"They say—What say they?Let thame say!"—Old Scottish Inscription.
"They say—What say they?Let thame say!"—Old Scottish Inscription.
After luncheon, I drove over to the village with Phillida, who had some housewifely orders to give at the shops. On second thoughts, Vere and I had agreed to tell her nothing about the venture we planned for tonight. We had satisfied her by the assurance that I meant to start for New York before the dangerous hours after midnight. Reassured, she regained her usual spirits with the buoyancy of her few years and healthy nerves. I gathered her secret belief was that no "ghost" would dare face Ethan.
Which may have been quite true!
On our way home, we stopped at the shop of Mrs. Hill to add to our supply of eggs, Phillida's hens having unaccountably failed to supply their quota. I went in, leaving my companion in the car.
No one else was in the shop. An impulseprompted me to put a question to the little woman whose life had been spent in this neighborhood.
"Mrs. Hill, did you ever hear of anyone named Desire Michell?" I asked.
She stopped counting eggs and blinked up at me. Her sallow, wrinkled face lightened with curiosity and an absurd primness.
"Now, Mr. Locke! I'd like to know where a young city feller like you got that old story from?"
"I have not got it. I want you to tell it to me. She was a witch?"
"She was a hussy," said Mrs. Hill severely. "I was a little girl when she ran away from her father's respectable house, fifty-odd years ago. The disgrace killed him, being a clergyman. An' the gossip that came back, later, an' pictures of her in such dresses! Dear! Dear! The wicked certainly have opportunities."
"Fifty years ago!" I echoed, dazed by this intrusion of a third Desire Michell.
"Ah! Nearly seventy she'd be if she was alive today; which she ain't. Why, she changed her name to one fancier that you might have heard talk of? She was——"
The name she gave me I shall not set down. It is enough to say it was that of a super-woman whose beauty, genius and absolute lack of conscience set Europe ablaze for a while. A torch of womanhood, quenched at the highest-burning hour of her career by a sudden and violent death.
"There was an older house once, on your place," she added pensively. "Did you know that? It stood in the hollow where your lake is now. Two—three hundred years old, folks say it was. One night it burned down in a big thunderstorm. The Michells then living had your house built over by the orchard, then, an' had a dam built across so as to cover up the old site with water. All the Michells lived there till the last one went missionary abroad an' died in foreign parts. I mean the hussy's brother. He took up his father's work, feelin' a strong call. He was only a young boy when his sister went off, but he felt it dreadful. He was a hard man on the sinner. Preached hell and damnation all his days, he did. Lean over the pulpit, he would, his eyes flamin' fire an' his tongue shrivellin' folks in their pews, I can tell you!"
"He left children?" I asked.
"No, sir! Rev'rund never married. He felt women a snare. Land, not much snarin' with what farm women get to wear around here! I've kind of thought of one of those blue foulard silks with white spots into it since before I married Hill, but never came any nearer than pricin' it an' bringin' home a sample. He was death on sweet odors an' soft raiment. Only sweet odors I ever get are the ten-cent bottles Hill makes the pedlar throw in when we trade. I do fancyJockey Clubfor special times, an' I've got a reasonable hope of salvation, too. I notice your cousin, Mrs. Vere, has scent on her handkerchief week days as well as when she's goin' somewhere, so I guess you don't hold with the Rev'rund Michell in New York?"
I laughed with her as I took up the bag of eggs.
"Did the runaway sister leave any children?" I queried.
"Not a Michell alive anywhere," she asserted positively. "Dead, all dead! The Rev'rund was buried at his mission in some outlandish place. An' if those heathen women dress like I've seen in the movin' picture palace in the village, I don't knowhow he makes out to rest with them flauntin' past his grave!"
I went thoughtfully out to the car. Indeed, I drove home in such abstraction that Phillida reproved me.
"'The cat has stolen your tongue,'" she teased. "Or did Mrs. Hill vamp you and make roast meat of your heart with her eyes?"
"Phil, do you put scent on your handkerchief week days as well as Sundays?" I shook off thought to inquire.
"No; I keep sachet in my handkerchief box. Why?"
"Next time you are in town, will you buy a blue silk foulard dress with white spots in it and the largest bottle of Jockey Club Extract on sale, and give them to Mrs. Hill for a Christmas present? I'll give you a blank check."
"Cousin Roger? Why?"
So I told her why. But I did not tell her the story of the second Desire Michell; nor of the original house that stood in the hollow now filled by our lake.
Why had a peculiar horror crept through mewhen Mrs. Hill told me what ruins that water covered? Why had I remembered the inexplicable, repugnant sound that on several occasions had preceded the coming of the Monster; a sound like the smack of huge lips, or some body withdrawn from thick slime? Was entrance into human air open to the alien Thing only through the ruins of the house where It had first been called by the sorceress of long ago?
We were walking across from the garage, after putting away the car, when a recollection flashed upon me. The Metropolitan Museum, in New York, held a portrait by a famous French artist of that incendiary beauty whose name it now appeared cloaked the identity of Desire Michell, daughter and sister of New England clergymen. I had seen the portrait. And piled in an intricate magnificence of curls, puffs and coils about the haughty little head of the lady, was her gold-bronze hair; the color of the braid upstairs in my chiffonier drawer.
I went up to my room and opened the work of Master Abimelech Fetherstone. Yes, there was likeness between the poor, coarse woodcut and the French portrait. The long, dark eyes with theirexpression of blended drowsiness and watchfulness were too individual to have escaped either record. Moreover, both pictures resembled that face of ivory and dusk I had glimpsed in the ray of the electric torch, all clouded and surrounded by swirls of gray vapor shot with gold.
Who and what was the girl Desire Michell whom I had come to love through a more profound darkness than that of the sight?
It seemed wisest to keep busy for the rest of the afternoon. I sorted my music. There was the score of a musical comedy so nearly completed that it could be sent to those who waited for it. Vere would attend to that, if tonight made it necessary. I reflected with disappointment that the first rehearsals would begin in a couple of weeks, and I had looked forward to this production with especial interest. There was the symphony, still unfinished, that I had hoped might be more enduring than popular music. If I was to be less enduring than either, we must go glimmering on our ways. If I snatched Desire out of her path into mine, she and I would see all those things together.
I finished at last, and set my room in order. Therewas a fire laid ready for lighting in my hearth, a mere artistic flourish in such weather. I kindled it, and put in the flames three of the volumes from the ancient bookcase. The others were oddities in occult science. Those three were vile and poisonous. No doubt other copies exist, but at least I refused to be guilty of leaving these to wreak their mischief in Phillida's household. They burned quietly enough, and meekly fell to ashes under my poker.
Our round dinner-table was cheerful as usual, with yellow-shaded candles flanking a bowl of yellow and scarlet nasturtiums. But I found its mistress suffering from a nervous headache.
"It is only the fog," she answered our sympathy. "It came on with the evening, somehow. Never mind me. Cristina has made a cream-of-lettuce bisque, and she will never forgive us if we do not eat every bit. Yes, Ethan; of course I'll take mine. I only wish every bush and tree would not drip, drip like a horrid kind of clock ticking; and the foghorns over at the lighthousesmooregularly every half minute. And I never heard the waterfall over the dam so loud!"
"We've had a wet summer," Vere observed,soothingly tranquil as ever. "The lake and creek are full. There is more water going over to make a noise."
"Please do not be so frightfully sensible, Drawls. You know I mean a different loudness. It sort of rises up and swims all over one, then dies away."
"Even a fountain will seem to do that if a wind shifts the spray," I suggested.
"Yes, Cousin Roger. But there is no wind tonight."
A discomfort stirred me at the simple reminder. I fancied Vere was similarly affected. If something moved under the water——?
We changed the conversation to a pergola planned for building next spring, that was to be overrun by grapevines and honeysuckle.
"The grapes shall hang through like an Italian picture," Phillida anticipated, headache forgotten in her enthusiasm. She shook her hair about her pink cheeks, leaning over to outline a pergola with four spoons. "Here in the middle we must have a birdbath. Or no! The birds might peck the grapes. We could have one of those big silver-colored looking-balls on a pedestal to reflect wee views of the gardenand lake and sky, with people moving no bigger than dolls. Imagine a reflection of Ethan like a Lilliputiansohigh!"
So I was able to leave her eagerly hunting catalogues of garden ornaments in her sewing-room, when the time came for me to keep my rendezvous with Death or the lady. In spite of my warning gesture, Vere followed me into the hall. His dark face was distressed and anxious.
"Let me go with you," he urged.
"No, thanks. Stay with Phil, and keep her too busy to suspect where I am."
"If I'm doing wrong to let you go," he began.
"You cannot stop me. It is still too early for danger, I think. If you like, you can stroll out on the lawn from time to time and look up at my windows. As long as the lamps are lighted in the room, I am all right. Nothing is happening."
"Your lamps were all three lighted when I found you last night," he said.
The darkness had been only for my eyes, then? Certainly I had seemed to see light withdrawn from the lamps. I mastered a tremor of the nerves, and covered it by stroking Bagheera, who sat on a hallchair making an after-dinner toilet with tongue and paw.
"Well, take care of Phil," I repeated, evading argument.
He detained me.
"The young lady might not come if there were two people, Mr. Locke. I can see that! But I'll go instead. I guess I'd be safer than you, with the—the——You know what I mean! It would be the first time for me. And if I sat waiting in the dark, the lady couldn't tell you were not there. Of course I'd bring her right to you."
No one could appreciate the courage of that offer so well as we who had both felt the intolerable horror of the nearness of the Thing whose nature was beyond our nature to endure.
"She would come to no one except me," I refused. "But, thank you. And Vere, if what you have said about my feeling toward Phillida's husband was true once, it is true no longer."
His clasp was still warm on my hand when I went into my room and switched on the lights. Soft and colorful, the haunted room sprang into view. The writing-table and piano gleamed bare withouttheir usual burdens of scattered papers and music, removed that afternoon. For lack of familiar occupation, when I sat down in my favorite place, I took up the gold pomander and fell to studying the intricate designs worked in the metal.
"Containing a rare herb of Jerusalem called Lady's Rose, resembling spikenard, with vervain, and cedar, and secret simples——"
"Vervain, which is powerful against evil spirits——"
The strange fragrance, heady as the bouquet of rich wine, never cloying, exquisite, might well have seemed magical to the dry Puritans, I mused. It should stay by me tonight, like a promise of her coming.
After I had sat there a while, I turned out the lights.
"An excellent way to get a fayrie—and when you have her, bind her!"—Ancient Alchemist's Recipe.
"An excellent way to get a fayrie—and when you have her, bind her!"—Ancient Alchemist's Recipe.
In the darkness Time crept along like a crippled thing, slow-moving, hideous. Outside fell the monotonous drip, drip from trees and bushes, likened by Phillida to a horrid clock. The fog was a sounding-board for furtive noises that grew up like fungi in the moist atmosphere. The thought of Phillida and Vere down in the pleasant living room tempted me almost beyond resistance. I wanted to spring up, to rush out of the room; to fling myself into my car and drive full speed until strength failed and gasoline gave out.
Was that the lake which stirred in the windless night? The lake, under which lay the fire-blackened ruins of the house where the first Desire Michell flung open an awful door that her vengeance might stride through!
Was it too late for my Desire to come, and time for the coming of that Other?
The step of Vere sounded on the gravel path where he walked beneath the window. He was making a trip of inspection, and would find no light shining from the room. I was about to rise and call down a word of reassurance to him, when a current of spiced air passed by me. I sat arrested in hope and expectancy.
"Here, after my warning, after last night?" her soft voice panted across the dark. "Will you die, then? Cruel to me, and wicked to come here again! Oh, must I wish you were a coward!"
Every vestige of her calmness gone, she was sobbing as she spoke. I could imagine she was wringing the little hands that once had left a betraying print upon my table's surface.
"I was cruel to you last night, Desire; yet afterward you saved my life by sending Ethan Vere to wake me. Would you have had me leave without meeting you again, neither thanking you nor asking your forgiveness?"
I thought she came nearer.
"For so little, you would brave the Dread One in Its time of triumph? O steadfast soldier, who faces the Breach even in the hour of death, in all that you have done you have remembered me.Why speak of anger or forgiveness? Have I not injured you?"
"Never. I love you."
"Is not that an injury? Even though I hid my ill-omened face from you, reared as I was to sad knowledge of the wrath upon me, the wrong has been done. Weak as water in the test, I kept the letter of my promise and broke the intent. Yet go; keep life at least."
"Desire, I do not understand you," I answered. "No matter for that, now! I am content to share whatever you bring. Not roughly or in challenge as I asked you last night, but earnestly and with humility I ask you to come away with me now. If trouble comes to my wife and me, I do not doubt we can bear it. Let us not be frightened from the attempt. Come."
"I, to take happiness like that?" she marveled in desolate amazement. "No. At least I will go to my own place, if tardily. Roger, be kind to me. Give me a last gift. Let me know that somewhere you are living. Out of my sight, out of my knowledge, but living in the same world with me. Each moment you stay here is a risk."
In that warning she had reason. I rose. It was time to act, but action must be certain. If my groping movements missed her in the dark there might be no second chance.
"Desire, if all is as you say and we are not to meet again as we have done, you shall let me touch you before I go," I said firmly.
"No!"
"Yes. Why, would you have me live all the years to come in doubt whether you were a woman or a dream? Perhaps you might seem at last a phantom of my own sick brain to which faithfulness would be folly? Here across the table I stretch my arm. Lay your palm in my palm. I may die tonight."
Whether she wished it also, or whether my resolve drew obedience, I do not know. But a vague figure moved through the dark toward me. A hand settled in mine with the brushing touch of an alighting bird. I closed my hand hotly upon that one. I sprang a step aside from the table between us, found her, and drew her to me.
What did I hold in my arms? Softness, fragrance, draperies beneath which beat life andwarmth. As I stooped to reassure her, her breath curled against my cheek. So with that guide I turned my head, and set my lips on the lips I had never seen.
Did Something uprear Itself out there in the black fog? A cold air rushed across the summer heat of the fog; air foul as if issued from the opened door of a vault. As once before, a tremor quivered through the house. The hanging chains of the lamps swung with a faint tinkling sound.
I snatched Desire Michell off her feet and sprang for the door. Somehow I found and opened it at the first essay. We were out into the hall. With one hand I dragged the door shut behind us, then carried her on to the head of the stairs. There I set her down, but stood before her as a bar against any attempt at escape.
A lamp shed a subdued light above us. I looked at my captive. Never again after that kiss could she deny her womanhood or pose as a phantom. So far my victory was complete. The lady might be angry, but it must be woman's anger. I knew she had not suspected my intention until I lifted her in my arms. She had struggled then, after her defenses had fallen.
She was quiet now, as though the light had quelled her resistance. She stood drooped and trembling; not the old-time witch, not the dazzling adventuress, only a small fragile girl wound and wrapped in some gray stuff that even covered the brightness of her hair. Her face was held down and showed no more color than a water-lily.
"I thought," she whispered, just audibly. "I thought you—would say, good-bye!"
"I know," I stammered. "But I could not. That way was impossible for us."
She did not contradict me. She was so very small, I saw, that her head would reach no higher than where the bright spot had rested above my heart when I had last stood at the Barrier. One hand gripped the veils beneath her chin, and seemed the clenched fist of a child.
The crash of my door had startled the household. I had heard Phillida cry out, and Vere's running steps upon the gravel path. Now he came springing up the stairs. At the head of the flight he stopped, staring at us.
"Desire," I spoke as naturally as I could manage,"this is Mr. Vere. Vere, my fiancée, Miss Michell. Shall we go down to Phillida?"
And Desire Michell did not deny my claim.
I am not very sure of how we found ourselves downstairs. Nor do I remember in what words we made the two girls known to one another. Presently we were all in the living room, and Phillida had possession of Desire Michell while Vere and I looked on stupidly at the proceedings.
Phil had placed her in a chair beside a tall floor-lamp and gently drew off the draperies that hooded her. With little murmurs of compassion, she unbound and shook free her guest's hair.
"My dear, you are all damp! This awful fog! You must have been out a long time? You shall drink some tea before we start. Drawls, will you light the alcohol lamp on the tea-table? The kettle is filled."
Now I could understand how Desire had appeared amid a drift of fireshot smoke in the beam of my electric torch, the night before. Her hair was a garment of flame-bright silk flowing around her, curling and eddying in rich abundance. Over this she had worn the gray veils to smother all thatcolor and sheen into neutral sameness with night and shadows. No wonder her face had seemed wraith-like when her startled shrinking away from the light had set all that drapery billowing about her.
She was the voice that had been my intimate comrade through weeks of strange adventure. She was the woman of the faded, yellow book, and the painted beauty at the Metropolitan. She was all the Desires of whom I had ever dreamed; and she was none of them, for she was herself. Her long dark eyes, suddenly lifted to me, were individual by that ancestral blending of drowsiness with watchfulness; yet were akin to the eyes of youth in all times by their innocence. Her mouth, too, was the soft mouth of a young girl kept apart from sordid life. But her forehead, the noble breadth between the black tracery of her eyebrows, expressed the student whose weird, lofty knowledge had so often abashed my ignorance.
Only my ignorance? Now as she looked at me across the room, all self-confidence trickled away from me. What distinguished me from a thousand men she might meet on any city street? What had I ever said worth note in the hours we had spenttogether? Now she saw me in the light, plainly commonplace; and remembering myself lame, I stood amazed at the audacity with which I had laid claim to her.
She was rising from the chair, gently putting aside Phillida's detaining hands. She had not spoken one word since her faltered speech to me, upstairs. Neither Vere nor Phillida had heard her voice. She had given her hand to each of them and submitted to Phil's care with a docility I failed to recognize in my companion of the dark. Her decisive movement now was more like the Desire Michell I knew. Only, what was she about to do? Repudiate my violence and me—perhaps go back to her hiding-place?
She came straight to where I stood, not daring even to advance toward her. We might have been alone in the room. I rather think we were, to her preoccupation.
"You must go away," she said. "If there is any hope, it is in that. Nothing else matters, now; nothing! If you wish, take me with you. It would be wiser to leave me. But nothing really matters except that you should not stay here. I will obey you ineverything if you will only go. Take your car and drive—drive fast—anywhere!"
It is impossible to convey the desperate urgency and fervor of her low voice. Phillida uttered an exclamation of fear. Vere wheeled about and left the room. The front door closed behind him. The gravel crunched under his tread on the path to the garage, and the rate at which the light he carried moved through the fog showed that he was running. He obviously accepted the warning exactly as it was given. After the briefest indecision, Phillida hurried out into the hall.
For my part, I did nothing worth recording. I had made discovery of two places where I was not the "lame feller." And if the first place was the dreary Frontier, the second country was that rich Land of Promise in Desire Michell's eyes.
What we said in our brief moment of solitude is not part of this account.
Phillida was back promptly, her arms full of garments. With little murmurs of explanation by way of accompaniment, she proceeded to invest Desire in a motor coat and a dark-blue velvet hat rather like an artist's tam-o'shanter. I noticed thenthat the girl wore a plain frock of gray stuff, long of sleeve and skirt, fastened at the base of her throat with severe intent to cover from sight all loveliness of tint and contour. Nothing farther from the fashion of the day or the figure of my cousin could be imagined.
"You must wear the coat because it is always cool motoring at night," Phillida was murmuring. "And of course you will want it at a hotel; until you can do some shopping. I will just tie back your gorgeous, scrumptious hair with this ribbon, now. I know I haven't enough hairpins to put it up without wasting an awful lot of time, but we will buy them in the morning. We are going to take the very best care of you every minute, so you must not worry."
"You are so kind to me," Desire began tremulously. "No one was ever so kind! It does not matter about me, or what people think of me, if he will only go from here quickly."
"Right away," Phillida soothed. "My husband has gone for the car. I hear him coming now!"
In fact, Vere was coming up the veranda steps. His hand was on the knob of the outer door, fumbling with it in a manner not usual to him, then the knob yielded and he was inside.
"But how slow you are, Drawls," his wife called, with an accent of wonder.
Vere crossed the threshold of the room, his gaze seeking mine. He was pale, and drops of fog moisture pearled his dark face like sweat.
"I am sorry, Mr. Locke," he addressed me, ignoring the others. "Perhaps you felt that shake-up, a quarter-hour ago? Like a kind of earthquake, or the kick from a big explosion a long ways off? It didn't seem very strong to me. It was too strong for that old tree by the garage, though! Must have been decayed clear through inside. Willows are like that, tricky when they get old."
"Ethan, whatareyou talking about?" cried Phillida, aghast.
He continued to look at me.
"I guess it must have fallen just about when you slammed your door upstairs. Seems I do remember a sort of second crash following the noise you made. I was too keen on finding out what was happening up there to pay much heed."
"Well, Vere?"
"Tree smashed down through the roof of the garage," he reluctantly gave his report. "Everything under the hood of the automobile is wrecked. There is no motor left, and no radiator. Just junk, mixed up with broken wood and leaves and pieces of the stucco and tiles of the garage."
So there was to be no going tonight from the house beside the lake. A frustrated group, we stood amid our preparations; the two girls wearing cloaks and hats for the drive that would never be taken. Had we ever really expected to go? Already the project was fading into the realm of fantastic ideas, futile as the pretended journeys of children who are kept in their nursery. Desire lifted her hands and took off the blue velvet cap with a resignation more expressive than words. Only my practical little cousin charged valiantly at all obstacles.
"We aren't ever going to give up?" she cried protest. "Cousin Roger? Ethan?Youcannot mean to give up. Why—'phone to the nearest garage to send us another car. If we pay them enough they will drive anywhere. Or if they cannot take us to New York, they will take us to therailroad station where we can get a train for some place. Can't we, Drawls?"
"We could," Vere admitted. "I'd admire to try it, anyhow. But the telephone wire came across the place right past the garage, you know——"
"The tree tore the wire down, too?"
"I'm afraid it snapped right in two, Phil."
"We—we might walk," she essayed.
But even her brave voice trailed into silence as she glanced toward the black, dripping night beyond the windows.
"Or if we found a horse and wagon," she murmured a final suggestion.
Vere shook his head.
"Come!" I assumed charge with a cheerfulness not quite sincere. "None of us are ready for such desperate efforts to leave our cozy quarters here. Especially as I fancy Vere's 'earthquake' was the tremor of an approaching thunderstorm. I felt it, myself. Let us light all the lamps and draw the curtains to shut out the fog which has got on everyone's nerves by its long continuance. We are overwrought beyond reason. Suppose we sit heretogether, strong in numbers, for the few hours until daylight? I think that should be safeguard enough. Tomorrow we will do all we had planned for tonight. Come in, Vere, and close the door."
He obeyed me at once. Desire Michell passively suffered me to unfasten and take off the coat she wore, too heavy for such a night. She had uttered no word since Vere announced the destruction of the car. She did not speak now, when I put her in the low chair beneath the lamp. I had a greed of light for her, as a protection and because darkness had held her so long.
"It seems as if we should do something!" Phillida yielded unwillingly.
Vere's eyes met mine as he turned from drawing the last curtain. We were both thinking of the force that had driven the frail old willow tree through tile and cement of the new building to flatten the metal of motor and car into uselessness. The mere weight of the tree would not have carried it through the roof. To "do something" by way of physical escape from that——
The ribbon had glided from Desire's hair, almostas if the vital, resilient mass resentfully freed itself from restraint by the bit of satin. Now she put up her hands with a slow movement and drew two broad strands of the glittering tresses across her shoulders, veiling her face.
"Wait," she answered Phillida, most unexpectedly. "I must be sure—quite sure! I must think. If you will—wait."
"Oh, little booke—how darst thou put thyself in press for drede?"—Chaucer.
"Oh, little booke—how darst thou put thyself in press for drede?"—Chaucer.
We sat quietly waiting. I had drawn a chair near Desire. Phillida and Vere were together, chairs touching, her right hand curled into his left. Bagheera the cat had slipped into the room before the door was closed, and lay pressed against his mistress's stout little boot. Our small garrison was assembled, surely for as strange a defense as ever sober moderns undertook. For my part, it was wonder enough to study that captive who was at once so strange yet so intimately well known to me.
The Tiffany clock on the mantel shelf chimed midnight. Soon after, we began to experience the first break in the heavy monotony of heat and fog that had overlaid the place for three days. The temperature began to fall. The fog did not lift. The flowered cretonne curtains hung straight from their rods unstirred by any movement of air. But the atmosphere in the room steadily grew colder. I saw Phillida shiver in the chill dampness and pullcloser the collar of her thin blouse. When Desire finally spoke, we three started as if her low tones had been the clang of a hammer.
"I have tried to judge what is best," she said, not raising her face from its shadowing veil of hair. "I am not very wise. But it seems better that there should be no ignorance between us. If I had been either wise or good, I should never have come down from the convent to draw another into danger and horror without purpose or hope of any good ending."
"The convent?" I echoed, memory turning to the bleak building far up the hillside. "You came from there?"
"There is a path through the woods. I am very strong and vigorous. But I had to wait until all there were asleep before I could come. Sometimes I could not come at all. For this house, I had my father's old key. It was only for this little time while I am being taught. Soon I will put on a nun's dress and cut my hair, and—and never—never leave there any more."
Stupefied, I thought of the black loneliness of the wooded hillside behind us. No wonder the fog was wet upon her hair! Her slight feet had traversed thatpath night after night, had brought her to the door her key fitted, had come through the dark house to the door of the room upstairs. When she left me, she had toiled that desolate way back. For what? Humility bent me, and bewilderment.
"But why?" Phillida gasped. "Why? Cousin Roger hunted everywhere to find you. He would have gone anywhere you told him to see you. Didn't you know that?"
"I never meant him to see me."
"Why not?"
"I am Desire Michell, fourth of that name; all women who brought misfortune upon those who cared for them," she answered, her voice lower still. "How shall I make you understand? I was brought up to know the wrath and doom upon me, yet I myself can scarcely understand. My father knew all, yet he fell in weakness."
"Your father?" I questioned, recalling Mrs. Hill's positive genealogy of the Michells in which there was no place for this daughter of the line.
"He was the last of his family. When he was very young the conviction came to him that his duty was never to marry, so our race might cease to exist.He lived here and preached against evil. He studied the ancient learning that he might be fitted to wrestle with sin. But in the end horror of what was here gained upon him so that he closed the house and went abroad to work as a missionary. There was a girl; the daughter of the clergyman who was leaving the mission. My father—fell in love. He forgot all his convictions and married her. He knew it was a sin, but it was stronger than he was. She only lived one year. When I was born, she died. He prayed that I would die, too. But—I——"
Her voice died into silence. I ventured to lean nearer and take her hand into mine.
"Desire," I said, "why should you be a sufferer for the actions of a woman who died over two centuries ago? What is the long dead Desire Michell to you?"
A strange and solemn hush followed my question. The words seemed to take a significance and importance beyond their simple meaning. The hand I held trembled in my clasp. She answered at last, just audibly:
"You know. You said that you had read her book."
"But the book tells so little, Desire. Just such a chronicle of superstition as may be found in a hundred old records."
She shook her head slightly.
"Not that! Bring me the book."
The book was upstairs in the room from which I had carried her half an hour before in something very like a panic flight. Before I could release her hand and rise, before I comprehended his intention, Vere was out of the living room and upon the stairs. It was too late to overtake him. The man who had been a professional skater covered the stairs in a few easy, swinging strides. We heard his light tread on the floor overhead, heard him stop beside the table where the book lay. Then, he was returning. My door closed. His step sounded on the stairs again; in a moment he was back among us, and quietly offering the volume to our guest. His dark eyes met mine reassuringly, deprecating the thoughts I am sure my face expressed.
"Lights burning and all serene up there," he announced.
Desire touched the book with a curious repugnance.
"I was looking for this, the first night I came here," she murmured. "That is why I came to America after my father died. I had promised him to destroy this record. When I heard that the house was sold to a gentleman from New York, I came down from the convent on the hill to find the bookcase holding the old history. I did not know anyone was here, that night, until you touched my hair."
I remembered the bookcase near the bed, where I stood my candle and matches. Unaware, I had prevented her finding the thing she sought, and so forced her to return. Afterward, the house had been full of workmen making alterations and improvements, until later still Phillida had transferred the bookcase and its contents to her sewing room. If I had not taken the whim to sleep in the old house on the night of my purchase, or if I had chosen another room, the existence of Desire Michell might never have been known to me.
Would the creature from the Barrier have appeared to me, if I had not known her?
She was drawing something from behind the portrait of the first Desire Michell; a thin, small book that had lain concealed between the cover of thelarger volume and the page bearing the woodcut, where a sort of pocket was formed that had escaped our notice. Laid upon the table, the little book rolled away from the girl's fingers and lay curled upon itself in the lamplight. The limp morocco cover was spotted with mildew and half-revealed pages of close, fine writing blotched in places with rusty stains. It gave out an odor of mould and age in an atmosphere made sweet by Desire's presence.
Phillida, who had been silent even when Vere left her to go upstairs, shrank away from the book on the table. She darted a glance over her shoulder at the curtained windows behind her.
"Drawls, I cannot help what everybody thinks of me," she said plaintively. "I am cold. The fire is ready laid in the grate. Will you put a match to it, please?"
No one smiled at the request. Her husband uttered some soothing phrase of compliance. We all looked on while the flame caught and began to creep up among the apple-logs. Bagheera rose and changed his position to one before the hearth. When Vere stood erect, Desire leaned toward him.
"Will you read, aloud, sir?" she asked of him, and made a gesture toward the morocco book.
She surprised us all by that choice. I was unreasoning enough to feel slighted, although the task was one for which I felt a strong dislike. I fancied Vere liked the idea no better, from his expression. However, he offered no demur, but sat down at the table and began to flatten the warped pages that perversely sprang back and clung about his fingers. Desire slowly turned her lovely eyes to me, eyes that looked by gift of nature as if their long corners had been brushed with kohl. She said nothing, yet somehow conveyed her meaning and intent. I understood that she did not wish to hear me read those pages; that it was painful to her that they should be read at all.
Vere was ready. He glanced around our circle, then began with the simple directness that gave him a dignity peculiarly his own.
"'Mistress Desire Michell, her booke, Beginning at the nineteenth year of her Age,'" he read, in his leisurely voice.
The living Desire Michell and I were regarding one another. I smiled at the quaint wording, but she shuddered, and put her hands across her eyes.
Yet there was nothing in those first pages except a girl's chronicle of village life. This book evidently carried on a diary kept from early childhood; a diary written out of loneliness. Apparently the bare colonial life pressed heavily upon the writer; who, having no companions of the intellect, turned to this record of her own mind as a prisoner might talk to his reflection in a mirror rather than go mad from sheer silence. Discontent and restlessness beat through the lines like fluttering wings. She wrote of her own beauty with a cool appraisal oddly removed from vanity, almost with resentment of a possession she could not use.
"Like a man who finds treasure in a desert isle, I am rich in coin that I may not spend," she wrote. "I stand before my mirror and take a tress of my hair in either hand; I spread wide my arms full reach, yet I cannot touch the end of those tresses. Nor can my two hands clasp the bulk of them. There have been other women who had such hair, who were of body straight and white, and had the eyes—but I cannot read that they stayed poor and obscure."
There followed some quotations from the classics of which I was able to give but vague translationswhen Vere passed the book to me, both because my knowledge was scanty and because of their daring unconventionality. There were allusions, too, to ladies of later history who had found fairness a broad staircase for ambition to mount. Of the writer's learning, there could be no question; a learning amazing in one so young and so situated. The source of this became apparent. Her father was consumed with the passion of scholarship, and the girl's hungry mind fed in the pastures where he led the way.
Here crept into view an anomaly of character. The austere Puritan divine, whose life was open and blank, bare and cold as a winter field, cherished a secret dissipation of the mind. He labored upon a book on the errors of magic. So laboring, he became snared by the thing he denounced. He believed in the hidden lore while he condemned it. Deeper and deeper into forbidden knowledge his eagerness for research led him. Unsanctioned by any church were the books Dr. Michell starved his body to buy from Jews or other furtive dealers in unusual wares. The titles in his library comprehended the names of more charlatans than bishops.He could define the distinctions between necromancy, sorcery, and magic. The marvelous calculations of the Pythagoreans engaged him, and the lost mysteries of the Cabiri.
From such studies he would arise on the Sabbath to preach sermons that held his dull flock agape. Bitter draughts of salvation he poured for their spiritual drinking. He scarcely saw how any man might escape hell-fire, all being so vile. Against witchcraft and tampering with Satan's agents he was eloquent. He rode sixty miles in midwinter to see a Quaker whipped and a woman hung who had been convicted as a witch.
Of all this, his daughter wrote with an elfin mockery. Her brilliant eye of youth saw through the inconsistency of the beliefs he strove to reconcile. She learned his lore, read his books, and discarded his doctrine.
"I study with him, but I think alone," she set down her independence.
Without his knowledge, she proceeded to actual experiment with rude crucible and alembic in her own chamber. She essayed some age-old recipes of blended herbs and ingredients within her reach,handled at certain hours of the night and phases of the moon. All were innocent enough, it seemed. She cured a beloved old dog of rheumatism and partial blindness. She discovered an exquisite perfume which she named Rose of Jerusalem.
But the experiments were not fortunate, she made obscure complaint. The dog, cured, lived only a few weeks. The perfume, in which she revelled with a fierce, long-denied appetite, steeping her rich hair in it and her severely dull garments, awoke many whispers in a community where sweet odors were unknown and disapproved. She alluded, with a mingling of freezing scorn and triumph, to the young men who followed after her—"seeking a wife who would be at their hearth as fatal a guest as that fair woman sent by an enemy to Alexander the Great, whose honey breath was deadly poison to who so kissed there."
Into this situation rode the fine gentleman from the colonial world of fashion who was to fix the fate of Desire Michell and his own.
From this point on, the diary was a record of the same story as the "History of Ye foule Witch, Desire Michell."
The love affair that followed Sir Austin's visit to the clergyman's house leaped hot and instant as flame from oil and fire brought together. The girl was parched with thirst for life, yet despised all around her. The man was dazzled by a beauty and mentality foreign as a bird of paradise found nested in Connecticut snow. A mad, wild passion linked them that was more than half a duel. For Sir Austin was already betrothed. Honor might not have chained him for long, but his need of his betrothed's fortune proved more enduring. He was a man bred to wealth, who did not possess it. He offered Desire Michell his left hand.
He was turned out of her father's house with a red weal struck across his face like a brand.
Of course he returned. The arrow was firmly fixed. He asked her to marry him, and was refused with savage contempt. He would not take the refusal. Her heart and ambition were hidden traitors to his cause. In the end she surrendered and the marriage day was set.
Sir Austin rode away to set his house in order, while Desire turned from alchemy to make her wedding garments.
The entries during this interval were sweetly gentle and feminine. Her Rose of Jerusalem fragrance was all her own, and was kept so, but she made less-rare essences and sold them through a pedlar in order to buy fine linen and brocade for a trousseau not designed to be worn in a Puritan village. She was happy and at rest in expectation.
On her wedding day the destroying news fell. Sir Austin hid a weak spirit within a strong and handsome body. Away from Desire's glamour, back in New York, he had not broken his engagement to the heiress. Instead, he had married her on the day arranged before he met the clergyman's daughter.
There was never again a connected record in the diary. Pages were torn out in places, entries were broken off, half-made. But the story Vere's slow, steady voice conveyed to us was the one we knew; the one my Desire had told to me the first night I slept in this house. The half-mad girl turned to her father's deadly books. Sir Austin died as his waxen image dissolved before the fire, where the girl sat watching with merciless hate. He died, raving and frothing, on her door-sill. She never saw him after the day he rode away to prepare fortheir marriage. She set open her window that she might hear his progress to that hard death, but never deigned to turn her glance upon him.
The clergyman was dead, now; of shame, or perhaps of terror at the child he had reared. The girl was alone.
The diary grew wilder, with gaps of weeks where there were no entries. More frequently, pages were missing and paragraphs obliterated by the reddish blotches like rust or blood. There were accounts of weird, half-told experiments ranging through the three degrees of magic set forth by Talmud and Cabala. She wrote of legions of kingdoms between earth and heaven, and the twelve unearthly worlds of Plato. She alluded to a Barrier between men and other orders of beings, beyond which dwelt Those whom the magicians of old glimpsed after long toil and incantation.
"Those of whom Vertabied, the Armenian, says: 'Their orders differ from one another in situation and degree of glory, just as there are different ranks among men, though they are all of one nature.' They cannot cross nor overthrow this Wall, nor can man alone; but if they and man join together——One there beyond whispers to me of power, splendor, victory——"
Days later, there was entered a passage of mad triumph and terror. The Barrier was broken through. Out of the breach issued the One whom she had invited to her silver lamps; colossal, formless, whose approach froze blood and spirit. Eyes of unspeakable meaning glared across the dark, whispers unbearable to humanity beat upon her intelligence and named her comrade.
Now as Vere read this, I felt again that quiver of the house or air he had likened to an earth shock and held responsible for the fall of the willow tree that had destroyed our hope of escape by automobile. I looked at my companions and saw no evidence of anyone having noticed what I had seemed to feel. Vere indeed was pale; while Phillida, who sat beside him, was highly flushed with excitement and wonder as she listened. Desire had not stirred in her chair, except to bend her head so her face was shaded by the loosened richness of her hair. Seeing them so undisturbed, I kept silence. A storm might be approaching, but I made no pretense to myself of believing that shock either thunder or earthquake.
The tone of the diary altered rapidly. At first, the unknown from beyond the wall appalled the woman only by its unhuman strangeness, the repugnance of flesh and blood for its loathly neighborhood. Fear emanated from its presence, seen yet unseen, a blackness moving in the black of night when it visited her. Yet she had courage to endure those awful colloquies. She listened. She strove by the spell and incantation to subdue This to her service, as the demon Orthone served the Lord of Corasse, as Paracelsus was served by his Familiar, or Gyges by the spirit of his ring.
Alas for the sorceress, misguided by legend and fantasy! She had evoked no phantom, but a fact actual as nature always is even if nature is not humanly understood. The Thing was real.
The awe of the magician became the stricken panic of the woman. She had unloosed what she could not bind. She had called a servant, and gained a master. Gone forever were the dreams of power and splendor and triumph. Now she learned that only pure magic can discharge the spirits it has summoned, nor could a murderess attain that lofty art.
We were given a glimpse of a frantic girlcrouched in the useless pentagram traced on the floor for her protection, covering her beauty with the cloak of her hair against the eyes that burned upon her between the overturned silver lamps.
A deepening horror gathered about the house of Mistress Desire Michell. The old dame who had been the girl's nurse and caretaker fled the place and fell into mumbling dotage in a night. No child would come near the garden, though fruit and nuts rotted away where they dropped from overripeness. No neighbor crossed the doorstep where Sir Austin had died. She lived in utter solitude by day. By night she waged hideous battle against her Visitor; using woman's cunning, essaying every expedient and art her books suggested to her desperate need.
With each conflict, her strength and resource waned, while That which she held at bay knew no weariness. Time was not, for it, nor change of purpose.
"I faint, I fail!" she wrote. "The Sea of Dread breaks about my feet. It is midnight. The pentagram fades from the floor—the nine lamps die—the breath of the One at the casement is upon me——"
Vere stopped.
"A handful of pages have been torn out here," he stated. "The next entry that I can read is in the middle of a stained page, and must be considerably later on."
Phillida made an odd little noise like a whimper, clutching at his sleeve. The third shock for which I had been waiting shuddered through the house, this time distinctly enough for all to feel. A gust of wind went through the wet trees outside like a gasp.
"Ethan, what was that?" she stammered. "Oh, I'm afraid! Cousin Roger——?"
I had no voice to answer her. In my ears was the rush and surge of that sea whose waters had gripped me in the past night. I felt the icy death-tide hiss around me in its first returning wave, rise to my knee's height, then sink away down its unearthly beach. What I had dimly known all day, underlying Vere's sturdy cheerfulness and our plans and efforts, was the truth. Through those intervening hours of daylight I had remained my enemy's prisoner, bound on that shore we both knew well, until It pleased or had power to return and finish with me. No doubt It was governed by laws, as we are.
As before, the cold struck a paralysis across my senses. Vere's reassurance sounded faint and distant.
"The thunder is getting closer," he said. "That was a storm wind, all right! Would you rather go upstairs and lie down, and not hear any more of this stuff tonight?"
"No! Oh, no! I could not bear to be alone," she refused. "Just, just go on, dear. Of course it is the coming storm that makes the room so cold."
He put his left arm around her as she nestled against him. His right hand held the diary flattened on the table under the light.
"The next entry is just one line in the middle of a page where everything else is blotted out," Vere repeated. "It reads: 'The child is a week old today.'"
The wave crashed foaming in tumult up the strand, flowing higher, drenching me in cold sharp as fire. The tide rose faster tonight. The silence that held the others dumb before the significance of that last sentence covered my silence from notice. Desire's face was quite hidden; lamplight and firelight wavered and gleamed across her bent head. I wanted to arise and go to her, to take her hands and tell herto have patience and courage. But when this wave ebbed, my strength drained away with the receding water. Moreover, the darkness curdled and moved beyond the window opposite me. The curtains hung between were no bar to my vision, as the light and presence of my companions were no bar to the Thing that kept rendezvous with me. Since last night, we were nearer to one another.
A breath of chill foulness crept across the pungent odor of the burning apple-log in the fireplace. A whisper spoke to my intelligence.
"Man conquered by me, fall down before me. Beg my forbearance. Beg life of me—and take the gift!"
"No," my thought answered Its.
"You die, Man."
"All men die."
"Not as they die who are mine."
"I am not yours. You kill me, as a wild beast might. But I am not yours; not dying nor dead am I yours."
"Would you not live, pygmy?"
"Not as your pensioner."
The logs on the hearth crackled and sank downwith a soft rustle, burned through to a core of glowing red. Phillida spoke with a hushed urgency, drawing still closer to her husband, so that her forehead rested against his shoulder.
"Go on, Ethan. Finish and let us be done."
Vere bent his head above the book on the table to obey her. Across the dark I suddenly saw the Eyes glare in upon him.
"On the next page, the writing begins again," he said. "It says:
"'I am offered the kingdoms of earth. But I crave that kingdom of myself which I cast away. The child is sent to England. The circle is drawn. The names are traced and the lamps filled. Tonight I make the last essay. There remains untried one mighty spell. This Mystery——'"
A clap of thunder right over the house overwhelmed the reader's voice. Phillida screamed as a violent wind volleyed through the place with a crashing of doors and shutters, upstairs and down. The diary was ripped from beneath Vere's hand and hurled straight to the center of that nest of fire formed by the settling of the logs. A long tongue of flame leaped high in the chimney as the spread leavesof the book caught and flared, fanned by wind and draft. Vere sprang up, but Phillida's clinging arms delayed him. When he reached the fire-tongs there was nothing to rescue except a charring mass half-way toward ashes.
He turned toward me, perhaps at last surprised by my immobility.
"I am sorry, Mr. Locke," he apologized.
Desire had started up with the others when the sudden uproar of the storm burst upon them. Now she cried out, breaking Vere's excuse of the loss. Her small face blanched, she ran a few steps toward me.
"It has come! He will die—he is dying. Look, look!"