Chapter XIII: Part 13

“’Twas along about then that I got to hatin’ Jim, lookin’ at him sleepin’ so hard, his face all red an’ his mouth open. ’Twasn’t that so much, though, Doctor, ’cause I always thought Jim was nice-lookin’ even though he was coarse complected. But he got to havin’ restless spells, wakin’ up along of cock-crowin’ time, ’bout when I’d got my pill an’ had kind of quit shakin’ over the shadows an’ things. Then I’d have to rouse up to ’em again an’ rub him to sleep once more. I got to wonderin’ if he’d die right off, without it’s hurtin’ him none, if I’d press down hard on them soft spots in his temples. Seem like havin’ to do it any more would be more’n I could bear—”

She stopped again as if re-living her torture; perhaps slipping once more like a white wraith from bedroom to kitchen shelf and back again, to stand looking down upon her husband’s sprawled figure, battling against the up-surge of desire to crush out the life beneath her hands and be forever free from her hideous task!

“... I didn’t kill Jim, though, Doctor, until them pills give out. I reckon mebby I wouldn’t never have done it if they hadn’t give out. But after that ... sometime after that I killed Jim. I pressed down—down....”

Maynard waited until he was sure she had finished; then he spoke in a commanding tone.

“_Mrs. Howard!_”

Startled, she stared at us as if seeing us for the first time. She grasped the cell door and shook it in a frenzy of anxiety.

“Doctor Maynard! You’re a-goin’ to let me out, ain’t you? You’re a-goin’ to let me go home an’ rub Jim’s head for him so’s he can sleep? Jim cain’t sleep unless I rub his head! I’ve told you so often, Doctor....”

* * * * *

Maynard drew me away; but that pleading voice followed us down the length of the corridor, thin, anguished—

I hurried.

When we had closed the door of the Psychopathic Ward behind us, Maynard said:

“Now that’s the interesting part of it—that last—to a psychologist. Did you note that she still loves him, whenever she comes out from under her obsession about killing him?”

“Didn’t she kill him?” I asked.

“Not at all. You see, when she could get no more of the drug, her grief and her loss of sleep ‘turned her brain,’ as you laymen would say. Remember what she said about ‘Pa’.”

I battled with my bewilderment at this unexpected turn of the affair.

“But I don’t understand!” I stammered.

“Probably not. I shall try to explain it, as simply as possible and without using scientific terms. You see, she had _wanted_ to kill him for so long—had gone over the manner of it so often in her silent vigils—that when at last her conscious mind became unbalanced the resisted desire took its revenge by becoming a subconscious obsession, which announced itself an accomplished fact. It is an interesting sidelight on psychopathy, don’t you think?”

I did not. I changed the subject.

“What became of the man—her husband? How did he take it?”

“Well. Very well, indeed. Level-headed fellow. Of course, he was upset at first over her condition; but when we made it clear to him that she was incurable he calmed down. He went home and slept on it for a night or two—”

“How do you suppose,” I broke in (I really could not resist asking it)—“How do you suppose he got to sleep without—”

“... And then he applied for a divorce,” continued Maynard, ignoring my childish rudeness. “He wants to marry again, but, of course, our laws—”

“_Marry!_”

Maynard frowned. “One can see his point of view.”

“Yes; to be sure. And our laws ... quite unsympathetic—”

Maynard dismissed the matter with a magnanimous gesture. Also, his kindling eye bespoke a concentration of interest which ignored the trivial. He peered at me eagerly.

“What would you think, Wayne—I am studying the case, and I ask for information—would you be led to believe that her reason for wanting to kill him was a subconscious sensing of that trait in him, that eagerness to be rid of whatever irked him, regardless of his responsibilities? Or, on the other hand, would you think it a flair of sex antagonism—resentment that he, unlike herself, could resume a normal existence so soon after an emotional cataclysm?”

I fumbled my hat and turned toward the door. I wanted to get away.

“My time is up, Maynard,” I said hastily. “Sorry, but I must go. Glad to have had this visit with you. Awfully proud to have been the classmate of a celebrity, you know, and all that. But I really cannot follow your scientific subtleties. If you mean do I think his cruelty drove her mad—”

Maynard threw up his hands. “Oh you laymen!” he laughed. “But come in again, Wayne. Any time you’re passing through town. Glad to see you always. We have some very interesting cases here.”

Deaf and Blind Students Perform Miracles

Wide attention has been attracted by two students at Northwestern University, one of them stone blind, the other deaf and dumb, by reason of their marvelous demonstrations in “seeing” and “hearing.” Wiletta Huggins, deaf and dumb, can hear with her fingertips, or by placing a pole against a speaker’s chest and feeling the vibrations. Professor Robert H. Gault is conducting a series of experiments with her that may eventually lead to teaching deaf mutes to talk. No less remarkable are the achievements of the blind student, Carl Bostrom, who has so trained his facial nerves and ears that he can “see” things that are denied those who have the use of their eyes. In a crowded court room, he could tell, by the sound of a prisoner’s voice, whether or not he was telling the truth. Also, with uncanny accuracy, he told the dimensions of the room, located the doors and windows, and calmly announced that on one side of the room only men were standing, and on the other only women.

“I can tell by the sounds,” he said—“little sounds that most people miss. There is a difference in the noises made by men and women.”

A reporter asked him how many persons there were in the court.

He listened acutely, then said, “Seventy-five.”

The reporter guessed one hundred. Another guess estimated the number at sixty. The persons in the room were counted. There were exactly eighty two.

The Finale

_By_ WM. MERRIT

Thornton Stowe was always a puzzle to me. Very methodical in everything from early childhood, he always seemed utterly devoid of impulsive emotion. The only thing he ever did that really surprised me was to suddenly declare, one evening, that he loved Josephine Thralton and was betrothed to her.

Soon, vague rumors about Stowe’s private life were breathed around town, and his fianceé married Lakeland; the thick lipped, pock marked, red nosed political boss of the town, whose character was known and unquestioned, and about which each citizen held a private, unvoiced opinion.

I left town shortly after the wedding, and all that I heard of Stowe after that was a newspaper account of his killing Lakeland. I then wrote him the only letter since my departure; but knew him too well to expect an answer.

I returned, unannounced, one dreary afternoon in November. Quickening my steps as I left the depot, I turned toward the roller mill, which to the world was Stowe’s sole vocation, but to me, only his avocation for the purpose of defraying expenses of the work in his private chemical laboratory.

I had left him experimenting with an explosive gas which was more powerful and much cheaper than the most modern gunpowder. But it corroded every metal known, except gold. If he could only find some means of eliminating this fault, his fortune would be made.

As I hurried through the heart of town, a lone pedestrian, who seemed to shudder at the doleful dirge of the bare tree limbs overhead, and to shrink from looking at the gloomy, leaden skies beyond, approached with stooped shoulders and bowed head. It was Thornton Stowe; but he had so changed since I had seen him last that, had he not spoken, I would have passed him by. On the instant of recognition I was about to greet him cheerfully, but there was such an air of pathos in his whole bearing that I merely walked up and gripped his hand. It was as listless as his spirits, and he looked into my eyes with a silent appeal that sickened my soul to think of the emotions that impelled it.

Finally I ventured, “How’s business in the old town now, Thornt?” I had almost asked: “What’s the trouble?” but remembered that he had killed Lakeland in July and, although he had been cleared on the plea of “self defense” I felt a delicacy in arousing such reminiscences in a man of his temperament.

His reply puzzled me:

“Let’s go on home to dinner. I’ve got to tell it to somebody.”

He left me to my conjectures the rest of the way to his home, a large gray brick house, a mansion for that little town, where he lived alone with a faithful old negro man, an ex-slave, who prepared his meals and kept the house in order. The untrimmed ivy on the walls of the old antibellum home was in keeping with the neglected condition of the house, which looked now like an old deserted castle. There was no light in the front windows, although it was long after sundown. As we approached, my spirits were damped with awe at the weird aspect. A premonition of horror haunted me and it was only by a tremendous effort that I refrained from making some excuse to go immediately to the hotel.

* * * * *

The door swung open noiselessly and easily and Stowe switched on the lights in the hall. Everything was green, the sickly, poisonous green of a stagnant tarn. The grim monotony of the hideous color, and the suddenness with which the horrible aspect was revealed was appalling. The curtains were green, the walls were green, the woodwork and furniture were all green. With each turn of my head I was confronted by nothing but that nauseating hue. My head swam. The ghastly invariable color seemed to be pressing my eyeballs back into their sockets and irresistibly closing ever closer and closer around me with its overwhelming and unbroken density. The dull light from the green globe that hung in the center of the hall seemed to stifle me. I was on the point of rushing back to the street in frantic terror.

We disposed of our coats and hats without a word and walked back to the library. Again everything was the same ghastly green. The impelling terror of aggravated claustrophobia rushed back upon me with redoubled fury. I could not by force of will power, nor by artifice of reason, shake off the uncanny dread that haunted me; but was now determined to stay.

Drinks were served, and my host then addressed me for the first time since we had started home from the street; merely:

“Help yourself.”

He reached eagerly for a green bottle on the tray, drank two glasses of absinthe from it, then rested his elbows on the table and stared steadily at me for a few moments.

The real specter now rose before me: had he killed Lakeland for self defense or was it merely the diabolic fancy of a lunatic? If, with the precise cunning of a maniac, he had devised a scheme so intricate and flawless that it had baffled even the eye witnesses, then I was at the mercy of a man, known to have the power of thought impelled by passions and emotions and not controlled by reason.

He began in an even hollow voice:

“I guess you know why I killed Lakeland.”

“I heard they found ‘self defense,’” I admitted.

He swallowed a glass of wine at a gulp, then sneered with a note of irony:

“Unquestionable evidence. Lakeland is the only man who has ever even suspected that I intended to kill him when I shook hands with him.

“You can guess the first thing he did: but he was Josephine’s husband before I learned who started those stories. I felt that she hadn’t given me a fair chance to disprove all he had said and I resolved to forget her; but when I saw her getting paler and thinner because of the life she had to live, I couldn’t help feeling a sympathy for her. When Lakeland wanted to buy back the mill I had bought from his father because he had found it to be the best paying business in town, I was fool enough to tell him I’d trade with him if he would stop drinking. Of course he just told me to go to hell with my morals and threw all his money into an effort to kill my business.

“I played the game with him until all my men suddenly refused to work longer, and refused to explain why. That was too much; I shoved a pistol into my pocket and went in search of him that very afternoon. When I found him, he was, as usual, beastly drunk. To shoot him then would convict me of murder in the first degree. Besides, I couldn’t snuff his life out that way if my revenge was to be sweet. He must know about it, for half the delight of revenge would be in knowing that I had made him suffer without its costing me a thing.”

I was amazed at the mad man’s logic; for mad he certainly was.

“Of course,” he went on, “I thought first of my chemistry. He would come to liquor like a hog to slop. A little potassium cyanide in it and he would simply drop dead. There would be no symptoms of poison and the coroner’s verdict would be ‘heart failure.’ But I never drank with him and could not afford to make a special occasion for poisoning him. I merely walked by.

“‘Hello,’ he grunted. ‘Looks like I’ll have to run you clear out of town to get that mill. It isn’t half as easy to take away as your girl was.’

“Several heard it; and I wouldn’t have changed a word he said if I had had the power.

“The very next day Lewis Dalton came into the mill and told me that Lakeland was inquiring for me down in town. ‘And he’s sober today,’ he added. What better could I ask? I shoved a wrench into my pocket—that would be easily enough explained—and started immediately to town. I met him just as I turned the corner on to Main Street. There were several people in sight, but none within a hundred feet of us.”

* * * * *

Stowe’s expression had been gradually changing ever since he had begun his story. Now he was completely transformed. He leaned far over the table toward me, every muscle tense, his eyes snapping with a steely glint that made me shudder to see. I took another drink of wine, but, for the first time, he seemed to forget his completely. His lips drew in a thin, straight, colorless line as he hissed with diabolic vehemence:

“I held out my hand to him civilly enough, but spoke before he took it. I didn’t call him Lakeland that time either, I called him by his right name, the name he’s deserved ever since this world has been cursed with his damned green eyed face. His hand went straight into his coat under his arm, but I was ready for him. I grabbed his wrist and shoved him back against the wall. As soon as he saw the wrench in my other hand he realized that I was going to kill him, and the dammed coward got so weak in the legs that he didn’t even try to get away. He groaned like a calf when I hit him right over the temple. But his eyes; they still had enough of the devil in them to look at me even while he was falling, and say: ‘You’re not ahead yet, even with this.’”

He reached again for the green bottle and I offered no protest. Although he had already had enough for two men, anything would be better than his present condition.

“I didn’t even know that she was sick when I killed him,” he continued. “When they told me, I went straight to the house. She was dying—dying, and that brute was down in town just walking around the streets while she was calling for him and begging him to come to her! She recognized me as soon as I got into the room and seemed to know all.

“‘Where is Jim?’ she begged me to tell her.

“I didn’t answer her. I couldn’t.

“‘Will I have to go to him?’ she cried; and she never spoke again, and never took her eyes from mine. She is still looking straight into my eyes. And since she died,” he groaned, “her eyes have gotten as green as his.”

“Then why, in the name of Heaven, have you made everything in the house green?” I asked, reminded once more of our hideous surroundings.

“So that I couldn’t see them here. But every way I turn they are looking straight at me. Sometimes they almost blaze when I try to look away.”

There was but one chance for him now: he must have some diversion. I forgot that I had come to stay this time.

“Say, Thornt,” I suggested, “come with me for a few weeks hunting in the mountains. It’s been two years since you and I were together on a trip.”

He sat for a moment in deep thought, his face twitching convulsively, his eyes staring into vacancy.

“I am going to get out of this town,” he finally asserted.

I reached my hand across the table to him. He hesitated as though he didn’t understand, but finally took it with the same grasp he had given me on the street when he recognized my sympathy for him, and with the same pathetic appeal in his eye, gripped it until I winced.

While I still pondered over the situation he straightened up resolutely, as though he had finally reached a determination. With a desperate effort to control the emotion that now convulsed his whole being, he addressed me in a dry, husky voice:

“Frank, excuse me for a moment; and as we have always been friends, don’t think hard of me tonight.”

I nodded an assent and he walked slowly to a door at the far side of the room, passed through and closed it.

As soon as I found myself alone, the grim horror of my surroundings attacked me with reinforced fury. The dread of my wretched host’s insanity became more intense with him in the next room on a mysterious mission, at which he had asked me not to be offended. Not even the slightest sound proceeded now from the room he had entered. The changeless monotony of the omnipresent green was enhanced by the oppressive silence that reigned throughout the house, save for the intolerable tick of the old clock that stood on the floor in the corner, and seemed to pause indefinitely after each stroke, measuring eternity instead of time.

I had never seen inside that room more than half a dozen times in my whole life. There was nothing in there to go for. It had been used as a store room for old furniture ever since I could remember. Finally the suspense grew unbearable. I rose impulsively, went hastily to the door through which he had passed and flung it open.

The room had been cleared of its junk and remodeled into a neat little laboratory. Thornton stood at the far side of a table in the center of the floor, pouring absinthe into a glass that was sitting perilously near the edge. With the glass half full he placed the bottle on the table. It tilted and rolled off; but he paid it no heed. Supporting himself with one hand and raising the glass in the other, he seemed aware of my presence for the first time.

“Frank,” he gasped huskily, “no one but you knows; and they will never guess.”

I remembered in a flash, what he had said of his abandoned plan to poison Lakeland, and realized; but before I could reach him he had drained the glass. It slipped from his fingers and shattered on the floor. He stood for a moment, staring on past me into space.

I grasped the edge of the table for support and felt the cold sweat start on my brow and weakening limbs.

“Green as hell!” he muttered; and flinging his arms across his fixed eyes, crumpled to the floor; then stiffened, stark and dead.

For minutes I stood motionless, powerless to move.

Finally, tossing a burning match into the spilt liquor, I answered his last and only plea:

“No, Thornt, they shall never know.”

_Here’s Proof of the Love of the Weird and Mysterious in the Eighteenth Century_

THE CLOSED CABINET

_By_ ⸺ ⸺

_I._

It was with a little alarm and a good deal of pleasurable excitement that I looked forward to my first grown-up visit to Mervyn Grange. I had been there several times as a child, but never since I was twelve years old, and now I was over eighteen. We were all of us very proud of our cousins the Mervyns: it is not everybody that can claim kinship with a family who are in full and admitted possession of a secret, a curse, and a mysterious cabinet, in addition to the usual surplusage of horrors supplied in such cases by popular imagination. Some declared that a Mervyn of the days of Henry VIII had been cursed by an injured abbot from the foot of the gallows. Others affirmed that a dissipated Mervyn of the Georgian era was still playing cards for his soul in some remote region of the Grange. There were stories of white ladies and black imps, of bloodstained passages and magic stones. We, proud of our more intimate acquaintance with the family, naturally gave no credence to these wild inventions. The Mervyns, indeed, followed the accepted precedent in such cases, and greatly disliked any reference to the reputed mystery being made in their presence; with the inevitable result that there was no subject so pertinaciously discussed by their friends in their absence. My father’s sister had married the late Baronet, Sir Henry Mervyn, and we always felt that she ought to have been the means of imparting to us a very complete knowledge of the family secret. But in this connection she undoubtedly failed of her duty. We knew that there had been a terrible tragedy in the family some two or three hundred years ago—that a peculiarly wicked owner of Mervyn, who flourished in the latter part of the sixteenth century, had been murdered by his wife who subsequently committed suicide. We knew that the mysterious curse had some connection with this crime, but what the curse exactly was we had never been able to discover. The history of the family since that time had indeed in one sense been full of misfortune. Not in every sense. A coal mine had been discovered in one part of the estate, and a populous city had grown over the corner of another part; and the Mervyns of today, in spite of the usual percentage of extravagant heirs and political mistakes, were three times as rich as their ancestors had been. But still their story was full of bloodshed and shame, of tales of duels and suicides, broken hearts and broken honor. Only these calamities seemed to have little or no relation to each other, and what the precise curse was that was supposed to connect or account for them we could not learn. When she first married, my aunt was told nothing about it. Later on in life, when my father asked her for the story, she begged him to talk upon a pleasanter subject; and being unluckily a man of much courtesy and little curiosity, he complied with her request. This, however, was the only part of the ghostly traditions of her husband’s home upon which she was so reticent. The haunted chamber, for instance—which, of course, existed at the Grange—she treated with the greatest contempt. Various friends and relations had slept in it at different times, and no approach to any kind of authenticated ghost-story, even of the most trivial description, had they been able to supply. Its only claim to respect, indeed, was that it contained the famous Mervyn cabinet, a fascinating puzzle of which I will speak later, but which certainly had nothing haunting or horrible about its appearance.

My uncle’s family consisted of three sons. The eldest, George, the present baronet, was now in his thirties, married, and with children of his own. The second, Jack, was the black-sheep of the family. He had been in the Guards, but, about five years back, had got into some very disgraceful scrape, and had been obliged to leave the country. The sorrow and the shame of this had killed his unhappy mother, and her husband had not long afterwards followed her to the grave. Alan, the youngest son, probably because he was the nearest to us in age, had been our special favorite in earlier years. George was grown up before I had well left the nursery, and his hot, quick temper had always kept us youngsters somewhat in awe of him. Jack was four years older than Alan, and, besides, his profession had, in a way, cut his boyhood short. When my uncle and aunt were abroad, as they frequently were for months together on account of her health, it was Alan, chiefly, who had to spend his holidays with us, both as school-boy and as undergraduate. And a brighter, sweeter-tempered comrade, or one possessed of more diversified talents for the invention of games or the telling of stories, it would have been difficult to find.

For five years together now our ancient custom of an annual visit to Mervyn had been broken. First there had been the seclusion of mourning for my aunt, and a year later for my uncle; then George and his wife, Lucy—she was a connection of our own on our mother’s side, and very intimate with us all—had been away for nearly two years on a voyage round the world; and since then sickness in our own family had kept us in our turn a good deal abroad. So that I had not seen my cousins since all the calamities which had befallen them in the interval, and as I steamed northwards I wondered a good deal as to the changes I should find. I was to have come out that year in London, but ill-health had prevented me; and as a sort of consolation Lucy had kindly asked me to spend a fortnight at Mervyn, and be present at a shooting-party, which was to assemble there in the first week of October.

I had started early, and there was still an hour of the short autumn day left when I descended at the little wayside station, from which a six-mile drive brought me to the Grange. A dreary drive I found it—the round, gray, treeless outline of the fells stretching around me on every side beneath the leaden, changeless sky. The night had nearly fallen as we drove along the narrow valley in which the Grange stood: it was too dark to see the autumn tints of the woods which clothed and brightened its sides, almost too dark to distinguish the old tower—Dame Alice’s tower as it was called—which stood some half mile farther on at its head. But the light shown brightly from the Grange windows, and all feeling of dreariness departed as I drove up to the door. Leaving maid and boxes to their fate, I ran up the steps into the old, well remembered hall, and was informed by the dignified man-servant that her ladyship and the tea were awaiting me in the morning room.

I found that there was nobody staying in the house except Alan, who was finishing the long vacation there: he had been called to the bar a couple of years before. The guests were not to arrive for another week, so that I had plenty of opportunity in the interval to make up for lost time with my cousins. I began my observations that evening as we sat down to dinner, a cozy party of four. Lucy was quite unchanged—pretty, foolish, and gentle as ever. George showed the full five years’ increase of age, and seemed to have acquired a somewhat painful control of his temper. Instead of the old petulant outbursts, there was at times an air of nervous, irritable self-restraint, which I found the less pleasant of the two. But it was in Alan that the most striking alteration appeared. I felt it the moment I shook hands with him, and the impression deepened that evening with every hour. I told myself that it was only the natural difference between boy and man, between twenty and twenty-five, but I don’t think that I believed it. Superficially the change was not great. The slight-built, graceful figure; the deep gray eyes, too small for beauty; the clear-cut features, the delicate, sensitive lips, close shaven now, as they had been hairless then—all were as I remembered them. But the face was paler and thinner than it had been, and there were lines round the eyes and at the corners of the mouth which were no more natural to twenty-five than they would have been to twenty. The old charm indeed—the sweet friendliness of manner, which was his own peculiar possession—was still there. He talked and laughed almost as much as formerly, but the talk was manufactured for our entertainment, and the laughter came from his head and not from his heart. And it was when he was taking no part in the conversation that the change showed most. Then the face, on which in the old time every passing emotion had expressed itself in a constant, living current, became cold and impassive—without interest, and without desire. It was at such times that I knew most certainly that here was something which had been living and was dead. Was it only his boyhood? This question I was unable to answer.

Still, in spite of all, that week was one of the happiest in my life. The brothers were both men of enough ability and cultivation to be pleasant talkers, and Lucy could perform adequately the part of conversational accompanist which, socially speaking, is all that is required of a woman. The meals and evenings passed quickly and agreeably; the mornings I spent in unending gossips with Lucy, or in games with the children, two bright boys of five and six years old. But the afternoons were the best part of the day. George was a thorough squire in all his tastes and habits, and every afternoon his wife dutifully accompanied him round farms and coverts, inspecting new buildings, trudging along half-made roads, or marking unoffending trees for destruction. Then Alan and I would ride by the hour together over moor and meadowland, often picking our way homewards down the glen-side long after the autumn evenings had closed in. During these rides I had glimpses many a time into depths in Alan’s nature of which I doubt whether in the old days he had himself been aware. To me certainly they were as a revelation. A prevailing sadness, occasionally a painful tone of bitterness, characterized these more serious moods of his, but I do not think that, at the end of that week, I would, if I could, have changed the man, whom I was learning to revere and to pity, for the light-hearted playmate whom I felt was lost to me forever.

_II._

The only feature of the family life which jarred on me was the attitude of the two brothers towards the children. I did not notice this much at first, and at all times it was a thing to be felt rather than to be seen. George himself never seemed quite at ease with them. The boys were strong and well grown, healthy in mind and body; and one would have thought that the existence of two such representatives to carry on his name and inherit his fortune would have been the very crown of pride and happiness to their father. But it was not so. Lucy indeed was devoted to them, and in all practical matters no one could have been kinder to them than was George. They were free of the whole house, and every indulgence that money could buy for them they had. I never heard him give them a harsh word. But there was something wrong. A constraint in their presence, a relief in their absence, an evident dislike of discussing them and their affairs, a total want of that enjoyment of love and possession which in such a case one might have expected to find. Alan’s state of mind was even more marked. Never did I hear him willingly address his nephews, or in any way allude to their existence. I should have said that he simply ignored it, but for the heavy gloom which always overspread his spirits in their company, and for the glances which he would now and again cast in their direction—glances full of some hidden painful emotion, though of what nature it would have been hard to define. Indeed, Alan’s attitude towards her children I soon found to be the only source of friction between Lucy and this otherwise much-loved member of her husband’s family. I asked her one day why the boys never appeared at luncheon.

“Oh, they come when Alan is away,” she answered; “but they seem to annoy him so much that George thinks it is better to keep them out of sight when he is here. It is very tiresome. I know that it is the fashion to say that George has got the temper of the family; but I assure you that Alan’s nervous moods and fancies are much more difficult to live with.”

That was on the morning—a Friday it was—of the last day which we were to spend alone. The guests were to arrive soon after tea; and I think that with the knowledge of their approach Alan and I prolonged our ride that afternoon beyond its usual limits. We were on our way home, and it was already dusk, when a turn of the path brought us face to face with the old ruined tower, of which I have already spoken as standing at the head of the valley. I had not been close up to it yet during this visit at Mervyn. It had been a very favorite haunt of ours as children, and partly on that account, partly perhaps in order to defer the dreaded close of our ride to the last possible moment, I proposed an inspection of it. The only portion of the old building left standing in any kind of entirety was two rooms, one above the other. The tower room, level with the bottom of the moat, was dark and damp, and it was the upper one, reached by a little outside staircase, which had been our rendezvous of old. Alan showed no disposition to enter, and said that he would stay outside and hold my horse, so I dismounted and ran up alone.

The room seemed in no way changed. A mere stone shell, littered with fragments of wood and mortar. There was the rough wooden block on which Alan used to sit while he first frightened us with bogey-stories, and then calmed our excited nerves by rapid sallies of wild nonsense. There was the plank from behind which, erected as a barrier across the doorway, he would defend the castle against our united assault, pelting us with fir cones and sods of earth. This and many a bygone scene thronged on me as I stood there, and the room filled again with the memories of childish mirth. And following close came those of childish terrors. Horrors which had oppressed me then, wholly imagined or dimly apprehended from half-heard traditions, and never thought of since, flitted around me in the gathering dusk. And with them it seemed to me as if there came other memories too,—memories which had never been my own, of scenes whose actors had long been with the dead, but which, immortal as the spirit before whose eyes they had dwelt, still lingered in the spot where their victim had first learnt to shudder at their presence. Once the ghastly notion came to me, it seized on my imagination with irresistible force. It seemed as if from the darkened corners of the room vague, ill-defined shapes were actually peering out at me. When night came they would show themselves in that form, livid and terrible, in which they had been burnt into the brain and heart of the long ago dead.

I turned and glanced towards where I had left Alan. I could see his figure framed in by the window, a black shadow against the gray twilight of the sky behind. Erect and perfectly motionless he sat, so motionless as to look almost lifeless, gazing before him down the valley into the illimitable distance beyond. There was something in that stern immobility of look and attitude which struck me with a curious sense of congruity. It was right that he should be thus—right that he should be no longer the laughing boy who a moment before had been in my memory. The haunting horrors of that place seemed to demand it, and for the first time I felt that I understood the change. With an effort I shook myself free from these fancies, and turned to go. As I did so, my eye fell upon a queer-shaped painted board, leaning up against the wall, which I well recollected in old times. Many a discussion had we had about the legend inscribed upon it, which in our wisdom we had finally pronounced to be German, chiefly because it was illegible. Though I had loudly professed my faith in this theory at the time, I had always had uneasy doubts on the subject, and now half smiling I bent down to verify or remove them. The language was English, not German; but the badly painted, faded Gothic letters in which it was written made the mistake excusable. In the dim light I had difficulty even now in deciphering the words, and felt when I had done so that neither the information conveyed nor the style of the composition was sufficient reward for the trouble I had taken. This is what I read:

“Where the woman sinned the maid shall win;
But God help the maid that sleeps within.”

What the lines could refer to I neither had any notion nor did I pause then even in my own mind to inquire. I only remember vaguely wondering whether they were intended for a tombstone or for a doorway. Then, continuing my way, I rapidly descended the steps and remounted my horse, glad to find myself once again in the open air and by my cousin’s side.

The train of thought into which he had sunk during my absence was apparently an absorbing one, for to my first question as to the painted board he could hardly rouse himself to answer.

“A board with a legend written on it? Yes, he remembered something of the kind there. It had always been there, he thought. He knew nothing about it,”—and so the subject was not continued.

The weird feelings which had haunted me in the tower still oppressed me, and I proceeded to ask Alan about that old Dame Alice whom the traditions of my childhood represented as the last occupant of the ruined building. Alan roused himself now, but did not seem anxious to impart information on the subject. She had lived there, he admitted, and no one had lived there since. “Had she not,” I inquired, “something to do with the mysterious cabinet at the house? I remember hearing it spoken of as ‘Dame Alice’s cabinet.’”

“So they say,” he assented; “she and an Italian artificer who was in her service, and who, chiefly I imagine on account of his skill, shared with her the honor of reputed witchcraft.”

“She was the mother of Hugh Mervyn, the man who was murdered by his wife, was she not?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Alan, briefly.

“And had she not something to do with the curse?” I inquired after a short pause, and nervously I remembered my father’s experience on that subject, and I had never before dared to allude to it in the presence of any member of the family. My nervousness was fully warranted. The gloom on Alan’s brow deepened, and after a very short “They say so” he turned full upon me, and inquired with some asperity why on earth I had developed this sudden curiosity about his ancestress.

I hesitated a moment, for I was a little ashamed of my fancies; but the darkness gave me courage, and besides I was not afraid of telling Alan—he would understand. I told him of the strange sensations I had had while in the tower—sensations which had struck me with all that force and clearness which we usually associate with a direct experience of fact. “Of course it was a trick of imagination,” I commented; “but I could not get rid of the feeling that the person who had dwelt there last must have had terrible thoughts for the companions of her life.”

Alan listened in silence, and the silence continued for some time after I had ceased speaking.

“It is strange,” he said at last; “instincts which we do not understand form the motive-power of most of our life’s actions, and yet we refuse to admit them as evidence of any external truth. I suppose it is because we _must_ act somehow, rightly or wrongly; and there are a great many things which we need not believe unless we choose. As for this old lady, she lived long—long enough, like most of us, to do evil; unlike most of us, long enough to witness some of the results of that evil. To say that, is to say that the last years of her life must have been weighted heavily enough with tragic thought.”

I gave a little shudder of repulsion.

“That is a depressing view of life, Alan,” I said. “Does our peace of mind depend only upon death coming early enough to hide from us the truth? And, after all, can it? Our spirits do not die. From another world they may witness the fruits of our lives in this one.”

“If they do,” he answered with sudden violence, “it is absurd to doubt the existence of a purgatory. There must in such a case be a terrible one in store for the best among us.”

I was silent. The shadow that lay on his soul did not penetrate to mine, but it hung round me nevertheless, a cloud which I felt powerless to disperse.

After a moment he went on,—“Provided that they are distant enough, how little, after all, do we think of the results of our actions! There are few men who would deliberately instill into a child a love of drink, or wilfully deprive him of his reason; and yet a man with drunkenness or madness in his blood thinks nothing of bringing children into the world tainted us deeply with the curse as if he had inoculated them with it directly. There is no responsibility so completely ignored as this one of marriage and fatherhood, and yet how heavy it is and far-reaching.”

“Well,” I said, smiling, “let us console ourselves with the thought that we are not all lunatics and drunkards.”

“No,” he answered; “but there are other evils besides these, moral taints as well as physical, curses which have their roots in worlds beyond our own,—sins of the fathers which are visited upon the children.”

He had lost all violence and bitterness of tone now; but the weary dejection which had taken their place communicated itself to my spirit with more subtle power then his previous mood had owned.

“That is why,” he went on, and his manner seemed to give more purpose to his speech than hitherto,—“that is why, so far as I am concerned, I mean to shirk the responsibility and remain unmarried.”

I was hardly surprised at his words. I felt that I had expected them, but their utterance seemed to intensify the gloom which rested upon us. Alan was the first to arouse himself from its influence.

“After all,” he said, turning round to me and speaking lightly, “without looking so far and so deep, I think my resolve is a prudent one. Above all things, let us take life easily, and you know what St. Paul says about ‘trouble in the flesh,’—a remark which I am sure is specially applicable to briefless barristers, even though possessed of a modest competence of their own. Perhaps one of these days, when I am a fat old judge, I shall give my cook a chance if she is satisfactory in her clear soups; but till then I shall expect you, Evie, to work me one pair of carpet-slippers per annum, as tribute due to a bachelor cousin.”

I don’t quite know what I answered,—my heart was heavy and aching,—but I tried with true feminine docility to follow the lead he had set me. He continued for some time in the same vein; but as we approached the house the effort seemed to become too much for him, and we relapsed again into silence.

This time I was the first to break it. “I suppose,” I said, drearily, “all those horrid people will have come by now.”

“Horrid people,” he repeated, with rather an uncertain laugh, and through the darkness I saw his figure bend forward as he stretched out his hand to caress my horse’s neck. “Why Evie, I thought you were pining for gayety, and that it was, in fact, for the purpose of meeting these ‘horrid people’ that you came here.”

“Yes, I know,” I said, wistfully; “but somehow the last week has been so pleasant that I cannot believe that anything will ever be quite so nice again.”

We had arrived at the house as I spoke, and the groom was standing at our horses’ heads. Alan got off and came round to help me to dismount; but instead of putting up his arm as usual as a support for me to spring from, he laid his hand on mine. “Yes, Evie,” he said, “it has been indeed a pleasant time. God bless you for it.” For an instant he stood there looking up at me, his face full in the light which streamed from the open door, his gray eyes shining with a radiance which was not wholly from thence. Then he straightened his arm, I sprang to the ground, and as if to preclude the possibility of any answer on my part, he turned sharply on his heel, and began giving some orders to the groom. I went on alone into the house, feeling, I knew not and cared not to know why, that the gloom had fled from my spirit, and that the last ride had not after all been such a melancholy failure as it had bid fair at one time to become.

_III._

In the hall I was met by the housekeeper, who informed me that, owing to a misunderstanding about dates, a gentleman had arrived whom Lucy had not expected at that time, and that in consequence my room had been changed. My things had been put into the East Room,—the haunted room,—the room of the Closed Cabinet, as I remembered with a certain sense of pleased importance, though without any surprise. It stood apart from the other guest-rooms, at the end of the passage from which opened George and Lucy’s private apartment; and as it was consequently disagreeable to have a stranger there, it was always used when the house was full for a member of the family. My father and mother had often slept there: there was a little room next to it, though not communicating with it, which served for a dressing-room. Though I had never passed the night there myself, I knew it as well as any room in the house. I went there at once, and found Lucy superintending the last arrangements for my comfort.

She was full of apologies for the trouble she was giving me. I told her that the apologies were due to my maid and to her own servants rather than to me; “and besides,” I added, glancing round, “I am distinctly a gainer by the change.”

“You know, of course,” she said, lightly, “that this is the haunted room of the house, and that you have no right to be here?”

“I know it is the haunted room,” I answered; “but why have I no right to be here?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “There is one of those tiresome Mervyn traditions against allowing unmarried girls to sleep in this room. I believe two girls died in it a hundred and fifty years ago, or something of that sort.”

“But I should think that people, married or unmarried, must have died in nearly every room in the house,” I objected.

“Oh, yes, of course they have,” said Lucy; “but once you come across a bit of superstition in this family, it is of no use to ask for reasons. However, this particular bit is too ridiculous even for George. Owing to Mr. Leslie having come to-day, we must use every room in the house: it is intolerable having a stranger here, and you are the only relation staying with us. I pointed all that out to George, and he agreed that, under the circumstances, it would be absurd not to put you here.”

“I am quite agreeable,” I answered; “and, indeed, I think I am rather favored in having a room where the last recorded death appears to have taken place a hundred and fifty years ago, particularly as I should think that there can be scarcely anything now left in it which was here then, except, of course, the cabinet.”