CHAPTER XITHE THIRD NIGHT
THIS was a child’s room; there were playthings on the floor.
The rain fell heavily on the low roof, blanketing the skylight and making the loft so dark that for a few seconds I could not see.
A sound came from a far corner. High-strung with terror, I thought it was some witless creature who had been concealed up here for many years, waiting for death to unburden it from a life that could never grow old.
It moved—and I saw it was the cat.
Again I could have killed it, but instead I sank down on the floor and began to laugh and cry.
“Come here, Cat! I won’t hurt you. We’re all mad together.”
But the cat mistrusted me. She slunk away, and for a while watched me very carefully, until, deciding that I had lost interest inher, she sat up and licked her tail. I wondered if this was her regular abode and if it was she whom I had heard walking above me at night, and, if so, how she managed an entrance when the doors were closed. Perhaps she was feline by day and by night was psychic. But she was not a confidential cat. Something fell coldly on my hand. I looked up. The skylight was leaking.
I could distinguish the furniture in the loft now. I saw a wash-bowl on a little stand, and put it under the loose-paned glass in the roof beneath which a pool was spreading. There was a low bureau in the room and a short turned bed, painted green, with a quilt thrown over one end, two little hand-made chairs, and one of those solid wooden rocking-horses, awesomely brave in the dusk. An open sea-chest held picture-books and paints and bent lead soldiers, and strewn upon the floor were quahaug-shells and a string of buoys. The room appeared as if its owner had just stepped out, and once more I took a cautious look around, behind me and in all the corners. Running my hand over the quilt I found that the dust of years was thick upon it. This attic had not been lived inrecently. Its disturbed face was only the kind of confusion that is left after some one has died whose belongings are too precious to touch.
I opened one of the drawers of the cherry bureau and discovered that it was full of the clothes of a little boy, of a period so long ago that I could not fathom the mystery of who he might have been. Tears came to my eyes as I unfolded the little ruffled shirts made by hand out of faded anchor-printed calico, and picked up the knitted stockings. This had been a real child; there were real holes in the stockings.
My theory that it was the captain who was living up here was exploded. Like a percussion-cap under a railroad train it had gone off when I blundered into the room. Nothing remained of it now but a wan smile and a sensation of relief. I only regretted that I had not broken open both doors behind my bed after the first night and rid my mind of the obsession at once. I walked across the room to the door at the far end and found it was not locked after all, only that the rusty latch was stuck. Forcing it up, I found myself,as I had expected, in the eaves closet, where the little door ahead of me led into Mattie’s room. I would have to go down the other way and move the bed in order to open it, but I felt assured that no one had been before me and escaped by retreating through here. I peered up and down the black length of the closet, whose floor was the adjacent edge of the roof of the old part of the house. Obviously no one was concealed. But from the rain that filtered in and the shaking of the attic beneath the storm, I felt that drafts alone might have caused the bending of the wall. Wind was sure to be playing tag at midnight in this space between two partitions, and a neurasthenic imagination could supply the rest.
I only wished that I had all those miserable hours back that I had wasted during the day, wrestling with the mystery. The best theory that I had evolved was that the New Captain had not died at all, but that Mattie, watching him during that legendary week, had managed to raise him out of his cataleptic sleep, and, although the townspeople thought he had been buried, she had kept his life a secret for the last five years. She could easily havehidden him in this unknown room. That would explain why she was so loath to show the house to any one. It would also explain why she refused to move out and why, in the end, she committed suicide rather than do so. Not daring to abandon him and have him discovered by the next occupant, an event which would end by their both being incarcerated in the same poor-house, she had done away with herself. The significance of this move would have been that Mattie was no longer dependent on the New Captain nor enchained to him by the spirit, as she was always reported to have been. Loving him, she would never have deserted him. But thinking of him in the rôle of a cataleptic old man, resuscitated after his second death, it was plausible to suppose that he would be so loathsome as to have worn out all her emotions, even faithfulness. He must have been no more than a crazy man, shut up in that loft, and love, though as strong as Mattie’s had been, cannot live forever on mere remembrance. So, according to my solution, she had at last forsaken him, after having provisioned him beforehand, as for a siege. It had been only the short length of a month after her drowningthat we had moved in, and during that time no one else had been near the place. After my arrival, perhaps as before, he had lain quiet all day. By night he had prowled around trying to get out.
It was a grand theory—while it lasted. I did not analyse the flaws in it, now I had given it up. Another night did that!
However, so many things had been solved by my heroic journey into the unknown and the unknowable, and I was so interested in them, that I forgot the rest. Here was the crux of the building of the captain’s wing, the reason for not hiring workmen in the town, and why Mattie alone had helped to carry lumber and worked until she fell exhausted from her own roof. Without dwelling on the secret room that had become a nursery, considering that room in its original aspect as part of the passageway between Mattie’s room and the New Captain’s, here was cause enough for not wanting any outside help. Mrs. Dove had been wrong in her conclusion that because he had employed no village carpenters they had afterward boycotted him. He would never have given them the opportunity. Also, the architecturalidiosyncrasies of that room were her excuse for not showing the house when the judge had tried to sell it. A person who would buy it as I had, without going inside the door, was an exception. There were not many whose need was so urgent; most house-shoppers would have poked behind her bed and pried into all the closets before the deal was closed.
Mattie had managed to keep this room hidden all her life. Alf, at the Sailor’s Rest, had told me squarely that there was no attic, and he knew as much as any one else in the town about the House of the Five Pines. Old Mis’ Hawes had died without knowing that after Mattie had plumped up her pillows and thrust the brass warming-pan into her bed, and taken her candle and gone upstairs, she was able to come down again and spend the evening with the New Captain. I would keep the secret, too, partly out of loyalty to Mattie, who had bequeathed it to me, and partly because it would be a lark to have it known only to my dear one. I could hear Jasper’s exclamation of pleased surprise when, some night after he had tucked me in, I appeared again through his study-closet. It would be a game for winter evenings.
I let myself down the steep steps behind the chimney and, going through the study and the kitchen, came up into Mattie’s room. Shoving the bed away from the little door in the eaves closet, I opened it and walked straight back into the attic-chamber. That was the way of it—a complete loop through the house!
Mattie’s room was to be mine for no other reason than its mysterious means of egress. If I had any servants or any visiting relatives, I would put them in the two big bedrooms on the other side of the upper hall and turn the hall bedroom into a bath-room. But if I ever had any babies, ifweever had, I knew where I would put them. There was a room next mine waiting for some child to play with the wall-eyed rocking-horse and sleep in the little turned bed. Dormer-windows could be cut on both sides and running water be brought up, and such a nursery would bloom beneath the old roof that the art magazines would send up representatives to take pictures of it. I could hardly restrain my impatience to begin to make it ready, although as yet there was no need for it. For the first time since we moved into the house I was happy and contented.
I was in the mood to write Jasper a long and intimate letter, telling him of my hopes for our life up here and how the House of the Five Pines was all ready for us. Of my hallucinations about the attic I said, “Nothing was locked in the room but my own fears.”
The tide had turned, and from my window at the big desk in the lower room I watched the lines of foaming spray licking up the beach. There was no longer any horizon between sea and sky. All was one blur of moving gray water, picked out with breaking white-caps and roaring as it fought to engulf the land. I thought, as I often had before: suppose the tide does not pause at the crest and retreat into the ocean, but keeps on creeping up and over, over the bank and over the road, over the hedge and over the house. However, as always, it halted in its race, pawed upon the stone breakwater, and I knew that by morning it would have slunk out again, and that children would be wading where waves had been, and Caleb Snow would be picking up winkles. Living was like that; the tide of our passions turns. The New Captain had built this double room for the great storm that had swept through his life, bearingaway the barricades of his traditions; but its force was spent now, and the skeleton laid as bare as a fish-bone on the sandy flats where strangers walked.
As I sat at the desk I smelled coffee cooking. The impression was so strong that I went into the kitchen and walked over to the stove to shove back the coffee-pot that I fancied had been left there since morning. The fire must have caught on a smoldering coal and the grounds were boiling up. But the coffee-pot was not on the stove. I found it still on the shelf, and the coffee was safe in the can. The odor must have come from out-of-doors.
I was too tired to figure the matter out, and ended by making some for myself, and going to bed. This was my third night at the House of the Five Pines, and I retired peacefully, in confidence, without any disturbing inhibitions. Everything had been solved.
I had shut the door in the secret stairs in the study-closet and fastened it with a piece of wire. In Mattie’s room I dropped down on the bed where I had shoved it across the floor that afternoon. Afterward I rose and pushed the bureau in front of the little door.I do not know what subconscious motive impelled this, but a woman who is living alone in a house with nine known rooms, none of which are in their right places, and three stairs, front, back, and secret, ought to be forgiven for locking up what she can.
Rain fell in wearied gusts; the worst was over. The wind, still high, blew dense clouds across the face of the moon and carried them on again over the sea, so that the waste was momentarily illumined. Whenever the veils of mist were torn aside the oval mirror in its frame above my bureau reflected the moonlight. I watched it for a long time on my way to sleep.
At exactly twelve o’clock I found myself sitting up in bed.
There was moonlight in the room, that fell in quivering patches on the bed-quilt and lightened up the dark walls, throwing into relief all the five white doors. But there was also another light, on the ceiling, that moved steadily up and down. Forcing my hypnotized glance away from it, I turned to the haunted door and the bureau that I had placed in front of it, and saw with sickening understanding that the mirror above it was swayingon its hinges, swinging back and forth. This caused the moonlight reflected from the water to dance like a sun-spot. The glass turned as if it were being pushed and could not keep its balance. I crawled over to it and put my hand out to steady it, and the whole thing turned.
As I drew back, the pressure on the other side of the wall withdrew. I could hear footsteps receding until they fell away down what I now knew was the stairway at the other end of the secret room. I had heard them the night before and I was sure. Whatever was in there had given up trying to get out at this side and was going back to try and get out of the door in the study-closet. I had wired that; the footsteps would return.
There was no use in trying to convince myself for the third time that this phenomenon was caused by the cat. I had put her out in the rain. And if I were mistaken, if after all, I had locked her up in the loft, could the weight of a cat shake a wall so that a mirror would swing on its hinges? This was the footstep of something larger than a cat and, Heaven help me, smaller than a man!
I heard it coming back, stealthily, walkingsoftly, picking a barefooted course across the upper chamber toward the thin partitions that separated its room from mine. I knew that in a second more it would try one door and then the other, and that the whole wall would shake and give and the mirror I was clutching would tip again and throw fantastic lights. I heard it lift the latch.