard the far complaining fog horn of a steamer up the Bay.

“There goes the Boston boat out, pretty near on time,” said Mrs. Todd with satisfaction. “Sometimes these late August storms’ll sound a good deal worse than they really be. I do hate to hear the poor steamers callin’ when they’re bewildered in thick nights in winter, comin’ on the coast. Yes, there goes the boat; they’ll find it rough at sea, but the storm’s all over.”

THE READJUSTMENT

Mary Austin

1908

Emma Jossylin had been dead and buried three days. The sister who had come to the funeral had taken Emma’s child away with her, and the house was swept and aired; then, when it seemed there was least occasion for it, Emma came back. The neighbor woman who had nursed her was the first to know it. It was about seven of the evening, in a mellow gloom: the neighbor woman was sitting on her own stoop with her arms wrapped in her apron, and all at once she found herself going along the street under an urgent sense that Emma needed her. She was half-way down the block before she recollected that this was impossible, for Mrs. Jossylin was dead and buried, but as soon as she came opposite the house she was aware of what had happened. It was all open to the summer air; except that it was a little neater, not otherwise than the rest of the street. It was quite dark; but the presence of Emma Jossylin streamed from it and betrayed it more than a candle. It streamed out steadily across the garden, and even as it reached her, mixed with the smell of the damp mignonette, the neighbor woman owned to herself that she had always known Emma would come back.

“A sight stranger if she wouldn’t,” thought the woman who had nursed her. “She wasn’t ever one to throw off things easily.”

Emma Jossylin had taken death, as she had taken everything in life, hard. She had met it with the same hard, bright, surface competency that she had presented to the squalor of the encompassing desertness, to the insuperable commonness of Sim Jossylin, to the affliction of her crippled child; and the intensity of her wordless struggle against it had caught the attention of the townspeople and held it in a shocked, curious awe. She was so long a-dying, lying there in the little low house, hearing the abhorred footsteps going about her house and the vulgar procedure of the community encroach upon her like the advances of the sand wastes on an unwatered field.

For Emma had always wanted things different, wanted them with a fury of intentness that implied offensiveness in things as they were. And the townspeople had taken offence, the more so because she was not to be surprised in any inaptitude for their own kind of success. Do what you could, you could never catch Emma Jossylin in a wrapper after three o’clock in the afternoon. And she would never talk about the child – in a country where so little ever happened that even trouble was a godsend if it gave you something to talk about. It was reported that she did not even talk to Sim. But there the common resentment got back at her. If she had thought to effect anything with Sim Jossylin against the benumbing spirit of the place, the evasive hopefulness, the large sense of leisure that ungirt the loins, if she still hoped somehow to get away with him to some place for which by her dress, by her manner, she seemed forever and unassailably fit, it was foregone that nothing would come of it. They knew Sim Jossylin better than that. Yet so vivid had been the force of her wordless dissatisfaction that when the fever took her and she went down like a pasteboard figure in the damp, the wonder was that nothing toppled with her. And as if she too had felt herself indispensable, Emma Jossylin had come back.

The neighbor woman crossed the street, and as she passed the far corner of the gate, Jossylin spoke to her. He had been standing, she did not know how long a time, behind the syringa bush, and moved even with her along the fence until they came to the gate. She could see in the dusk that before speaking he wet his lips with his tongue.

“She’s in there,” he said at last.

“Emma?”

He nodded. “I been sleeping at the store since – but I thought I’d be more comfortable – as soon as I opened the door, there she was.”

“Did you see her?”

“No.”

“How do you know, then?”

“Don’t you know?”

The neighbor felt there was nothing to say to that.

“Come in,” he whispered, huskily. They slipped by the rose tree and the wisteria and sat down on the porch at the side. A door swung inward behind them. They felt the Presence in the dusk beating like a pulse.

“What do you think she wants?” said Jossylin. “Do you reckon it’s the boy?”

“Like enough.”

“He’s better off with his aunt. There was no one here to take care of him, like his mother wanted.” He raised his voice unconsciously with a note of justification, addressing the room behind.

“I am sending fifty dollars a month,” he said; “he can go with the best of them.” He went on at length to explain all the advantage that was to come to the boy from living at Pasadena, and the neighbor woman bore him out in it.

“He was glad to go,” urged Jossylin to the room. “He said it was what his mother would have wanted.”

They were silent then a long time, while the Presence seemed to swell upon them and encroached upon the garden. Finally, “I gave Zeigler the order for the monument yesterday,” Jossylin threw out, appeasingly. “It’s to cost three hundred and fifty.” The Presence stirred. The neighbor thought she could fairly see the controlled tolerance with which Emma Jossylin threw off the evidence of Sim’s ineptitude.

They sat on helplessly without talking after that, until the woman’s husband came to the fence and called her.

“Don’t go,” begged Jossylin.

“Hush!” she said. “Do you want all the town to know? You had naught but good from Emma living, and no call to expect harm from her now. It’s natural she should come back – if – if she was lonesome like – in – the place where she’s gone to.”

“Emma wouldn’t come back to this place,” Jossylin protested, “without she wanted something.”

“Well, then, you’ve got to find out,” said the neighbor woman.

All the next day she saw, whenever she passed the house, that Emma was still there. It was shut and barred, but the Presence lurked behind the folded blinds and fumbled at the doors. When it was night and the moths began in the columbine under the window, it went out and walked in the garden.

Jossylin was waiting at the gate when the neighbor woman came. He sweated with helplessness in the warm dusk, and the Presence brooded upon them like an apprehension that grows by being entertained.

“She wants something,” he appealed, “but I can’t make out what. Emma knows she is welcome to everything I’ve got. Everybody knows I’ve been a good provider.”

The neighbor woman remembered suddenly the only time she had ever drawn close to Emma Jossylin touching the child. They had sat up with it together all one night in some childish ailment, and she had ventured a question: “What does his father think?” And Emma had turned her a white, hard face of surpassing dreariness. “I don’t know,” she admitted; “he never says.”

“There’s more than providing,” suggested the neighbor woman.

“Yes. There’s feeling… but she had enough to do to put up with me. I had no call to be troubling her with such.” He left off to mop his forehead, and began again.

“Feelings,” he said; “there’s times a man gets so wore out with feelings, he doesn’t have them any more.”

He talked, and presently it grew clear to the woman that he was voiding all the stuff of his life, as if he had sickened on it and was now done. It was a little soul knowing itself and not good to see. What was singular was that the Presence left off walking in the garden, came and caught like a gossamer on the ivy tree, swayed by the breath of his broken sentences. He talked, and the neighbor woman saw him for once as he saw himself and Emma, snared and floundering in an inexplicable unhappiness. He had been disappointed too. She had never relished the man he was, and it made him ashamed. That was why he had never gone away, lest he should make her ashamed among her own kind. He was her husband; he could not help that, though he was sorry for it. But he could keep the offence where least was made of it. And there was a child – she had wanted a child, but even then he had blundered – begotten a cripple upon her. He blamed himself utterly, searched out the roots of his youth for the answer to that, until the neighbor woman flinched to hear him. But the Presence stayed.

He had never talked to his wife about the child. How should he? There was the fact – the advertisement of his incompetence. And she had never talked to him. That was the one blessed and unassailable memory, that she had spread silence like a balm over his hurt. In return for it, he had never gone away. He had resisted her that he might save her from showing among her own kind how poor a man he was. With every word of this ran the fact of his love for her – as he had loved her with all the stripes of clean and uncleanness. He bared himself as a child without knowing; and the Presence stayed. The talk trailed off at last to the commonplaces of consolation between the retchings of his spirit. The Presence lessened and streamed toward them on the wind of the garden. When it touched them like the warm air of noon that lies sometimes in hollow places after nightfall, the neighbor woman rose and went away.

The next night, she did not wait for him. When a rod outside the town – it was a very little one – the burrowing owls whoo-whooed, she hung up her apron and went to talk with Emma Jossylin. The Presence was there, drawn in, lying close. She found the key between the wisteria and the first pillar of the porch; but as soon as she opened the door she felt the chill that might be expected by one intruding on Emma Jossylin in her own house.

“’The Lord is my shepherd!’” said the neighbor woman; it was the first religious phrase that occurred to her; then she said the whole of the psalm, and after that a hymn. She had come in through the door, and stood with her back to it and her hand upon the knob. Everything was just as Mrs. Jossylin had left it, with the waiting air of a room kept for company.

“Em,” she said, boldly, when the chill had abated a little before the sacred words – “Em Jossylin, I’ve got something to say to you. And you’ve got to hear,” she added with firmness as the white curtains stirred duskily at the window. “You wouldn’t be talked to about your troubles when you were here before, and we humored you. But now there is Sim to be thought of. I guess you heard what you came for last night, and got good of it. Maybe it would have been better if Sim had said things all along instead of hoarding them in his heart, but, anyway, he has said them now. And what I want to say is, if you was staying on with the hope of hearing it again, you’d be making a mistake. You was an uncommon woman, Emma Jossylin, and there didn’t none of us understand you very well, nor do you justice, maybe; but Sim is only a common man, and I understand him because I’m that way myself. And if you think he’ll be opening his heart to you every night, or be any different from what he’s always been on account of what’s happened, that’s a mistake, too… and in a little while, if you stay, it will be as bad as it always was… men are like that… you’d better go now while there’s understanding between you.” She stood staring into the darkling room that seemed suddenly full of turbulence and denial. It seemed to beat upon her and take her breath, but she held on.

“You’ve got to go… Em… and I’m going to stay until you do,” she said with finality; and then began again: “’The Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart,’” and repeated the passage to the end.

Then, as the Presence sank before it, “You better go, Emma,” persuasively: and again, after an interval: “’He shall deliver thee in six troubles. Yea, in seven there shall no evil touch thee.’” The Presence gathered itself and was still; she could make out that it stood over against the opposite corner by the gilt easel with the crayon portrait of the child.

“’For thou shalt forget thy misery. Thou shalt remember it as waters that are past,’” concluded the neighbor woman, as she heard Jossylin on the gravel outside. What the Presence had wrought upon him in the night was visible in his altered mien. He looked, more than anything else, to be in need of sleep. He had eaten his sorrow, and that was the end of it – as it is with men.

“I came to see if there was anything I could do for you,” said the woman, neighborly, with her hand upon the door.

“I don’t know as there is,” said he. “I’m much obliged, but I don’t know as there is.”

“You see,” whispered the woman, over her shoulder, “not even to me.” She felt the tug of her heart as the Presence swept past her. The neighbor went out after that and walked in the ragged street, past the schoolhouse, across the creek below the town, out by the fields, over the headgate, and back by the town again. It was full nine of the clock when she passed the Jossylin house. It looked, except for being a little neater, not other than the rest of the street. The door was open and the lamp was lit; she saw Jossylin black against it. He sat reading in a book like a man at ease in his own house.

THE NIGHT CALL

Henry van Dyke

1912

I

The first caprice of November snow had sketched the world in white for an hour in the morning. After mid-day, the sun came out, the wind turned warm, and the whiteness vanished from the landscape. By evening, the low ridges and the long plain of New Jersey were rich and sad again, in russet and dull crimson and old gold; for the foliage still clung to the oaks and elms and birches, and the dying monarchy of autumn retreated slowly before winter’s cold republic.

In the old town of Calvinton, stretched along the highroad, the lamps were lit early as the saffron sunset faded into humid night. A mist rose from the long, wet street and the sodden lawns, muffling the houses and the trees and the college towers with a double veil, under which a pallid aureole encircled every light, while the moon above, languid and tearful, waded slowly through the mounting fog. It was a night of delay and expectation, a night of remembrance and mystery, lonely and dim and full of strange, dull sounds.

In one of the smaller houses on the main street the light in the window burned late. Leroy Carmichael was alone in his office reading Balzac’s story of “The Country Doctor.” He was not a gloomy or despondent person, but the spirit of the night had entered into him. He had yielded himself, as young men of ardent temperament often do, to the subduing magic of the fall. In his mind, as in the air, there was a soft, clinging mist, and blurred lights of thought, and a still foreboding of change. A sense of the vast tranquil movement of Nature, of her sympathy and of her indifference, sank deeply into his heart. For a time he realised that all things, and he, too, some day, must grow old; and he felt the universal pathos of it more sensitively, perhaps, than he would ever feel it again.

If you had told Carmichael that this was what he was thinking about as he sat in his bachelor quarters on that November night, he would have stared at you and then laughed.

“Nonsense,” he would have answered, cheerfully. “I’m no sentimentalist: only a bit tired by a hard afternoon’s work and a rough ride home. Then, Balzac always depresses me a little. The next time I’ll take some quinine and Dumas: he is a tonic.”

But, in fact, no one came in to interrupt his musings and rouse him to that air of cheerfulness with which he always faced the world, and to which, indeed (though he did not know it), he owed some measure of his delay in winning the confidence of Calvinton.

He had come there some five years ago with a particularly good outfit to practice medicine in that quaint and alluring old burgh, full of antique hand-made furniture and traditions. He had not only been well trained for his profession in the best medical school and hospital of New York, but he was also a graduate of Calvinton College (in which his father had been a professor for a time), and his granduncle was a Grubb, a name high in the Golden Book of Calvintonian aristocracy and inscribed upon tombstones in every village within a radius of fifteen miles. Consequently the young doctor arrived well accredited, and was received in his first year with many tokens of hospitality in the shape of tea-parties and suppers.

But the final and esoteric approval of Calvinton was a thing apart from these mere fashionable courtesies and worldly amenities – a thing not to be bestowed without due consideration and satisfactory reasons. Leroy Carmichael failed, somehow or other, to come up to the requirements for a leading physician in such a conservative community. In the judgment of Calvinton he was a clever young man; but he lacked poise and gravity. He walked too lightly along the streets, swinging his stick, and greeting his acquaintances blithely, as if he were rather glad to be alive. Now this is a sentiment, if you analyse it, near akin to vanity, and, therefore, to be discountenanced in your neighbour and concealed in yourself. How can a man be glad that he is alive, and frankly show it, without a touch of conceit and a reprehensible forgetfulness of the presence of original sin even in the best families? The manners of a professional man, above all, should at once express and impose humility.

Young Dr. Carmichael, Calvinton said, had been spoiled by his life in New York. It had made him too gay, light-hearted, almost frivolous. It was possible that he might know a good deal about medicine, though doubtless that had been exaggerated; but it was certain that his temperament needed chastening before he could win the kind of confidence that Calvinton had given to the venerable Dr. Coffin, whose face was like a monument, and whose practice rested upon the two pillars of podophyllin and predestination.

So Carmichael still felt, after his five years’ work, that he was an outsider; felt it rather more indeed than when he had first come. He had enough practice to keep him in good health and spirits. But his patients were along the side streets and in the smaller houses and out in the country. He was not called, except in a chance emergency, to the big houses with the white pillars. The inner circle had not yet taken him in.

He wondered how long he would have to work and wait for that. He knew that things in Calvinton moved slowly; but he knew also that its silent and subconscious judgments sometimes crystallised with incredible rapidity and hardness. Was it possible that he was already classified in the group that came near but did not enter, an inhabitant but not a real burgher, a half-way citizen and a lifelong new-comer? That would be rough; he would not like growing old in that way.

But perhaps there was no such invisible barrier hemming in his path. Perhaps it was only the naturally slow movement of things that hindered him. Some day the gate would open. He would be called in behind those white pillars into the world of which his father had often told him stories and traditions. There he would prove his skill and his worth. He would make himself useful and trusted by his work. Then he could marry the girl he loved, and win a firm place and a real home in the old town whose strange charm held him so strongly even in the vague sadness of this autumnal night.

He turned again from these musings to his Balzac, and read the wonderful pages in which Benassis tells the story of his consecration to his profession and Captain Genestas confides the little Adrien to his care, and then the beautiful letter in which the boy describes the country doctor’s death and burial. The simple pathos of it went home to Carmichael’s heart.

“It is a fine life, after all,” said he to himself, as he shut the book at midnight and laid down his pipe. “No man has a better chance than a doctor to come close to the real thing. Human nature is his patient, and each case is a symptom. It’s worth while to work for the sake of getting nearer to the reality and doing some definite good by the way. I’m glad that this isn’t one of those mystical towns where Christian Science and Buddhism and all sorts of vagaries flourish. Calvinton may be difficult, but it’s not obscure. And some day I’ll feel its pulse and get at the heart of it.”

The silence of the little office was snapped by the nervous clamour of the electric bell, shrilling with a night call.

II

Dr. Carmichael turned on the light in the hall, and opened the front door. A tall, dark man of military aspect loomed out of the mist, and, behind him, at the curbstone, the outline of a big motorcar was dimly visible. He held out a visiting-card inscribed “Baron de Mortemer,” and spoke slowly and courteously, but with a strong nasal accent and a tone of insistent domination.

“You are the Dr. Carmichael, yes? You speak French – no? It is a pity. There is need of you at once – a patient – it is very pressing. You will come with me, yes?”

“But I do not know you, sir,” said the doctor; “you are—”

“The Baron de Mortemer,” broke in the stranger, pointing to the card as if it answered all questions. “It is the Baroness who is very suffering – I pray you to come without delay.”

“But what is it?” asked the doctor. “What shall I bring with me? My instrument-case?”

The Baron smiled with his lips and frowned with his eyes. “Not at all,” he said, “Madame expects not an arrival – it is not so bad as that – but she has had a sudden access of anguish – she has demanded you. I pray you to come at the instant. Bring what pleases you, what you think best, but come!”

The man’s manner was not agitated, but it was strangely urgent, overpowering, constraining; his voice was like a pushing hand. Carmichael threw on his coat and hat, hastily picked up his medicine-satchel and a portable electric battery, and followed the Baron to the motor.

The great car started easily and rolled softly purring down the deserted street. The houses were all asleep, and the college buildings dark as empty fortresses. The moon-threaded mist clung closely to the town like a shroud of gauze, not concealing the form beneath, but making its immobility more mysterious. The trees drooped and dripped with moisture, and the leaves seemed ready, almost longing, to fall at a touch. It was one of those nights when the solid things of the world, the houses and the hills and the woods and the very earth itself, grow unreal to the point of vanishing; while the impalpable things, the presences of life and death which travel on the unseen air, the influences of the far-off starry lights, the silent messages and presentiments of darkness, the ebb and flow of vast currents of secret existence all around us, seem so close and vivid that they absorb and overwhelm us with their intense reality.

Through this realm of indistinguishable verity and illusion, strangely imposed upon the familiar, homely street of Calvinton, the machine ran smoothly, faintly humming, as the Frenchman drove it with master-skill – itself a dream of embodied power and speed. Gliding by the last cottages of Town’s End where the street became the highroad, the car ran swiftly through the open country for a mile until it came to a broad entrance. The gate was broken from the leaning posts and thrown to one side. Here the machine turned in and laboured up a rough, grass-grown carriage-drive.

Carmichael knew that they were at Castle Gordon, one of the “old places” of Calvinton, which he often passed on his country drives. The house stood well back from the road, on a slight elevation, looking down over the oval field that was once a lawn, and the scattered elms and pines and Norway firs that did their best to preserve the memory of a noble plantation. The building was colonial; heavy stone walls covered with yellow stucco; tall white wooden pillars ranged along a narrow portico; a style which seemed to assert that a Greek temple was good enough for the residence of an American gentleman. But the clean buff and white of the house had long since faded. The stucco had cracked, and, here and there, had fallen from the stones. The paint on the pillars was dingy, peeling in round blisters and narrow strips from the grey wood underneath. The trees were ragged and untended, the grass uncut, the driveway overgrown with weeds and gullied by rains – the whole place looked forsaken. Carmichael had always supposed that it was vacant. But he had not passed that way for nearly a month, and, meantime, it might have been reopened and tenanted.

The Baron drove the car around to the back of the house and stopped there.

“Pardon,” said he, “that I bring you not to the door of entrance; but this is the more convenient.”

He knocked hurriedly and spoke a few words in French. The key grated in the lock and the door creaked open. A withered, wiry little man, dressed in dark grey, stood holding a lighted candle, which flickered in the draught. His head was nearly bald; his sallow, hairless face might have been of any age from twenty to a hundred years; his eyes between their narrow red lids were glittering and inscrutable as those of a snake. As he bowed and grinned, showing his yellow, broken teeth, Carmichael thought that he had never seen a more evil face or one more clearly marked with the sign of the drug-fiend.

“My chauffeur, Gaspard,” said the Baron, “also my valet, my cook, my chambermaid, my man to do all, what you call factotum, is it not? But he speaks not English, so pardon me once more.”

He spoke a few words to the man, who shrugged his shoulders and smiled with the same deferential grimace while his unchanging eyes gleamed through their slits. Carmichael caught only the word “Madame” while he was slipping off his overcoat, and understood that they were talking of his patient.

“Come,” said the Baron, “he says that it goes better, at least not worse – that is always something. Let us mount at the instant.”

The hall was bare, except for a table on which a kitchen lamp was burning, and two chairs with heavy automobile coats and rugs and veils thrown upon them. The stairway was uncarpeted, and the dust lay thick under the banisters. At the door of the back room on the second floor the Baron paused and knocked softly. A low voice answered, and he went in, beckoning the doctor to follow.

III

If Carmichael lived to be a hundred he could never forget that first impression. The room was but partly furnished, yet it gave at once the idea that it was inhabited; it was even, in some strange way, rich and splendid. Candles on the mantelpiece and a silver travelling-lamp on the dressing-table threw a soft light on little articles of luxury, and photographs in jewelled frames, and a couple of well-bound books, and a gilt clock marking the half-hour after midnight. A wood fire burned in the wide chimney-place, and before it a rug was spread. At one side there was a huge mahogany four-post bedstead, and there, propped up by the pillows, lay the noblest-looking woman that Carmichael had ever seen.

She was dressed in some clinging stuff of soft black, with a diamond at her breast, and a deep-red cloak thrown over her feet. She must have been past middle age, for her thick, brown hair was already touched with silver, and one lock of snow-white lay above her forehead. But her face was one of those which time enriches; fearless and tender and high-spirited, a speaking face in which the dark-lashed grey eyes were like words of wonder and the sensitive mouth like a clear song. She looked at the young doctor and held out her hand to him.

“I am glad to see you,” she said, in her low, pure voice, “very glad! You are Roger Carmichael’s son. Oh, I am glad to see you indeed.”

“You are very kind,” he answered, “and I am glad also to be of any service to you, though I do not yet know who you are.”

The Baron was bending over the fire rearranging the logs on the andirons. He looked up sharply and spoke in his strong nasal tone.

“Pardon! Madame la Baronne de Mortemer, j’ai l’honneur de vous presenter Monsieur le Docteur Carmichael.”

The accent on the “doctor” was marked. A slight shadow came upon the lady’s face. She answered, quietly:

“Yes, I know. The doctor has come to see me because I was ill. We will talk of that in a moment. But first I want to tell him who I am – and by another name. Dr. Carmichael, did your father ever speak to you of Jean Gordon?”

“Why, yes,” he said, after an instant of thought, “it comes back to me now quite clearly. She was the young girl to whom he taught Latin when he first came here as a college instructor. He was very fond of her. There was one of her books in his library – I have it now – a little volume of Horace, with a few translations in verse written on the fly-leaves, and her name on the title-page – Jean Gordon. My father wrote under that, ‘My best pupil, who left her lessons unfinished.’ He was very fond of the book, and so I kept it when he died.”

The lady’s eyes grew moist, but the tears did not fall. They trembled in her voice.

“I was that Jean Gordon – a girl of fifteen – your father was the best man I ever knew. You look like him, but he was handsomer than you. Ah, no, I was not his best pupil, but his most wilful and ungrateful one. Did he never tell you of my running away – of the unjust suspicions that fell on him – of his voyage to Europe?”

“Never,” answered Carmichael. “He only spoke, as I remember, of your beauty and your brightness, and of the good times that you all had when this old house was in its prime.”

“Yes, yes,” she said, quickly and with strong feeling, “they were good times, and he was a man of honour. He never took an unfair advantage, never boasted of a woman’s favour, never tried to spare himself. He was an American man. I hope you are like him.”

The Baron, who had been leaning on the mantel, crossed the room impatiently and stood beside the bed. He spoke in French again, dragging the words in his insistent, masterful voice, as if they were something heavy which he laid upon his wife.

Her grey eyes grew darker, almost black, with enlarging pupils. She raised herself on the pillows as if about to get up. Then she sank back again and said, with an evident effort:

“Rene, I must beg you not to speak in French again. The doctor does not understand it. We must be more courteous. And now I will tell him about my sudden illness to-night. It was the first time – like a flash of lightning – an ice-cold hand of pain—”

Even as she spoke a swift and dreadful change passed over her face. Her colour vanished in a morbid pallor; a cold sweat lay like death-dew on her forehead; her eyes were fixed on some impending horror; her lips, blue and rigid, were strained with an unspeakable, intolerable anguish. Her left arm stiffened as if it were gripped in a vise of pain. Her right hand fluttered over her heart, plucking at an unseen weight. It seemed as if an invisible, silent death-wind were quenching the flame of her life. It flickered in an agony of strangulation.

“Be quick,” cried the doctor; “lay her head lower on the pillows, loosen her dress, warm her hands.”

He had caught up his satchel, and was looking for a little vial. He found it almost empty. But there were four or five drops of the yellowish, oily liquid. He poured them on his handkerchief and held it close to the lady’s mouth. She was still breathing regularly though slowly, and as she inhaled the pungent, fruity smell, like the odour of a jargonelle pear, a look of relief flowed over her face, her breathing deepened, her arm and her lips relaxed, the terror faded from her eyes.

He went to his satchel again and took out a bottle of white tablets marked “Nitroglycerin.” He gave her one of them, and when he saw her look of peace grow steadier, after a minute, he prepared the electric battery. Softly he passed the sponges charged with their mysterious current over her temples and her neck and down her slender arms and blue-veined wrists, holding them for a while in the palms of her hands, which grew rosy.

In all this the Baron had helped as he could, and watched closely, but without a word. He was certainly not indifferent; neither was he distressed; the expression of his black eyes and heavy, passionless face was that of presence of mind, self-control covering an intense curiosity. Carmichael conceived a vague sentiment of dislike for the man.

When the patient rested easily they stepped outside the room together for a moment.

“It is the angina, I suppose,” droned the Baron, “hein? That is of great inconvenience. But I think it is the false one, that is much less grave – not truly dangerous, hein?”

“My dear sir,” answered Carmichael, “who can tell the difference between a false and a true angina pectoris, except by a post-mortem? The symptoms are much alike, the result is sometimes identical, if the paroxysm is severe enough. But in this case I hope that you may be right. Your wife’s illness is severe, dangerous, but not necessarily fatal. This attack has passed and may not recur for months or even years.”

The lip-smile came back under the Baron’s sullen eyes.

“Those are the good news, my dear doctor,” said he, slowly. “Then we shall be able to travel soon, perhaps to-morrow or the next day. It is of an extreme importance. This place is insufferable to me. We have engagements in Washington – a gay season.”

Carmichael looked at him steadily and spoke with deliberation.

“Baron, you must understand me clearly. This is a serious case. If I had not come in time your wife might be dead now. She cannot possibly be moved for a week, perhaps it may take a month fully to restore her strength. After that she must have a winter of absolute quiet and repose.”

The Frenchman’s face hardened; his brows drew together in a black line, and he lifted his hand quickly with a gesture of irritation. Then he bowed.

“As you will, doctor! And for the present moment, what is it that I may have the honour to do for your patient?”

“Just now,” said the doctor, “she needs a stimulant – a glass of sherry or of brandy, if you have it – and a hot-water bag – you have none? Well, then, a couple of bottles filled with hot water and wrapped in a cloth to put at her feet. Can you get them?”

The Baron bowed again, and went down the stairs. As Carmichael returned to the bedroom he heard the droning, insistent voice below calling “Gaspard, Gaspard!”

The great grey eyes were open as he entered the room, and there was a sense of release from pain and fear in them that was like the deepest kind of pleasure.

“Yes, I am much better,” said she; “the attack has passed. Will it come again? No? Not soon, you mean. Well, that is good. You need not tell me what it is – time enough for that to-morrow. But come and sit by me. I want to talk to you. Your first name is—”

“Leroy,” he answered. “But you are weak; you must not talk much.”

“Only a little,” she replied, smiling; “it does me good. Leroy was your mother’s name – yes? It is not a Calvinton name. I wonder where your father met her. Perhaps in France when he came to look for me. But he did not find me – no, indeed – I was well hidden then – but he found your mother. You are young enough to be my son. Will you be a friend to me for your father’s sake?”

She spoke gently, in a tone of infinite kindness and tender grace, with pauses in which a hundred unspoken recollections and appeals were suggested. The young man was deeply moved. He took her hand in his firm clasp.

“Gladly,” he said, “and for your sake too. But now I want you to rest.”

“Oh,” she answered, “I am resting now. But let me talk a little more. It will not harm me. I have been through so much! Twice married – a great fortune to spend – all that the big world can give. But now I am very tired of the whirl. There is only one thing I want – to stay here in Calvinton. I rebelled against it once; but it draws me back. There is a strange magic in the place. Haven’t you felt it? How do you explain it?”

“Yes,” he said, “I have felt it surely, but I can’t explain it, unless it is a kind of ancient peace that makes you wish to be at home here even while you rebel.”

She nodded her head and smiled softly.

“That is it,” she said, hesitating for a moment. “But my husband – you see he is a very strong man, and he loves the world, the whirling life – he took a dislike to this place at once. No wonder, with the house in such a state! But I have plenty of money – it will be easy to restore the house. Only, sometimes I think he cares more for the money than – but no matter what I think. He wishes to go on at once – to-morrow, if we can. I hate the thought of it. Is it possible for me to stay? Can you help me?”

“Dear lady,” he answered, lifting her hand to his lips, “set your mind at rest. I have already told him that it is impossible for you to go for many days. You can arrange to move to the inn to-morrow, and stay there while you direct the putting of your house in order.”

A sound in the hallway announced the return of the Baron and Gaspard with the hot-water bottles and the cognac. The doctor made his patient as comfortable as possible for the night, prepared a sleeping-draught, and gave directions for the use of the tablets in an emergency.

“Good night,” he said, bending over her. “I will see you in the morning. You may count upon me.”

“I do,” she said, with her eyes resting on his; “thank you for all. I shall expect you – au revoir.”

As they went down the stairs he said to the Baron, “Remember, absolute repose is necessary. With that you are safe enough for to-night. But you may possibly need more of the nitrite of amyl. My vial is empty. I will write the prescription, if you will allow me.”

“In the dining-room,” said the Baron, taking up the lamp and throwing open the door of the back room on the right. The floor had been hastily swept and the rubbish shoved into the fireplace. The heavy chairs stood along the wall. But two of them were drawn up at the head of the long mahogany table, and dishes and table utensils from a travelling-basket were lying there, as if a late supper had been served.

“You see,” said the Baron, drawling, “our banquet-hall! Madame and I have dined in this splendour to-night. Is it possible that you write here?”

His secret irritation, his insolence, his contempt spoke clearly enough in his tone. The remark was almost like an intentional insult. For a second Carmichael hesitated. “No,” he thought, “why should I quarrel with him? He is only sullen. He can do no harm.”

He pulled a chair to the foot of the table, took out his tablet and his fountain-pen, and wrote the prescription. Tearing off the leaf, he folded it crosswise and left it on the table.

In the hall, as he put on his coat he remembered the paper.

“My prescription,” he said, “I must take it to the druggist to-night.”

“Permit me,” said the Baron, “the room is dark. I will take the paper, and procure the drug as I return from escorting the doctor to his residence.”

He went into the dark room, groped about for a moment, and returned, closing the door behind him.

“Come, Monsieur,” he said, “your work at the Chateau Gordon is finished for this night. I shall leave you with yourself – at home, as you say – in a few moments. Gaspard – Gaspard, fermez la porte a cle!”

The strong nasal voice echoed through the house, and the servant ran lightly down the stairs. His master muttered a few sentences to him, holding up his right hand as he did so, with the five fingers extended, as if to impress something on the man’s mind.

“Pardon,” he said, turning to Carmichael, “that I speak always French, after the rebuke. But this time it is of necessity. I repeat the instruction for the pilules. One at each hour until eight o’clock – five, not more – it is correct? Come, then, our equipage is always harnessed, always ready, how convenient!”

The two men did not speak as the car rolled through the brumous night. A rising wind was sifting the fog. The moon had set. The loosened leaves came whirling, fluttering, sinking through the darkness like a flight of huge dying moths. Now and then they brushed the faces of the travellers with limp, moist wings.

The red night-lamp in the drug-store was still burning. Carmichael called the other’s attention to it.

“You have the prescription?”

“Without doubt!” he answered. “After I have escorted you, I shall procure the drug.”

The doctor’s front door was lit up as he had left it. The light streamed out rather brightly and illumined the Baron’s sullen black eyes and smiling lips as he leaned from the car, lifting his cap.

“A thousand thanks, my dear doctor, you have been excessively kind; yes, truly of an excessive goodness for us. It is a great pleasure – how do you tell it in English? – it is a great pleasure to have met you. Adieu.”

“Till to-morrow morning!” said Carmichael, cheerfully, waving his hand.

The Baron stared at him curiously, and lifted his cap again.

“Adieu!” droned the insistent voice, and the great car slid into the dark.

IV

The next morning was of crystal. It was after nine when Carmichael drove his electric-phaeton down the leaf-littered street, where the country wagons and the decrepit hacks were already meandering placidly, and out along the highroad, between the still green fields. It seemed to him as if the experience of the past night were “such stuff as dreams are made of.” Yet the impression of what he had seen and heard in that firelit chamber – of the eyes, the voice, the hand of that strangely lovely lady – of her vision of sudden death, her essentially lonely struggle with it, her touching words to him when she came back to life – all this was so vivid and unforgettable that he drove straight to Castle Gordon.

The great house was shut up like a tomb: every door and window was closed, except where half of one of the shutters had broken loose and hung by a single hinge. He drove around to the back. It was the same there. A cobweb was spun across the lower corner of the door and tiny drops of moisture jewelled it. Perhaps it had been made in the early morning. If so, no one had come out of the door since night.

Carmichael knocked, and knocked again. No answer. He called. No reply. Then he drove around to the portico with the tall white pillars and tried the front door. It was locked. He peered through the half-open window into the drawing-room. The glass was crusted with dirt and the room was dark. He was trying to make out the outlines of the huddled furniture when he heard a step behind him. It was the old farmer from the nearest cottage on the road.

“Mornin’, doctor! I seen ye comin’ in, and tho’t ye might want to see the house.”

“Good morning, Scudder! I do, if you’ll let me in. But first tell me about these automobile tracks in the drive.”

The old man gazed at him with a kind of dull surprise as if the question were foolish.

“Why, ye made ’em yerself, comin’ up, didn’t ye?”

“I mean those larger tracks – they were made by a much heavier car than mine.”

“Oh,” said the old man, nodding, “them was made by a big machine that come in here las’ week. You see this house’s bin shet up ’bout ten years, ever sence ol’ Jedge Gordon died. B’longs to Miss Jean – her that run off with the Eye-talyin. She kinder wants to sell it, and kinder not – ye see—”

“Yes,” interrupted Carmichael, “but about that big machine – when did you say it was here?”

“P’raps four or five days ago; I think it was a We’nsday. Two fellers from Philadelfy – said they wanted to look at the house, tho’t of buyin’ it. So I bro’t ’em in, but when they seen the outside of it they said they didn’t want to look at it no more – too big and too crumbly!”

“And since then no one has been here?”

“Not a soul – leastways nobody that I seen. I don’t s’pose you think o’ buyin’ the house, doc’! It’s too lonely for an office, ain’t it?”

“You’re right, Scudder, much too lonely. But I’d like to look through the old place, if you will take me in.”

The hall, with the two chairs and the table, on which a kitchen lamp with a half-inch of oil in it was standing, gave no sign of recent habitation. Carmichael glanced around him and hurried up the stairway to the bedroom. A tall four-poster stood in one corner, with a coverlet apparently hiding a mattress and some pillows. A dressing-table stood against the wall, and in the middle of the floor there were a few chairs. A half-open closet door showed a pile of yellow linen. The daylight sifted dimly into the room through the cracks of the shutters.

“Scudder,” said Carmichael, “I want you to look around carefully and tell me whether you see any signs of any one having been here lately.”

The old man stared, and turned his eyes slowly about the room. Then he shook his head.

“Can’t say as I do. Looks pretty much as it did when me and my wife breshed it up in October. Ye see it’s kinder clean fer an old house – not much dust from the road here. That linen and that bed’s bin here sence I c’n remember. Them burnt logs mus’ be left over from old Jedge Gordon’s time. He died in here. But what’s the matter, doc’? Ye think tramps or burglers—”

“No,” said Carmichael, “but what would you say if I told you that I was called here last night to see a patient, and that the patient was the Miss Jean Gordon of whom you have just told me?”

“What d’ye mean?” said the old man, gaping. Then he gazed at the doctor pityingly, and shook his head. “I know ye ain’t a drinkin’ man, doc’, so I wouldn’t say nothin’. But I guess ye bin dreamin’. Why, las’ time Miss Jean writ to me – her name’s Mortimer now, and her husband’s a kinder Barrin or some sorter furrin noble, – she was in Paris, not mor’n two weeks ago! Said she was dyin’ to come back to the ol’ place agin, but she wa’n’t none too well, and didn’t guess she c’d manage it. Ef ye said ye seen her here las’ night – why – well, I’d jest think ye’d bin dreamin’. P’raps ye’re a little under the weather – bin workin’ too hard?”

“I never was better, Scudder, but sometimes curious notions come to me. I wanted to see how you would take this one. Now we’ll go downstairs again.”

The old man laughed, but doubtfully, as if he was still puzzled by the talk, and they descended the creaking, dusty stairs. Carmichael turned at once into the dining-room.

The rubbish was still in the fireplace, the chairs ranged along the wall. There were no dishes on the long table; but at the head of it two chairs; and at the foot, one; and in front of that, lying on the table, a folded bit of paper. Carmichael picked it up and opened it.

It was his prescription for the nitrite of amyl.

He hesitated a moment; then refolded the paper and put it in his vest-pocket.

Seated in his car, with his hand on the lever, he turned to Scudder, who was watching him with curious eyes.

“I’m very much obliged to you, Scudder, for taking me through the house. And I’ll be more obliged to you if you’ll just keep it to yourself – what I said to you about last night.”

“Sure,” said the old man, nodding gravely. “I like ye, doc’, and that kinder talk might do ye harm here in Calvinton. We don’t hold much to dreams and visions down this way. But, say, ’twas a mighty interestin’ dream, wa’n’t it? I guess Miss Jean hones for them white pillars, many a day – they sorter stand for old times. They draw ye, don’t they?”

“Yes, my friend,” said Carmichael as he moved the lever, “they speak of the past. There is a magic in those white pillars. They draw you.”

TWILIGHT ZONE

Mary Keegan

1916

Dr. Bealby bent over the bed. He stretched an arm across the knees of the man just dead and touched Mrs. Webster on the shoulder. He touched her very gently, and when she raised her head and lifted her haggard gaze to his, his head bent slowly.

The young wife, beautiful even in her misery, looked up at him with eyes bloodshot and wild from many nights and days of watching. Her white lips drew back across her teeth. She shook her head. Dr. Bealby turned away.

Mary rose from her knees by the bed and lay down beside the dead man. She kissed him. She loosened her long, dark hair and spread it over his head and face. Under this warm canopy she pressed her face to his.

“Godfrey!” she whispered. “Godfrey!”

Dr. Bealby spoke in an undertone to Miss Gunter, the nurse. Then he went out.

“Mrs. Webster,” said Miss Gunter, “let me take you to your room.”

“Godfrey,” whispered Mary, “Godfrey, I’m here! I’m with you! Can’t you feel how warm my arms are?”

“Mrs. Webster! Mrs. Webster!” Miss Gunter spoke kindly but firmly, “let me take you to your room.”

“Godfrey, Godfrey, come back! I want you to come back! Come back! It’s Mary calling you, Godfrey! I can’t live without you – and I want to live! Godfrey, come back!”

“Mrs, Webster,” whispered Miss Gunter, trying to lift Mary, “you must come with me.”

Mary pushed her back.

“There are things to be done, Mrs. Webster, and you ought not to be here.”

“Leave me alone,” said Mary violently.

“I am disobeying Dr. Bealby’s orders, Mrs. Webster, if I leave you.”

“This is my house,” said Mary; “leave me.” She pressed her face against the dead man. “Godfrey!”

Miss Gunter went out and closed the door, remaining on the other side of it.

“Godfrey, you must come back!” commanded the young wife, pressing her body close to the stark figure on the bed. “You must feel my kisses, Godfrey – you must know! It is Mary who is kissing you, love – Mary!” She pushed the eyelids back from the sightless eyes. “Look at me, Godfrey! Ah, you are not—” She shuddered, then laughed softly. “You are pretending! You are a lazy boy! You are just sleeping!”

A clock in the hall struck four. The room was dim, lighted only by a faint, shaded bulb over the bed. The silence of night and death weighed in the place. In the house there was movement; there were rapid footsteps, low and hurried voices, but Mary did not hear them. In the darks and shadows beneath her hair, she kissed her husband’s lips and looked into the narrow slits of gray blue, rapidly glazing under the stiffening lids. There was no gleam of life, no faintest response to the wild heartbeats thumping against his breast.

The door opened softly. “Mrs. Webster,” whispered Miss Gunter, “you must come with me. I will take you to your room.” Miss Gunter paused a moment, “The men are waiting downstairs to – to – There are things to be done, Mrs. Webster.”

“I don’t care,” said Mary; “go away.”

Miss Gunter went out and closed the door. Distantly, Mary heard her saying: “I wish Dr. Bealby had not gone! Tell the men to wait.”

With all the warmth of her young, strong body, Mary pressed the big, lifeless man beside her. She raised his broad shoulders a little and let him fall back again upon the bed. Then she looked into his eyes, peering down underneath the lids. She flung back her hair, the better to see.

“Godfrey, Godfrey, I can tell by your eyes you can see me! Godfrey, Godfrey, I love you! Come back to me, Godfrey! I cannot bear the loneliness while you sleep! Come back to me! Come back! I don’t ask you – I don’t beg you – I just tell you that I love you and I need you—come back!”

The awful stillness throbbed with its own intensity. Mary drew herself a little way from the stark body, leaning up upon her hands.

Godfrey Webster opened his eyes.

Mary screamed and fell unconscious.

•   •   •   •   •

The door opened quickly and Miss Gunter came into the room. A housemaid followed.

“Come – help me,” said Miss Gunter; “we will take her to her room.” She bent down and placed an arm under Mrs. Webster and raised her from the bed. She dropped her quickly with a sharp exclamation of fear. The housemaid ran screaming from the room.

•   •   •   •   •

It was several weeks before the Websters left town. They went to their house at Newport, out of season. They needed quiet to recover, for both were far from well. They had been so gay and happy there the season before, and again, the season before that – the first after their marriage – that baffled specialists hoped a quiet convalescence there might develop some sort of interest in things about them, and in life itself.

But the weeks rolled into months and no change was visible. They were not ill; they were not well. They were no longer young. They were persons of non-descript age living together peaceably enough, without sympathy, without distractions; without interest in anything, in themselves, or in each other. When old friends called to see them, they left depressed, dismayed. Dr. Bealby, as an old family friend, sometimes took a run over to try to “shake them up,” as he expressed it, but he left, baffled; and when he had gone it was to them as if he had not been.

Mary, who used to meet him with laughing face, light step and hands extended, came toward him now with slow, uncertain tread, one hand partly extended as from habit, and a face old and puzzled, and, perhaps, a trifle wistful.

In spite of the passionate personal interest which Bealby took in the case, as a scientist it filled him with keen and impersonal fervor. Any hours that he could spare, and many that he should not have spared, were spent with the Websters, at Newport.

He brought, from time to time, one after another, and sometimes in groups, most of the distinguished men of science of the present decade. Few liked to admit it, but the consensus of opinion reached was that the case was actually outside, and beyond, the pale of science it its present development. They were keenly interested, scientifically excited, but admittedly helpless.

With Bealby, in his prime, it was a frenzy and had to be worked out. He had been twitted by some of his peers with having made a hurried pronouncement; found a man to be dead who was not dead, and so on. But the larger men saw farther – some of them farther than they would admit, or farther than they dared – in short, farther than they could follow.

On his visits to the Websters, Dr. Bealby had studiously avoided any allusion to the strange event, or by circumlocution, trying to reach it from afar, had arrived at so little satisfaction, that he decided on methods more direct. One day when he and Mary were alone, he turned to her abruptly.

“Mrs. Webster,” lowering his brows and speaking to her with great intentness, “why did you do it?” He almost barked it at her, wishing to startle her, if possible, into some sudden confession.

Mary was not startled: she looked at him with that puzzled, inquiring expression that had become habitual to her.

“I couldn’t help it.”

“Nonsense,” said Bealby with brutal force, “you had no business to!”

“Why?”

The tables were turned: it was Bealby who was startled.

“Why?” repeated Bealby, in order to gain time and wisdom, “why?” He raised his eyebrows judicially, with an aspect tolerant of absurdities. “Because it was a ridiculous and unnatural thing to do, and,” shaking his forefinger at her, “thoroughly unscientific.”

He could picture to himself the Mary of other days and hear her mocking laugh. He felt foolish and self-conscious – as self-conscious as a schoolboy – and he rose quickly and took a turn about the room. He paused momentarily before a little portrait of Mary as she used to be only a year ago. It was done by a famous man in Paris, and succeeded wonderfully in bringing out the fascinating qualities of the healthy, buoyant girl.

“Because I loved him,” said Mary.

Bealby turned and looked at the weak, colorless woman reclining in the corner of a deep, wide chair. When his eyes fixed her, she put a hand to her head as if to remember.

“I think that was it – but it was such a long time ago.”

“Stuff and nonsense,” growled Bealby, “it was less than a year ago.” Then he leaned down in order to be on a level with her eyes, and shook his forefinger at her – in a fashion which would have provoked much merriment in the old days – “Mrs. Webster, why didn’t you do your work better? Were you experimenting, or had you done this sort of thing before, eh?”

“I don’t think so,” said Mary.

“Don’t think what?”

“I don’t know.”

Bealby was sorry he had confused the questions. “You made a bad job of it, Mrs. Webster. Your husband hasn’t enough life in him to count, nowadays. You made a bad job of it, Mrs. Webster – and with that, I say good-by!”

Mary looked at him as if she wanted to detain him. “It isn’t what it used to be,” she said vaguely, and then, as if the effort were too great, she sighed and lost consciousness.

•   •   •   •   •

It was not before she opened her eyes and looked at him that Bealby left – with a sense of having reached his first station on the road to a new discovery.

Mary went upstairs slowly to where Godfrey sat alone in his study, always in the same place, facing a window, his eyes fixed on the line of the horizon. He rose instinctively as she entered, but he did not turn or greet her in any way. His eyes did not leave their hold on that far distance.

The room was warm and very cheerful. A blaze of crackling logs lighted the creeping twilight. But it could not warm the strange pair seated side by side in the deep window. It played on them as to give a semblance of life. But the other side of them was gray and cold. They were two strange friends, passing and meeting like shadows, never kissing, never touching hands. Mary’s eyes were fixed on Godfrey with that puzzled, wistful look they always had; but Godfrey’s were far off, filled with longing and loneliness and pain.

There was a slight note of reproach in Mary’s voice when she broke into a subject never before alluded to.

“You answered me, Godfrey.”

“You called me.” His voice was cold and strange and singularly remote and he did not turn or move his eyes.

“You answered me, Godfrey.” There was a shade of defense in the dull voice. Those were the first words that had passed between them that day and they were the last. They sat side by side at the window. She looked out at the line of the horizon, too. She saw vaguely a dull, gray-green sea tossing under a wintry sky, and against it, very dimly, a little sail far off. But Godfrey saw more.

•   •   •   •   •

Dr. Bealby felt that it would be absolutely necessary for him to look in on the Websters, if not every day, at least several times a week. This would be impossible while they remained at Newport; so, making the anniversary of Godfrey’s return an excuse, he arrived in his happiest mood and insisted on taking them back in his own car to New York.

Servants and luggage would go a little ahead of them in their own car. They offered no resistance, nor any comment.

“I feel,” said Bealby, “that I must drink to the continued health and long life of our friend here. What do you say, Mrs. Webster? Will you have me to dinner tonight?”

A shudder seemed to pass through Godfrey, and Mary said nothing. Bealby stayed.

•   •   •   •   •

The dinner was as good as a good cook could make it, and the wine was better, but it was still a dull affair. Not so Bealby, who began to make a new discovery at every course. He left early and ordered them both to bed and rest.

A call by phone next morning caused Dr. Bealby to cancel an important appointment and hasten to the Websters’. The call explained nothing – in fact, said nothing, and was made by a servant – but something about it struck Dr. Bealby as unusual; moreover, this was the very first time since the strange occurrence that he had been called to the Websters’ home at all. His visits had always been taken as a matter of course.

He went upstairs with a sense of he knew not what. His pulse beat so fast that for a moment he lingered at their bedroom door to steady his nerves. Then he tapped lightly, as was his habit, with the tip of his middle finger. There being no response, he turned the handle softly and went in, closing the door behind him. Although it was already daylight, the curtains were drawn and the room dim, the only light being a heavily shaded bulb that hung over the bed.

Bealby closed his eyes a moment, fearing to look. When he opened them he saw two figures on the bed. One, Godfrey Webster, a smile upon his lips, handsome, young – dead. The other, Mary, crouched beside him, her dark hair hiding her face and covering his shoulder, her hands clasped about the back of her head. There was an awful stillness.

Dr. Bealby bent down to ascertain if the crouching figure breathed. He found it did, so he stood at the foot of the bed and waited. He waited a long time, and then, unable to endure the torture of suspense, touched her very gently.

“Mrs. Webster—”

The touch and the voice brought from her a long, deep sob, followed by longer and deeper ones. Presently Bealby took her by the hand and drew her into a sitting position and looked into her face.

“Good God!” There was a sudden, unrestrained note of exultation. It was the Mary Webster of a year ago.

“I had to do it,” she sobbed.

Bealby bent closer.

“Had to?” he whispered, apprehensively. “Why did you?”

“He wanted to go back, and I had to let him.”

“How did you do it?” he repeated, with a sickening sense of dread.

She looked at him with her wonderful clear eyes. “I couldn’t hold him any longer,” she answered simply. She turned to what had been her husband. “See how glad he is! Oh—” She broke off suddenly, her voice choked with sobs, “I – I can’t bear it!”

“Go look at yourself in the glass. Mrs. Webster,” said Bealby with authority, as he turned to examine the dead man. Mechanically she obeyed, and the reflection which Bealby took pains to notice, had streaming eyes, but the mouth twitched upward at the corners.

“You’ve come back again!” he said. “You had gone part way to meet him. That was your mistake. You were too impatient. You were neither here nor there, and he was neither here nor there. A little longer and he would have come all the way. You were too impatient!”

“Oh, how cruel you are! Why do you say such things?” Bowing her beautiful head, her body shook with sobs. “Isn’t it bad enough?”

“No!” Bealby spoke reflectively. “Anything is better than the past year, even – separation. At any rate, he is – there – wherever that may be – and you are here.”

SOULS OF THE DAMNED

John D. Swain

1917

Carrington had a canvas in the Salon while he was a pupil at Lemaitre’s. I remember it well, for I saw it on vernissage day, and thereafter many times. It wasn’t skied by the committee and always there was a crowd before it. The French government ultimately purchased it for the Luxembourg.

In general, good artists may be divided into two classes; those who make you think, and they who make you feel. Carrington did both. “Just Around the Corner,” he called his painting; and the fact that he was a wonder in drawing and pretty fair in color doesn’t in the least explain the appeal of it.

You saw a typical French village street, the houses linked one to the other, solidly constructed, thatched, with the cross of the old parish church brooding over all. In the middle of the street a dog lay sleeping in the warm sun whose light – the stippled luminosity of the impressionists – flooded the composition. In a doorway a fat baby rolled on his back and tried to get a toe into his mouth: a pursuit he would abandon later in life, but was surprisingly successful at now.

But the people! They were so still – so strained in their attitudes, as they gazed with fearful eyes at the corner just below – a corner empty of everything save the all-pervading sunshine.

Two or three women were flattened against the walls of the houses, their faces set in a terrified stare. An old man peered from a doorway, with the same horrified attention. And one young peasant was creeping on hands and knees towards the corner of the street, his head thrust out like a tortoise’s, so that the sinews of his neck stood out like whipcord, and his eyes were the ultimate in tragic despair.

What was coming just around the corner, that quiet, sunlit, morning? You see, it could not have been strangers approaching – the sleeping dog told you that. Nor wild beasts. What, then?

I assure you, all day long there was a crowd about this picture. I used to watch them more than it; and many times, on returning half an hour later. I would find the same ones there. It was as if they were patiently waiting to see what nameless menace would presently appear “just around the corner.” There was an eery, shuddery quality to it that was enhanced by the very restraint of the serene details.

A great future was predicted for the young artist. It always is, when his first work is admitted to the Salon. Many are never heard from thereafter.

•   •   •   •   •

I lost track of Carrington for a long time. I heard that various schools first claimed, then repudiated him. At one time he was regarded as a symbolist. He himself never lined up with any movement. He painted steadily on – the strangest pictures, the sort that people go to look at but do not buy. I once overheard a man say he would as soon live in a haunted house as one in which a Carrington oil hung.

Always the man’s infernally clever draftsmanship overtopped his other technical equipment. Even here, a decadent strain showed. Often he would lavish upon the secondary details, the “props,” an exquisite craftsmanship, a genius for texture and values that would make the still-life lads green with envy – only to paint in his central figure with a few powerful strokes, leaving it almost sketchy. Beardsley had this same trait.

Carrington never had another painting in the Salon, and I never heard of him selling anything big. He eked out a living by doing book illustrations, and was, I imagine, rather miserable on the whole.

Like every other artist, he lived in the expectation of some day achieving a masterpiece, a work he could leave as his monument, something that would astonish the critics and, of far more importance, satisfy himself. He did not mind pot-boiling as long as he kept his magnum opus clearly in view. All artists live more or less on this orchid food, and most of them die leaving a garret full of pot-boilers with the masterpiece still unpainted.

At least this did not happen to Carrington. He did paint his ideal, a picture more eery even than “Just Around the Corner,” and was satisfied with it. He was convinced that he had achieved his dream and that it could not be bettered. Then he emerged from the obscurity of his Paris atelier, rolled up the canvas, and came home to reap his reward. He expected to be rich and famous, to paint many commissions, but never one to equal “Souls of the Damned,” as he called his great work.

I ran across him in a café one night. His father, who had come up from Tennessee to visit him, was present. And what a figure the old gentleman was! Looking at him, you thought at once of dueling pistols beautifully chased, lying ready oiled in their mahogany case; of a serene belief that there existed no such thing as a bad woman; and of old daguerreotypes. You felt somehow that he would never admit to his friendship any man who questioned the Nicene Creed, or used a chaser.

Two days later, before I sailed for Spain, I met Carrington, this time alone and greatly depressed. Naturally enough I inquired for his father – and he astonished me by saying that the old gentleman had returned home in a high temper, swearing that he would never again permit his son to cross his threshold nor his name to pass his lips.

“As bad as that!” I cried. “Cut off with a shilling?”

“It’s not the shilling part, Bennet; there isn’t much money left anyhow. It’s because I’ve loved and admired him so – and he is all I have left in the world!”

“But surely you can fix it up – make concessions to so venerable a man, even though he be entirely in the wrong?”

Carrington shook his head gloomily.

“Not with him; you don’t know him! You see, I showed him my ‘Souls of the Damned’ – you must come to see it – and he looked at it a long time without speaking. Then he turned to me – he was perfectly calm – and told me that if I did not destroy it he would disown me. That was all.”

“But – but I don’t understand!” I exclaimed. “What sort of a picture is it, Carrington, to affect him so?”

“It’s the best thing I ever did, or shall do, Bennet. I’m staking all I am and hope to be on it. Why, man! I painted my own blood, my own soul into that canvas!”

“Even so, to humor the old gentleman, wouldn’t it be justifiable? You are still a young man, while he – well, he can’t be with you many years longer.”

“Destroy it?” There was a quality of horror in Carrington’s voice. “I could even do that – although I shall never paint its equal – but can’t you see? It’s his mind; broken, you know. Even were I to burn it, he would only be appeased for the moment. On some other absurd pretext he would break with me again. It’s hard, but I’ve got to make up my mind that I’ve lost him. When brains like his begin to go, their obstinacy lives on.”

•   •   •   •   •

I did not think of Carrington for months after that, as I was busy painting in Granada. When I returned with a steamer trunk full of sketches, I found that “Souls of the Damned” had acted as a strange leaven in artistic circles.

The singular part was that one had so little that was of a definite nature to put one’s finger on. Artist friends who admitted having seen Carrington’s painting refused to discuss it. Others vehemently denied having seen it at all. There was some talk of a model to whom the artist had got himself engaged – a handsome animal, but with the intellect of a simian – who had broken off the affair because he refused to repudiate “Souls of the Damned.” And the committee of the Art League had refused to hang it in their Winter exhibition.

Out of this welter of rumor and innuendo I did isolate two or three tangible facts. There was the case of Simon Levine, the antique dealer, a man of unsavory reputation and questionable integrity. Twice he had been in trouble with the customs authorities, and he had fought a dozen lawsuits with clients over some of his fake masterpieces.

Levine had heard of Carrington’s work and, always quick to mint publicity, had offered him five hundred dollars for the loan of “Souls of the Damned” to exhibit in his shop for one week.

It is some evidence of Carrington’s pecuniary condition that he accepted the offer. He knew the old rogue and detested him.

Levine visited his studio to see the painting, and just what took place between them was never known. But “Souls of the Damned” did not appear as advertised, although Levine paid the five hundred dollars. He was square, that way. Once a bargain was struck, he would abide by it. But it certainly must have hurt in this case!

I knew Levine pretty well, and my curiosity was sufficiently roused by now to send me over to his shop to get his story.

“Five hundert dollars!” he wailed, after I had explained the object of my call. “And for not’ings! In the fire I should as well burn it.”

“But tell me about it,” I urged. “Why didn’t you take it? Is it – er – salacious? Something the anti-vice people would row about?”

Levine glared at me disgustedly from beneath puffy lids.

“Vice?” he exploded. “Now, my dear Pennet, you are an artist. You know as well as I do that a photograph may be impure – a painting, never! It is but realism – yes? But I tell you this ‘Souls of the Damned’ might hang in a synagogue, so far as that goes.”

“Then why – ?”

He shrugged fat shoulders and waved deprecating palms.

“I am Levine, a connisoor!” he declared. “They call me a hard man. Maybe. I enjoy myself. On this Earth I live only once. But I tell you, some time I die. And sooner as I die with that on my soul – to bring peoples to see such a work – I give up not five hundert but five thousand dollars!”

Nor could I get more out of him.

“Go see for yourself,” he said. “Why ask me to explain what you haf but to visit Carrington to look at already?”

Which was reasonable enough, of course, and what I intended to do. But first I wanted to learn all I could about what had happened.

When Levine canceled the exhibition he had advertised and actually forfeited five hundred dollars, a clever reporter wrote up the story in lurid style. He played up the quarrel between Carrington and his father; described the tearful scene in which the pure lovely young girl had begged her affianced to destroy the wicked picture, and on his refusal had torn off her diamond engagement ring and cast it dramatically at his feet; emphasized the fact that even Levine would not sell his soul for five hundred dollars; added and embellished every studio rumor he could dig up, and made a corking good story of it all.

So good, in fact, that the Era instructed Hartwell to devote a full page to Carrington’s masterpiece in the Sunday number, with a cut of it and a likeness of the artist. And Hartwell had gone to the studio with his camera, had interviewed Carrington and seen “Souls of the Damned” – and flatly refused to have anything to do with it!

Nothing like this had ever happened to the Era before. They were obliged to fill in Hartwell’s page with what was practically boiler-plate, and the managing editor promptly fired him.

Now Hartwell was a particular friend of mine. He had been with the Era for fifteen years and was the highest salaried art and dramatic critic in town. He was middle-aged, blasé, the author of half a dozen books, a man as little likely to be swept off his feet as the Statue of Liberty from her pedestal. I knew that he had quite lived up to his income, and could ill afford to give up his place, nor expect to secure as good a one elsewhere. Therefore to Hartwell I went to slake my curiosity once and for all.

I found him, not in the smart apartment hotel where he had lived for some years, but in a standardized bungalow in a little Jersey town. He answered my ring himself – and I am sure I caught sight of the vanishing Mrs. Hartwell with checked apron and duster. A Japanese butler had admitted me on my last call.

Hartwell carried a book in one hand, a finger keeping the place; with the other hand he greeted me cordially – almost defiantly – and ushered me into a tiny library which the bungalow miraculously included, and on whose panel boards I recognized the best of his fine collection of artists’ proofs and holograph letters.

“And now,” I asked, after we had successfully despatched the customary preliminaries of friends after a long parting, “how about ‘Souls of the Damned?’”

My host threw out his hands in a gesture of helplessness, his rare smile flashing upon me.

“So that has pursued me clear into the Jersey jungle? Of course, you would have heard about it! You know Carrington pretty well, don’t you?”

“So-so,” I nodded. “Never at all chummy. Always thought he would do something unusual – and apparently he has?”

A non-committal expression crossed Hartwell’s face.

“You know, of course, that I have left the Era?” he asked.

“Yes: what are you doing now?”

Hartwell shrugged.

“Living on my royalties and growing roses; just marking time. You know, at my age one doesn’t fall into another berth like mine with the Era. They often keep on old fellows from force of habit – but they don’t hire them.”

“Just why did you quit, old man?”

“Why, I fancy the story you must have heard covers the facts. I left Carey in rather an awkward situation – insubordination, I suppose you might call it. Had been there so long I’d almost forgotten that I was an employee. I’ve no grievance.”

I looked him steadily in the eye. He did not seek to avoid my gaze, yet seemed vaguely uncomfortable.

“But why didn’t you give Carrington’s painting a write-up? If it was a false alarm you should have said so, at least, and so put an end to all this idle gossip.”

“The trouble was,” Hartwell said quietly, “it wasn’t a false alarm! Had it been, I could have turned off a bit of hack-work. I’ve done enough in my time.”

“Then?” I encouraged.

Hartwell smiled in a tired sort of way and shook his head.

“It’s no use, Bennet. You wouldn’t understand. It’s something like this: every man, good or bad, comes at length to some wall he knows he must not scale. We say, crudely but expressively, ‘one must draw the line somewhere!’ And ‘the line’ may be hard and fast or easy and loose. In Carrington’s case I came to that point. You know me for an easy-going creature, tolerant of my own and other men’s weaknesses, not critical of religion, but rather bored by it. But here was my crisis. I had to draw the line or damn my own soul – if I have one.”

I frowned.

“You mean to tell me that conscientious scruples prevented you from publishing a critique of ‘Souls of the Damned’?”

“Call it that if you like,” Hartwell replied curtly.

“But what is this painting? What’s it all about? You’ve seen it.”

“Yes – I’ve seen it, but I can’t describe it. Its title does that, once and for all.”

“You never found any difficulty in describing a picture before, not even when the futurist stuff came in,” I objected.

“True: possibly I’m getting old. Hardening of the imagination, perhaps.”

“And you always laughed at the idea of morality or immorality in art.”

“I did – many a loud hee-haw,” Hartwell readily agreed. “What of it?”

“I don’t in the least understand,” I sighed. “And anyhow, do you suppose the painting won’t be written up by someone? It’s bound to be exhibited somewhere.”

Hartwell went through the motions of washing his hands, the familiar gesture of Pilate and Lady Macbeth.

“It’s no go, old fellow!” He closed the interview. “I can’t describe ‘Souls of the Damned.’ My vocabulary doesn’t cover the situation. And I wouldn’t if I could! But there’s nothing to prevent you from going to see it yourself, is there? Come down next June and see my Killarney roses,” he invited. “And as often before then as you can stand for the Sabine farm stuff.”

•   •   •   •   •

I puzzled over his attitude on the train ride back to the city. It gave color to all the silly rot I had heard about Carrington’s picture – but left me as much in the dark as before. Well – I had run down every rumor, only to bump into a blind wall at the end. What the devil had Carrington done, anyhow! There remained nothing for me to do but to go and see for myself.

I have been so often disappointed when on the trail of a sensation that but for the singular attitude of Hartwell, sane, cynical and self-possessed, I should have expected this to be another wild goose chase. Chambers of horror, spiritualistic séances, an Apache dive I had visited in Paris, the first Cubist exhibition – what a succession of anti-climaxes, from my boyhood days on!

I began to feel at last I was to be rewarded. A painting which had produced so profound a revulsion, such nameless horror in people of such diverse mentality, must surely have in it the divine touch of madness.

Adam Deloit, an artist friend, told me where I would find Carrington’s studio. Carrington lived for a long time on Levine’s five hundred dollars and had no other assets that Adam knew of. He had even heard that Carrington was destitute. Couldn’t seem to paint a thing since “Souls of the Damned” was finished.

No, he hadn’t seen it himself. Didn’t know Carrington personally, but meant to have a look-see one of these days. Glad to be able to give me his address – fancied the poor devil would be pleased enough to see a friend! Everyone deserted him – hard sledding, et cetera, et cetera. Our talk drifted to other things.

•   •   •   •   •

A day or two later, with gray fog muffling the street sounds and sights, I found myself climbing the dirty stairs to Carrington’s attic studio and presently was reading in the dull yellow light the soiled card tacked onto his door. A voice bade me enter.

The great room was cheerless enough, with the fog drifting in through an open window. In the far end, behind a rickety screen, was a cheap iron bed and wash-stand. And on the bed lay Carrington, dead.

But what startled me even more was the figure of Carrington’s father standing by his side, grief and pride struggling in his face for mastery.

“I am so sorry,” I murmured inanely. “I came to call on your son – and to see his picture.”

The senior Carrington bowed with a dignity that was at once kindly and compelling.

“Pray, do my son this last honor,” he said. “It is my wish.”

Vastly uncomfortable, I turned to the canvas I had come to see. There it stood – the one conspicuous object in the bare and barren room, apart from poor Carrington himself.

I moved slowly toward where it hung on the wall, shrouded by a black curtain, the title plate just showing on the edge of the frame beneath. I seized the cord almost with hesitation.

Truly the stage was set for a climax. The silent man lay on his bed, face turned toward me and eyes half open, as if curious to know what I would think of his strange composition. The casual noises of the street came to me muffled by the pall of fog; a rat which squeaked in the wall at my elbow sounded loudly.

Impatient of the suspense, I jerked the curtain back so sharply that it parted from its string and hung like a funeral weed across the upper corner of the frame.

With a gasp I started back from it – for Carrington had painted it entirely out with a thick coat of bister! The dark, shiny mess was still wet to my touch.

It seemed to me that a faint chuckle echoed through the room. It was but the ghost of a chuckle – such as might come from the dry lips of Thothmes III in the museum, were it to be discovered that he was not Thothmes at all, but someone else: say, the queen’s favorite.

Yet when I turned nervously toward the living and the dead there was no change, save indeed – and this may have been a fancy – the pride in the old gentleman’s face seemed to have overmastered the grief.

FEAR

Achmed Abdullah

1919

The fact that the man whom he feared had died ten years earlier did not in the least lessen Stuart McGregor’s obsession of horror, of a certain grim expectancy, every time he recalled that final scene, just before Farragut Hutchison disappeared in the African jungle that stood, spectrally motionless as if forged out of some blackish-green metal, in the haggard moonlight.

As he reconstructed it, the whole scene seemed unreal, almost oppressively, ludicrously theatrical. The pall of sodden, stygian darkness all around; the night sounds of soft-winged, obscene things flapping lazily overhead or brushing against the furry trees that held the woolly heat of the tropical day like boiler pipes in a factory; the slimy, swishy things that glided and crawled and wiggled underfoot; the vibrant growl of a hunting lioness that began in a deep basso and peaked to a shrill, high-pitched, ridiculously inadequate treble; a spotted hyena’s vicious, bluffing bark; the chirp and whistle of innumerable monkeys; a warthog breaking through the undergrowth with a clumsy, clownish crash – and somewhere, very far away, the staccato thumping of a signal drum, and more faintly yet the answer from the next in line.

He had seen many such drums, made from fire-hollowed palm trees and covered with tightly stretched skin – often the skin of a human enemy.

Yes. He remembered it all. He remembered the night jungle creeping in on their camp like a sentient, malign being – and then that ghastly, ironic moon squinting down, just as Farragut Hutchison walked away between the six giant, plumed, ochre-smeared Bakoto warriors, and bringing into crass relief the tattoo mark on the man’s back where the shirt had been torn to tatters by camel thorns and wait-a-bit spikes and saber-shaped palm leaves.

He recalled the occasion when Farragut Hutchison had had himself tattooed; after a crimson, drunken spree at Madam Celeste’s place in Port Said, the other side of the Red Sea traders’ bazaar, to please a half-caste Swahili dancing girl who looked like a golden Madonna of evil, familiar with all the seven sins. Doubtless the girl had gone shares with the Levantine craftsman who had done the work – an eagle, in bold red and blue, surmounted by a lop-sided crown, and surrounded by a wavy design. The eagle was in profile, and its single eye had a disconcerting trick of winking sardonically whenever Farragut Hutchison moved his back muscles or twitched his shoulder blades.

Always, in his memory, Stuart McGregor saw that tattoo mark.

Always did he see the wicked, leering squint in the eagle’s eye – and then he would scream, wherever he happened to be, in a theatre, a Broadway restaurant, or across some good friend’s mahogany and beef.

Thinking back, he remembered that, for all their bravado, for all their showing off to each other, both he and Farragut Hutchinson had been afraid since that day, up the hinterland, when, drunk with fermented palm wine, they had insulted the fetish of the Bakotos, while the men were away hunting and none left to guard the village except the women and children and a few feeble old men whose curses and high-pitched maledictions were picturesque, but hardly effectual enough to stop him and his partner from doing a vulgar, intoxicated dance in front of the idol, from grinding burning cigar ends into its squat, repulsive features, and from generally polluting the juju hut – not to mention the thorough and profitable looting of the place.

They had got away with the plunder, gold dust and a handful of splendid canary diamonds, before the Bakoto warriors had returned. But fear had followed them, stalked them, trailed them; a fear different from any they had ever experienced before. And be it mentioned that their path of life had been crimson and twisted and fantastic, that they had followed the little squinting swarth-headed, hunchbacked djinni of adventure wherever man’s primitive lawlessness rules above the law, from Nome to Timbuktu, from Peru to the black felt tents of Outer Mongolia, from the Australian bush to the absinth-sodden apache haunts of Paris. Be it mentioned, furthermore, that thus, often, they had stared death in the face and, not being fools, had found the staring distasteful and shivery.

But what they had felt on that journey, back to the security of the coast and the ragged Union Jack flapping disconsolately above the British governor’s official corrugated iron mansion, had been something worse than mere physical fear; it had been a nameless, brooding, sinister apprehension which had crept through their souls, a harshly discordant note that had pealed through the hidden recesses of their beings.

Everything had seemed to mock them – the crawling, sour-miasmic jungle; the slippery roots and timber falls; the sun of the tropics, brown, decayed, like the sun on the Day of Judgment; the very flowers, spiky, odorous, waxen, unhealthy, lascivious.

At night, when they had rested in some clearing, they had even feared their own campfire – flaring up, twinkling, flickering, then coiling into a ruby ball. It had seemed completely isolated in the purple night.

Isolated!

And they had longed for human companionship – white companionship.

White faces. White slang. White curses. White odors. White obscenities.

Why – they would have welcomed a decent, square, honest white murder; a knife flashing in some yellow-haired Norse sailor’s brawny fist; a belaying pin in the hand of some bullying Liverpool tramp-ship skipper; some Nome gambler’s six-gun splattering leaden death; some apache of the Rue de Venise garroting a passerby.

But here, in the African jungle – and how Stuart McGregor remembered it – the fear of death had seemed pregnant with unmentionable horror. There had been no sounds except the buzzing of the tsetse flies and a faint rubbing of drums, whispering through the desert and jungle like the voices of disembodied souls, astray on the outer rim of creation.

And, overhead, the stars. Always, at night, three stars, glittering, leering; and Stuart McGregor, who had gone through college and had once written his college measure of limping, anemic verse, had pointed at them.

“The three stars of Africa!” he had said. “The star of violence! The star of lust! And the little stinking star of greed!”

And he had broken into staccato laughter which had struck Farragut Hutchinson as singularly out of place and had caused him to blurt forth with a wicked curse:

“Shut your trap, you—”

For already they had begun to quarrel, those two pals of a dozen tight, riotous adventures. Already, imperceptibly, gradually, like the shadow of a leaf through summer dusk, a mutual hatred had grown up between them.

But they had controlled themselves. The diamonds were good, could be sold at a big figure; and, even split in two, would mean a comfortable stake.

Then, quite suddenly, had come the end – the end for them.

And the twisting, gliding skill of Stuart McGregor’s fingers had made sure that Farragut Hutchison should be that one.

Years after, when Africa as a whole had faded to a memory of coiling, unclean shadows, Stuart McGregor used to say, with that rather plaintive, monotonous drawl of his, that the end of this phantasmal African adventure had been different from what he had expected it to be.

In a way, he had found it disappointing.

Not that it had lacked in purely dramatic thrills and blood-curdling trimmings. That wasn’t it. On the contrary, it had had a plethora of thrills.

But, rather, he must have been keyed up to too high a pitch; must have expected too much, feared too much during that journey from the Bakoto village back through the hinterland.

Thus when, one night, the Bakoto warriors had come from nowhere, out of the jungle, hundreds of them, silent, as if the wilderness had spewed them forth, it had seemed quite prosy.

Prosy, too, had been the expectation of death. It had even seemed a welcome relief from the straining fatigues of the jungle pull, the recurrent fits of fever, the flying and crawling pests, the gnawing moroseness which is so typically African.

“An explosion of life and hatred,” Stuart McGregor used to say, “that’s what I had expected, don’t you see? Quick and merciless. And it wasn’t. For the end came – slow and inevitable. Solid. Greek in a way. And so courtly! So polite! That was the worst of it!”

For the leader of the Bakotos, a tall, broad, frizzy, odorous warrior, with a face like a black Nero with a dash of Manchu emperor, had bowed before them with a great clanking of barbarous ornaments. There had been no marring taint of hatred in his voice as he told them that they must pay for their insults to the fetish. He had not even mentioned the theft of the gold dust and diamonds.

“My heart is heavy at the thought, white chiefs,” he said. “But – you must pay!”

Stuart McGregor had stammered ineffectual, foolish apologies:

“We – we were drunk. We didn’t know what – oh – what we—”

“What you were doing!” the Bakoto had finished the sentence for him, with a little melancholy sigh. “And there is forgiveness in my heart—”

“You – you mean to say—” Farragut Hutchison had jumped up, with extended hand, blurting out hectic thanks.

“Forgiveness in my heart, not the juju’s,” gently continued the black man. “For the juju never forgives. On the other hand, the juju is fair. He wants his just measure of blood. Not an ounce more. Therefore,” the Bakoto had gone on, and his face had been as stony and as passionless as that of the Buddha who meditates in the shade of the cobra’s hood, “the choice will be yours.”

“Choice?” Farragut Hutchison had looked up, a gleam of hope in his eyes.

“Yes. Choice which one of you will die.” The Bakoto had smiled, with the same suave courtliness which had, somehow, increased the utter horror of the scene. “Die – oh – a slow death, befitting the insult to the juju, befitting the juju’s great holiness!”

Suddenly, Stuart McGregor had understood that there would be no arguing, no bargaining whatsoever; and, quickly, had come his hysterical question:

“Who? I – or—”

He had slurred and stopped, somehow ashamed, and the Bakoto had finished the interrupted question with gentle, gliding, inhuman laughter: “Your friend? White chief, that is for you two to decide. I only know that the juju has spoken to the priest, and that he is satisfied with the life of one of you two; the life – and the death. A slow death.”

He had paused; then had continued gently, so very, very gently: “Yes. A slow death, depending entirely upon the vitality of the one of you two who will be sacrificed to the juju. There will be little knives. There will be the flying insects which follow the smell of blood and festering flesh. Too, there will be many crimson-headed ants, many ants – and a thin river of honey to show them the trail.”

He had yawned. Then he had gone on: “Consider. The juju is just. He only wants the sacrifice of one of you, and you yourselves must decide which one shall go, and which one shall stay. And – remember the little, little knives. Be pleased to remember the many ants which follow the honey trail. I shall return shortly and hear your choice.”

He had bowed and, with his silent warriors, had stepped back into the jungle that had closed behind them like a curtain.

Even in that moment of stark, enormous horror, horror too great to be grasped, horror that swept over and beyond the barriers of fear – even in that moment Stuart McGregor had realized that, by leaving the choice to them, the Bakoto had committed a refined cruelty worthy of a more civilized race, and had added a psychic torture fully as dreadful as the physical torture of the little knives.

Too, in that moment of ghastly, lecherous expectancy, he had known that it was Farragut Hutchison who would be sacrificed to the juju – Farragut Hutchison who sat there, staring into the camp fire, making queer little, funny noises in his throat.

Suddenly, Stuart McGregor had laughed – he remembered that laugh to his dying day – and had thrown a greasy pack of playing cards into the circle of meager, indifferent light.

“Let the cards decide, old boy,” he had shouted. “One hand of poker – and no drawing to your hand. Showdown! That’s square, isn’t it?”

“Sure!” the other had replied, still staring straight ahead of him. “Go ahead and deal—”

His voice had drifted into a mumble while Stuart McGregor had picked up the deck, had shuffled, slowly, mechanically.

As he shuffled, it had seemed to him as if his brain was frantically telegraphing to his fingers, as if all those delicate little nerves that ran from the back of his skull down to his finger tips were throbbing a clicking little chorus:

“Do – it – Mac! Do – it – Mac! Do – it – Mac!” with a maddening, syncopated rhythm.

And he had kept on shuffling, had kept on watching the motions of his fingers – and had seen that his thumb and second finger had shuffled the ace of hearts to the bottom of the deck.

Had he done it on purpose? He did not know then. He never found out – though, in his memory, he lived through the scene a thousand times.

But there were the little knives. There were the ants. There was the honey trail. There was his own, hard decision to live. And, years earlier, he had been a professional faro dealer at Silver City.

Another ace had joined the first at the bottom of the deck. The third. The fourth.

And then Farragut Hutchison’s violent: “Deal, man, deal! You’re driving me crazy. Get it over with.”

The sweat had been pouring from Stuart McGregor’s face. His blood had throbbed in his veins. Something like a sledgehammer had drummed at the base of his skull.

“Cut, won’t you?” he had said, his voice coming as if from very far away.

The other had waved a trembling hand, “No, no! Deal ’em as they lie. You won’t cheat me.”

Stuart McGregor had cleared a little space on the ground with the point of his shoe.

He remembered the motion. He remembered how the dead leaves had stirred with a dry, rasping, tragic sound, how something slimy and phosphorous-green had squirmed through the tufted jungle grass, how a little furry scorpion had scurried away with a clicking tchk-tchk-tchk.

He had dealt.

Mechanically, even as he was watching them, his fingers had given himself five cards from the bottom of the deck. Four aces – and the queen of diamonds. And, the next second, in answer to Farragut Hutchison’s choked: “Show-down! I have two pair – kings – and jacks!” his own well simulated shriek of joy and triumph:

“I win! I’ve four aces! Every ace in the pack!”

And then Farragut Hutchison’s weak, ridiculous exclamation – ridiculous considering the dreadful fate that awaited him:

“Geewhittaker! You’re some lucky guy, aren’t you, Mac?”

At the same moment, the Bakoto chief had stepped out of the jungle, followed by half a dozen warriors.

Then the final scene – that ghastly, ironic moon squinting down, just as Farragut Hutchison had walked away between the giant, plumed, ochre-smeared Bakoto warriors, and bringing into stark relief the tattoo mark on his back where the shirt had been torn to tatters – and the leering, evil wink in the eagle’s eye as Farragut Hutchison twitched his shoulder blades with absurd, nervous resignation.

Stuart McGregor remembered it every day of his life.

He spoke of it to many. But only to Father Aloysius O’Donnell, the priest who officiated in the little Gothic church around the corner, on Ninth Avenue, did he tell the whole truth – did he confess that he had cheated.

“Of course I cheated!” he said. “Of course!” And, with a sort of mocking bravado: “What would you have done, padre?”

The priest, who was old and wise and gentle, thus not at all sure of himself, shook his head.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “I don’t know.”

“Well – I do know. You would have done what I did. You wouldn’t have been able to help yourself.” Then, in a low voice: “And you would have paid! As I pay – every day, every minute, every second of my life.”

“Regret, repentance,” murmured the priest, but the other cut him short.

“Repentance – nothing. I regret nothing! I repent nothing! I’d do the same tomorrow. It isn’t that – oh – that – what d’ye call it – sting of conscience, that’s driving me crazy. It’s fear!”

“Fear of what?” asked Father O’Donnell.

“Fear of Farragut Hutchison – who is dead!”

•   •   •   •   •

Ten years ago!

And he knew that Farragut Hutchison had died. For not long afterward a British trader had come upon certain gruesome but unmistakable remains and had brought the tale to the coast. Yet was there fear in Stuart McGregor’s soul, fear worse than the fear of the little knives. Fear of Farragut Hutchison who was dead?

No. He did not believe that the man was dead. He did not believe it, could not believe it.

“And even suppose he’s dead,” he used to say to the priest, “he’ll get me. He’ll get me as sure as you’re born. I saw it in the eye of that eagle – the squinting eye of that infernal, tattooed eagle!”

Then he would turn a grayish yellow, his whole body would tremble with a terrible palsy and, in a sort of whine, which was both ridiculous and pathetic, given his size and bulk, given the crimson, twisted adventures through which he had passed, he would exclaim:

“He’ll get me. He’ll get me. He’ll get me even from beyond the grave.”

And then Father O’Donnell would cross himself rapidly, just a little guiltily.

It is said that there is a morbid curiosity which forces the murderer to view the place of his crime.

Some psychic reason of the same kind may have caused Stuart McGregor to decorate the walls and corners of his sitting room with the memories of that Africa which he feared and hated, and which, daily, he was trying to forget – with a shimmering, cruel mass of jungle curios, sjamboks and assegais, signal drums and daggers, knobkerries and rhino shields and what not.

Steadily, he added to his collection, buying in auction rooms, in little shops on the waterfront, from sailors and ship pursers and collectors who had duplicates for sale.

He became a well-known figure in the row of antique stores in back of Madison Square Garden, and was so liberal when it came to payment that Morris Newman, who specialized in African curios, would send the pick of all the new stuff he bought to his house.

•   •   •   •   •

It was on a day in August – one of those tropical New York days when the very birds gasp for air, when orange-flaming sun rays drop from the brazen sky like crackling spears and the melting asphalt picks them up again and tosses them high – that Stuart McGregor, returning from a short walk, found a large, round package in his sitting room.

“Mr. Newman sent it,” his servant explained. “He said it’s a rare curio, and he’s sure you’ll like it.”

“All right.”

The servant bowed, left, and closed the door, while Stuart McGregor cut the twine, unwrapped the paper, looked.

And then, suddenly, he screamed with fear; and, just as suddenly, the scream of fear turned into a scream of maniacal joy.

For the thing which Newman had sent him was an African signal drum, covered with tightly stretched skin-human skin – white skin! And square in the center there was a tattoo mark – an eagle in red and blue, surmounted by a lopsided crown, and surrounded by a wavy design.

Here was the final proof that Farragut Hutchison was dead, that, forever, he was rid of his fear. In a paroxysm of joy, he picked up the drum and clutched it to his heart.

And then he gave a cry of pain. His lips quivered, frothed. His hands dropped the drum and fanned the air, and he looked at the thing that had fastened itself to his right wrist.

It seemed like a short length of rope, grayish in color, spotted with dull red. Even as Stuart McGregor dropped to the floor, dying, he knew what had happened.

A little venomous snake, an African fer-de-lance, that had been curled up in the inside of the drum, been numbed by the cold, and had been revived by the splintering heat of New York.

•   •   •   •   •

Yes – even as he died he knew what had happened. Even as he died, he saw that malign, obscene squint in the eagle’s eye. Even as he died, he knew that Farragut Hutchison had killed him – from beyond the grave!

LUCIFER

John D. Swain

1923

The notorious Remsen Case was table-talk a year or so ago, although a few today could quote the details offhand. Because of it, half a dozen men were discussing psychic trivialities, in a more or less desultory way. Bliven, the psychoanalyst, was speaking.

“It all hinges on a tendency which is perhaps best expressed in such old saws as: ‘Drowning men clutch at straws,’ ‘Any port in a storm,’ or, ‘A gambling chance.’

“When men have exhausted science and religion, they turn to mediums, and crystal-gazers, and clairvoyants, and patent medicines. I knew an intelligent pharmacist who was dying of a malignant disease. Operated on three times. Specialists had given him up. Then he began to take the nostrums and cure-alls on his own shelves, although he knew perfectly well what they contained – or could easily enough have found out. Consulted a lot of herb doctors, and long-haired Indian healers, and advertising specialists.”

“And, of course, without result,” commented the little English doctor.

“I wouldn’t say that,” said Bliven. “It kept alive the forlorn spark of hope in his soul. Better than merely folding his hands and waiting for the inevitable! He was just starting in with a miraculous Brazilian root, when he snuffed out. On the whole, he lived happier, and quite possibly longer, because of all the fake remedies and doctors he spent so much money on. It’s all in your own mind, you know. Nothing else counts much.”

“All fakes, including the records of the P.S.R.,” nodded Holmes, who lectured on experimental psychology.

The little doctor shook his head depreciatingly.

“I shouldn’t go as far as that, really,” he objected, “because, every now and then, in the midst of their conscious faking, as you call it, with the marked cards and prepared slates, the hidden magnets and invisible wires and all, these mediums and pseudo-magicians come up against something that utterly baffles them. I have talked with a well-known prestidigitator who has a standing bet of a hundred guineas that he can duplicate the manifestations of any medium; and yet he states that every now and then he finds himself utterly baffled. He can fake the thing cleverly, you understand; but he cannot fathom the unknown forces back of it all. It is dangerous ground. It is sometimes blasphemy! It is blundering in where angels fear to tread.”

“Piffle!” snorted Bliven. “The subconscious mind explains it all; and we have only skirted the edge of our subject. When we have mastered it, we shall do thing right in the laboratory that will put every astrologer and palmist and tea-ground prophet out of business.”

Nobody seemed to have anything to answer, and the psychoanalyst turned to the little doctor.

“You know this, Royce,” he asserted, a bit defiantly.

“I don’t pretend to follow you new-era chaps as closely as I ought; but I recall an incident in my early practice that is not explicable in the present-day stage of your science, as I understand it.”

Bliven grunted.

“Well – shoot!” he said, “Of course, we can’t check up your facts, but if you were an accurate observer, we may be able to offer a plausible theory, at least.”

Royce flushed at his brusque way of putting it, but took no offence. Everyone makes allowances for Bliven, who is a good fellow, but crudely sure of himself, and a slave to his hobby.

•   •   •   •   •

“It happened a long, long time ago,” began Royce, “when I was an intern in a London hospital. If you know anything about our hospitals, you will understand that they are about the last places on earth for anything bizarre to occur in. Everything is frightfully ethical, and prosy, and red-tapey – far more so than in institutions over here, better as these are in many ways.

“But almost anything can happen in London, and does. You love to point to New York as the typical Cosmopolis – because it has a larger Italian population than has Rome, a larger German than Berlin, a Jewish than Jerusalem, and so forth. Well, London has all this, and more. It has nuclei of Afghans, and Turkomans, and Arabs; it has neighborhoods where conversation is carried on in no known tongue. It even has a Synagogue of Black Jews – dating certainly from the Plantagenet dynasty, and probably earlier.

“Myriads spend all their lives in London, and die knowing nothing about it. Sir Walter Besant devoted twenty years to the collecting of data for his history of the city, and confessed that he had only a smattering of his subject. Men learn some one of its hundred phases passing well; Scotland Yard agents, buyers of old pewter or black-letter books, tea importers, hotel keepers, solicitors, clubmen; but outside of their own little broods the eternal fog, hiding the real London in its sticky, yellow embrace. I was born there, attended its University, practiced for a couple of years in Whitechapel, and migrated to the fashionable Westminster district; but I visit the city as a stranger.

“So, if anything mysterious were to happen anywhere, it might well be in London; although as I have said, one would hardly look for it in one of our solid, dull, intensely prosaic hospitals.

“Watts-Bedloe was the big man in my day. You will find his works in your medical libraries, Bliven; though I dare say he has been thrust aside by the onmarch of science. Osteopathy owes a deal to him, I think; and I know that Doctor Lorenz, the great orthopedist of today, freely acknowledges his own debt.

“There was brought to us one day a peculiarly distressing case; the only child of Sir William Hutchinson, a widower, whose hopes had almost idolatrously centered in this boy, who was a cripple. You would have to be British to understand just how Sir William felt. He was a keen sportsman; played all outdoor games superlatively well, rode to hounds over his own fields, shot tigers from an elephant’s back in India, and on foot in Africa, rented a salmon stream in Norway, captained the All-English polo team for years, sailed his own yacht, bred his own hunters, had climbed all the more difficult Swiss peaks, and was the first amateur to operate a biplane.

“So that to natural parental grief was added the bitter downfall of all the plans he had for this boy; instructing him in the fine art of fly-casting, straight shooting, hard riding, and all that sort of thing. Instead of a companion who could take up the life of his advancing years were forcing him to relinquish, in a measure, he had a hopeless cripple to carry on, and end his line.

“He was a dear, patient little lad, with the most beautiful head, and great, intelligent eyes; but his wretched little body was enough to wring your heart. Twisted, warped, shriveled – and far beyond the skill of Watts-Bedloe himself, who had been Sir William’s last resort. When he sadly confessed that there was nothing he could do, that science and skillful nursing might add a few years to the mere existence of the little martyr, you will understand that his father came to that pass which you, Bliven, have illustrated in citing the case of the pharmacist. He was, in short, ready to try anything: to turn to quacks, necromancers, to Satan himself, if his son might be made whole!

“Oh, naturally he had sought the aid of religion. Noted clergy of his own faith had anointed the brave eyes, the patient lips, the crooked limbs, and prayed that God might work a miracle. But none was vouchsafed. I haven’t the least idea who it was that suggested the to Luciferians to Sir William.”

“Luciferians? Devil worshipers?” interrupted Holmes. “Were there any of them in your time?”

“There are plenty of them today; but it is the most secret sect in the world. Huysmand in La-Bas has told us as much as has anyone; and you know perfectly well, or should, that all priests who believe in the Real Presence, take the utmost care that the sacred wafer does not pass into irresponsible hands. Many will not even place it on the communicant’s palm; but only in his mouth. For the stolen Host is essential to the celebration of the infamous Black Mass which forms the chief ceremony of the Luciferian ritual. And every year a number of thefts, or attempted thefts, from the tabernaculum, are reported in the press.

“Now the theory of this strange sect is not without a certain distorted rationality. They argue that Lucifer’s Star of the Morning was cast out of Heaven after a great battle, in which he was defected to be sure, but not destroyed, nor even crippled. Today, after centuries of missionary zeal, Christianity has gathered only a tithe of the people into its fold; the great majority is, and always has been, outside. The wicked flourish, often the righteous stumble; and at the last great battle of Armageddon, the Luciferians believe that their champion will finally triumph.

“Meanwhile, and in almost impenetrable secrecy, they practice their infamous rites and serve the devil, foregathering preferably in some abandoned church, which has an altar, and above it a crucifix, which they reverse. It is believed that they number hundreds of thousands, and flourish in every quarter of the world; and it is presumed that they employ grips and passwords. But amid so much that is conjecture, this fact stands clear: the cult of Lucifer does exist, and has from time immemorial.

“I never had the least idea who suggested them to Sir William. May have been some friend who was a secret devotee, and wished to make a proselyte. May have been an idle word overheard in a club – or penny bus. The point is, he did hear, discovered that an occult power was claimed by their unholy priests, was ready to mortgage his estate or sell his soul for this little chap, and somehow got in touch with them.

“The fact that he managed it, that he browbeat Watts-Bedloe into permitting one of the fraternity to enter the hospital at all, is the best example I can give of his despairing persistence. At that, the physician agreed only upon certain seemingly prohibitive conditions. The fellow was not to touch the little patient, nor even to draw near his bed. He was not to speak to him, or seek to hold his gaze. No phony hypnotism, or anything like that.

“Watts-Bedloe, I think, framed the conditions in the confident hope that they would end negotiations; and he was profoundly disgusted when he learned that the Luciferian, though apathetic, was not in the least deterred by the hardness of the terms. It appeared that he had not been at all willing to come under any circumstances; that he tried persistently to learn how Sir William had heard of him, and his address, and that he had refused remuneration of any sort. Altogether, a new breed of fakir, you see!

“There were five of us in the room at the time appointed, besides the little patient, who was sleeping peacefully. Fact is, Watts-Bedloe had taken the precaution of administering a sleeping draught, in order that the quack might not in any possible way work upon his nervous system. Watts-Bedloe was standing by the cot, his sandy hair rumpled, his stiff moustache bristling, for all the world like an Airdale terrier on guard. The father was there, of course; and the head nurse, and a powerful and taciturn orderly. You can see that there wasn’t much chance of the devil-man pulling off anything untoward!

“When, precisely on the moment, the door opened and he stood before us, I suffered as great a shock of surprise as ever in my life; and a rapid glance at my companions’ faces showed me that their amazement equaled mine. I don’t know just what type we had visualized – whether a white-bearded mystic clad in a long cloak with a peaked hat bearing cabalistic symbols, or a pale, sinister and debonair man of the world, such as George Arliss has given us, or what not; but certainly not the utterly insignificant creature who bowed awkwardly, and stood twirling a bowler hat in his hands as the door closed behind him.

“He was a little, plump, bald man of middle age, looking for all the world like an unsuccessful greengrocer, or a dealer in butter and cheese in a small way. Although the day was cool, with a damp yellow fog swirling over the city, he perspired freely, and continually wiped his brow with a cheap bandana. He seemed at once ill at ease, yet perfectly confident, if you know what I mean. I realize that it sounds like silly rot; but that is the only way I can describe him. Utterly certain that he could do that for which he had come, but very much wishing that he were anywhere else. I heard Watts-Bedloe mutter ‘my word!’ And I believe he would have spat disgustedly – were such an act thinkable of a physician in a London hospital!

“The Luciferian priest turned to Sir William. When he spoke, it seemed entirely in keeping with his appearance that he should take liberties with his aspirates. ‘I’m ’ere, m’lord. And h’at your service.’

“Watts-Bedloe spoke sharply, ‘Look here, my man!’ he said. ‘Do you pretend to say that you can make this crippled child whole?’

“The strange man turned his moist, pasty face, livid in the fog murk, toward the specialist. ’E that I serves can, and will. I’m a middleman, in a manner of speaking. A transmitter. H’its easy enough for ’im, but I don’t advise it, and I warns you I’m not to be ’eld responsible for ’ow ’E does it.’

“Watts-Bedloe turned to Sir William. ‘Let’s have an end to the sickening farce,’ he said curtly. ‘I need fresh air!’

“Sir William nodded to the little man, who mopped his brow with his bandana, and pointed to the cot. ‘Draw back the coverlet!’ he commanded.

“The nurse obeyed, after a questioning glance at Watts-Bedloe. ‘Tyke off ’is night gown,’ continued the visitor.

“Watts-Bedloe’s lips parted in a snarl at this, but Sir William arrested him with a gesture, stepped to his son’s side, and with infinite gentleness took off the tiny gown, leaving the sleeping child naked in his bed.

“Again, as always, I felt a surge of pity sweep through me. The noble head, the pigeon breast, rising and falling softly now, the crooked spine, the little gnarled, twisted limbs! But my attention was quickly drawn back to the strange man.

“Barely glancing at the child, he fumbled at his greasy waistcoat, Watts-Bedloe watching him meanwhile like a lynx, as he took out a crumb of chalk and, squatting down, drew a rude circle on the floor about him; a circle of possibly four feet in diameter. And within this circle he began laboriously to write certain works and figures.”

“Hold on there!” spoke Bliven. “Certain words and figures? Just what symbols, please?”

“There was a swastika emblem,” Royce promptly replied, “and others familiar to some of the older secret orders, and sometimes found on Aztec ruins and Babylonian brick tablets; the open eye, for instance, and a rude fist with thumb extended. Also he scrawled the sequence 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-9, the ‘8’ omitted, you notice, which he multiplied by 18, and again by 27, and by 36; you can amuse yourselves working it out. The result is curious. Lastly, he wrote the sentence, ‘Sigma te, sigma, temere me tangis et angis.’ A palindrome, you observe; that is, it reads equally well – or ill, backward or forward.”

“Hocus pocus! Old stuff!” snorted Bliven.

Royce gazed mildly at him.

“Old stuff, as you say, professor. Older than recorded history. Having done this, a matter of five minutes, perhaps, with Watts-Bedloe becoming more and more restless, and evidently holding himself in with difficulty, the fellow rose stiffly from his squatting position, carefully replaced the fragment of chalk in his pocket, mopped his brow for the twentieth time, and gestured toward the cot with a moist palm. ‘Now, cover ’im h’up!’ he ordered. ‘All h’up; ’ead and all.’

“The nurse gently drew the sheet over the little form. We could see it rise and fall with the regular respiration of slumber. Suddenly, eyes wide open and staring at the floor, the fellow began to pray, in Latin. And whatever his English, his Latin was beautiful to listen to, and virgin pure! It was too voluble for me to follow verbatim – I made as good a transcript as I could a bit later, and will be glad to show it to you, Bliven – but, anyhow, it was a prayer to Lucifer, at once an adoration and a petition, that he would vouchsafe before these Christian unbelievers a proof of his dominion over fire, earth, air and water. He ceased abruptly as he had begun, and nodded toward the cot. ‘H’it is done!’ he sighed, and once again mopped his forehead.

“‘You infernal charlatan!’ snarled Watts-Bedloe, unable longer to contain himself. ‘You’ve got the effrontery to stand there and tell us anything has been wrought upon that child by your slobbering drivel?’

“The man looked at him with lusterless eyes. ‘Look for yerself, guv’ner.’ he answered.

“It was Sir William who snatched back the sheet from his son; and till my dying day I shall remember the unearthly beauty of what our astounded eyes beheld. Lying there, smile upon his lips, like a perfect form fresh from the hand of his Creator, his little limbs straight and delicately rounded, a picture of almost awesome loveliness, lay the child we had but five minutes before seen as a wrecked and broken travesty of humanity.”

Again Bliven interrupted explosively:

“Oh, I say now, Royce! I’ll admit you tell a ripping story, as such; you had even me hanging breathless on your climax. But this is too much! As man to man, you can’t sit there and tell us this child was cured!”

“I didn’t say that; for he was dead.”

Bliven was speechless, for once; but Holmes spoke up in remonstrance:

“It seems strange to me that such a queer story should not have been repeated, and discussed!”

“It isn’t strange, if you happen to know anything about London hospitals,” Royce explained patiently. “Who would repeat it? Would Watts-Bedloe permit it to be known that by his permission some charlatan was admitted, and that during his devilish incantations his patient died? Would the stricken father mention the subject, even to us? Or the head nurse and orderly, cogs in an inexorable machine?

“All this took place nearly forty years ago; and it is the first time I have spoken of it. Watts-Bedloe died years back; and Sir William’s line is extinct. I can’t verify a detail; but it all happened exactly as I have stated. As for the Luciferians, none of us, I think, saw him depart. He simply stole out in to the slimy yellow fog, back to whatever private hell it was he came from, somewhere in London, the city nobody knows, and where anything may happen!”