CHAPTER IXTHE SECOND NIGHT
SO Mattie had committed suicide.
The knowledge changed the day for me, altered the whole circumstance of our moving in, made a mist of what had before been as clear as sunlight, forced me from the relationship of a buyer into the moral position of a murderer. It seemed hardly possible that one could, with no intent of evil, be the sole cause of such a tragedy! And we had been frankly glad, had almost laughed, when we had found that she was dead! Never was I further from hilarity than that second evening in our new home, when I stood at the great window looking at the bit of sea through the pine-trees, the note from Mattie crumpled in my hand.
The sun had set behind the sand-dunes and the bay was liquid red with the reflection. It had lost the quality of water and had become blood. So must it have looked to Mattie, not once but many times during the yearsthat she had tended the terrible “Mis’ Hawes,” after she had grown out of being the barefoot girl whom the boy had chased through the drying-frames. There was no cod spread out to the salt winds now. The whole industry had vanished as completely as the owners of it, and, to take the place of these persons indigenous to the sea, was only myself, a stranger sleeping in their beds, one who could only guess out their histories and who knew nothing of their thwarted ambitions and their dreams.
Tell me your dreams!... But your dream is you.We are our dreams—and the dream is all!
Tell me your dreams!... But your dream is you.We are our dreams—and the dream is all!
Tell me your dreams!... But your dream is you.
We are our dreams—and the dream is all!
What had Mattie’s reveries been during all those twilights when she must have stood at this same window with the New Captain and, after him, alone? However dreary, they could not have included the possibility of being driven forth. It had been left for me, in my presumptuous selfishness, to add that cataclysm. Now I was the one to be alone here. Was it to be the lot of some woman always to be left at this window at sunset, to face the growing shadows in solitude? Would it be that way with me, too?
Some Puritanical instinct in me, deeper-rooted than the casual conscience of the Middle West where I had been born, tracing back to forefathers whose stern necessities of doctrine were related to this atmosphere, made me wonder if the justice which ought to be meted out to me, the murderer of Mattie, would be that, for some reason still obscure, my husband would never return and fate would force me to change places with the woman whose house I had usurped and leave me stranded there.
I checked myself. This was no mood with which to meet the night. That life had stripped Mattie at last even of her dwelling, leaving her body as bereft as her soul, was no precedent for me to follow, or I would end, as she had, in the bottom of the bay. I was grateful to her that she had not chosen the house for her act of renunciation. If her revenge upon me had taken the form of hanging herself, so that I would have unexpectedly come upon her body, swinging from the kitchen-rafters, in the dark—I put that thought away, too, and tried to occupy myself.
The sunset, flaming through the windows that faced the west, now made a red light everywhere that touched into form the tall bookcasewhere I had found the message from Mattie, burnished the gold in a Chinese cabinet brought back by some seafarer, and fell softly upon the ivory mantel at the end of the room. I made a fire with driftwood which lay piled in a rough box, had my tea in front of it, and then began again on the books. There was no likelihood that more notes would tumble out of them, unless it should be a will, or maybe an old tintype or a valentine. I shook each volume carefully.
There are people who can straighten up a library or turn a vacuum-cleaner on a bookcase in a hurry, but to me it is a labor that time forgets. There is always a clipping to be cut from a stale newspaper, or a review that has not been read before, or old acquaintances among long-closed volumes that lure one on, page by page. It takes me hours to go over a five-foot bookshelf with a dust-rag. And to-night was no exception. Particularly fascinating were the books of the New Captain on esoteric philosophy. There was no getting away from them; here was the “foreign religion” he and Mattie had embraced and the “books to prove it by.”
There was nothing modern. One great tome was Madame Blavatsky’s “Isis Unveiled,” Eastern theosophy set forth in defiant terms to a skeptical audience of 1875. Luckily, I had read it before, or I should have been reading it yet. I was already informed as to the writings on the Temple of Karnac that were identical with those on the walls of a ruin in Yucatan, proving that the religious rites of Asia and America were the same in the days before the Pyramids, when Atlantis was a continent in the middle of the ocean and the British Isles were under the sea. I wished that the New Captain had heard a certain lecture that I had recently heard delivered by a savant, who claimed that the secret of how to cut a canal from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean was well understood by the Magi of the Orient and that it was only due to international politics that it had never been attempted. Because, forsooth, it would incidentally cause the Sahara to be partially inundated and to “bloom like a rose,” but that the redistribution of the waters of the world would engulf all of England. Poor England! As if she, like myself, did not have enough trouble with what wasinher house,without being swamped by what was under it! However, this erudite lecturer had just been released from a sanitarium, we learned afterward, and to it he was shortly returned, the Mecca of most of those who follow worlds too far.
Blavatsky’s story of the ball of fire which turned itself into a cat and frisked around the room, before floating up the chimney, was marked. It could have happened in this very room. There was a white sheet of paper pinned to the wall opposite me, with a round black disk on it, that might have been there when she wished to go into a trance. I felt that if I looked at it long enough I might see means by which Mattie aided concentration a ball of fire turning into a cat. I wondered what they would have thought of Hudson’s drummer, who, although locked up in a cell, played upon his drum which was left behind in his lodging-house to keep awake the enemies who had thrown him into jail? Or of Conan Doyle’s poltergeists who threw pebbles at the man seeking shelter in a bomb-cellar? But they had manifestations of their own, no doubt, and perhaps I should come across some record of them, although they had worked out theirphilosophy before the days when one could simply seize a pencil and write upon a roll of wall-paper facts dictated by one’s “control.”
Mattie and the New Captain had had no opportunity to be influenced by the great mass of post-war spiritualistic literature. The fragments from which they formed their code were bits of gold for which they had to wash many cold streams of Calvinistic thought. They must have gloated over each discovery like misers. I could see them sitting here in this room on a winter evening, the shutters closed, the lean fire crackling, the two heads bent beneath the oil-lamp, exclaiming over some nugget of wisdom which would corroborate their own experiences. Those were the times when “old Mis’ Hawes” must have called and bellowed and pounded on the floor without getting Mattie to answer any summons to the front bedroom on the other side of the house.
Mattie and the New Captain may not have known anything about photographing fairies, or the S. P. R., or the S. P. C. A., for that matter, but cats they knew. I had found the saucers of seven of them in the kitchen andstrings on all the chairs, as if Mattie had sometimes tied them up. There was a book on the shelves about a cat: “The World of Wonders, or Divers Developments Showing the Thorough Triumph of Animal Magnetism in New England, Illustrated by the Power of Prevision in Matilda Fox,” published in Boston in 1838. It was enlivened with pen-and-ink drawings showing Mrs. Matilda Fox being hypnotized by a feather, with the cat in her lap, which, according to the text, licked her neck until it sent her spirit soaring from her body in aërial journeys to distant lands. As far as I had time to read I could not ascertain whether the author was in earnest or whether he was trying to ridicule animal magnetism, but I could not help wondering if the book had not had some influence on the legacy in favor of a home for cats, which had defrauded Mattie. If any one could be put in a trance by the manipulation of the tongue of a cat, perhaps she had not been entirely altruistic in her harboring of the creatures. Certainly, the one who had rushed wildly out of the house as we came in was glad to make its escape. Where were the rest of the cats that belongedto the saucers? Catching fish on the beach in the moonlight, possibly, and hypnotizing sand-pipers.
The books that told of cataleptic sleep were all well worn. The New Captain lived in the days when the subject of a wandering mesmerist would allow himself to be stretched out in a village drugstore window, remaining inert between two chairs for days at a time, while the curious glued their eyes to the glass and tried to stay there long enough to see him move or catch a confederate sneaking in to feed him. But this sleep was only the imperfect imitation of the somnambulance which the East Indians had practised for centuries. Theirs was true life-in-death, when the heart ceased to beat and the body grew cold, and yet, to a disciple of the occult, there was a way of reviving it. The theory of vampires rose from this phenomenon, and that of catalepsy, for if a tomb were opened and the corpse found without decay it was easy enough to ascribe the wilting of a child, in the meantime, to the thirst of the absent spirit for blood to satisfy its coffined body. More persons would have lived for longer periods if, instead of making sure of death by drivinga stake through the possessed one’s heart, they had made sure of life by breathing into his mouth and unwinding the tight shroud. The ancient Orientals understood this. The holy fakirs permitted themselves to be buried and dug up again, to the glory of God, only making sure beforehand that their bodies were not interred in ground infested with white ants. But the New Captain had the Puritan’s respect for life and death. He dreaded that he would come to life again in an iron-bound box, or he would not have despised undertakers or written into the will which we had seen at the Winkle-Man’s the clause about Mattie spending a week beside his body. He must have thought it was only due to her that he had been called back before from the first of the seven planes, and that his celestial passport was spurious unless she signed it. Poor Mattie! No one had sat beside her after her tired spirit had freed itself.
I picked up another book.
French, this time. It was called “Les Secrets du Petit Albert,” and dealt with necromancy of the eighteenth century. There was also a French book on astrology, illustrated with crude drawings of the sacredsigns of the zodiac and diagrams of potent numbers. Another one, “Le Dragon Rouge, ou L’Art de Commander les Esprits Célestes,” was not more than three by four inches, and half an inch thick. Its brittle yellow pages were bound in worn calfskin, and gave explicit directions how to conjure up the devil and how to send him back to his own kingdom when one had done with him. My scant school French could barely master the archaic forms, but I gave Mattie full credit for being able to read all the volumes stored on her top shelf. Her ancestry was traditionally French, according to the judge’s story, for she had been picked up from a ship just off Quebec, and the grooves of her mind would run easily to the mother-tongue. A recluse will master a foreign language for the mental exercise it affords. Perhaps in some other nook of the house I should find her French grammar, but here, indeed, were books that some one must have been able to read,—a significant part of their highly specialized library.
I began reading aloud from “Le Dragon Rouge”:
“Je te conjure, O Esprit! Deparoitre dansla minute par la force du grand Adonay, par Eloim, par Ariel, par Jehovam, par Agla, Tagla, Mathon, Oarios, Almouzin, Arios, Menbrot, Varios, Pithona, Magots, Silphae, Cabost, Salamandre, Tabots, Gnomus Terrae, Coelis, Godens, Aqua, Gingua, Janua, Etituamus, Zariatnatmik, A. E. A. J. A. T. M. O. A. A. M. V. P. M. S. C. T. G. T. C. G. A. J. E. Z.”
[“I conjure thee, O Spirit, to appear instantly through the will of the great Adonay”—etc.]
The little magic book then went on to say that if this were repeated twice, Lucifer would appear immediately. I thought perhaps it would be just as well to discontinue reading.
Had they actually attempted materialization up here in this very room in the old house on the tip end of the cape? There was nothing against it. If it were possible anywhere to conjure up the shades of the dead, or the devils themselves, this was as apt a place as any—a hamlet at the tip of a barren cape that extended into the ocean a hundred and forty miles, a house separated from that hamlet by its bad repute, as well as its location, aroom cut off from the rest of the house, and two people in it who had no contact with realities, to whom each was the other’s world and this world not all. If any one was able to cut through the opaque cloud of dogma surrounding metaphysical subjects to a glimpse of realities beyond, I believed that Mattie had done so. And then, I realized that I had come by a circuitous path of my own to the very same conclusion that all the townspeople had long since come to—that Mattie was clairvoyant.
Would that help her now? Did she know where her spirit would dwell more accurately than those who were orthodox? Could she return the more easily from Stygian shores? Or was that power of prevision only a mortal faculty that passed with her passing and that, while it was able to call up others from the further world, could not bring back itself?
There was a story of an old nurse of mine that I wished I had forgotten—how she was once governess in a house where a strange foreign gentleman had intercourse with spirits; how he used to talk to them as he walked about the rooms—and was happy in theirfriendship and sullen when they would not appear.
“That was all right for him,” she used to say; “but after he left, the spirits that he had called up to amuse him still hung around. That they did, and I could never get rid of them. Try as I would,—paint, paper, or insect-powder,—every dark night when I was alone one or the other of them would brush up against me and stay just where I could never quite see it until dawn.”
It was a dark night and I was alone. I sincerely hoped that whatever had been conjured up by Mattie would not brush past me. At any rate, I had no mind to sleep upstairs again in that little gabled room. I did not argue with myself about the headboard; it was too late at night for that. I opened up a folding sofa in the room that I was in, where the New Captain must have slept many times, and lay down. The sound of the full tide on the rising, answering the questioning of the Five Pines trees, made a lullaby.
It was with a shock and the feeling that I had been asleep a long time that I woke up, hearing some one coming down the stairs.The little kitchen-stairs, it must be, that pitched down from the upper room like a ladder, for the main stairs were too far away for me to have heard any footfall on them. And this was not the clumping step of a full-sized man. This was the stealthy, soundless tread of a body without weight. But still it was unmistakable.
I sat up in chilled terror, gathering the bed-clothes around me with that involuntary gesture known to all women surprised in their sleep, and waited for whoever it was to come through the kitchen into my room.
But no one entered my room.
At the foot of the stairs some one tried a door, rattled a latch, and went back up again. For a brave second I thought I would leap out of bed and run and push the bolt on the kitchen door, but before I managed to start I heard the footsteps coming down upon me. This time they would keep on, I thought; but again slowly, laboriously, they went back up, and every time they lost themselves upstairs it seemed as if I heard the weight of a person thrown against a door. Or did it go through the door and then throw its weight against it? I strained to listen. Then the stepswould come down again. The inside door of the eaves closet upstairs was locked. I had left it the way I had found it, but the steps seemed not to be within that secret room to-night, but without, as if last night a presence had been struggling to get through the closet into my room and now was trying to get back. Tortured, restless footsteps going up and down the stairs, up and down, up and down.
Every time they reached the bottom and tried the kitchen door, I swooned with terror. When they rattled the latch and went back up again I clutched my knees and did not breathe till they returned.
At cockcrow they ceased of their own volition, and, my will released, my body fell exhausted.