III
III
Lindsay drove directly from the Quinanog station to the Quinanog Arms. The Arms proved to be a tiny mid-Victorian hotel, not an inexact replica—and by no means a discreditable one—of many small rustic hotels that he had seen in England and France. Indeed Quinanog, as he caught it in glimpses, might have been one part of France or one part of England—that region which only the English Channel prevents from being the same country. The motor, which conducted him from the station to the Arms, drove on roads in which high wine-glass elms made Gothic arches; between wide meadowy stretches, brilliant with buttercups, daisies, iris; unassertive, well-proportioned houses with roomy vegetable plots and tiny patches here and there of flower garden. He arrived at so early an hour that the best of the long friendly day stretched before him. He felt disposed to spend it merely in reading and smoking. He had plenty to smoke; hehad seen to that himself in New York. And he had plenty to read; Spink Sparrel had seen to that in Boston. The bottom of one of his trunks was covered with Lutetia Murray’s works.
But although he smoked a great deal, he did not read at all. Until luncheon he merely followed his impulses. Those impulses took him a little way down the main street, which ran between comfortable, white colonial houses, set back from the road. He walked through the tiny triangular Common. He visited the little, poster-hung post-office; looked into the big neatly arranged general store; strolled back again. His impulses then led him to explore the grounds of the Arms and deposited him finally in the hammock on the side porch. After a simple and very well-cooked luncheon, his languor broke into a sudden restlessness. “Where is the Murray place?” he asked of the proprietor of the Arms, whose name, the letterhead of the Arms stationery stated, was Hyde.
“The Murray place!” Hyde repeated inquiringly. He was a long, noncommittal-looking person with big pale blue eyes illuminating a sandybaldness. “Oh, theMurrayplace! You mean the old Murray place.”
“I mean the house, whichever and wherever it is, that Lutetia Murray, the author, used to live in.”
“Oh, sure! I get you. You see it’s been empty for such a long spell that we forget all about it. The old Murray place is on the road to West Quinanog.”
“It isn’t occupied, you say?”
“Lord, no! Hasn’t been lived in since—well, since Lutetia Murray died. And that was—let me see—” Hyde cast a reflective eye upward. “Ten, eleven, twelve—oh, fifteen or twenty, I should say. Yes, all of fifteen years.”
“Does it still belong in the Murray family?”
“Lord bless your soul, no. There hasn’t been a Murray around these parts since—well, since Lutetia Murray died.”
“Who owns it now?”
“The Turners. They bought it when it came up for sale after Miss Murray’s death.”
“Well, weren’t there any heirs?”
“There was a niece—her brother’s little girl.They had to sell the place and everything in it. There neverwasa sale in Quinanog like that. Why, folks say that the mahogany would bring fancy prices in New York nowadays.”
“Didn’t they get as much as they should have?” Lindsay asked idly.
“Oh Lord, no! And they found her estate was awful involved, and the debts et up about all the auction brought in.”
“What became of the little girl?”
“Some cousins took her.”
“Where is she now?”
“Never heard tell.”
“Has anybody ever lived in the Murray place since the family left?”
“No, I believe not.”
“Is it to let?”
“Yes, and for sale.”
“Well, why hasn’t it let or sold?”
“Oh, I dunno exactly. It’s a great big barn of a place. Kinda ramshackle, and of course it’s off the main-traveled road. You’d need a flivver, at least, to live there nowadays. And there ain’t a single modern improvement in it. Nobathroom, nor electric lights, not set tubs, nor any of the things that women like. No garage neither.”
“Every disability you quote makes it sound all the better to me,” Lindsay commented. He meditated a moment. “I’d like to go over and look at it this afternoon. Is there anyone here to drive me?”
“Yes, Dick’ll take you in the runabout.” Hyde appeared to meditate in his turn, and he cocked an inquiring eye in Lindsay’s direction. “You wasn’t thinking of hiring the place, was you?”
Lindsay laughed. “I should say I wasn’t. No, I just wanted to look at it.”
“I was going to say,” Hyde went on, “that it’s a very pleasant location. City folks always think it’s a lovely spot. If you was thinking of hiring it, my brother’s the agent.”
Lindsay laughed again. “Hiring a house is about as far from my plans at present as returning to France.”
“Well,” Hyde commented dryly, “judging from the way the Quinanog boys feel, I guess I know just about how much you want to do that.”
“How soon can we go to the Murray place?” Lindsay inquired.
“Now—as far as Dick’s concerned.”
“By the way,” Hyde dropped, as he turned toward the garage, “the Murrays called the place Blue Medders.”
“Blue Meadows,” Lindsay repeated aloud. And to himself, “Blue Meadows.” And again, though wordlessly, “Blue Meadows.” It was apparent that he liked the sound and the image the sound evoked.
The runabout chugged to Blue Meadows in less than ten minutes. The road branched off from the State highway at the least frequented place in its ample stretch; ran for a long way to West Quinanog. On this side road, houses were few and they grew fewer and fewer until they left Blue Meadows quite by itself. Its situation, though solitary, was not lonely. It sat near the road. Perhaps, Lindsay decided, it would have been too near if stately wine-glass elms, feathered with leaves all along their lissom trunks, in collaboration with a high lilac hedge now past its blooming, had not helped to sequester it. Fromthe street, the house showed only a roof with two capacious chimneys, the upper story of its gray clapboarded façade.
Dick, a gangling freckled youth, slowed down the machine as if in preparation for a stop. “I’ve got the key,” he volunteered, “if you want to go in.”
Until that moment Lindsay had entertained no idea of going in. But Dick’s words fired his imagination. “Thanks, I think I will.”
Dick handed over the long, delicately wrought key. He made no move to follow Lindsay out of the car. “If you don’t mind,” he said, “I’ll run down the road to see a cousin of mine. How soon before you’ll want to start back?”
“Oh, give me half an hour or so,” Lindsay decided carelessly.
The runabout chugged into the green arch which imprisoned the distance.
Alone, Lindsay strolled between lilac bushes and over the sunken flags which led to the front door. Then, changing his mind, he made an appraising tour about the outside of the place.
Blue Meadows was a big old house: big, soit seemed to his amateur judgment, by an incredible number of rooms; and old—and here his judgment, though swift, was more accurate—to the time of two hundred years. Outside, it had all the earmarks of Colonial architecture—plain lines, stark walls, the windows, with twenty-four lights, geometrically placed; but its lovely lines, its beautiful proportions, and the soft plushy nap which time had laid upon its front clapboardings mitigated all its severities. The shingles of the roof and sides were weather-beaten and gray, the blinds a deep old blue. At one side jutted an incongruous modern addition; into the second story of which was set a galleried piazza. At the other side stretched an endless series of additions, tapering in size to a tiny shed.
“This is Lutetia’s house!” Lindsay stopped to muse. “Is it true that I spent two years with the French Army? Is it true that I served two more with the American Army? Oh, to think you didn’t live to see all that, Lutetia!”
A lattice arched over the doorway and on it a big climbing rose was just coming into bud. The beautiful door showed the pointed architrave,the leaded side panels, the fanlight, the engaged columns, of Colonial times. It resisted the first attack of the key, but yielded finally to Lindsay’s persuasion. He stepped into the hall.
It was a rectangular hall, running straight to the back of the house. Pairs of doors, opposite each other, gaped on both sides. At the left arose a slender straight stairway, mahogany-railed. Lindsay strolled from one room to the other, opening windows and blinds. They were big square rooms, finished in the conventional Colonial manner, with fireplaces and fireplace cupboards. The wallpaper, faded and stained, was of course quite bare of pictures and ornaments. He stopped to examine the carving on the white, painted panels above the fireplace—garlands of flowers caught with torches and masks.
Smiling to himself, Lindsay returned to the hall. “Oh, Lutetia, I should like to have seen you here!” he remarked wordlessly.
Behind the stairway, at the back, appeared another door. He opened it into darkness. Fumbling in his pocket, he produced a box of matches, lighted his way through the blackness;again opened windows and shutters. This proved to be the long back room so common in Colonial homes; running the entire width of the house. There were two fireplaces. One was small, with a Franklin stove. The other—Lindsay calculated that it would take six-foot logs. Four well-grown children, shoulder to shoulder, could have walked into it. This room was not entirely empty. In the center—by a miracle his stumbling progress had just avoided it—was a long table of the refectory type. Lindsay studied the position of the two fireplaces. He examined the ceiling. “You threw the whole lot of little rooms together to make this big room, Lutetia. You’re a lady quite of my own architectural taste. I, too, like a lot of space.”
He continued his explorations. From one side of the long living-room extended kitchen, laundry; servants’ rooms and servants’ dining-room; an endless maze of butteries, pantries, sheds. Lindsay gave them short shrift. At the other side, however, lay a little half-oval room, the first floor of that Victorian addition which he had marked from the outside.
“Oh, Lutetia, Lutetia, how could you, how could you?” he burst out at first glance. “To add this modern bit to that fine Colonial stateliness! Perhaps we’re not kindred souls after all.”
Hugging the wall of this room and leading to the second floor was a stairway so narrow that only one person could mount it at a time. Lindsay proved this to his own satisfaction by ascending it. It opened into a big back room of the main house, the one with the galleried piazza. Lindsay opened all the windows here; and then went rapidly from room to room, letting in the June sunshine.
They were all empty, of course—and yet, in a dozen plaintive ways—faded wall spaces, which showed the exact size of pictures, nails with carpet tufts still clinging to them, a forgotten window shade or two—they spoke eloquently of habitation. Indeed, the whole place had a friendly atmosphere, Lindsay reflected; there was none of the cold, dead connotation of most long-empty houses. This old place was spiritually warm, as though some reflection of a long-ago vivid life still hung among its shadows. From the dust, thestains, the cobwebs, it might have been vacant for a century. From the welcoming warmth of its quiet rooms, it might have been vacant but for a day.
Through the back windows, Lindsay looked down onto what must once have been a huge rectangle of lawn; and near the house, what must once have been an oval of flower garden. The lawn, stretching to a stone wall—beyond which towered a chaos of trees—was now knee-deep in timothy-grass; the garden had reverted to jungle. He studied the garden. Close to the house, an enormous syringa bush heaped into a mountain of fragrant snow. Near, a smoke-bush was just beginning to bubble into rounds of blood-scarlet gauze. Strangled rosebushes showed yellow or crimson. Afar an enormous patch of tiger lilies gave the effect of a bizarre, orchidous tropical group. The rest was an indiscriminate early-summer tangle of sumac; elderberry; bayberry; silver birches; wild roses; daisies; buttercups; and what would later be Queen Anne’s lace and goldenrod. From a back corner window, it seemed to him that he caught a glint of water;but he could not recapture it from any other point of view. However, he lost all memory of this in a more affording discovery. For the front windows gave him the reason of the name, Blue Meadows. Across the road stretched a series of meadows, all bluish purple with blooming iris.
Lindsay contemplated this charming prospect for a long interval.
“And now, Lutetia,” he suddenly turned and addressed the empty rooms, “I want to findyourroom. Which of these six was it?”
Retracing his steps, he went from room to room until, many times, he had made a complete survey of the second floor. He crossed and recrossed his own trail, as the excitement of the quest mounted in him.
“Ah!” he exclaimed aloud, “here it is! You can’t escape your soul-mate, Lutetia.”
It was not because the room was so much bigger than the rest that he made this decision; it was only because it was so much more quaint. At one side it merged, by means of a slender doorway, with the galleried piazza. From it, bymeans of that tiny flight of stairs, Lutetia could have descended to the first floor of that mid-Victorian addition. “I take it all back, Lutetia,” he approved. “Middle of the nineteenth century or not, it’s a wonder—this combination.” At the back of Lutetia’s room was a third door; as slender as the door leading to the gallery, but much lower; not four feet high. Lindsay pushed it open, crawled on hands and knees through it. He had of course, on his first exploration, entered the small room into which it led. But he had gone in and out without careful examination; it had seemed merely a four-walled room. Coming into it, however, from Lutetia’s bedroom, it suddenly acquired character.
The walls were papered in white. And on the mid-Victorian dado scarcely legible now, he suddenly discovered drawings. Drawings of a curious character and of a more curious technique. He followed their fluttery maze from wall to wall—a flight of little beings, winged at the shoulders and knees, with flying locks and strange finlike hands and feet; fanciful, comic, tender.
“Oh!” Lindsay emitted aloud. “Ah!” Andin an instant: “I see! This room belonged to that child Hyde spoke of.”
He ascended to the garret. This was of course the big storeroom of the Colonial imagination. It too was quite empty. At one spot a post—obviously not a roof-support—ran from floor to ceiling. Lindsay gazed about a little unseeingly. “I wonder what that post was for?” he questioned himself absently. After a while, “What’s become of that child?” he demanded of circumambient space.
As though this offered food for reflection, he descended by means of the main stairway to the lower floor; sat on the doorsteps a while. He mused—gazing out into the green-colored, sweet-scented June afternoon. After an interval he arose and repeated his voyage of exploration.
Again he was struck with the friendly quality of the old place. That physical dampness, which long vacant houses hold in solution, seemed entirely to have disappeared before the flood of June sunshine. The spiritual chill, which always accompanies it—that sinister quality so connotative of congregations of evil spirits—he againobserved was completely lacking. As he emerged from one room to enter another, it seemed to him that the one back of him filled with—companionship, he described it to himself. As he continued his explorations, it seemed to him that the room he was about to enter would offer him not ghostly but human welcome. That human welcome did not come, of course. Instead, there surged upon him the rich odors of the lilacs and syringas; the staccato greetings of the birds.
After a while he went downstairs again. Sitting in the front doorway, he fell into a rich revery.
This was where Lutetia Murray wrote the books which had so intrigued his boyish fancy. Mentally he ran over the list:The Sport of the Goddesses,The Weary Time,Mary Towle,Old Age,Intervals,With Pitfall and with Gin,Cynthia Ware— Details came up before his mental vision which he had entirely forgotten and now only half remembered; dramatic moments; descriptive passages; conversational interludes; scenes; epigrams.... He tried to imagine Lutetia Murray at Blue Meadows. The picturewhich, in college, he had cut from a book-house catalogue, flashed before him; he had found it among his papers. The figure was standing.... He had looked at it only yesterday, but his masculine observation retained no details of the gown except that it left her neck and arms bare. The face was in profile. The curling hair rose to a high mass on her head. The delicate features weremignonne, except for the delicious, warm, lusciously cut mouth— Was she blonde or brunet he wondered. She died at forty-five. To David Lindsay at twenty-two, forty-five had seemed a respectable old age. To David Lindsay at twenty-eight, it seemed almost young. She was dead, of course, when he began to read her. Oh, if he could only have met her! It was a great pity that she had died so young. Her work—he had made a point of this in his thesis—had already swung from an erratic, highly colored first period into a more balanced, carefully characterized second period; was just emerging into a third period that was the union of these two; big and rounded and satisfying. But death had cut that development short. In the last four years Lindsay had seena great deal of death and often in atrocious form. He had long ago concluded that he had thought on the end of man all the thoughts that were in him. But now, sitting in the scented warmth of Lutetia’s trellised doorway, he found that there were still other thoughts which he could think.
The runabout chugged up the road presently. “Ben waiting long?” the freckled Dick asked with a cheery shamelessness.
“No, I’ve been looking the house over. Wonderful old place, isn’t it?”
“Don’t care much for it myself,” Dick answered. “I don’t like anything old—old houses or that old truck the summer folks are always buying. Things can’t be too new or up-to-date for me.”
Lindsay did not appear at first to hear this; he was still bemused from the experiences of the afternoon. But as they approached the Arms, he emerged from his daze with a belated reply. “Well, I suppose a lot of people feel the way you do,” he remarked vaguely. “Mr. Hyde tells me that the Murray place hasn’t been let forfifteen years. I expect the rest of the people around here don’t like old houses.”
“Oh, that ain’t the reason the Murray house hasn’t let,” Dick explained with the scorn of rustic omniscience. “They say it’s haunted.”
“What rent do they ask for the Murray house?” Lindsay asked Hyde that evening.
Hyde scratched the back of his head. His face contracted with that mental agony which afflicts the Yankee when an exact statement is demanded of him. “Well, I shouldn’t be surprised if you could get it for two hundred dollars the season,” he finally brought out.
Lindsay considered, but apparently not Hyde’s answer; for presently he came out with a different question. “Why do they say it’s haunted?”
Hyde emitted a short contemptuous laugh. “Did you ever hear of any house in the country that’s been empty for a number of years that worn’t considered haunted?”
“No,” Lindsay admitted. “I am disappointed, though. I had hoped you would be able to tell me about the ghost.”
“Well, I can’t,” Hyde asserted scornfully, “nor nobody else neither.”
The two men smoked in silence.
After a while Lindsay made the motions preliminary to rising. He knocked the ashes out of his pipe; put his pipe in his pocket; withdrew his feet from their comfortable elevation on the piazza rail. Finally he assembled his full height on the floor, but not without a prolonged stretching movement. “Well,” he said, halfway through the yawn, “I guess you can tell that brother of yours that I’m going to hire the Murray house for the season.”
Hyde was equally if not moredégagé. He did not move; nor did he change his expression. “All right,” he commented without enthusiasm, “I’ll let him know. How soon would you like to go in, say?”
“As soon as I can buy a bed.” Lindsay disappeared through the doorway.
Two days later Lindsay found himself comfortably settled at Blue Meadows. Upstairs—he had of course chosen Lutetia’s room—was a cotand a bureau of soft wood. Downstairs was a limited assortment of cheap china; cheaper cutlery; the meagerest possible cooking equipment.
But there was an atmosphere given to Lindsay’s room by Lutetia’s own picture hanging above the bureau. And another to the living-room by Lutetia’s own works—a miscellaneous collection of ugly-proportioned, ugly-colored, late-nineteenth-century volumes—ranged on the broad shelf above the fireplace; by Lindsay’s writing materials scattered over the refectory table. Economical as he had been inside, he had exploded into extravagance outside. A Gloucester hammock swung at the back. A collection of garden materials which included a scythe, a spade, a sickle, a lawn-mower, and a hose filled one corner of the barn. Already—his back still complained of the process—he had cut the spacious lawn.
He was at one and the same time sanely placid and wildly happy.
Every morning he awoke with the sun and the birds. Adapting himself with an instant spiritual content to the fact that he was no longer in Franceand would not have to fly, he turned over to take another nap. An hour or two later, he was up and eating his self-prepared breakfast. The rest of the day was reading Lutetia; musing on Lutetia; “scything” or “sickling,” as he called it in his letters to Spink, in the garden; reflecting on Lutetia; exploring the neighborhood on foot; meditating on Lutetia; reading and rereading the mass of Spink’s data on Lutetia; hosing the garden; making notes on Spink’s data on Lutetia and thinking of his notes on Spink’s data on Lutetia. He awoke in the morning with Lutetia on his mind. He fell asleep at night with Lutetia in his heart. He had come to realize that Lutetia, the author, was even better than he had supposed her. His college thesis had described her merely as the Mrs. Gaskell of New England. Now, mentally, he promoted her to its Jane Austen. His youth had risen to the lure of her color and fecundity, but his youngness had not realized how rich she was in humor; how wise; what a tenderness for people informed her careful, realistic detail. It was a triumph to find her even better than the flattering dictum of his boyish judgment.
Exploring Lutetia’s domain gave results only second in satisfaction to exploring Lutetia’s mind. It was obvious at his first inspection that the garden had once stretched contrasting glories of color and perfume. A careful study from the windows was even more productive than a close survey. There, definitely, he could trace the remains of flower-plots; pleached paths; low hedges and lichened rocks. Resurrecting that garden would be an integral part of the joy of resurrecting Lutetia. By this time also, he had explored the barn. There, a big roomy lower floor sustained only part of a broken stairway. The equally roomy upper floor seemed, from such glimpses as he could get below, to be piled with rubbish. Some day, he promised himself, he would clean it out. Beyond, and to the right of the barn, bounded by the stone wall, scrambled a miniature wilderness. That wilderness evaded every effort of exploration. Only an axe could clear a trail there. Another day he would tackle the wilderness. But in the meantime he would devote himself to garden and lawn; in the meantime also loaf and invite his soul. After all, thatwas his main reason for coming to Quinanog. Whenever he thought of this, he took immediately to the Gloucester hammock.
Every morning he walked briskly over the long mile of road, shaded with wine-glass elms, slashed with vistas of pasture, pond, and brook which lay between Blue Meadows and the Quinanog post-office. When he had inquired for his mail—usually he had none—he strolled over to the general store and made his few simple purchases. He had followed this routine for ten days before it occurred to him that he had not seen a newspaper since he settled himself at Blue Meadows. “I’ll let it go that way, I guess,” he said to himself. He noticed at first with a little embarrassment and then with amusement that the groups in the post-office waiting for mail, the customers at the general store, were all quietly watching him. And one morning this floated to him from behind a pile of cracker boxes:
“He’s the nut that’s taken the Murray place. Lives all alone—batching it. Some sort of highbrow.”
Gradually, however, he made acquaintance.Silas Turner, who owned the next farm to Blue Meadows, offered him a ride one morning on the road. Out of a vague conversation on the weather and real estate, Mr. Turner dropped one interesting fact. He had known Lutetia Murray. This revelation kept Lindsay chatting for half an hour while Mr. Turner spilled a mass of uncorrelated details. Such as Miss Murray’s neighborliness; the time her cow ran away and Art Curtis brought it back; how Miss Murray admired Mis’ Turner’s beach plum jelly so much that Mis’ Turner always made some extra just for her. As they parted he let fall dispassionately: “She was a mighty handsome woman. Fine figure!” He added, still dispassionately but with an effect somehow of enthusiastic conviction, “She kept her looks to the last day of her life.”
Useless, all this, for a biography, Lindsay reflected; but it gave him an idea. He bought that day a second-hand bicycle at the Quinanog garage; and thereafter, when the devil of restlessness stirred in his young muscles, he trundled about the countryside in search of those families mentioned in Lutetia’s letters. Some wereutterly gone from Quinanog, some were not affording, and some added useful detail; as when old Mrs. Apperson produced a dozen letters written from Europe during Lutetia’s first trip abroad. “I’d have admired to go to Europe, but it never came so’s I could,” said Mrs. Apperson. “When Miss Murray went, she wrote me from every city, telling me all about it. I read ’em over a lot—makes me feel as though I’d been there too. And every Decoration Day,” she added inconsequently, “I put a bunch of heliotrope on her grave. She just loved the smell of heliotrope.”
Somehow, Lindsay had never even thought of Lutetia’s grave. The next day he made that pilgrimage. The graveyard lay near the town center, overtopped by the pine-covered hill which bore three austere white buildings—church, town-hall, and grange. The grave itself was in a patch of modern tombstones, surrounded by the flaking slabs of two centuries ago. The stone was featureless, ill-proportioned; the inscription recorded nothing but her name and the dates of her birth and death.
The note which most often came out of thesewayside gossipings was a high one—of the gaiety and the brilliancy of the Blue Meadows hospitality. Apparently people were coming and going all the time; some distinguished; some undiscovered: but all with personality. When Lindsay returned from such a talk, the old house glowed like an opal—so full did it seem of the colors of those vivacious days.
But he was not quite content to be long away from his own fireside. The friendly atmosphere of the Murray house continued to exercise its enchanting sway. He always felt that one room became occupied the instant he left it, that the one he was about to enter was already occupied—and this feeling grew day by day, augmented. It brought him back to the house always with a sense of expectancy. “Lutetia’s house is my hotel-lobby, my movie, my theater, my grand opera, my cabaret,” he wrote Spink. “There’s a strange fascination about it—a fascination with an element of eternal promise.”
At times, when he entered the trellised doorway, he found himself expecting someone to come forward to greet him. It kept occurring to himthat a neighbor had stopped to call, was waiting inside for him. Sometimes in the middle of the night he would drift slowly out of a delicious sleep to a sense, equally delicious, of being most gently and lovingly companioned in the room; sometimes in the morning he would wake up with a snap, as though the house were full of company. For a moment the whole place would seem brilliant and gay, and then—it was as though a bubble burst in the air—he was alone. “It’s almost as good,” he wrote Spink, “as though you were here yourself, you goggle-eyed hick, you!” Once or twice he caught himself talking aloud; addressing the empty air. He stifled this impulse, however. “People always have a tendency to get bughouse,” he explained to Spink, “when they live alone. I used to do that in your rooms. I’m going to try to keep sane as long as possible.”
Ten days increased rather than diminished this impression. By this time he had burned his thesis and was now making notes that were part the direct product of Spink’s data and part the byproduct of Lutetia’s own works. The syringas were beginning to run down; but the roses werecoming out in great numbers. The hollyhocks had opened flares of color under the living-room window. The lawn was as close to plush as constant care could make it. The garden was not yet quite cleaned out. He was glad, for he liked working there. It was not a whit less friendly than the house. Indeed, he felt so companioned there that sometimes he looked up suddenly to see who was watching his efforts to resurrect a neglected rosebush; or to uproot a flourishing patch of poison ivy. The evenings were long, and as—consciously girlish and in quotation marks he wrote Spink—“lovely.” His big lamp made a spot of golden color in the shadowy long room. One northeaster, which lasted three days, gave him dark and damp excuse for three days of roaring fire. Much of that time he sat opposite the blazing logs in the big, rush-bottomed piazza chair which he had purchased, smoking and reading Lutetia. Now and then, he looked up at Lutetia’s picture, which he had finally brought down from his bedroom.
Perhaps it was the picture which made him feel more companioned here than anywhere inthe house or out. The living-room was peculiarly rich with presence, so rich that he left it reluctantly at night and returned to it as quickly as possible in the morning; so rich that often he smiled, though why he could not have said; so rich that in the evening he often looked up suddenly from his book and stared into its shadowy length for a long, moveless—and breathlessly expectant—interval.
Indeed that sensation so concretely, so steadily, so persistently augmented that one evening—
He had been reading ever since dark; and it was getting late. Finally he arose; closed the door and windows. He came back to the table and stood leaning against it, idly whistling theSambre et Meusethrough his teeth, while he looked at Lutetia’s portrait.
He took upThe Sport of the Goddessesjust to look it over ... turned a page or two ... became immersed.... Suddenly ... he realized that he was not alone....
He was not alone. That was conclusive. That he suddenly and absolutely knew; though how he knew it he could not guess. His eyes stopped, inthe midst of Lutetia’s single grim murder, fixed on the printed line. He could not move them along that line. He did not mind that. But he could not move them off the page. And he did mind that; for he wanted—most intensely wanted—to lift his gaze. After lifting it, he presently discovered, he would want to project it to the left. Whoever his visitor was, it sat at the left. That he knew, completely, absolutely, and conclusively; but again, how he knew it, he did not know.
An immeasurable interval passed.
He tried to raise his eyes. He could not accomplish it. The air grew thick; his hands, still holding the book, turned cold and hard as clamps of iron. His eyes smarted from their unwinking immobility. This was absurd. Breaking this deathly ossification was just a matter of will. He made himself turn a page. Five lines down he decided; he would look up. But he did not look up. He could not. He wanted to see ... but something stronger than desire and will withheld him. He read; turned another page. Five lines down....
Ah ... the paralysing chill was moving off.... In a moment ... he was going to be able.... In a moment....
He lifted his eyes.... He gazed steadily to the left....