"Behold! Where are their abodes?Their places are not, even as though they had not been."—Tomb of King Entef.
"Behold! Where are their abodes?Their places are not, even as though they had not been."—Tomb of King Entef.
Desire Michell was beside me, and I could not rise or answer her. She bent over me, so that the Rose of Jerusalem fragrance inundated me and drove back the sickening air that was the breath of our enemy.
"Let me go," she sobbed, her head beside my head. "If you can hear me, listen and leave me as It wills. You know now that I belong to It by heritage? You know why we can never be together as you planned? Try to feel horror of me. Put me away from you. No evil can come to me unless I seek evil. But It will not suffer you to take me. Live, dear Roger, and let me go."
"Yield to me, Man, what you may not keep," the whisper of the Thing followed after her voice. "Would you take the witch-child to your hearth? Cast her off; and taste my pardon."
"Can you hear, Roger? Roger, let me go."
With an effort terrible to make as death to meet, I broke from the paralysis that chained me. As from the drag of a whirlpool, I tore myself from the tide-clutch, from the will of the Thing, from the numb weakness upon me. For a moment I thrust back the hand at my throat. I stood up and drew Desire up with me in my arms, both of us reeling with my unsteadiness.
"I do not give you up," I said, my speech hoarse and difficult. "I claim you, now, and after. And my claim is good, because I pay."
Desire exclaimed something. What, I do not know. Her voice was lost in the triumphant conviction that I was right. She was free, and the freedom was my gift to her. I was not vanquished, but victor. The life I paid was not a penalty, but a price.
Her face was uplifted to mine as she clung to me; then my weight glided through her arms and I fell back in my chair.
I was alone amid blackness and desolation that poured past me like the wind above the world.
For the last time, I opened my eyes on the gray shore at the foot of the Barrier. I, pygmy indeed,stood again before the colossal wall whose palisades reared up beyond vision and stretched away beyond vision on either side.
I was alone here. No whisper of taunt or menace, no presence of horror troubled me. Opposite me, the Breach that split the cliff showed as a shadowed cañon, empty except of dread. Far out behind me the sea that was like no sea of earth gathered itself beneath its eternal mists as a tidal wave draws and gathers. With folded arms I stood there, waiting for the returning surge of mighty waters to overwhelm me in their flood. I waited in awe and solemn expectancy, beyond fear or hope.
But now I became aware of a new doubleness of experience. Here on the Frontier, I was between the worlds, yet I also saw the room in the house left behind. I saw myself as an unconscious body reclined in a chair beside the hearth. Desire Michell knelt on the floor beside me, her hands grasping my arms, her gaze fixed on my face, her hair spilling its shining lengths across my knees. Phillida was huddled in a chair, crying hysterically. Vere apparently had been trying to force some stimulant upon the man who was myself, yet was not myself, for whileI watched he reluctantly rose from bending above the figure and set a glass upon the table. I echoed his sigh. Life was good.
The sea behind me began to rush in from immeasurable distances. The roar of the waters' thunderous approach blended with the heat and flash of storm all about the house into which I looked.
"He dies," Desire spoke, her voice level and calm. "Has it not been so with all who loved the daughters of my race these two centuries past? Yet never did one of those die as he dies—not for passion, but for protection of the woman—not as a madman or one ignorant, but facing that which was not meant for man to face, his eyes beating back the intolerable Eyes. Oh, glory and grief of mine to have seen this!"
Phillida cowered lower in her chair, burying her face in the cushions. But Vere abruptly stood erect, his fine dark face lifted and set. Just so some ancestors of his might have risen in a bleak New England meeting-house when moved powerfully to wrestle with evil in prayer. But it is doubtful if any Maine deacon ever addressed his Deity as Vere appealed to his.
"Almighty, we're in places we don't understand,"he spoke simply as to a friend within the room, his earnest, drawling speech entirely natural. "But You know them as You do us. If things have got to go this way, why, we'll make out the best we can. But if they don't, and we're just blundering into trouble, please save Roger Locke and this poor girl. Because we know You can. Amen."
Now at this strange and beautiful prayer—or so it seemed to me—a ray of blinding light cleaved up from where Vere stood, like a shot arrow speeding straight through house and night into inconceivable space. Then the room vanished from my sight as the great wave burst out of the mist upon me.
I went down in a smother of ghastly snarling floods cold as space is cold. Something fled past me up the strand, shrieking inhuman passion; the Eyes of my enemy glared briefly across my vision.
One last view I glimpsed of that dread Barrier, amid the tumult and welter of my passing. The breach was closed! Unbroken, majestic, the enormous Wall stood up inviolate.
"Fancy, like the finger of a clock,Runs the great circuit, and is still at home."—Cowper.
"Fancy, like the finger of a clock,Runs the great circuit, and is still at home."—Cowper.
The uproar of rushing waters was still in my ears. But I was in my chair before the hearth in the living room of the farmhouse, and the noise was the din of a tempest outside.
Opposite me, Phillida and Desire were clinging together, watching me with such looks of gladness and anxiety that I felt myself abashed before them. Bagheera, the cat, sat on the table beside the lamp, yellow eyes blinking at each flash and rattle of lightning and thunder, while he sleeked his recently wetted fur. Wondering where that wet had come from, I discovered presently that the fire was out, and the hearth drenched with soot-stained water. I looked toward the windows, from which the curtains had been drawn aside. Rain poured glistening down the panes, but the clean storm was empty of horror.
"Drink some of this, Mr. Locke," urged Vere,whose arm was about me. "Sit quiet, and I guess you'll be all right in a few moments."
I took the advice. Strength was flowing into me, as inexplicably as it had flowed away from me a while past. How can I describe the certainty of life that possessed me? The assurance was established, singularly enough, for all of us. None of my companions asked, and I myself never doubted whether the danger might return. The experience was complete, and closed. Moreover, already the Thing that had been our enemy, the horror that had been Its atmosphere, the mystery that haunted Desire—all were fading into the past. The phantoms were exorcised, and the house purified of fear.
But there was something different from ordinary storm in this tempest. The tumult of rain and wind linked another, deeper roar with theirs. The house quivered with a steady trembling like a bridge over which a train is passing. Pulling myself together I turned to Vere.
"What is happening outdoors?" I asked.
"The cloudburst was too much for the dam," he answered regretfully. "It went off with a noise like a big gun, a while back. I expect the lake isflooding the whole place and messing up everything from our cellar to the chickenhouse. Daylight is due pretty soon, now, and the storm is dying down. We'll be able to add up the damage, after a bit."
"The water came down the chimney and drowned Bagheera," Phillida bravely tried to summon nonchalance. "Isn't it lucky you and Desire could not get started in the car, after all? Fancy being out in that!"
Desire Michell steadied her soft lips and gave her quota to the shelter of commonplace speech we raised between ourselves and emotions too recently felt.
"It was like the tropical storms in Papua, where I lived until this year," she said. "Once, one blew down the mission house."
Vere's weather prediction proved quite right. In an hour the storm had exhausted itself, or passed away to other places. Sunrise came with a veritable glory of crimson and gold, blazing through air washed limpidly pure by the rain. The east held a troop of small clouds red as flamingoes flying against a shining sky; last traces of our tempest.
We stood on the porch together to survey anunfamiliar scene in the rosy light. Water overlay lawns and paths, so the house stood in a wide, shallow lake whose ripples lapped around the white cement steps and the pillars of the porte-cochère. Phillida's Pekin ducks floated and fed on this new waterway as contentedly as upon their accustomed pastures. Small objects sailed on the flood here and there; Bagheera's milk-pan from the rear veranda bobbed amidst a fleet of apples shaken down in the orchard, while some wooden garden tools nudged a silk canoe-cushion.
In contrast to all this aquatic prospect, where the real lake had been there now lay some acres of ugly, oozing marsh; its expanse dotted with the bodies of dead water-creatures and such of Vere's young trout as had not been swept away by the outpouring flood. The dam was a mere pile of débris through which trickled a stream bearing no resemblance to the sparkling waterfall of yesterday. Already the sun's rays were drawing a rank, unwholesome vapor from the long-submerged surface.
We contemplated the ruin for a while, without words.
"Poor Drawls!" Phillida sighed at length. "All your work just rubbed out!"
"Never mind, Vere," I exclaimed impulsively. "We will put it all back in the same shape as it was."
But even as I spoke, I felt an odd shock of uneasiness and recoil from my own proposition. I did not want the lake to be there again; or to hear the unaccountable sounds to which it gave birth and the varying fall of the cataract over the dam. Did the others share my repugnance? I seemed to divine that they did. Even the impetuous Phil did not break out in welcome of my offer. Desire, who had smoothed her sober gray dress in some feminine fashion and stood like Marguerite or Melisande with a great braid over either shoulder, moved as if to speak, then changed her intention. A faint distress troubled her expression.
As usual, Vere himself quietly lifted us out of unrest.
"I'm not sure that couldn't be bettered, Mr. Locke," he demurred. "That is if you liked, of course! That marsh could be cleaned up and drained into pretty rich land, I guess. And down there beyond the barn, on the other side where thecreek naturally widens out into a kind of basin, I should think might be the spot for a smaller, cleaner lake."
"Doesn't it seem to you, Ethan," I said, "that we have progressed rather past theMr. Lockestage?"
A little later, when Desire and I were alone on the porch, we walked to the end nearest the vanished lake. Or rather, I led her to a swinging couch there, and sat down beside her.
"Point out the path down the hill by which you used to come," I asked of her.
She shook her head. There are no words to paint how she looked in the clear morning, except that she seemed its sister.
"It is only the end of a path that matters," she said. "Look instead at the marsh. Do you see nothing there stranger than a path through the woods even when trodden by a wilful woman?"
Following her lifted finger, I saw a series of long mounds out there in the muddy floor not far from the dam. Not high, two or three feet at most, the mounds formed an irregular square of considerable area.
"The old house!" I exclaimed.
"It was set on fire by the second Desire Michell one night deep in winter. Her father built this house of yours and put in the dam that covered the ruins with water. I think he hoped to wash away the horror upon the place."
"I know so little of your history."
"You can imagine it." She turned her head from me. "The first child came back from England when it was a man grown, and claimed the house and name of the first Desire. He settled and married here. For two generations only sons were born to the Michells. I do not know if the Dark One came to them. I believe it did, but they were hard, austere men who beat off evil. Then, a daughter was born. She looked like the first Desire and she was—not good. She was a scandal to the family. She listened to It——! The tradition is that she set fire to the house after a terrible quarrel with her people, but herself perished by some miscalculation. There were no more girls born for another while after that. Not until my father's time. He had a sister who resembled the two Desires of the past. My grandfather brought her up in harshness and austerity, holding always before her the wickedness to whichshe was born. Yet it was no use. She fled from his house with a man no one knew, and died in Paris after a life of great splendor and heartlessness. Everyone who loved the Desires suffered. That is why I—covered myself from—you."
I took her hand, so small a thing to hold and feel flutter in mine.
"But what of me, Desire? The darkness covered no beauty in me, but a defect. You never saw me until last night and now in the morning. Now that you know, can you bear with a man who—limps? You, so perfect?"
She turned toward me. Her kohl-dark eyes, vivid as a summer noon, opened to my anxious scrutiny.
"But I have seen you often," she said, the heat of confession bright on cheek and lip. "I never meant you to know, but now——! After the first time you spoke to me so kindly and gayly—I was so very sorrowfully alone—and the convent was so dull! My father's field-glasses were in my trunk."
"Desire?"
"I fear I have no vocation for a nun. I—there is a huge rock half-way down the hill with a clearview of this place. I have spent hours there, watching these lawns and verandas, and the things you all did. It all seemed so amusing and, and happy. You see, where I lived there were almost no white people except my father and a priest at the Catholic mission. So I learned to know Phillida and Mr. Vere and——"
"Then, all this time, Desire——"
"The glasses brought you very close," she whispered. "I knew you by night and by day."
"Life hath its term, the assembly is dispersed,And we have not described Thee from the first."—Gulistan.
"Life hath its term, the assembly is dispersed,And we have not described Thee from the first."—Gulistan.
I have come to the end of this narrative and with the end, I come to what people of practical mind may call its explanation. Of the four of us who were joined in living through the events of that summer, my wife and I and Ethan Vere agree in one belief, while Phillida holds the opinion of her father, the Professor. I think Bagheera, the cat, might be added to our side also, if his testimony was available.
The press reports of the cloudburst and flood brought the Professor up to Connecticut to verify with his own eyes his daughter's safety. Aunt Caroline did not come with him, but I may here set down that she did come later. They found their son-in-law by no means what their forebodings menaced, so reconciled themselves at last to the marriage; to Phillida's abiding joy.
But first the little Professor arrived alone, three days after the storm. Characteristically, he had sentno warning of his coming, so no one met him at the railway station. He arrived in one of those curious products of a country livery stable known as a rig, driven by a local reprobate whom no prohibition could sober.
I shall never forget the incredulous rapture with which Phillida welcomed him, nor the pride with which she presented Vere.
The damages to the place were already being repaired, although weeks of work would be needed to restore a condition of order and make the changes we planned. The automobile had been disentangled from the wreckage of garage and willow tree and towed away to receive expert attention. We were awaiting the arrival of the new car I had ordered for the honeymoon tour Desire and I were soon to take. Phillida had declared two weeks shopping a necessary preliminary to the wedding of a bride who was to live in New York "and meet everybody." Nor would I have shortened the pretty orgy into which the two girls entered, transforming my sorceress into a lady of the hour; happiness seeming to me rather to be savored than gulped.
Needless to say, there was no more talk of theconvent whose iron gates were to have closed between the last Desire Michell and the world. She had been directed there by the priest whose island mission was near her father's. In her solitude and ignorance of life, the sisterhood seemed to offer a refuge in which to keep her promise to her father. But she had to learn the principles of the Church she was about to adopt, and during that period of delay I had come to the old house.
On the second day of his visit, we told all the story to the Professor. We could not have told Aunt Caroline, but we told him.
"It is perfectly simple," he pronounced at the end. "Interesting, even unique in points, but simple of explanation."
"And what may be the explanation?" I inquired with scepticism.
"Marsh gas," he replied triumphantly. "Have none of you young people ever considered the singular emanations from swamps and marshes where rotting vegetation underlies shallow water? Phillida, I am astonished that you did not enlighten your companions on this point. You, at least, have been carefully educated, not in the light froth of modern musicand art, but in the rudiments of science. I do not intend to wound your feelings, Roger!"
"I am not wounded, sir," I retorted. "Just incredulous!"
"Ah?" said the Professor, with the bland superiority of his tribe. "Well, well! Yet even you know something of the evils attending people who live in low, swampy areas; malaria, ague, fevers. In the tropics, these take the form of virulent maladies that sweep a man from earth in a few hours. Your lakewashaunted, so was the house that once stood in its basin, as some vague instinct strove to warn the generations of Michells as well as you. Haunted by emanations of some powerful form of marsh gas given forth more plentifully at night, which lowered the heart action and impeded the breathing of one drawing the poison into his lungs through hours of sleep, producing—nightmare. Science has by no means analyzed all the possibilities of such phenomena."
"Nightmare!" I cried. "Do you mean to account by nightmare for the wide and repeated experiences that twice brought me to the verge of death? And Desire? What of her knowledge of that same nightmare? What of the legend of her family so exactlycoinciding with all I felt? And why did not Phillida and Ethan suffer the nightmare with me?"
He held up a lean hand.
"Gently, gently, Roger! Consider that of all the household you alone slept in the side of the house toward the lake. I know that you always have your windows open day and night—a habit that used to cause great annoyance to your Aunt Caroline when you were a boy. Thus you were exposed to the full effect of the water gases. That you did not feel the effects every night I attribute to differences in the wind, that from some directions would blow the fumes away from the house, thus relieving you. I gather from your account that the phenomena were most pronounced in close, foggy weather, when the poisonous air was atmospherically held down to the earth. You have spoken of miasmic mists that hung below the level of the tree-tops. When Mr. Vere experienced a similar unease and depression, he was on the shore of the lake at dawn after precisely such a close, foggy night as I have described as most dangerous. The symptoms confirm this theory. You say you awakened on each occasion with a sense of suffocation. Your heart labored, your limbs werecold and mind unnaturally depressed, owing to slow circulation of the blood. You were a man asphyxiated. After each attack you were more sensitive to the next, as a malaria patient grows worse if he remains in the swamp districts. It is remarkable that you did not guess the truth from the smell of decaying vegetation and stagnant damp which you admit accompanied the seizures! However, you did not; and in your condition the last three days of continuous fog brought on two attacks that nearly proved fatal. Now as to the character of your hallucinations, and their agreement with the young lady's ideas. That is a trifle more involved discussion, yet simple, simple!"
He put the tips of his fingers together and surveyed us with the benign condescension of one instructing a class of small children.
"The first night that you passed in your newly purchased house, Roger, you accidentally encountered Miss Michell; or she did you!" He smiled humorously. "While your feelings were excited by the unusual episode, the strange surroundings and the dark, she related to you a wild legend of witchcraft and monsters. Later, when you suffered yourfirst attack of marsh-gas poisoning, your consequent hallucination took form from the story you had just heard. Later conversations with your mysterious lady fixed the idea into an obsession. Recurrent dreams are a common phenomenon even in healthy persons. In this case, no doubt the exact repetition of the physical sensations of miasmic poisoning tended to reproduce in your mind the same sequence of ideas or semi-delirious imaginings. These were of course varied or distorted somewhat on each occasion, influenced by what you had been hearing or reading in advance of them. This mental condition became more and more confirmed as you steeped yourself more deeply in legendary lore and also—pardon me—in the morbid fancies of the young lady; whose ghostly visits in the dark and whose increasing interest for you put a further bias upon your thoughts."
"What were the noises I heard from the lake, and the shocks we all felt?" I demanded.
He nodded amiably toward Vere.
"Mr. Vere has mentioned the large bubbles which formed and burst on the surface of the lake. That is a common manifestation of ordinary marsh gas.Possibly the singular and unknown emanation that took place at night came to the surface in the form of a bubble or bubbles huge enough to produce in bursting the smacking sound of which you speak. But I am inclined to another theory, after a walk I took about your place this morning. When you put up your cement dam instead of the old log affair that held back only a part of the stream, you made a greater depth and bulk of water in the swamp basin than it has contained these many years, if ever. As a result, I believe the sloping mud basin began to slip toward the dam. Oh, very gradually! Probably not stirring for weeks at a time. Just a yielding here, a parting there, until the cloudburst precipitated the disaster. You had, my dear Roger, a miniature landslide, which would account for sounds of shifting mud and water in your lake, and for the shocks or trembling of your house when the earth movements occurred."
The rest of us regarded one another. I think Vere might have spoken, if he had not been unwilling to mar Phillida's contentment by any appearance of dispute with her father.
"It is very cleverly worked out, sir," I conceded."But how do you explain that Desire knew what I experienced with the Thing from the Barrier, if my experiences were merely delirious dreams?"
"I have not yet understood that she did know," said the Professor dryly. "She put the suggestions into your head; innocently, of course. When you afterward compared notes and found they agreed, you cried 'miraculous'! How is that, Miss Michell? Did you actually know what Roger experienced in these excursions before he told you of them?"
Desire gazed at him with her meditative eyes, so darkly lovely, yet never quite to lose their individual difference from any other lovely eyes I have ever seen. The eyes, I thought then and still think, of one who has seen more, or at least seen into farther spaces, than most of treadmill-trotting humanity. She wore one of the new frocks for which Phillida and she had already made a flying trip to town; a most sophisticated frock from Fifth Avenue, with frivolous French shoes to correspond. Her hair of a Lorelei was demurely coiled and wound about her little head. Yet some indescribable atmosphere closed her delicately around, an impalpable wall between her and the commonplace. Even the desiccated, materialProfessor was aware of this influence and took off his spectacles uneasily, wiped them and put them on again to contemplate her.
"I am not sure," she answered him with careful candor. "I believe that I could always tell when the Dark One had been with him. I could feel that, here," she touched her breast. "I knew what its visits were like, because I was brought up to know by my father and was told the history of the three Desire Michells. My father had studied deeply and taught me—I shall not tell anyone all he taught me! I do not want to think of those things. Some of them I have told to Roger. Some of them are quite harmless and pleasant, like the secret formula for making the Rose of Jerusalem perfume; which has virtues not common, as Roger can say who has felt it revive him from faintness. But there are places into which we should not thrust ourselves. It is like—like suicide. One's mind must be perverted before certain things can be done. And that is the true sin—to debase one's soul. All men discover and learn of science and the universe by honest duty and effort is good, is lofty and leads up. Nothing is forbidden to us. But if we turn aside to the lowdoor which only opens to crime and evil purpose, we step outside. I am unskilful; I do not express myself well."
"Very well, young lady," the Professor condescended. "Unfortunately, your theories are wild mysticism. The veritable fiend that has plagued the house of Michell is the mischievous habit of rearing each generation from childhood to a belief in doom and witchcraft. A child will believe anything it is told. Why not, when all things are still equally wonderful to it? Let me point out that your theory also contradicts itself, since Roger certainly did not enter upon any path of crime, yet he met your unearthly monster."
"Because he chose to link his fate with mine, who am linked by heredity with the Dweller at the Frontier," she said earnestly. "He was in the position of one who enters the lair of a wild beast to bring out a victim who is trapped there. It may cost that rescuer his life. Roger nearly paid his life. But he mastered It and took me away from It, because he was not afraid and not seeking his own good. I never imagined anyone so brave and strong and unselfish as Roger. I suppose it is because he thinks of others instead of himself, which gives the strongest kind of strength."
"The Thing nearly had me, though," I hastily intervened to spare my own modesty. "And It did have me worse than afraid!"
"I seem to be arguing against an impenetrable obstinacy," snapped the Professor. "Do you, Roger, who were educated under my own eye, in my house, have the effrontery to tell me that you believe Miss Michell is descended from the union of an evil spirit and a human being; as the Eastern legends claim for Saladin the Great?"
"Your own theory, sir, being——?" I evaded.
"There is no theory about the matter," he declared. "Excuse me, Miss Michell! The child was undoubtedly Sir Austin's son. Which accounts for the madness of the first Desire Michell."
We were all silent for a while. Whatever thoughts each held remained unvoiced.
"Come, Phillida, you take my sane point of view, I hope?" the Professor finally challenged his daughter, with a glance of scorn and compassion atthe rest of our group. "You observe that I have explained every point raised, Miss Michell's testimony being of the vaguest?"
"Yes, Papa," Phillida agreed hesitatingly. "I do believe you have solved the whole problem. Only, if Cousin Roger was suffering from marsh-gas poisoning last night when he seemed to be dying, I do not quite see why Ethan's prayer should have cured him."
The Professor was momentarily posed. He looked disconcerted, took off his glasses and put them on again, and at length muttered something about storm-wind dissipating the miasma in the air and events being mere coincidence.
The house was never again visited by the Dark Presence. Phantom or fancy, the horror was gone as if it never had brooded about the place. Desire Locke is a fatal companion only to my heart.
But whether all this is so because the lake is drained and the Shetland pony of a young Vere browses over the green pasture that was once a miasmic swamp; or whether it is so for more subtle,wilder reasons, no one can say. I, recalling that colossal Barrier I visioned as closed and a certain cleaving arrow of light, must at least call the coincidence amazing.
As I have said, my wife and I, Ethan Vere and Bagheera the cat have an understanding between us.