CHAPTER XVITHE FIFTH NIGHT
MY sense of security was so natural that housekeeping was my last thought. I fell to thinking of how I would have made over the room if I had decided to stay in the house. The dark walls would have to be painted lighter and the stuffy feather-bed changed for new box-springs. I turned over and over, trying to find a place that was neither on the hard edge of the frame of the bed nor directly under my comfortable companion.
It was not easy to be neurasthenic when in the society of Mrs. Dove, even if she was asleep. To look at her and hear her quiet breathing was like watching a peaceful baby. All the repose of the country was embodied in her relaxed form, from the tired hand resting on the patchwork quilt, to the head indulging in its one vanity of hair-curlers. I was wishing that Mrs. Dove had stayed at thehouse on the four preceding nights when, unconsciously, I drifted off into dreams. Nothing untoward could happen, I thought, when Mrs. Dove was near. What I had needed was another woman to keep the vigil with me.
The house was too still.
I woke up thinking that I heard something, but there was not a sound.
The tide was out and there was no noise of waves lapping the beach. There was no wind and no murmur in the pine-trees. Then I heard what I had heard before. Some one was crying!
Mrs. Dove slept on beside me, the high mound of the bed-clothes rising regularly with her deep inhalations. If only I could sleep like that! But in spite of the fact that I had gone to bed in peace and was rested from my day in the sunlight, although I had been thinking happy domestic thoughts dear to the heart of contented women and far removed from overwrought nervous hallucinations, still I could not deceive myself—I heard crying! They were weeping softly, in a smothered way, as if they were trying not to be heard, as if they knew well they mustnot allow themselves to be heard, but as if their grief had passed beyond human control.
At the sound all my scant and precious reserve of courage was dissipated. The calm repose of spirit that I had been developing during the day was gone. The unearthly manifestation played on my chilled heart. I was appalled.
It was such a wailing suffocated cry! Like some one in a nightmare, or a child struggling in its sleep—or a child shut up in a room!... That was it!
I tried not to comprehend the meaning of this horror. I wanted to hide under the bed-clothes, but a voice rose above the weeping. I raised my cowardly head to be sure that what I was straining to listen to was there.... It was like the séance. I did not believe in it, but I heard it just the same. The tones were not unlike those last faint whispers I had heard in that eery hut on the sand-dunes. It was a woman’s voice, frightened and trembling and shut away from me by two partitions, but still I understood it.
“No— No— You can’t go! He would kill you if you ever got out.”
The cry was distraught and agonized, terrified as only a mother bird’s is when the young robin hops out of the nest to the branch and a cat crouches under the tree, or of a lioness whose cub is facing a coiled snake at the mouth of her deep cave.
Some one moaned. I looked sharply at Mrs. Dove, but she was sleeping. Had I uttered that despairing sigh myself, or was it only a fitful gust in the tops of the five pine-trees?
Again there was wild weeping, and once more, barely distinguishable, “Don’t go! Don’t go!”
But even that thwarted mother-love, defeated in life and restless in death, could not hold back the elusive footsteps. I heard them start, as they always had, to cross the room and try the doors and go up and down the stairs.
Suddenly I remembered that after I had shown the secret way behind the chimney to Mrs. Dove I had not wired or locked the doors again. I had left everything open, thinking she might want to go up there, and afterward we had forgotten. Guilt overwhelmed me. Something urged me to goimmediately and lock the downstairs closet. I felt that I had to do this thing as much as if some one were telling me to and urging me not to put it off. There was barely time if I was to turn the key before twelve o’clock. And at the same time I felt that nothing I could do would make any difference, that what was about to happen had happened that way before. Afraid, but drawn on despite myself, I slipped out of bed and down through the kitchen to the captain’s room.
There I stopped. Some one was in the room. I could not see any one in the room, but Iknewsome one was there. The moonlight flooded every corner of it and the giant pine-trees outside cast great shadows that ran like bars across the floor. The closet door was partly open, and a faint red light shone through. But that there was something alive in the room I felt so sure that I dared not take another step. I was equally unable to go forward or to retreat. Then I heard soft steps descending the chimney, heard them distinctly, as I had heard them that night when I had slept down here in this room, only now I knew them for what they were.
I strained to hear the latch lifted, but did not. This was my fault. I had left the door open and it would slip out. Its mother would not want it to get out!
I tried to call a warning, but it was too late. Something brushed across the red crack of the doorway, something that was no more than an ugly gesture, a hiss, or a black shadow. There was the sound of impact and a blow, a body falling, a moan, a door banging. Then all was still.
The red aura had vanished.
“Murder!” I screamed.
I staggered back to the kitchen companionway, gasping and calling out, “Help! Help! Murder!”
A light was descending the stairs and Mrs. Dove was behind it. She stood on the step in her starched white night-dress, holding a candle high above her curl-papers.
“Murder!” I sobbed, and threw myself at her feet.
“Why, dearie,” said Mrs. Dove, “I didn’t hear nothing.”