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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Shape of Fear, by Elia W. Peattie
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Shape of Fear
+
+Author: Elia W. Peattie
+
+Posting Date: November 20, 2008 [EBook #1876]
+Release Date: September, 1999
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SHAPE OF FEAR ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Judy Boss
+
+
+
+
+
+THE SHAPE OF FEAR
+
+AND OTHER GHOSTLY TALES
+
+
+By Elia Wilkinson Peattie
+
+
+
+Original Transcriber's Note:
+
+ I have omitted signature indicators and italicization of the
+ running heads.  In addition, I have made the following changes
+ to the text:
+
+ PAGE  LINE  ORIGINAL      CHANGED TO
+  156     1  where as      were as
+  156     4  mouth         mouth.
+  165     5  Wedgwood      Wedgewood
+  166     9  Wedgwood      Wedgewood
+  167     6  surperfluous  superfluous
+  172    11  every         ever
+  173    17  Bogg          Boggs
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+     THE SHAPE OF FEAR
+
+     ON THE NORTHERN ICE
+
+     THEIR DEAR LITTLE GHOST
+
+     A SPECTRAL COLLIE
+
+     THE HOUSE THAT WAS NOT
+
+     STORY OF AN OBSTINATE CORPSE
+
+     A CHILD OF THE RAIN
+
+     THE ROOM OF THE EVIL THOUGHT
+
+     STORY OF THE VANISHING PATIENT
+
+     THE PIANO NEXT DOOR
+
+     AN ASTRAL ONION
+
+     FROM THE LOOM OF THE DEAD
+
+     A GRAMMATICAL GHOST
+
+
+
+
+THE SHAPE OF FEAR
+
+TIM O'CONNOR--who was descended from the O'Conors with one N---- started
+life as a poet and an enthusiast. His mother had designed him for
+the priesthood, and at the age of fifteen, most of his verses had an
+ecclesiastical tinge, but, somehow or other, he got into the newspaper
+business instead, and became a pessimistic gentleman, with a literary
+style of great beauty and an income of modest proportions. He fell in
+with men who talked of art for art's sake,--though what right they had
+to speak of art at all nobody knew,--and little by little his view of
+life and love became more or less profane. He met a woman who sucked
+his heart's blood, and he knew it and made no protest; nay, to the great
+amusement of the fellows who talked of art for art's sake, he went the
+length of marrying her. He could not in decency explain that he had
+the traditions of fine gentlemen behind him and so had to do as he did,
+because his friends might not have understood. He laughed at the days
+when he had thought of the priesthood, blushed when he ran across any of
+those tender and exquisite old verses he had written in his youth,
+and became addicted to absinthe and other less peculiar drinks, and to
+gaming a little to escape a madness of ennui.
+
+As the years went by he avoided, with more and more scorn, that part of
+the world which he denominated Philistine, and consorted only with the
+fellows who flocked about Jim O'Malley's saloon. He was pleased with
+solitude, or with these convivial wits, and with not very much else
+beside. Jim O'Malley was a sort of Irish poem, set to inspiring measure.
+He was, in fact, a Hibernian Mæcenas, who knew better than to put
+bad whiskey before a man of talent, or tell a trite tale in the presence
+of a wit. The recountal of his disquisitions on politics and other
+current matters had enabled no less than three men to acquire national
+reputations; and a number of wretches, having gone the way of men who
+talk of art for art's sake, and dying in foreign lands, or hospitals,
+or asylums, having no one else to be homesick for, had been homesick for
+Jim O'Malley, and wept for the sound of his voice and the grasp of his
+hearty hand.
+
+When Tim O'Connor turned his back upon most of the things he was born
+to and took up with the life which he consistently lived till the
+unspeakable end, he was unable to get rid of certain peculiarities. For
+example, in spite of all his debauchery, he continued to look like the
+Beloved Apostle. Notwithstanding abject friendships he wrote limpid and
+noble English. Purity seemed to dog his heels, no matter how violently
+he attempted to escape from her. He was never so drunk that he was
+not an exquisite, and even his creditors, who had become inured to his
+deceptions, confessed it was a privilege to meet so perfect a gentleman.
+The creature who held him in bondage, body and soul, actually came to
+love him for his gentleness, and for some quality which baffled her,
+and made her ache with a strange longing which she could not define.
+Not that she ever defined anything, poor little beast! She had skin the
+color of pale gold, and yellow eyes with brown lights in them, and great
+plaits of straw-colored hair. About her lips was a fatal and sensuous
+smile, which, when it got hold of a man's imagination, would not let it
+go, but held to it, and mocked it till the day of his death. She was
+the incarnation of the Eternal Feminine, with all the wifeliness and the
+maternity left out--she was ancient, yet ever young, and familiar as joy
+or tears or sin.
+
+She took good care of Tim in some ways: fed him well, nursed him back
+to reason after a period of hard drinking, saw that he put on overshoes
+when the walks were wet, and looked after his money. She even prized his
+brain, for she discovered that it was a delicate little machine which
+produced gold. By association with him and his friends, she learned that
+a number of apparently useless things had value in the eyes of certain
+convenient fools, and so she treasured the autographs of distinguished
+persons who wrote to him--autographs which he disdainfully tossed in the
+waste basket. She was careful with presentation copies from authors, and
+she went the length of urging Tim to write a book himself. But at that
+he balked.
+
+"Write a book!" he cried to her, his gentle face suddenly white with
+passion. "Who am I to commit such a profanation?"
+
+She didn't know what he meant, but she had a theory that it was
+dangerous to excite him, and so she sat up till midnight to cook a chop
+for him when he came home that night.
+
+He preferred to have her sitting up for him, and he wanted every
+electric light in their apartments turned to the full. If, by any
+chance, they returned together to a dark house, he would not enter till
+she touched the button in the hall, and illuminated the room. Or if it
+so happened that the lights were turned off in the night time, and
+he awoke to find himself in darkness, he shrieked till the woman came
+running to his relief, and, with derisive laughter, turned them on
+again. But when she found that after these frights he lay trembling and
+white in his bed, she began to be alarmed for the clever, gold-making
+little machine, and to renew her assiduities, and to horde more
+tenaciously than ever, those valuable curios on which she some day
+expected to realize when he was out of the way, and no longer in a
+position to object to their barter.
+
+O'Connor's idiosyncrasy of fear was a source of much amusement among the
+boys at the office where he worked. They made open sport of it, and
+yet, recognizing him for a sensitive plant, and granting that genius was
+entitled to whimsicalities, it was their custom when they called for
+him after work hours, to permit him to reach the lighted corridor before
+they turned out the gas over his desk. This, they reasoned, was but a
+slight service to perform for the most enchanting beggar in the world.
+
+"Dear fellow," said Rick Dodson, who loved him, "is it the Devil you
+expect to see? And if so, why are you averse? Surely the Devil is not
+such a bad old chap."
+
+"You haven't found him so?"
+
+"Tim, by heaven, you know, you ought to explain to me. A citizen of the
+world and a student of its purlieus, like myself, ought to know what
+there is to know! Now you're a man of sense, in spite of a few
+bad habits--such as myself, for example. Is this fad of yours
+madness?--which would be quite to your credit,--for gadzooks, I like a
+lunatic! Or is it the complaint of a man who has gathered too much
+data on the subject of Old Rye? Or is it, as I suspect, something more
+occult, and therefore more interesting?"
+
+"Rick, boy," said Tim, "you're too--inquiring!" And he turned to his
+desk with a look of delicate hauteur.
+
+It was the very next night that these two tippling pessimists spent
+together talking about certain disgruntled but immortal gentlemen, who,
+having said their say and made the world quite uncomfortable, had now
+journeyed on to inquire into the nothingness which they postulated. The
+dawn was breaking in the muggy east; the bottles were empty, the
+cigars burnt out. Tim turned toward his friend with a sharp breaking of
+sociable silence.
+
+"Rick," he said, "do you know that Fear has a Shape?"
+
+"And so has my nose!"
+
+"You asked me the other night what I feared. Holy father, I make my
+confession to you. What I fear is Fear."
+
+"That's because you've drunk too much--or not enough.
+
+  "'Come, fill the cup, and in the fire of Spring
+    Your winter garment of repentance fling--'"
+
+"My costume then would be too nebulous for this weather, dear boy. But
+it's true what I was saying. I am afraid of ghosts."
+
+"For an agnostic that seems a bit--"
+
+"Agnostic! Yes, so completely an agnostic that I do not even know that
+I do not know! God, man, do you mean you have no ghosts--no--no things
+which shape themselves? Why, there are things I have done--"
+
+"Don't think of them, my boy! See, 'night's candles are burnt out, and
+jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain top.'"
+
+Tim looked about him with a sickly smile. He looked behind him and there
+was nothing there; stared at the blank window, where the smoky dawn
+showed its offensive face, and there was nothing there. He pushed away
+the moist hair from his haggard face--that face which would look like
+the blessed St. John, and leaned heavily back in his chair.
+
+"'Yon light is not daylight, I know it, I,'" he murmured drowsily, "'it
+is some meteor which the sun exhales, to be to thee this night--'"
+
+The words floated off in languid nothingness, and he slept. Dodson arose
+preparatory to stretching himself on his couch. But first he bent over
+his friend with a sense of tragic appreciation.
+
+"Damned by the skin of his teeth!" he muttered. "A little more, and he
+would have gone right, and the Devil would have lost a good fellow. As
+it is"--he smiled with his usual conceited delight in his own sayings,
+even when they were uttered in soliloquy--"he is merely one of those
+splendid gentlemen one will meet with in hell." Then Dodson had a
+momentary nostalgia for goodness himself, but he soon overcame it, and
+stretching himself on his sofa, he, too, slept.
+
+That night he and O'Connor went together to hear "Faust" sung, and
+returning to the office, Dodson prepared to write his criticism. Except
+for the distant clatter of telegraph instruments, or the peremptory
+cries of "copy" from an upper room, the office was still. Dodson wrote
+and smoked his interminable cigarettes; O' Connor rested his head in
+his hands on the desk, and sat in perfect silence. He did not know when
+Dodson finished, or when, arising, and absent-mindedly extinguishing the
+lights, he moved to the door with his copy in his hands. Dodson gathered
+up the hats and coats as he passed them where they lay on a chair, and
+called:
+
+"It is done, Tim. Come, let's get out of this."
+
+There was no answer, and he thought Tim was following, but after he had
+handed his criticism to the city editor, he saw he was still alone, and
+returned to the room for his friend. He advanced no further than the
+doorway, for, as he stood in the dusky corridor and looked within the
+darkened room, he saw before his friend a Shape, white, of perfect
+loveliness, divinely delicate and pure and ethereal, which seemed as the
+embodiment of all goodness. From it came a soft radiance and a perfume
+softer than the wind when "it breathes upon a bank of violets stealing
+and giving odor." Staring at it, with eyes immovable, sat his friend.
+
+It was strange that at sight of a thing so unspeakably fair, a coldness
+like that which comes from the jewel-blue lips of a Muir crevasse
+should have fallen upon Dodson, or that it was only by summoning all the
+manhood that was left in him, that he was able to restore light to
+the room, and to rush to his friend. When he reached poor Tim he was
+stone-still with paralysis. They took him home to the woman, who nursed
+him out of that attack--and later on worried him into another.
+
+When he was able to sit up and jeer at things a little again, and help
+himself to the quail the woman broiled for him, Dodson, sitting beside
+him, said:
+
+"Did you call that little exhibition of yours legerdemain, Tim, you
+sweep? Or are you really the Devil's bairn?"
+
+"It was the Shape of Fear," said Tim, quite seriously.
+
+"But it seemed mild as mother's milk."
+
+"It was compounded of the good I might have done. It is that which I
+fear."
+
+He would explain no more. Later--many months later--he died patiently
+and sweetly in the madhouse, praying for rest. The little beast with
+the yellow eyes had high mass celebrated for him, which, all things
+considered, was almost as pathetic as it was amusing.
+
+Dodson was in Vienna when he heard of it.
+
+"Sa, sa!" cried he. "I wish it wasn't so dark in the tomb! What do you
+suppose Tim is looking at?"
+
+As for Jim O'Malley, he was with difficulty kept from illuminating the
+grave with electricity.
+
+
+
+
+ON THE NORTHERN ICE
+
+
+THE winter nights up at Sault Ste. Marie are as white and luminous as
+the Milky Way. The silence which rests upon the solitude appears to be
+white also. Even sound has been included in Nature's arrestment, for,
+indeed, save the still white frost, all things seem to be obliterated.
+The stars have a poignant brightness, but they belong to heaven and not
+to earth, and between their immeasurable height and the still ice rolls
+the ebon ether in vast, liquid billows.
+
+In such a place it is difficult to believe that the world is actually
+peopled. It seems as if it might be the dark of the day after Cain
+killed Abel, and as if all of humanity's remainder was huddled in
+affright away from the awful spaciousness of Creation.
+
+The night Ralph Hagadorn started out for Echo Bay--bent on a pleasant
+duty--he laughed to himself, and said that he did not at all object
+to being the only man in the world, so long as the world remained as
+unspeakably beautiful as it was when he buckled on his skates and shot
+away into the solitude. He was bent on reaching his best friend in time
+to act as groomsman, and business had delayed him till time was at its
+briefest. So he journeyed by night and journeyed alone, and when the
+tang of the frost got at his blood, he felt as a spirited horse feels
+when it gets free of bit and bridle. The ice was as glass, his skates
+were keen, his frame fit, and his venture to his taste! So he laughed,
+and cut through the air as a sharp stone cleaves the water. He could
+hear the whistling of the air as he cleft it.
+
+As he went on and on in the black stillness, he began to have fancies.
+He imagined himself enormously tall--a great Viking of the Northland,
+hastening over icy fiords to his love. And that reminded him that he had
+a love--though, indeed, that thought was always present with him as a
+background for other thoughts. To be sure, he had not told her that she
+was his love, for he had seen her only a few times, and the auspicious
+occasion had not yet presented itself. She lived at Echo Bay also, and
+was to be the maid of honor to his friend's bride--which was one more
+reason why he skated almost as swiftly as the wind, and why, now and
+then, he let out a shout of exultation.
+
+The one cloud that crossed Hagadorn's sun of expectancy was the
+knowledge that Marie Beaujeu's father had money, and that Marie lived in
+a house with two stories to it, and wore otter skin about her throat
+and little satin-lined mink boots on her feet when she went sledding.
+Moreover, in the locket in which she treasured a bit of her dead
+mother's hair, there was a black pearl as big as a pea. These things
+made it difficult--perhaps impossible--for Ralph Hagadorn to say
+more than, "I love you." But that much he meant to say though he were
+scourged with chagrin for his temerity.
+
+This determination grew upon him as he swept along the ice under the
+starlight. Venus made a glowing path toward the west and seemed eager to
+reassure him. He was sorry he could not skim down that avenue of light
+which flowed from the love-star, but he was forced to turn his back upon
+it and face the black northeast.
+
+It came to him with a shock that he was not alone. His eyelashes were
+frosted and his eyeballs blurred with the cold, so at first he thought
+it might be an illusion. But when he had rubbed his eyes hard, he
+made sure that not very far in front of him was a long white skater in
+fluttering garments who sped over the ice as fast as ever werewolf went.
+
+He called aloud, but there was no answer. He shaped his hands and
+trumpeted through them, but the silence was as before--it was complete.
+So then he gave chase, setting his teeth hard and putting a tension on
+his firm young muscles. But go however he would, the white skater went
+faster. After a time, as he glanced at the cold gleam of the north star,
+he perceived that he was being led from his direct path. For a moment
+he hesitated, wondering if he would not better keep to his road, but his
+weird companion seemed to draw him on irresistibly, and finding it sweet
+to follow, he followed.
+
+Of course it came to him more than once in that strange pursuit, that
+the white skater was no earthly guide. Up in those latitudes men see
+curious things when the hoar frost is on the earth. Hagadorn's own
+father--to hark no further than that for an instance!--who lived up
+there with the Lake Superior Indians, and worked in the copper mines,
+had welcomed a woman at his hut one bitter night, who was gone by
+morning, leaving wolf tracks on the snow! Yes, it was so, and John
+Fontanelle, the half-breed, could tell you about it any day--if he were
+alive. (Alack, the snow where the wolf tracks were, is melted now!)
+
+Well, Hagadorn followed the white skater all the night, and when the ice
+flushed pink at dawn, and arrows of lovely light shot up into the cold
+heavens, she was gone, and Hagadorn was at his destination. The sun
+climbed arrogantly up to his place above all other things, and as
+Hagadorn took off his skates and glanced carelessly lakeward, he beheld
+a great wind-rift in the ice, and the waves showing blue and hungry
+between white fields. Had he rushed along his intended path, watching
+the stars to guide him, his glance turned upward, all his body at
+magnificent momentum, he must certainly have gone into that cold grave.
+
+How wonderful that it had been sweet to follow the white skater, and
+that he followed!
+
+His heart beat hard as he hurried to his friend's house. But he
+encountered no wedding furore. His friend met him as men meet in houses
+of mourning.
+
+"Is this your wedding face?" cried Hagadorn. "Why, man, starved as I am,
+I look more like a bridegroom than you!"
+
+"There's no wedding to-day!"
+
+"No wedding! Why, you're not--"
+
+"Marie Beaujeu died last night--"
+
+"Marie--"
+
+"Died last night. She had been skating in the afternoon, and she came
+home chilled and wandering in her mind, as if the frost had got in it
+somehow. She grew worse and worse, and all the time she talked of you."
+
+"Of me?"
+
+"We wondered what it meant. No one knew you were lovers."
+
+"I didn't know it myself; more's the pity. At least, I didn't know--"
+
+"She said you were on the ice, and that you didn't know about the big
+breaking-up, and she cried to us that the wind was off shore and the
+rift widening. She cried over and over again that you could come in by
+the old French creek if you only knew--"
+
+"I came in that way."
+
+"But how did you come to do that? It's out of the path. We thought
+perhaps--"
+
+But Hagadorn broke in with his story and told him all as it had come to
+pass.
+
+That day they watched beside the maiden, who lay with tapers at her head
+and at her feet, and in the little church the bride who might have been
+at her wedding said prayers for her friend. They buried Marie Beaujeu in
+her bridesmaid white, and Hagadorn was before the altar with her, as he
+had intended from the first! Then at midnight the lovers who were to
+wed whispered their vows in the gloom of the cold church, and walked
+together through the snow to lay their bridal wreaths upon a grave.
+
+Three nights later, Hagadorn skated back again to his home. They wanted
+him to go by sunlight, but he had his way, and went when Venus made her
+bright path on the ice.
+
+The truth was, he had hoped for the companionship of the white skater.
+But he did not have it. His only companion was the wind. The only voice
+he heard was the baying of a wolf on the north shore. The world was as
+empty and as white as if God had just created it, and the sun had not
+yet colored nor man defiled it.
+
+
+
+
+THEIR DEAR LITTLE GHOST
+
+
+THE first time one looked at Elsbeth, one was not prepossessed. She was
+thin and brown, her nose turned slightly upward, her toes went in just
+a perceptible degree, and her hair was perfectly straight. But when one
+looked longer, one perceived that she was a charming little creature.
+The straight hair was as fine as silk, and hung in funny little braids
+down her back; there was not a flaw in her soft brown skin, and her
+mouth was tender and shapely. But her particular charm lay in a look
+which she habitually had, of seeming to know curious things--such as it
+is not allotted to ordinary persons to know. One felt tempted to say to
+her:
+
+"What are these beautiful things which you know, and of which others are
+ignorant? What is it you see with those wise and pellucid eyes? Why is
+it that everybody loves you?"
+
+Elsbeth was my little godchild, and I knew her better than I knew any
+other child in the world. But still I could not truthfully say that I
+was familiar with her, for to me her spirit was like a fair and fragrant
+road in the midst of which I might walk in peace and joy, but where I
+was continually to discover something new. The last time I saw her quite
+well and strong was over in the woods where she had gone with her two
+little brothers and her nurse to pass the hottest weeks of summer. I
+followed her, foolish old creature that I was, just to be near her, for
+I needed to dwell where the sweet aroma of her life could reach me.
+
+One morning when I came from my room, limping a little, because I am
+not so young as I used to be, and the lake wind works havoc with me, my
+little godchild came dancing to me singing:
+
+"Come with me and I'll show you my places, my places, my places!"
+
+Miriam, when she chanted by the Red Sea might have been more exultant,
+but she could not have been more bewitching. Of course I knew what
+"places" were, because I had once been a little girl myself, but unless
+you are acquainted with the real meaning of "places," it would be
+useless to try to explain. Either you know "places" or you do not--just
+as you understand the meaning of poetry or you do not. There are things
+in the world which cannot be taught.
+
+Elsbeth's two tiny brothers were present, and I took one by each hand
+and followed her. No sooner had we got out of doors in the woods than
+a sort of mystery fell upon the world and upon us. We were cautioned to
+move silently, and we did so, avoiding the crunching of dry twigs.
+
+"The fairies hate noise," whispered my little godchild, her eyes
+narrowing like a cat's.
+
+"I must get my wand first thing I do," she said in an awed undertone.
+"It is useless to try to do anything without a wand."
+
+The tiny boys were profoundly impressed, and, indeed, so was I. I felt
+that at last, I should, if I behaved properly, see the fairies, which
+had hitherto avoided my materialistic gaze. It was an enchanting moment,
+for there appeared, just then, to be nothing commonplace about life.
+
+There was a swale near by, and into this the little girl plunged. I
+could see her red straw hat bobbing about among the tall rushes, and I
+wondered if there were snakes.
+
+"Do you think there are snakes?" I asked one of the tiny boys.
+
+"If there are," he said with conviction, "they won't dare hurt her."
+
+He convinced me. I feared no more. Presently Elsbeth came out of the
+swale. In her hand was a brown "cattail," perfectly full and round. She
+carried it as queens carry their sceptres--the beautiful queens we dream
+of in our youth.
+
+"Come," she commanded, and waved the sceptre in a fine manner. So we
+followed, each tiny boy gripping my hand tight. We were all three a
+trifle awed. Elsbeth led us into a dark underbrush. The branches, as
+they flew back in our faces, left them wet with dew. A wee path, made by
+the girl's dear feet, guided our footsteps. Perfumes of elderberry and
+wild cucumber scented the air. A bird, frightened from its nest, made
+frantic cries above our heads. The underbrush thickened. Presently the
+gloom of the hemlocks was over us, and in the midst of the shadowy green
+a tulip tree flaunted its leaves. Waves boomed and broke upon the
+shore below. There was a growing dampness as we went on, treading very
+lightly. A little green snake ran coquettishly from us. A fat and glossy
+squirrel chattered at us from a safe height, stroking his whiskers with
+a complaisant air.
+
+At length we reached the "place." It was a circle of velvet grass,
+bright as the first blades of spring, delicate as fine sea-ferns. The
+sunlight, falling down the shaft between the hemlocks, flooded it with
+a softened light and made the forest round about look like deep purple
+velvet. My little godchild stood in the midst and raised her wand
+impressively.
+
+"This is my place," she said, with a sort of wonderful gladness in her
+tone. "This is where I come to the fairy balls. Do you see them?"
+
+"See what?" whispered one tiny boy.
+
+"The fairies."
+
+There was a silence. The older boy pulled at my skirt.
+
+"Do YOU see them?" he asked, his voice trembling with expectancy.
+
+"Indeed," I said, "I fear I am too old and wicked to see fairies, and
+yet--are their hats red?"
+
+"They are," laughed my little girl. "Their hats are red, and as
+small--as small!" She held up the pearly nail of her wee finger to give
+us the correct idea.
+
+"And their shoes are very pointed at the toes?"
+
+"Oh, very pointed!"
+
+"And their garments are green?"
+
+"As green as grass."
+
+"And they blow little horns?"
+
+"The sweetest little horns!"
+
+"I think I see them," I cried.
+
+"We think we see them too," said the tiny boys, laughing in perfect
+glee.
+
+"And you hear their horns, don't you?" my little godchild asked somewhat
+anxiously.
+
+"Don't we hear their horns?" I asked the tiny boys.
+
+"We think we hear their horns," they cried. "Don't you think we do?"
+
+"It must be we do," I said. "Aren't we very, very happy?"
+
+We all laughed softly. Then we kissed each other and Elsbeth led us out,
+her wand high in the air.
+
+And so my feet found the lost path to Arcady.
+
+The next day I was called to the Pacific coast, and duty kept me there
+till well into December. A few days before the date set for my return to
+my home, a letter came from Elsbeth's mother.
+
+"Our little girl is gone into the Unknown," she wrote--"that Unknown in
+which she seemed to be forever trying to pry. We knew she was going, and
+we told her. She was quite brave, but she begged us to try some way to
+keep her till after Christmas. 'My presents are not finished yet,' she
+made moan. 'And I did so want to see what I was going to have. You can't
+have a very happy Christmas without me, I should think. Can you arrange
+to keep me somehow till after then?' We could not 'arrange' either with
+God in heaven or science upon earth, and she is gone."
+
+She was only my little godchild, and I am an old maid, with no business
+fretting over children, but it seemed as if the medium of light and
+beauty had been taken from me. Through this crystal soul I had perceived
+whatever was loveliest. However, what was, was! I returned to my home
+and took up a course of Egyptian history, and determined to concern
+myself with nothing this side the Ptolemies.
+
+Her mother has told me how, on Christmas eve, as usual, she and
+Elsbeth's father filled the stockings of the little ones, and hung them,
+where they had always hung, by the fireplace. They had little heart for
+the task, but they had been prodigal that year in their expenditures,
+and had heaped upon the two tiny boys all the treasures they thought
+would appeal to them. They asked themselves how they could have been
+so insane previously as to exercise economy at Christmas time, and what
+they meant by not getting Elsbeth the autoharp she had asked for the
+year before.
+
+"And now--" began her father, thinking of harps. But he could not
+complete this sentence, of course, and the two went on passionately and
+almost angrily with their task. There were two stockings and two piles
+of toys. Two stockings only, and only two piles of toys! Two is very
+little!
+
+They went away and left the darkened room, and after a time they
+slept--after a long time. Perhaps that was about the time the tiny boys
+awoke, and, putting on their little dressing gowns and bed slippers,
+made a dash for the room where the Christmas things were always placed.
+The older one carried a candle which gave out a feeble light. The other
+followed behind through the silent house. They were very impatient and
+eager, but when they reached the door of the sitting-room they stopped,
+for they saw that another child was before them.
+
+It was a delicate little creature, sitting in her white night gown, with
+two rumpled funny braids falling down her back, and she seemed to be
+weeping. As they watched, she arose, and putting out one slender
+finger as a child does when she counts, she made sure over and over
+again--three sad times--that there were only two stockings and two piles
+of toys! Only those and no more.
+
+The little figure looked so familiar that the boys started toward it,
+but just then, putting up her arm and bowing her face in it, as Elsbeth
+had been used to do when she wept or was offended, the little thing
+glided away and went out. That's what the boys said. It went out as a
+candle goes out.
+
+They ran and woke their parents with the tale, and all the house was
+searched in a wonderment, and disbelief, and hope, and tumult! But
+nothing was found. For nights they watched. But there was only the
+silent house. Only the empty rooms. They told the boys they must have
+been mistaken. But the boys shook their heads.
+
+"We know our Elsbeth," said they. "It was our Elsbeth, cryin' 'cause she
+hadn't no stockin' an' no toys, and we would have given her all ours,
+only she went out--jus' went out!"
+
+Alack!
+
+The next Christmas I helped with the little festival. It was none of
+my affair, but I asked to help, and they let me, and when we were all
+through there were three stockings and three piles of toys, and in the
+largest one was all the things that I could think of that my dear child
+would love. I locked the boys' chamber that night, and I slept on the
+divan in the parlor off the sitting-room. I slept but little, and the
+night was very still--so windless and white and still that I think I
+must have heard the slightest noise. Yet I heard none. Had I been in my
+grave I think my ears would not have remained more unsaluted.
+
+Yet when daylight came and I went to unlock the boys' bedchamber door,
+I saw that the stocking and all the treasures which I had bought for my
+little godchild were gone. There was not a vestige of them remaining!
+
+Of course we told the boys nothing. As for me, after dinner I went home
+and buried myself once more in my history, and so interested was I that
+midnight came without my knowing it. I should not have looked up at all,
+I suppose, to become aware of the time, had it not been for a faint,
+sweet sound as of a child striking a stringed instrument. It was so
+delicate and remote that I hardly heard it, but so joyous and tender
+that I could not but listen, and when I heard it a second time it seemed
+as if I caught the echo of a child's laugh. At first I was puzzled. Then
+I remembered the little autoharp I had placed among the other things in
+that pile of vanished toys. I said aloud:
+
+"Farewell, dear little ghost. Go rest. Rest in joy, dear little ghost.
+Farewell, farewell."
+
+That was years ago, but there has been silence since. Elsbeth was always
+an obedient little thing.
+
+
+
+
+A SPECTRAL COLLIE
+
+WILLIAM PERCY CECIL happened to be a younger son, so he left home--which
+was England--and went to Kansas to ranch it. Thousands of younger sons
+do the same, only their destination is not invariably Kansas.
+
+An agent at Wichita picked out Cecil's farm for him and sent the deeds
+over to England before Cecil left. He said there was a house on the
+place. So Cecil's mother fitted him out for America just as she had
+fitted out another superfluous boy for Africa, and parted from him
+with an heroic front and big agonies of mother-ache which she kept to
+herself.
+
+The boy bore up the way a man of his blood ought, but when he went out
+to the kennel to see Nita, his collie, he went to pieces somehow, and
+rolled on the grass with her in his arms and wept like a booby. But the
+remarkable part of it was that Nita wept too, big, hot dog tears which
+her master wiped away. When he went off she howled like a hungry baby,
+and had to be switched before she would give any one a night's sleep.
+
+When Cecil got over on his Kansas place he fitted up the shack as
+cosily as he could, and learned how to fry bacon and make soda biscuits.
+Incidentally, he did farming, and sunk a heap of money, finding out
+how not to do things. Meantime, the Americans laughed at him, and were
+inclined to turn the cold shoulder, and his compatriots, of whom there
+were a number in the county, did not prove to his liking. They consoled
+themselves for their exiled state in fashions not in keeping with
+Cecil's traditions. His homesickness went deeper than theirs, perhaps,
+and American whiskey could not make up for the loss of his English home,
+nor flirtations with the gay American village girls quite compensate
+him for the loss of his English mother. So he kept to himself and had
+nostalgia as some men have consumption.
+
+At length the loneliness got so bad that he had to see some living thing
+from home, or make a flunk of it and go back like a cry baby. He had
+a stiff pride still, though he sobbed himself to sleep more than one
+night, as many a pioneer has done before him. So he wrote home for Nita,
+the collie, and got word that she would be sent. Arrangements were made
+for her care all along the line, and she was properly boxed and shipped.
+
+As the time drew near for her arrival, Cecil could hardly eat. He
+was too excited to apply himself to anything. The day of her expected
+arrival he actually got up at five o'clock to clean the house and make
+it look as fine as possible for her inspection. Then he hitched up and
+drove fifteen miles to get her. The train pulled out just before he
+reached the station, so Nita in her box was waiting for him on the
+platform. He could see her in a queer way, as one sees the purple centre
+of a revolving circle of light; for, to tell the truth, with the long
+ride in the morning sun, and the beating of his heart, Cecil was only
+about half-conscious of anything. He wanted to yell, but he didn't.
+He kept himself in hand and lifted up the sliding side of the box and
+called to Nita, and she came out.
+
+But it wasn't the man who fainted, though he might have done so, being
+crazy homesick as he was, and half-fed and overworked while he was yet
+soft from an easy life. No, it was the dog! She looked at her master's
+face, gave one cry of inexpressible joy, and fell over in a real
+feminine sort of a faint, and had to be brought to like any other lady,
+with camphor and water and a few drops of spirit down her throat. Then
+Cecil got up on the wagon seat, and she sat beside him with her head on
+his arm, and they rode home in absolute silence, each feeling too much
+for speech. After they reached home, however, Cecil showed her all over
+the place, and she barked out her ideas in glad sociability.
+
+After that Cecil and Nita were inseparable. She walked beside him
+all day when he was out with the cultivator, or when he was mowing or
+reaping. She ate beside him at table and slept across his feet at night.
+Evenings when he looked over the Graphic from home, or read the books
+his mother sent him, that he might keep in touch with the world, Nita
+was beside him, patient, but jealous. Then, when he threw his book or
+paper down and took her on his knee and looked into her pretty eyes, or
+frolicked with her, she fairly laughed with delight.
+
+In short, she was faithful with that faith of which only a dog is
+capable--that unquestioning faith to which even the most loving women
+never quite attain.
+
+However, Fate was annoyed at this perfect friendship. It didn't give her
+enough to do, and Fate is a restless thing with a horrible appetite for
+variety. So poor Nita died one day mysteriously, and gave her last
+look to Cecil as a matter of course; and he held her paws till the last
+moment, as a stanch friend should, and laid her away decently in a pine
+box in the cornfield, where he could be shielded from public view if he
+chose to go there now and then and sit beside her grave.
+
+He went to bed very lonely, indeed, the first night. The shack seemed
+to him to be removed endless miles from the other habitations of men.
+He seemed cut off from the world, and ached to hear the cheerful little
+barks which Nita had been in the habit of giving him by way of good
+night. Her amiable eye with its friendly light was missing, the gay wag
+of her tail was gone; all her ridiculous ways, at which he was never
+tired of laughing, were things of the past.
+
+He lay down, busy with these thoughts, yet so habituated to Nita's
+presence, that when her weight rested upon his feet, as usual, he felt
+no surprise. But after a moment it came to him that as she was dead the
+weight he felt upon his feet could not be hers. And yet, there it was,
+warm and comfortable, cuddling down in the familiar way. He actually
+sat up and put his hand down to the foot of the bed to discover what
+was there. But there was nothing there, save the weight. And that stayed
+with him that night and many nights after.
+
+It happened that Cecil was a fool, as men will be when they are young,
+and he worked too hard, and didn't take proper care of himself; and so
+it came about that he fell sick with a low fever. He struggled around
+for a few days, trying to work it off, but one morning he awoke only to
+the consciousness of absurd dreams. He seemed to be on the sea, sailing
+for home, and the boat was tossing and pitching in a weary circle, and
+could make no headway. His heart was burning with impatience, but the
+boat went round and round in that endless circle till he shrieked out
+with agony.
+
+The next neighbors were the Taylors, who lived two miles and a half
+away. They were awakened that morning by the howling of a dog before
+their door. It was a hideous sound and would give them no peace. So
+Charlie Taylor got up and opened the door, discovering there an excited
+little collie.
+
+"Why, Tom," he called, "I thought Cecil's collie was dead!"
+
+"She is," called back Tom.
+
+"No, she ain't neither, for here she is, shakin' like an aspin, and a
+beggin' me to go with her. Come out, Tom, and see."
+
+It was Nita, no denying, and the men, perplexed, followed her to Cecil's
+shack, where they found him babbling.
+
+But that was the last of her. Cecil said he never felt her on his
+feet again. She had performed her final service for him, he said.
+The neighbors tried to laugh at the story at first, but they knew the
+Taylors wouldn't take the trouble to lie, and as for Cecil, no one would
+have ventured to chaff him.
+
+
+
+
+THE HOUSE THAT WAS NOT
+
+
+BART FLEMING took his bride out to his ranch on the plains when she
+was but seventeen years old, and the two set up housekeeping in three
+hundred and twenty acres of corn and rye. Off toward the west there was
+an unbroken sea of tossing corn at that time of the year when the bride
+came out, and as her sewing window was on the side of the house which
+faced the sunset, she passed a good part of each day looking into that
+great rustling mass, breathing in its succulent odors and listening
+to its sibilant melody. It was her picture gallery, her opera, her
+spectacle, and, being sensible,--or perhaps, being merely happy,--she
+made the most of it.
+
+When harvesting time came and the corn was cut, she had much
+entertainment in discovering what lay beyond. The town was east, and it
+chanced that she had never ridden west. So, when the rolling hills of
+this newly beholden land lifted themselves for her contemplation, and
+the harvest sun, all in an angry and sanguinary glow sank in the veiled
+horizon, and at noon a scarf of golden vapor wavered up and down
+along the earth line, it was as if a new world had been made for her.
+Sometimes, at the coming of a storm, a whip-lash of purple cloud, full
+of electric agility, snapped along the western horizon.
+
+"Oh, you'll see a lot of queer things on these here plains," her husband
+said when she spoke to him of these phenomena. "I guess what you see is
+the wind."
+
+"The wind!" cried Flora. "You can't see the wind, Bart."
+
+"Now look here, Flora," returned Bart, with benevolent emphasis, "you're
+a smart one, but you don't know all I know about this here country. I've
+lived here three mortal years, waitin' for you to git up out of your
+mother's arms and come out to keep me company, and I know what there is
+to know. Some things out here is queer--so queer folks wouldn't believe
+'em unless they saw. An' some's so pig-headed they don't believe their
+own eyes. As for th' wind, if you lay down flat and squint toward th'
+west, you can see it blowin' along near th' ground, like a big ribbon;
+an' sometimes it's th' color of air, an' sometimes it's silver an' gold,
+an' sometimes, when a storm is comin', it's purple."
+
+"If you got so tired looking at the wind, why didn't you marry some
+other girl, Bart, instead of waiting for me?"
+
+Flora was more interested in the first part of Bart's speech than in the
+last.
+
+"Oh, come on!" protested Bart, and he picked her up in his arms and
+jumped her toward the ceiling of the low shack as if she were a little
+girl--but then, to be sure, she wasn't much more.
+
+Of all the things Flora saw when the corn was cut down, nothing
+interested her so much as a low cottage, something like her own, which
+lay away in the distance. She could not guess how far it might be,
+because distances are deceiving out there, where the altitude is high
+and the air is as clear as one of those mystic balls of glass in which
+the sallow mystics of India see the moving shadows of the future.
+
+She had not known there were neighbors so near, and she wondered for
+several days about them before she ventured to say anything to Bart
+on the subject. Indeed, for some reason which she did not attempt to
+explain to herself, she felt shy about broaching the matter. Perhaps
+Bart did not want her to know the people. The thought came to her,
+as naughty thoughts will come, even to the best of persons, that some
+handsome young men might be "baching" it out there by themselves, and
+Bart didn't wish her to make their acquaintance. Bart had flattered her
+so much that she had actually begun to think herself beautiful, though
+as a matter of fact she was only a nice little girl with a lot of
+reddish-brown hair, and a bright pair of reddish-brown eyes in a white
+face.
+
+"Bart," she ventured one evening, as the sun, at its fiercest, rushed
+toward the great black hollow of the west, "who lives over there in that
+shack?"
+
+She turned away from the window where she had been looking at the
+incarnadined disk, and she thought she saw Bart turn pale. But then,
+her eyes were so blurred with the glory she had been gazing at, that she
+might easily have been mistaken.
+
+"I say, Bart, why don't you speak? If there's any one around to
+associate with, I should think you'd let me have the benefit of their
+company. It isn't as funny as you think, staying here alone days and
+days."
+
+"You ain't gettin' homesick, be you, sweetheart?" cried Bart, putting
+his arms around her. "You ain't gettin' tired of my society, be yeh?"
+
+It took some time to answer this question in a satisfactory manner, but
+at length Flora was able to return to her original topic.
+
+"But the shack, Bart! Who lives there, anyway?"
+
+"I'm not acquainted with 'em," said Bart, sharply. "Ain't them biscuits
+done, Flora?"
+
+Then, of course, she grew obstinate.
+
+"Those biscuits will never be done, Bart, till I know about that house,
+and why you never spoke of it, and why nobody ever comes down the road
+from there. Some one lives there I know, for in the mornings and at
+night I see the smoke coming out of the chimney."
+
+"Do you now?" cried Bart, opening his eyes and looking at her with
+unfeigned interest. "Well, do you know, sometimes I've fancied I seen
+that too?"
+
+"Well, why not," cried Flora, in half anger. "Why shouldn't you?"
+
+"See here, Flora, take them biscuits out an' listen to me. There ain't
+no house there. Hello! I didn't know you'd go for to drop the biscuits.
+Wait, I'll help you pick 'em up. By cracky, they're hot, ain't they?
+What you puttin' a towel over 'em for? Well, you set down here on my
+knee, so. Now you look over at that there house. You see it, don't yeh?
+Well, it ain't there! No! I saw it the first week I was out here. I was
+jus' half dyin', thinkin' of you an' wonderin' why you didn't
+write. That was the time you was mad at me. So I rode over there one
+day--lookin' up company, so t' speak--and there wa'n't no house there. I
+spent all one Sunday lookin' for it. Then I spoke to Jim Geary about
+it. He laughed an' got a little white about th' gills, an' he said he
+guessed I'd have to look a good while before I found it. He said that
+there shack was an ole joke."
+
+"Why--what--"
+
+"Well, this here is th' story he tol' me. He said a man an' his wife
+come out here t' live an' put up that there little place. An' she was
+young, you know, an' kind o' skeery, and she got lonesome. It worked on
+her an' worked on her, an' one day she up an' killed the baby an' her
+husband an' herself. Th' folks found 'em and buried 'em right there on
+their own ground. Well, about two weeks after that, th' house was burned
+down. Don't know how. Tramps, maybe. Anyhow, it burned. At least, I
+guess it burned!"
+
+"You guess it burned!"
+
+"Well, it ain't there, you know."
+
+"But if it burned the ashes are there."
+
+"All right, girlie, they're there then. Now let's have tea."
+
+This they proceeded to do, and were happy and cheerful all evening,
+but that didn't keep Flora from rising at the first flush of dawn and
+stealing out of the house. She looked away over west as she went to
+the barn and there, dark and firm against the horizon, stood the
+little house against the pellucid sky of morning. She got on Ginger's
+back--Ginger being her own yellow broncho--and set off at a hard pace
+for the house. It didn't appear to come any nearer, but the objects
+which had seemed to be beside it came closer into view, and Flora
+pressed on, with her mind steeled for anything. But as she approached
+the poplar windbreak which stood to the north of the house, the little
+shack waned like a shadow before her. It faded and dimmed before her
+eyes.
+
+She slapped Ginger's flanks and kept him going, and she at last got him
+up to the spot. But there was nothing there. The bunch grass grew tall
+and rank and in the midst of it lay a baby's shoe. Flora thought of
+picking it up, but something cold in her veins withheld her. Then she
+grew angry, and set Ginger's head toward the place and tried to drive
+him over it. But the yellow broncho gave one snort of fear, gathered
+himself in a bunch, and then, all tense, leaping muscles, made for home
+as only a broncho can.
+
+
+
+
+STORY OF AN OBSTINATE CORPSE
+
+
+VIRGIL HOYT is a photographer's assistant up at St. Paul, and enjoys
+his work without being consumed by it. He has been in search of the
+picturesque all over the West and hundreds of miles to the north, in
+Canada, and can speak three or four Indian dialects and put a canoe
+through the rapids. That is to say, he is a man of adventure, and no
+dreamer. He can fight well and shoot better, and swim so as to put up a
+winning race with the Indian boys, and he can sit in the saddle all day
+and not worry about it to-morrow.
+
+Wherever he goes, he carries a camera.
+
+"The world," Hoyt is in the habit of saying to those who sit with him
+when he smokes his pipe, "was created in six days to be photographed.
+Man--and particularly woman--was made for the same purpose. Clouds
+are not made to give moisture nor trees to cast shade. They have been
+created in order to give the camera obscura something to do."
+
+In short, Virgil Hoyt's view of the world is whimsical, and he likes to
+be bothered neither with the disagreeable nor the mysterious. That
+is the reason he loathes and detests going to a house of mourning to
+photograph a corpse. The bad taste of it offends him, but above all,
+he doesn't like the necessity of shouldering, even for a few moments, a
+part of the burden of sorrow which belongs to some one else. He dislikes
+sorrow, and would willingly canoe five hundred miles up the cold
+Canadian rivers to get rid of it. Nevertheless, as assistant
+photographer, it is often his duty to do this very kind of thing.
+
+Not long ago he was sent for by a rich Jewish family to photograph the
+remains of the mother, who had just died. He was put out, but he was
+only an assistant, and he went. He was taken to the front parlor, where
+the dead woman lay in her coffin. It was evident to him that there was
+some excitement in the household, and that a discussion was going on.
+But Hoyt said to himself that it didn't concern him, and he therefore
+paid no attention to it.
+
+The daughter wanted the coffin turned on end in order that the corpse
+might face the camera properly, but Hoyt said he could overcome the
+recumbent attitude and make it appear that the face was taken in the
+position it would naturally hold in life, and so they went out and left
+him alone with the dead.
+
+The face of the deceased was a strong and positive one, such as
+may often be seen among Jewish matrons. Hoyt regarded it with some
+admiration, thinking to himself that she was a woman who had known
+what she wanted, and who, once having made up her mind, would prove
+immovable. Such a character appealed to Hoyt. He reflected that he
+might have married if only he could have found a woman with strength of
+character sufficient to disagree with him. There was a strand of hair
+out of place on the dead woman's brow, and he gently pushed it back.
+A bud lifted its head too high from among the roses on her breast and
+spoiled the contour of the chin, so he broke it off. He remembered these
+things later with keen distinctness, and that his hand touched her chill
+face two or three times in the making of his arrangements.
+
+Then he took the impression, and left the house.
+
+He was busy at the time with some railroad work, and several days passed
+before he found opportunity to develop the plates. He took them from
+the bath in which they had lain with a number of others, and went
+energetically to work upon them, whistling some very saucy songs he had
+learned of the guide in the Red River country, and trying to forget that
+the face which was presently to appear was that of a dead woman. He had
+used three plates as a precaution against accident, and they came
+up well. But as they developed, he became aware of the existence of
+something in the photograph which had not been apparent to his eye
+in the subject. He was irritated, and without attempting to face the
+mystery, he made a few prints and laid them aside, ardently hoping that
+by some chance they would never be called for.
+
+However, as luck would have it,--and Hoyt's luck never had been
+good,--his employer asked one day what had become of those photographs.
+Hoyt tried to evade making an answer, but the effort was futile, and he
+had to get out the finished prints and exhibit them. The older man sat
+staring at them a long time.
+
+"Hoyt," he said, "you're a young man, and very likely you have never
+seen anything like this before. But I have. Not exactly the same thing,
+perhaps, but similar phenomena have come my way a number of times since
+I went in the business, and I want to tell you there are things in
+heaven and earth not dreamt of--"
+
+"Oh, I know all that tommy-rot," cried Hoyt, angrily, "but when anything
+happens I want to know the reason why and how it is done."
+
+"All right," answered his employer, "then you might explain why and how
+the sun rises."
+
+But he humored the young man sufficiently to examine with him the baths
+in which the plates were submerged, and the plates themselves. All was
+as it should be; but the mystery was there, and could not be done away
+with.
+
+Hoyt hoped against hope that the friends of the dead woman would somehow
+forget about the photographs; but the idea was unreasonable, and one
+day, as a matter of course, the daughter appeared and asked to see the
+pictures of her mother.
+
+"Well, to tell the truth," stammered Hoyt, "they didn't come out
+quite--quite as well as we could wish."
+
+"But let me see them," persisted the lady. "I'd like to look at them
+anyhow."
+
+"Well, now," said Hoyt, trying to be soothing, as he believed it was
+always best to be with women,--to tell the truth he was an ignoramus
+where women were concerned,--"I think it would be better if you didn't
+look at them. There are reasons why--" he ambled on like this, stupid
+man that he was, till the lady naturally insisted upon seeing the
+pictures without a moment's delay.
+
+So poor Hoyt brought them out and placed them in her hand, and then
+ran for the water pitcher, and had to be at the bother of bathing her
+forehead to keep her from fainting.
+
+For what the lady saw was this: Over face and flowers and the head of
+the coffin fell a thick veil, the edges of which touched the floor in
+some places. It covered the features so well that not a hint of them was
+visible.
+
+"There was nothing over mother's face!" cried the lady at length.
+
+"Not a thing," acquiesced Hoyt. "I know, because I had occasion to touch
+her face just before I took the picture. I put some of her hair back
+from her brow."
+
+"What does it mean, then?" asked the lady.
+
+"You know better than I. There is no explanation in science. Perhaps
+there is some in--in psychology."
+
+"Well," said the young woman, stammering a little and coloring, "mother
+was a good woman, but she always wanted her own way, and she always had
+it, too."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And she never would have her picture taken. She didn't admire her own
+appearance. She said no one should ever see a picture of her."
+
+"So?" said Hoyt, meditatively. "Well, she's kept her word, hasn't she?"
+
+The two stood looking at the photographs for a time. Then Hoyt pointed
+to the open blaze in the grate.
+
+"Throw them in," he commanded. "Don't let your father see them--don't
+keep them yourself. They wouldn't be agreeable things to keep."
+
+"That's true enough," admitted the lady. And she threw them in the fire.
+Then Virgil Hoyt brought out the plates and broke them before her eyes.
+
+And that was the end of it--except that Hoyt sometimes tells the story
+to those who sit beside him when his pipe is lighted.
+
+
+
+
+A CHILD OF THE RAIN
+
+
+IT was the night that Mona Meeks, the dressmaker, told him she didn't
+love him. He couldn't believe it at first, because he had so long been
+accustomed to the idea that she did, and no matter how rough the weather
+or how irascible the passengers, he felt a song in his heart as he
+punched transfers, and rang his bell punch, and signalled the driver
+when to let people off and on.
+
+Now, suddenly, with no reason except a woman's, she had changed her
+mind. He dropped in to see her at five o'clock, just before time for the
+night shift, and to give her two red apples he had been saving for her.
+She looked at the apples as if they were invisible and she could not see
+them, and standing in her disorderly little dressmaking parlor, with its
+cuttings and scraps and litter of fabrics, she said:
+
+"It is no use, John. I shall have to work here like this all my
+life--work here alone. For I don't love you, John. No, I don't. I
+thought I did, but it is a mistake."
+
+"You mean it?" asked John, bringing up the words in a great gasp.
+
+"Yes," she said, white and trembling and putting out her hands as if to
+beg for his mercy. And then--big, lumbering fool--he turned around
+and strode down the stairs and stood at the corner in the beating rain
+waiting for his car. It came along at length, spluttering on the wet
+rails and spitting out blue fire, and he took his shift after a gruff
+"Good night" to Johnson, the man he relieved.
+
+He was glad the rain was bitter cold and drove in his face fiercely.
+He rejoiced at the cruelty of the wind, and when it hustled pedestrians
+before it, lashing them, twisting their clothes, and threatening their
+equilibrium, he felt amused. He was pleased at the chill in his bones
+and at the hunger that tortured him. At least, at first he thought it
+was hunger till he remembered that he had just eaten. The hours passed
+confusedly. He had no consciousness of time. But it must have been
+late,--near midnight,--judging by the fact that there were few persons
+visible anywhere in the black storm, when he noticed a little figure
+sitting at the far end of the car. He had not seen the child when she
+got on, but all was so curious and wild to him that evening--he himself
+seemed to himself the most curious and the wildest of all things--that
+it was not surprising that he should not have observed the little
+creature.
+
+She was wrapped in a coat so much too large that it had become frayed
+at the bottom from dragging on the pavement. Her hair hung in unkempt
+stringiness about her bent shoulders, and her feet were covered with old
+arctics, many sizes too big, from which the soles hung loose.
+
+Beside the little figure was a chest of dark wood, with curiously
+wrought hasps. From this depended a stout strap by which it could be
+carried over the shoulders. John Billings stared in, fascinated by the
+poor little thing with its head sadly drooping upon its breast, its thin
+blue hands relaxed upon its lap, and its whole attitude so suggestive
+of hunger, loneliness, and fatigue, that he made up his mind he would
+collect no fare from it.
+
+"It will need its nickel for breakfast," he said to himself. "The
+company can stand this for once. Or, come to think of it, I might
+celebrate my hard luck. Here's to the brotherhood of failures!" And
+he took a nickel from one pocket of his great-coat and dropped it in
+another, ringing his bell punch to record the transfer.
+
+The car plunged along in the darkness, and the rain beat more viciously
+than ever in his face. The night was full of the rushing sound of the
+storm. Owing to some change of temperature the glass of the car became
+obscured so that the young conductor could no longer see the little
+figure distinctly, and he grew anxious about the child.
+
+"I wonder if it's all right," he said to himself. "I never saw living
+creature sit so still."
+
+He opened the car door, intending to speak with the child, but just
+then something went wrong with the lights. There was a blue and green
+flickering, then darkness, a sudden halting of the car, and a great
+sweep of wind and rain in at the door. When, after a moment, light and
+motion reasserted themselves, and Billings had got the door together, he
+turned to look at the little passenger. But the car was empty.
+
+It was a fact. There was no child there--not even moisture on the seat
+where she had been sitting.
+
+"Bill," said he, going to the front door and addressing the driver,
+"what became of that little kid in the old cloak?"
+
+"I didn't see no kid," said Bill, crossly. "For Gawd's sake, close the
+door, John, and git that draught off my back."
+
+"Draught!" said John, indignantly, "where's the draught?"
+
+"You've left the hind door open," growled Bill, and John saw him
+shivering as a blast struck him and ruffled the fur on his bear-skin
+coat. But the door was not open, and yet John had to admit to himself
+that the car seemed filled with wind and a strange coldness.
+
+However, it didn't matter. Nothing mattered! Still, it was as well no
+doubt to look under the seats just to make sure no little crouching
+figure was there, and so he did. But there was nothing. In fact, John
+said to himself, he seemed to be getting expert in finding nothing where
+there ought to be something.
+
+He might have stayed in the car, for there was no likelihood of more
+passengers that evening, but somehow he preferred going out where the
+rain could drench him and the wind pommel him. How horribly tired he
+was! If there were only some still place away from the blare of the city
+where a man could lie down and listen to the sound of the sea or the
+storm--or if one could grow suddenly old and get through with the bother
+of living--or if--
+
+The car gave a sudden lurch as it rounded a curve, and for a moment it
+seemed to be a mere chance whether Conductor Billings would stay on
+his platform or go off under those fire-spitting wheels. He caught
+instinctively at his brake, saved himself, and stood still for a moment,
+panting.
+
+"I must have dozed," he said to himself.
+
+Just then, dimly, through the blurred window, he saw again the little
+figure of the child, its head on its breast as before, its blue hands
+lying in its lap and the curious box beside it. John Billings felt a
+coldness beyond the coldness of the night run through his blood. Then,
+with a half-stifled cry, he threw back the door, and made a desperate
+spring at the corner where the eerie thing sat.
+
+And he touched the green carpeting on the seat, which was quite dry
+and warm, as if no dripping, miserable little wretch had ever crouched
+there.
+
+He rushed to the front door.
+
+"Bill," he roared, "I want to know about that kid."
+
+"What kid?"
+
+"The same kid! The wet one with the old coat and the box with iron
+hasps! The one that's been sitting here in the car!"
+
+Bill turned his surly face to confront the young conductor.
+
+"You've been drinking, you fool," said he. "Fust thing you know you'll
+be reported."
+
+The conductor said not a word. He went slowly and weakly back to his
+post and stood there the rest of the way leaning against the end of the
+car for support. Once or twice he muttered:
+
+"The poor little brat!" And again he said, "So you didn't love me after
+all!"
+
+He never knew how he reached home, but he sank to sleep as dying men
+sink to death. All the same, being a hearty young man, he was on duty
+again next day but one, and again the night was rainy and cold.
+
+It was the last run, and the car was spinning along at its limit, when
+there came a sudden soft shock. John Billings knew what that meant. He
+had felt something of the kind once before. He turned sick for a moment,
+and held on to the brake. Then he summoned his courage and went around
+to the side of the car, which had stopped. Bill, the driver, was before
+him, and had a limp little figure in his arms, and was carrying it to
+the gaslight. John gave one look and cried:
+
+"It's the same kid, Bill! The one I told you of!"
+
+True as truth were the ragged coat dangling from the pitiful body, the
+little blue hands, the thin shoulders, the stringy hair, the big arctics
+on the feet. And in the road not far off was the curious chest of dark
+wood with iron hasps.
+
+"She ran under the car deliberate!" cried Bill. "I yelled to her, but
+she looked at me and ran straight on!"
+
+He was white in spite of his weather-beaten skin.
+
+"I guess you wasn't drunk last night after all, John," said he.
+
+"You--you are sure the kid is--is there?" gasped John.
+
+"Not so damned sure!" said Bill.
+
+But a few minutes later it was taken away in a patrol wagon, and with it
+the little box with iron hasps.
+
+
+
+
+THE ROOM OF THE EVIL THOUGHT
+
+
+THEY called it the room of the Evil Thought. It was really the
+pleasantest room in the house, and when the place had been used as the
+rectory, was the minister's study. It looked out on a mournful clump
+of larches, such as may often be seen in the old-fashioned yards in
+Michigan, and these threw a tender gloom over the apartment.
+
+There was a wide fireplace in the room, and it had been the young
+minister's habit to sit there hours and hours, staring ahead of him at
+the fire, and smoking moodily. The replenishing of the fire and of his
+pipe, it was said, would afford him occupation all the day long, and
+that was how it came about that his parochial duties were neglected so
+that, little by little, the people became dissatisfied with him, though
+he was an eloquent young man, who could send his congregation away drunk
+on his influence. However, the calmer pulsed among his parish began to
+whisper that it was indeed the influence of the young minister and not
+that of the Holy Ghost which they felt, and it was finally decided
+that neither animal magnetism nor hypnotism were good substitutes for
+religion. And so they let him go.
+
+The new rector moved into a smart brick house on the other side of the
+church, and gave receptions and dinner parties, and was punctilious
+about making his calls. The people therefore liked him very much--so
+much that they raised the debt on the church and bought a chime of
+bells, in their enthusiasm. Every one was lighter of heart than under
+the ministration of the previous rector. A burden appeared to be lifted
+from the community. True, there were a few who confessed the new man
+did not give them the food for thought which the old one had done, but,
+then, the former rector had made them uncomfortable! He had not only
+made them conscious of the sins of which they were already guilty, but
+also of those for which they had the latent capacity. A strange and
+fatal man, whom women loved to their sorrow, and whom simple men could
+not understand! It was generally agreed that the parish was well rid of
+him.
+
+"He was a genius," said the people in commiseration. The word was an
+uncomplimentary epithet with them.
+
+When the Hanscoms moved in the house which had been the old rectory,
+they gave Grandma Hanscom the room with the fireplace. Grandma was well
+pleased. The roaring fire warmed her heart as well as her chill old
+body, and she wept with weak joy when she looked at the larches, because
+they reminded her of the house she had lived in when she was first
+married. All the forenoon of the first day she was busy putting things
+away in bureau drawers and closets, but by afternoon she was ready to
+sit down in her high-backed rocker and enjoy the comforts of her room.
+
+She nodded a bit before the fire, as she usually did after luncheon, and
+then she awoke with an awful start and sat staring before her with such
+a look in her gentle, filmy old eyes as had never been there before.
+She did not move, except to rock slightly, and the Thought grew and grew
+till her face was disguised as by some hideous mask of tragedy.
+
+By and by the children came pounding at the door.
+
+"Oh, grandma, let us in, please. We want to see your new room, and mamma
+gave us some ginger cookies on a plate, and we want to give some to
+you."
+
+The door gave way under their assaults, and the three little ones stood
+peeping in, waiting for permission to enter. But it did not seem to be
+their grandma--their own dear grandma--who arose and tottered toward
+them in fierce haste, crying:
+
+"Away, away! Out of my sight! Out of my sight before I do the thing I
+want to do! Such a terrible thing! Send some one to me quick, children,
+children! Send some one quick!"
+
+They fled with feet shod with fear, and their mother came, and Grandma
+Hanscom sank down and clung about her skirts and sobbed:
+
+"Tie me, Miranda. Make me fast to the bed or the wall. Get some one to
+watch me. For I want to do an awful thing!"
+
+They put the trembling old creature in bed, and she raved there all
+the night long and cried out to be held, and to be kept from doing the
+fearful thing, whatever it was--for she never said what it was.
+
+The next morning some one suggested taking her in the sitting-room
+where she would be with the family. So they laid her on the sofa, hemmed
+around with cushions, and before long she was her quiet self again,
+though exhausted, naturally, with the tumult of the previous night.
+Now and then, as the children played about her, a shadow crept over
+her face--a shadow as of cold remembrance--and then the perplexed tears
+followed.
+
+When she seemed as well as ever they put her back in her room. But
+though the fire glowed and the lamp burned, as soon as ever she was
+alone they heard her shrill cries ringing to them that the Evil Thought
+had come again. So Hal, who was home from college, carried her up to his
+room, which she seemed to like very well. Then he went down to have a
+smoke before grandma's fire.
+
+The next morning he was absent from breakfast. They thought he might
+have gone for an early walk, and waited for him a few minutes. Then
+his sister went to the room that looked upon the larches, and found him
+dressed and pacing the floor with a face set and stern. He had not been
+in bed at all, as she saw at once. His eyes were bloodshot, his face
+stricken as if with old age or sin or--but she could not make it out.
+When he saw her he sank in a chair and covered his face with his hands,
+and between the trembling fingers she could see drops of perspiration on
+his forehead.
+
+"Hal!" she cried, "Hal, what is it?"
+
+But for answer he threw his arms about the little table and clung to
+it, and looked at her with tortured eyes, in which she fancied she saw
+a gleam of hate. She ran, screaming, from the room, and her father came
+and went up to him and laid his hands on the boy's shoulders. And then
+a fearful thing happened. All the family saw it. There could be no
+mistake. Hal's hands found their way with frantic eagerness toward his
+father's throat as if they would choke him, and the look in his eyes was
+so like a madman's that his father raised his fist and felled him as he
+used to fell men years before in the college fights, and then dragged
+him into the sitting-room and wept over him.
+
+By evening, however, Hal was all right, and the family said it must have
+been a fever,--perhaps from overstudy,--at which Hal covertly smiled.
+But his father was still too anxious about him to let him out of his
+sight, so he put him on a cot in his room, and thus it chanced that the
+mother and Grace concluded to sleep together downstairs.
+
+The two women made a sort of festival of it, and drank little cups of
+chocolate before the fire, and undid and brushed their brown braids,
+and smiled at each other, understandingly, with that sweet intuitive
+sympathy which women have, and Grace told her mother a number of things
+which she had been waiting for just such an auspicious occasion to
+confide.
+
+But the larches were noisy and cried out with wild voices, and the flame
+of the fire grew blue and swirled about in the draught sinuously, so
+that a chill crept upon the two. Something cold appeared to envelop
+them--such a chill as pleasure voyagers feel when a berg steals beyond
+Newfoundland and glows blue and threatening upon their ocean path.
+
+Then came something else which was not cold, but hot as the flames of
+hell--and they saw red, and stared at each other with maddened eyes, and
+then ran together from the room and clasped in close embrace safe beyond
+the fatal place, and thanked God they had not done the thing that they
+dared not speak of--the thing which suddenly came to them to do.
+
+So they called it the room of the Evil Thought. They could not account
+for it. They avoided the thought of it, being healthy and happy folk.
+But none entered it more. The door was locked.
+
+One day, Hal, reading the paper, came across a paragraph concerning the
+young minister who had once lived there, and who had thought and
+written there and so influenced the lives of those about him that they
+remembered him even while they disapproved.
+
+"He cut a man's throat on board ship for Australia," said he, "and then
+he cut his own, without fatal effect--and jumped overboard, and so ended
+it. What a strange thing!"
+
+Then they all looked at one another with subtle looks, and a shadow fell
+upon them and stayed the blood at their hearts.
+
+The next week the room of the Evil Thought was pulled down to make way
+for a pansy bed, which is quite gay and innocent, and blooms all the
+better because the larches, with their eternal murmuring, have been laid
+low and carted away to the sawmill.
+
+
+
+
+STORY OF THE VANISHING PATIENT
+
+
+THERE had always been strange stories about the house, but it was a
+sensible, comfortable sort of a neighborhood, and people took pains to
+say to one another that there was nothing in these tales--of course
+not! Absolutely nothing! How could there be? It was a matter of common
+remark, however, that considering the amount of money the Nethertons had
+spent on the place, it was curious they lived there so little. They
+were nearly always away,--up North in the summer and down South in the
+winter, and over to Paris or London now and then,--and when they did
+come home it was only to entertain a number of guests from the city. The
+place was either plunged in gloom or gayety. The old gardener who kept
+house by himself in the cottage at the back of the yard had things much
+his own way by far the greater part of the time.
+
+Dr. Block and his wife lived next door to the Nethertons, and he and his
+wife, who were so absurd as to be very happy in each other's company,
+had the benefit of the beautiful yard. They walked there mornings when
+the leaves were silvered with dew, and evenings they sat beside the lily
+pond and listened for the whip-poor-will. The doctor's wife moved her
+room over to that side of the house which commanded a view of the yard,
+and thus made the honeysuckles and laurel and clematis and all the
+masses of tossing greenery her own. Sitting there day after day with
+her sewing, she speculated about the mystery which hung impalpably yet
+undeniably over the house.
+
+It happened one night when she and her husband had gone to their room,
+and were congratulating themselves on the fact that he had no very sick
+patients and was likely to enjoy a good night's rest, that a ring came
+at the door.
+
+"If it's any one wanting you to leave home," warned his wife, "you must
+tell them you are all worn out. You've been disturbed every night this
+week, and it's too much!"
+
+The young physician went downstairs. At the door stood a man whom he had
+never seen before.
+
+"My wife is lying very ill next door," said the stranger, "so ill that
+I fear she will not live till morning. Will you please come to her at
+once?"
+
+"Next door?" cried the physician. "I didn't know the Nethertons were
+home!"
+
+"Please hasten," begged the man. "I must go back to her. Follow as
+quickly as you can."
+
+The doctor went back upstairs to complete his toilet.
+
+"How absurd," protested his wife when she heard the story. "There is no
+one at the Nethertons'. I sit where I can see the front door, and no one
+can enter without my knowing it, and I have been sewing by the window
+all day. If there were any one in the house, the gardener would have the
+porch lantern lighted. It is some plot. Some one has designs on you. You
+must not go."
+
+But he went. As he left the room his wife placed a revolver in his
+pocket.
+
+The great porch of the mansion was dark, but the physician made out that
+the door was open, and he entered. A feeble light came from the bronze
+lamp at the turn of the stairs, and by it he found his way, his feet
+sinking noiselessly in the rich carpets. At the head of the stairs the
+man met him. The doctor thought himself a tall man, but the stranger
+topped him by half a head. He motioned the physician to follow him, and
+the two went down the hall to the front room. The place was flushed with
+a rose-colored glow from several lamps. On a silken couch, in the midst
+of pillows, lay a woman dying with consumption. She was like a lily,
+white, shapely, graceful, with feeble yet charming movements. She looked
+at the doctor appealingly, then, seeing in his eyes the involuntary
+verdict that her hour was at hand, she turned toward her companion with
+a glance of anguish. Dr. Block asked a few questions. The man answered
+them, the woman remaining silent. The physician administered something
+stimulating, and then wrote a prescription which he placed on the
+mantel-shelf.
+
+"The drug store is closed to-night," he said, "and I fear the druggist
+has gone home. You can have the prescription filled the first thing in
+the morning, and I will be over before breakfast."
+
+After that, there was no reason why he should not have gone home. Yet,
+oddly enough, he preferred to stay. Nor was it professional anxiety that
+prompted this delay. He longed to watch those mysterious persons, who,
+almost oblivious of his presence, were speaking their mortal farewells
+in their glances, which were impassioned and of unutterable sadness.
+
+He sat as if fascinated. He watched the glitter of rings on the woman's
+long, white hands, he noted the waving of light hair about her temples,
+he observed the details of her gown of soft white silk which fell about
+her in voluminous folds. Now and then the man gave her of the stimulant
+which the doctor had provided; sometimes he bathed her face with water.
+Once he paced the floor for a moment till a motion of her hand quieted
+him.
+
+After a time, feeling that it would be more sensible and considerate
+of him to leave, the doctor made his way home. His wife was awake,
+impatient to hear of his experiences. She listened to his tale in
+silence, and when he had finished she turned her face to the wall and
+made no comment.
+
+"You seem to be ill, my dear," he said. "You have a chill. You are
+shivering."
+
+"I have no chill," she replied sharply. "But I--well, you may leave the
+light burning."
+
+The next morning before breakfast the doctor crossed the dewy sward to
+the Netherton house. The front door was locked, and no one answered to
+his repeated ringings. The old gardener chanced to be cutting the grass
+near at hand, and he came running up.
+
+"What you ringin' that door-bell for, doctor?" said he. "The folks ain't
+come home yet. There ain't nobody there."
+
+"Yes, there is, Jim. I was called here last night. A man came for me to
+attend his wife. They must both have fallen asleep that the bell is not
+answered. I wouldn't be surprised to find her dead, as a matter of fact.
+She was a desperately sick woman. Perhaps she is dead and something has
+happened to him. You have the key to the door, Jim. Let me in."
+
+But the old man was shaking in every limb, and refused to do as he was
+bid.
+
+"Don't you never go in there, doctor," whispered he, with chattering
+teeth. "Don't you go for to 'tend no one. You jus' come tell me when you
+sent for that way. No, I ain't goin' in, doctor, nohow. It ain't part
+of my duties to go in. That's been stipulated by Mr. Netherton. It's my
+business to look after the garden."
+
+Argument was useless. Dr. Block took the bunch of keys from the old
+man's pocket and himself unlocked the front door and entered. He mounted
+the steps and made his way to the upper room. There was no evidence of
+occupancy. The place was silent, and, so far as living creature went,
+vacant. The dust lay over everything. It covered the delicate damask of
+the sofa where he had seen the dying woman. It rested on the pillows.
+The place smelled musty and evil, as if it had not been used for a long
+time. The lamps of the room held not a drop of oil.
+
+But on the mantel-shelf was the prescription which the doctor had
+written the night before. He read it, folded it, and put it in his
+pocket.
+
+As he locked the outside door the old gardener came running to him.
+
+"Don't you never go up there again, will you?" he pleaded, "not unless
+you see all the Nethertons home and I come for you myself. You won't,
+doctor?"
+
+"No," said the doctor.
+
+When he told his wife she kissed him, and said:
+
+"Next time when I tell you to stay at home, you must stay!"
+
+
+
+
+THE PIANO NEXT DOOR
+
+
+BABETTE had gone away for the summer; the furniture was in its summer
+linens; the curtains were down, and Babette's husband, John Boyce, was
+alone in the house. It was the first year of his marriage, and he missed
+Babette. But then, as he often said to himself, he ought never to
+have married her. He did it from pure selfishness, and because he was
+determined to possess the most illusive, tantalizing, elegant, and
+utterly unmoral little creature that the sun shone upon. He wanted her
+because she reminded him of birds, and flowers, and summer winds,
+and other exquisite things created for the delectation of mankind. He
+neither expected nor desired her to think. He had half-frightened her
+into marrying him, had taken her to a poor man's home, provided her with
+no society such as she had been accustomed to, and he had no reasonable
+cause of complaint when she answered the call of summer and flitted
+away, like a butterfly in the morning sunshine, to the place where the
+flowers grew.
+
+He wrote to her every evening, sitting in the stifling, ugly house, and
+poured out his soul as if it were a libation to a goddess. She sometimes
+answered by telegraph, sometimes by a perfumed note. He schooled himself
+not to feel hurt. Why should Babette write? Does a goldfinch indict
+epistles; or a humming-bird study composition; or a glancing, red-scaled
+fish in summer shallows consider the meaning of words?
+
+He knew at the beginning what Babette was--guessed her
+limitations--trembled when he buttoned her tiny glove--kissed her dainty
+slipper when he found it in the closet after she was gone--thrilled at
+the sound of her laugh, or the memory of it! That was all. A mere case
+of love. He was in bonds. Babette was not. Therefore he was in the
+city, working overhours to pay for Babette's pretty follies down at the
+seaside. It was quite right and proper. He was a grub in the furrow;
+she a lark in the blue. Those had always been and always must be their
+relative positions.
+
+Having attained a mood of philosophic calm, in which he was prepared to
+spend his evenings alone--as became a grub--and to await with
+dignified patience the return of his wife, it was in the nature of an
+inconsistency that he should have walked the floor of the dull little
+drawing-room like a lion in cage. It did not seem in keeping with
+the position of superior serenity which he had assumed, that, reading
+Babette's notes, he should have raged with jealousy, or that, in the
+loneliness of his unkempt chamber, he should have stretched out arms of
+longing. Even if Babette had been present, she would only have smiled
+her gay little smile and coquetted with him. She could not understand.
+He had known, of course, from the first moment, that she could not
+understand! And so, why the ache, ache, ache of the heart! Or WAS it the
+heart, or the brain, or the soul?
+
+Sometimes, when the evenings were so hot that he could not endure the
+close air of the house, he sat on the narrow, dusty front porch and
+looked about him at his neighbors. The street had once been smart and
+aspiring, but it had fallen into decay and dejection. Pale young men,
+with flurried-looking wives, seemed to Boyce to occupy most of the
+houses. Sometimes three or four couples would live in one house. Most of
+these appeared to be childless. The women made a pretence at fashionable
+dressing, and wore their hair elaborately in fashions which somehow
+suggested boarding-houses to Boyce, though he could not have told why.
+Every house in the block needed fresh paint. Lacking this renovation,
+the householders tried to make up for it by a display of lace curtains
+which, at every window, swayed in the smoke-weighted breeze. Strips
+of carpeting were laid down the front steps of the houses where the
+communities of young couples lived, and here, evenings, the inmates of
+the houses gathered, committing mild extravagances such as the treating
+of each other to ginger ale, or beer, or ice-cream.
+
+Boyce watched these tawdry makeshifts at sociability with bitterness and
+loathing. He wondered how he could have been such a fool as to bring
+his exquisite Babette to this neighborhood. How could he expect that she
+would return to him? It was not reasonable. He ought to go down on his
+knees with gratitude that she even condescended to write him.
+
+Sitting one night till late,--so late that the fashionable young wives
+with their husbands had retired from the strips of stair carpeting,--and
+raging at the loneliness which ate at his heart like a cancer, he heard,
+softly creeping through the windows of the house adjoining his own, the
+sound of comfortable melody.
+
+It breathed upon his ear like a spirit of consolation, speaking
+of peace, of love which needs no reward save its own sweetness, of
+aspiration which looks forever beyond the thing of the hour to find
+attainment in that which is eternal. So insidiously did it whisper these
+things, so delicately did the simple and perfect melodies creep upon the
+spirit--that Boyce felt no resentment, but from the first listened
+as one who listens to learn, or as one who, fainting on the hot road,
+hears, far in the ferny deeps below, the gurgle of a spring.
+
+Then came harmonies more intricate: fair fabrics of woven sound, in
+the midst of which gleamed golden threads of joy; a tapestry of sound,
+multi-tinted, gallant with story and achievement, and beautiful things.
+Boyce, sitting on his absurd piazza, with his knees jambed against
+the balustrade, and his chair back against the dun-colored wall of his
+house, seemed to be walking in the cathedral of the redwood forest,
+with blue above him, a vast hymn in his ears, pungent perfume in his
+nostrils, and mighty shafts of trees lifting themselves to heaven, proud
+and erect as pure men before their Judge. He stood on a mountain at
+sunrise, and saw the marvels of the amethystine clouds below his feet,
+heard an eternal and white silence, such as broods among the everlasting
+snows, and saw an eagle winging for the sun. He was in a city, and away
+from him, diverging like the spokes of a wheel, ran thronging streets,
+and to his sense came the beat, beat, beat of the city's heart. He saw
+the golden alchemy of a chosen race; saw greed transmitted to progress;
+saw that which had enslaved men, work at last to their liberation; heard
+the roar of mighty mills, and on the streets all the peoples of earth
+walking with common purpose, in fealty and understanding. And then, from
+the swelling of this concourse of great sounds, came a diminuendo, calm
+as philosophy, and from that, nothingness.
+
+Boyce sat still for a long time, listening to the echoes which this
+music had awakened in his soul. He retired, at length, content,
+but determined that upon the morrow he would watch--the day being
+Sunday--for the musician who had so moved and taught him.
+
+He arose early, therefore, and having prepared his own simple breakfast
+of fruit and coffee, took his station by the window to watch for the
+man. For he felt convinced that the exposition he had heard was that of
+a masculine mind. The long, hot hours of the morning went by, but the
+front door of the house next to his did not open.
+
+"These artists sleep late," he complained. Still he watched. He was
+too much afraid of losing him to go out for dinner. By three in the
+afternoon he had grown impatient. He went to the house next door and
+rang the bell. There was no response. He thundered another appeal. An
+old woman with a cloth about her head answered the door. She was very
+deaf, and Boyce had difficulty in making himself understood.
+
+"The family is in the country," was all she would say. "The family will
+not be home till September."
+
+"But there is some one living here?" shouted Boyce.
+
+"_I_ live here," she said with dignity, putting back a wisp of dirty
+gray hair behind her ear. "It is my house. I sublet to the family."
+
+"What family?"
+
+But the old creature was not communicative.
+
+"The family that lives here," she said.
+
+"Then who plays the piano in this house?" roared Boyce. "Do you?"
+
+He thought a shade of pallor showed itself on her ash-colored cheeks.
+Yet she smiled a little at the idea of her playing.
+
+"There is no piano," she said, and she put an enigmatical emphasis to
+the words.
+
+"Nonsense," cried Boyce, indignantly. "I heard a piano being played in
+this very house for hours last night!"
+
+"You may enter," said the old woman, with an accent more vicious than
+hospitable.
+
+Boyce almost burst into the drawing-room. It was a dusty and forbidding
+place, with ugly furniture and gaudy walls. No piano nor any other
+musical instrument stood in it. The intruder turned an angry and baffled
+face to the old woman, who was smiling with ill-concealed exultation.
+
+"I shall see the other rooms," he announced. The old woman did not
+appear to be surprised at his impertinence.
+
+"As you please," she said.
+
+So, with the hobbling creature, with her bandaged head, for a guide, he
+explored every room of the house, which being identical with his own, he
+could do without fear of leaving any apartment unentered. But no piano
+did he find!
+
+"Explain," roared Boyce at length, turning upon the leering old hag
+beside him. "Explain! For surely I heard music more beautiful than I can
+tell."
+
+"I know nothing," she said. "But it is true I once had a lodger who
+rented the front room, and that he played upon the piano. I am poor at
+hearing, but he must have played well, for all the neighbors used to
+come in front of the house to listen, and sometimes they applauded him,
+and sometimes they were still. I could tell by watching their hands.
+Sometimes little children came and danced. Other times young men and
+women came and listened. But the young man died. The neighbors were
+angry. They came to look at him and said he had starved to death. It was
+no fault of mine. I sold his piano to pay his funeral expenses--and it
+took every cent to pay for them too, I'd have you know. But since then,
+sometimes--still, it must be nonsense, for I never heard it--folks say
+that he plays the piano in my room. It has kept me out of the letting of
+it more than once. But the family doesn't seem to mind--the family that
+lives here, you know. They will be back in September. Yes."
+
+Boyce left her nodding her thanks at what he had placed in her hand, and
+went home to write it all to Babette--Babette who would laugh so merrily
+when she read it!
+
+
+
+
+AN ASTRAL ONION
+
+
+WHEN Tig Braddock came to Nora Finnegan he was red-headed and freckled,
+and, truth to tell, he remained with these features to the end of his
+life--a life prolonged by a lucky, if somewhat improbable, incident, as
+you shall hear.
+
+Tig had shuffled off his parents as saurians, of some sorts, do their
+skins. During the temporary absence from home of his mother, who was at
+the bridewell, and the more extended vacation of his father, who, like
+Villon, loved the open road and the life of it, Tig, who was not a
+well-domesticated animal, wandered away. The humane society never heard
+of him, the neighbors did not miss him, and the law took no cognizance
+of this detached citizen--this lost pleiad. Tig would have sunk into
+that melancholy which is attendant upon hunger,--the only form of
+despair which babyhood knows,--if he had not wandered across the path of
+Nora Finnegan. Now Nora shone with steady brightness in her orbit,
+and no sooner had Tig entered her atmosphere, than he was warmed and
+comforted. Hunger could not live where Nora was. The basement room where
+she kept house was redolent with savory smells; and in the stove in her
+front room--which was also her bedroom--there was a bright fire glowing
+when fire was needed.
+
+Nora went out washing for a living. But she was not a poor washerwoman.
+Not at all. She was a washerwoman triumphant. She had perfect health, an
+enormous frame, an abounding enthusiasm for life, and a rich abundance
+of professional pride. She believed herself to be the best washer of
+white clothes she had ever had the pleasure of knowing, and the value
+placed upon her services, and her long connection with certain families
+with large weekly washings, bore out this estimate of herself--an
+estimate which she never endeavored to conceal.
+
+Nora had buried two husbands without being unduly depressed by the
+fact. The first husband had been a disappointment, and Nora winked at
+Providence when an accident in a tunnel carried him off--that is to
+say, carried the husband off. The second husband was not so much of a
+disappointment as a surprise. He developed ability of a literary order,
+and wrote songs which sold and made him a small fortune. Then he ran
+away with another woman. The woman spent his fortune, drove him to
+dissipation, and when he was dying he came back to Nora, who received
+him cordially, attended him to the end, and cheered his last hours by
+singing his own songs to him. Then she raised a headstone recounting his
+virtues, which were quite numerous, and refraining from any reference to
+those peculiarities which had caused him to be such a surprise.
+
+Only one actual chagrin had ever nibbled at the sound heart of Nora
+Finnegan--a cruel chagrin, with long, white teeth, such as rodents have!
+She had never held a child to her breast, nor laughed in its eyes; never
+bathed the pink form of a little son or daughter; never felt a tugging
+of tiny hands at her voluminous calico skirts! Nora had burnt many
+candles before the statue of the blessed Virgin without remedying this
+deplorable condition. She had sent up unavailing prayers--she had, at
+times, wept hot tears of longing and loneliness. Sometimes in her sleep
+she dreamed that a wee form, warm and exquisitely soft, was pressed
+against her firm body, and that a hand with tiniest pink nails crept
+within her bosom. But as she reached out to snatch this delicious little
+creature closer, she woke to realize a barren woman's grief, and turned
+herself in anguish on her lonely pillow.
+
+So when Tig came along, accompanied by two curs, who had faithfully
+followed him from his home, and when she learned the details of his
+story, she took him in, curs and all, and, having bathed the three of
+them, made them part and parcel of her home. This was after the demise
+of the second husband, and at a time when Nora felt that she had done
+all a woman could be expected to do for Hymen.
+
+Tig was a preposterous baby. The curs were preposterous curs. Nora had
+always been afflicted with a surplus amount of laughter--laughter which
+had difficulty in attaching itself to anything, owing to the lack of the
+really comic in the surroundings of the poor. But with a red-headed and
+freckled baby boy and two trick dogs in the house, she found a good and
+sufficient excuse for her hilarity, and would have torn the cave where
+echo lies with her mirth, had that cave not been at such an immeasurable
+distance from the crowded neighborhood where she lived.
+
+At the age of four Tig went to free kindergarten; at the age of six he
+was in school, and made three grades the first year and two the next. At
+fifteen he was graduated from the high school and went to work as
+errand boy in a newspaper office, with the fixed determination to make a
+journalist of himself.
+
+Nora was a trifle worried about his morals when she discovered his
+intellect, but as time went on, and Tig showed no devotion for any woman
+save herself, and no consciousness that there were such things as bad
+boys or saloons in the world, she began to have confidence. All of his
+earnings were brought to her. Every holiday was spent with her. He told
+her his secrets and his aspirations. He admitted that he expected to
+become a great man, and, though he had not quite decided upon the nature
+of his career,--saving, of course, the makeshift of journalism,--it was
+not unlikely that he would elect to be a novelist like--well, probably
+like Thackeray.
+
+Hope, always a charming creature, put on her most alluring smiles for
+Tig, and he made her his mistress, and feasted on the light of her eyes.
+Moreover, he was chaperoned, so to speak, by Nora Finnegan, who listened
+to every line Tig wrote, and made a mighty applause, and filled him up
+with good Irish stew, many colored as the coat of Joseph, and pungent
+with the inimitable perfume of "the rose of the cellar." Nora Finnegan
+understood the onion, and used it lovingly. She perceived the difference
+between the use and abuse of this pleasant and obvious friend of hungry
+man, and employed it with enthusiasm, but discretion. Thus it came
+about that whoever ate of her dinners, found the meals of other cooks
+strangely lacking in savor, and remembered with regret the soups
+and stews, the broiled steaks, and stuffed chickens of the woman who
+appreciated the onion.
+
+When Nora Finnegan came home with a cold one day, she took it in such a
+jocular fashion that Tig felt not the least concern about her, and when,
+two days later, she died of pneumonia, he almost thought, at first, that
+it must be one of her jokes. She had departed with decision, such as had
+characterized every act of her life, and had made as little trouble for
+others as possible. When she was dead the community had the opportunity
+of discovering the number of her friends. Miserable children with faces
+which revealed two generations of hunger, homeless boys with vicious
+countenances, miserable wrecks of humanity, women with bloated faces,
+came to weep over Nora's bier, and to lay a flower there, and to scuttle
+away, more abjectly lonely than even sin could make them. If the cats
+and the dogs, the sparrows and horses to which she had shown kindness,
+could also have attended her funeral, the procession would have been,
+from a point of numbers, one of the most imposing the city had ever
+known. Tig used up all their savings to bury her, and the next week, by
+some peculiar fatality, he had a falling out with the night editor of
+his paper, and was discharged. This sank deep into his sensitive
+soul, and he swore he would be an underling no longer--which foolish
+resolution was directly traceable to his hair, the color of which, it
+will be recollected, was red.
+
+Not being an underling, he was obliged to make himself into something
+else, and he recurred passionately to his old idea of becoming a
+novelist. He settled down in Nora's basement rooms, went to work on
+a battered type-writer, did his own cooking, and occasionally pawned
+something to keep him in food. The environment was calculated to further
+impress him with the idea of his genius.
+
+A certain magazine offered an alluring prize for a short story, and Tig
+wrote one, and rewrote it, making alterations, revisions, annotations,
+and interlineations which would have reflected credit upon Honoré;
+Balzac himself. Then he wrought all together, with splendid brevity and
+dramatic force,--Tig's own words,--and mailed the same. He was convinced
+he would get the prize. He was just as much convinced of it as Nora
+Finnegan would have been if she had been with him.
+
+So he went about doing more fiction, taking no especial care of himself,
+and wrapt in rosy dreams, which, not being warm enough for the weather,
+permitted him to come down with rheumatic fever.
+
+He lay alone in his room and suffered such torments as the condemned
+and rheumatic know, depending on one of Nora's former friends to come in
+twice a day and keep up the fire for him. This friend was aged ten, and
+looked like a sparrow who had been in a cyclone, but somewhere inside
+his bones was a wit which had spelled out devotion. He found fuel for
+the cracked stove, somehow or other. He brought it in a dirty sack which
+he carried on his back, and he kept warmth in Tig's miserable body.
+Moreover, he found food of a sort--cold, horrible bits often, and Tig
+wept when he saw them, remembering the meals Nora had served him.
+
+Tig was getting better, though he was conscious of a weak heart and a
+lamenting stomach, when, to his amazement, the Sparrow ceased to visit
+him. Not for a moment did Tig suspect desertion. He knew that only
+something in the nature of an act of Providence, as the insurance
+companies would designate it, could keep the little bundle of bones away
+from him. As the days went by, he became convinced of it, for no Sparrow
+came, and no coal lay upon the hearth. The basement window fortunately
+looked toward the south, and the pale April sunshine was beginning
+to make itself felt, so that the temperature of the room was not
+unbearable. But Tig languished; sank, sank, day by day, and was kept
+alive only by the conviction that the letter announcing the award of the
+thousand-dollar prize would presently come to him. One night he reached a
+place, where, for hunger and dejection, his mind wandered, and he seemed
+to be complaining all night to Nora of his woes. When the chill dawn
+came, with chittering of little birds on the dirty pavement, and an
+agitation of the scrawny willow "pussies," he was not able to lift his
+hand to his head. The window before his sight was but "a glimmering
+square." He said to himself that the end must be at hand. Yet it was
+cruel, cruel, with fame and fortune so near! If only he had some food,
+he might summon strength to rally--just for a little while! Impossible
+that he should die! And yet without food there was no choice.
+
+Dreaming so of Nora's dinners, thinking how one spoonful of a stew such
+as she often compounded would now be his salvation, he became conscious
+of the presence of a strong perfume in the room. It was so familiar
+that it seemed like a sub-consciousness, yet he found no name for this
+friendly odor for a bewildered minute or two. Little by little, however,
+it grew upon him, that it was the onion--that fragrant and kindly bulb
+which had attained its apotheosis in the cuisine of Nora Finnegan of
+sacred memory. He opened his languid eyes, to see if, mayhap, the plant
+had not attained some more palpable materialization.
+
+Behold, it was so! Before him, in a brown earthen dish,--a most familiar
+dish,--was an onion, pearly white, in placid seas of gravy, smoking and
+delectable. With unexpected strength he raised himself, and reached for
+the dish, which floated before him in a halo made by its own steam. It
+moved toward him, offered a spoon to his hand, and as he ate he heard
+about the room the rustle of Nora Finnegan's starched skirts, and now
+and then a faint, faint echo of her old-time laugh--such an echo as one
+may find of the sea in the heart of a shell.
+
+The noble bulb disappeared little by little before his voracity, and in
+contentment greater than virtue can give, he sank back upon his pillow
+and slept.
+
+Two hours later the postman knocked at the door, and receiving no
+answer, forced his way in. Tig, half awake, saw him enter with no
+surprise. He felt no surprise when he put a letter in his hand bearing
+the name of the magazine to which he had sent his short story. He was
+not even surprised, when, tearing it open with suddenly alert hands, he
+found within the check for the first prize--the check he had expected.
+
+All that day, as the April sunlight spread itself upon his floor, he
+felt his strength grow. Late in the afternoon the Sparrow came back,
+paler, and more bony than ever, and sank, breathing hard, upon the
+floor, with his sack of coal.
+
+"I've been sick," he said, trying to smile. "Terrible sick, but I come
+as soon as I could."
+
+"Build up the fire," cried Tig, in a voice so strong it made the Sparrow
+start as if a stone had struck him. "Build up the fire, and forget you
+are sick. For, by the shade of Nora Finnegan, you shall be hungry no
+more!"
+
+
+
+
+
+FROM THE LOOM OF THE DEAD
+
+
+WHEN Urda Bjarnason tells a tale all the men stop their talking to
+listen, for they know her to be wise with the wisdom of the old people,
+and that she has more learning than can be got even from the great
+schools at Reykjavik. She is especially prized by them here in this
+new country where the Icelandmen are settled--this America, so new in
+letters, where the people speak foolishly and write unthinking books.
+So the men who know that it is given to the mothers of earth to be
+very wise, stop their six part singing, or their jangles about the
+free-thinkers, and give attentive ear when Urda Bjarnason lights her
+pipe and begins her tale.
+
+She is very old. Her daughters and sons are all dead, but her
+granddaughter, who is most respectable, and the cousin of a physician,
+says that Urda is twenty-four and a hundred, and there are others who
+say that she is older still. She watches all that the Iceland people do
+in the new land; she knows about the building of the five villages on
+the North Dakota plain, and of the founding of the churches and the
+schools, and the tilling of the wheat farms. She notes with suspicion
+the actions of the women who bring home webs of cloth from the store,
+instead of spinning them as their mothers did before them; and she
+shakes her head at the wives who run to the village grocery store every
+fortnight, imitating the wasteful American women, who throw butter in
+the fire faster than it can be turned from the churn.
+
+She watches yet other things. All winter long the white snows reach
+across the gently rolling plains as far as the eye can behold. In the
+morning she sees them tinted pink at the east; at noon she notes
+golden lights flashing across them; when the sky is gray--which is not
+often--she notes that they grow as ashen as a face with the death shadow
+on it. Sometimes they glitter with silver-like tips of ocean waves. But
+at these things she looks only casually. It is when the blue shadows
+dance on the snow that she leaves her corner behind the iron stove, and
+stands before the window, resting her two hands on the stout bar of her
+cane, and gazing out across the waste with eyes which age has restored
+after four decades of decrepitude.
+
+The young Icelandmen say:
+
+"Mother, it is the clouds hurrying across the sky that make the dance of
+the shadows."
+
+"There are no clouds," she replies, and points to the jewel-like blue of
+the arching sky.
+
+"It is the drifting air," explains Fridrik Halldersson, he who has
+been in the Northern seas. "As the wind buffets the air, it looks blue
+against the white of the snow. 'Tis the air that makes the dancing
+shadows."
+
+But Urda shakes her head, and points with her dried finger, and
+those who stand beside her see figures moving, and airy shapes, and
+contortions of strange things, such as are seen in a beryl stone.
+
+"But Urda Bjarnason," says Ingeborg Christianson, the pert young wife
+with the blue-eyed twins, "why is it we see these things only when we
+stand beside you and you help us to the sight?"
+
+"Because," says the mother, with a steel-blue flash of her old eyes,
+"having eyes ye will not see!" Then the men laugh. They like to hear
+Ingeborg worsted. For did she not jilt two men from Gardar, and one from
+Mountain, and another from Winnipeg?
+
+Not even Ingeborg can deny that Mother Urda tells true things.
+
+"To-day," says Urda, standing by the little window and watching the
+dance of the shadows, "a child breathed thrice on a farm at the West,
+and then it died."
+
+The next week at the church gathering, when all the sledges stopped
+at the house of Urda's granddaughter, they said it was so--that John
+Christianson's wife Margaret never heard the voice of her son, but that
+he breathed thrice in his nurse's arms and died.
+
+"Three sledges run over the snow toward Milton," says Urda; "all are
+laden with wheat, and in one is a stranger. He has with him a strange
+engine, but its purpose I do not know."
+
+Six hours later the drivers of three empty sledges stop at the house.
+
+"We have been to Milton with wheat," they say, "and Christian Johnson
+here, carried a photographer from St. Paul."
+
+Now it stands to reason that the farmers like to amuse themselves
+through the silent and white winters. And they prefer above all things
+to talk or to listen, as has been the fashion of their race for a
+thousand years. Among all the story-tellers there is none like Urda, for
+she is the daughter and the granddaughter and the great-granddaughter
+of storytellers. It is given to her to talk, as it is given to John
+Thorlaksson to sing--he who sings so as his sledge flies over the snow
+at night, that the people come out in the bitter air from their doors to
+listen, and the dogs put up their noses and howl, not liking music.
+
+In the little cabin of Peter Christianson, the husband of Urda's
+granddaughter, it sometimes happens that twenty men will gather about
+the stove. They hang their bear-skin coats on the wall, put their fur
+gauntlets underneath the stove, where they will keep warm, and then
+stretch their stout, felt-covered legs to the wood fire. The room is
+fetid; the coffee steams eternally on the stove; and from her chair in
+the warmest corner Urda speaks out to the listening men, who shake their
+heads with joy as they hear the pure old Icelandic flow in sweet rhythm
+from between her lips. Among the many, many tales she tells is that of
+the dead weaver, and she tells it in the simplest language in all
+the world--language so simple that even great scholars could find no
+simpler, and the children crawling on the floor can understand.
+
+"Jon and Loa lived with their father and mother far to the north of the
+Island of Fire, and when the children looked from their windows they saw
+only wild scaurs and jagged lava rocks, and a distant, deep gleam of the
+sea. They caught the shine of the sea through an eye-shaped opening in
+the rocks, and all the long night of winter it gleamed up at them, like
+the eye of a dead witch. But when it sparkled and began to laugh, the
+children danced about the hut and sang, for they knew the bright summer
+time was at hand. Then their father fished, and their mother was gay.
+But it is true that even in the winter and the darkness they were happy,
+for they made fishing nets and baskets and cloth together,--Jon and Loa
+and their father and mother,--and the children were taught to read in
+the books, and were told the sagas, and given instruction in the part
+singing.
+
+"They did not know there was such a thing as sorrow in the world, for no
+one had ever mentioned it to them. But one day their mother died. Then
+they had to learn how to keep the fire on the hearth, and to smoke the
+fish, and make the black coffee. And also they had to learn how to live
+when there is sorrow at the heart.
+
+"They wept together at night for lack of their mother's kisses, and in
+the morning they were loath to rise because they could not see her face.
+The dead cold eye of the sea watching them from among the lava rocks
+made them afraid, so they hung a shawl over the window to keep it out.
+And the house, try as they would, did not look clean and cheerful as it
+had used to do when their mother sang and worked about it.
+
+"One day, when a mist rested over the eye of the sea, like that which
+one beholds on the eyes of the blind, a greater sorrow came to them, for
+a stepmother crossed the threshold. She looked at Jon and Loa, and made
+complaint to their father that they were still very small and not likely
+to be of much use. After that they had to rise earlier than ever, and to
+work as only those who have their growth should work, till their hearts
+cracked for weariness and shame. They had not much to eat, for their
+stepmother said she would trust to the gratitude of no other woman's
+child, and that she believed in laying up against old age. So she put
+the few coins that came to the house in a strong box, and bought little
+food. Neither did she buy the children clothes, though those which their
+dear mother had made for them were so worn that the warp stood apart
+from the woof, and there were holes at the elbows and little warmth to
+be found in them anywhere.
+
+"Moreover, the quilts on their beds were too short for their growing
+length, so that at night either their purple feet or their thin
+shoulders were uncovered, and they wept for the cold, and in the
+morning, when they crept into the larger room to build the fire, they
+were so stiff they could not stand straight, and there was pain at their
+joints.
+
+"The wife scolded all the time, and her brow was like a storm sweeping
+down from the Northwest. There was no peace to be had in the house.
+The children might not repeat to each other the sagas their mother had
+taught them, nor try their part singing, nor make little doll cradles of
+rushes. Always they had to work, always they were scolded, always their
+clothes grew thinner.
+
+"'Stepmother,' cried Loa one day,--she whom her mother had called the
+little bird,--'we are a-cold because of our rags. Our mother would have
+woven blue cloth for us and made it into garments.'
+
+"'Your mother is where she will weave no cloth!' said the stepmother,
+and she laughed many times.
+
+"All in the cold and still of that night, the stepmother wakened, and
+she knew not why. She sat up in her bed, and knew not why. She knew not
+why, and she looked into the room, and there, by the light of a burning
+fish's tail--'twas such a light the folk used in those days--was a
+woman, weaving. She had no loom, and shuttle she had none. All with
+her hands she wove a wondrous cloth. Stooping and bending, rising and
+swaying with motions beautiful as those the Northern Lights make in a
+midwinter sky, she wove a cloth. The warp was blue and mystical to see,
+the woof was white, and shone with its whiteness, so that of all the
+webs the stepmother had ever seen, she had seen none like to this.
+
+"Yet the sight delighted her not, for beyond the drifting web, and
+beyond the weaver she saw the room and furniture--aye, saw them through
+the body of the weaver and the drifting of the cloth. Then she knew--as
+the haunted are made to know--that 'twas the mother of the children come
+to show her she could still weave cloth. The heart of the stepmother was
+cold as ice, yet she could not move to waken her husband at her side,
+for her hands were as fixed as if they were crossed on her dead breast.
+The voice in her was silent, and her tongue stood to the roof of her
+mouth.
+
+"After a time the wraith of the dead mother moved toward her--the wraith
+of the weaver moved her way--and round and about her body was wound the
+shining cloth. Wherever it touched the body of the stepmother, it was as
+hateful to her as the touch of a monster out of sea-slime, so that her
+flesh crept away from it, and her senses swooned.
+
+"In the early morning she awoke to the voices of the children,
+whispering in the inner room as they dressed with half-frozen fingers.
+Still about her was the hateful, beautiful web, filling her soul with
+loathing and with fear. She thought she saw the task set for her, and
+when the children crept in to light the fire--very purple and thin were
+their little bodies, and the rags hung from them--she arose and held out
+the shining cloth, and cried:
+
+"'Here is the web your mother wove for you. I will make it into
+garments!' But even as she spoke the cloth faded and fell into
+nothingness, and the children cried:
+
+"'Stepmother, you have the fever!'
+
+"And then:
+
+"'Stepmother, what makes the strange light in the room?'
+
+"That day the stepmother was too weak to rise from her bed, and the
+children thought she must be going to die, for she did not scold as they
+cleared the house and braided their baskets, and she did not frown at
+them, but looked at them with wistful eyes.
+
+"By fall of night she was as weary as if she had wept all the day, and
+so she slept. But again she was awakened and knew not why. And again
+she sat up in her bed and knew not why. And again, not knowing why, she
+looked and saw a woman weaving cloth. All that had happened the night
+before happened this night. Then, when the morning came, and the
+children crept in shivering from their beds, she arose and dressed
+herself, and from her strong box she took coins, and bade her husband go
+with her to the town.
+
+"So that night a web of cloth, woven by one of the best weavers in all
+Iceland, was in the house; and on the beds of the children were blankets
+of lamb's wool, soft to the touch and fair to the eye. After that the
+children slept warm and were at peace; for now, when they told the sagas
+their mother had taught them, or tried their part songs as they sat
+together on their bench, the stepmother was silent. For she feared
+to chide, lest she should wake at night, not knowing why, and see the
+mother's wraith."
+
+
+
+
+A GRAMMATICAL GHOST
+
+
+THERE was only one possible objection to the drawing-room, and that was
+the occasional presence of Miss Carew; and only one possible objection
+to Miss Carew. And that was, that she was dead.
+
+She had been dead twenty years, as a matter of fact and record, and to
+the last of her life sacredly preserved the treasures and traditions of
+her family, a family bound up--as it is quite unnecessary to explain to
+any one in good society--with all that is most venerable and heroic in
+the history of the Republic. Miss Carew never relaxed the
+proverbial hospitality of her house, even when she remained its sole
+representative. She continued to preside at her table with dignity and
+state, and to set an example of excessive modesty and gentle decorum to
+a generation of restless young women.
+
+It is not likely that having lived a life of such irreproachable
+gentility as this, Miss Carew would have the bad taste to die in any way
+not pleasant to mention in fastidious society. She could be trusted to
+the last, not to outrage those friends who quoted her as an exemplar of
+propriety. She died very unobtrusively of an affection of the heart, one
+June morning, while trimming her rose trellis, and her lavender-colored
+print was not even rumpled when she fell, nor were more than the tips of
+her little bronze slippers visible.
+
+"Isn't it dreadful," said the Philadelphians, "that the property should
+go to a very, very distant cousin in Iowa or somewhere else on the
+frontier, about whom nobody knows anything at all?"
+
+The Carew treasures were packed in boxes and sent away into the Iowa
+wilderness; the Carew traditions were preserved by the Historical
+Society; the Carew property, standing in one of the most umbrageous
+and aristocratic suburbs of Philadelphia, was rented to all manner
+of folk--anybody who had money enough to pay the rental--and society
+entered its doors no more.
+
+But at last, after twenty years, and when all save the oldest
+Philadelphians had forgotten Miss Lydia Carew, the very, very distant
+cousin appeared. He was quite in the prime of life, and so agreeable and
+unassuming that nothing could be urged against him save his patronymic,
+which, being Boggs, did not commend itself to the euphemists. With him
+were two maiden sisters, ladies of excellent taste and manners, who
+restored the Carew china to its ancient cabinets, and replaced the Carew
+pictures upon the walls, with additions not out of keeping with
+the elegance of these heirlooms. Society, with a magnanimity almost
+dramatic, overlooked the name of Boggs--and called.
+
+All was well. At least, to an outsider all seemed to be well. But,
+in truth, there was a certain distress in the old mansion, and in
+the hearts of the well-behaved Misses Boggs. It came about most
+unexpectedly. The sisters had been sitting upstairs, looking out at the
+beautiful grounds of the old place, and marvelling at the violets,
+which lifted their heads from every possible cranny about the house, and
+talking over the cordiality which they had been receiving by those upon
+whom they had no claim, and they were filled with amiable satisfaction.
+Life looked attractive. They had often been grateful to Miss Lydia Carew
+for leaving their brother her fortune. Now they felt even more grateful
+to her. She had left them a Social Position--one, which even after
+twenty years of desuetude, was fit for use.
+
+They descended the stairs together, with arms clasped about each other's
+waists, and as they did so presented a placid and pleasing sight. They
+entered their drawing-room with the intention of brewing a cup of tea,
+and drinking it in calm sociability in the twilight. But as they entered
+the room they became aware of the presence of a lady, who was already
+seated at their tea-table, regarding their old Wedgewood with the air of
+a connoisseur.
+
+There were a number of peculiarities about this intruder. To begin with,
+she was hatless, quite as if she were a habitué; of the house, and
+was costumed in a prim lilac-colored lawn of the style of two decades
+past. But a greater peculiarity was the resemblance this lady bore to a
+faded daguerrotype. If looked at one way, she was perfectly discernible;
+if looked at another, she went out in a sort of blur. Notwithstanding
+this comparative invisibility, she exhaled a delicate perfume of sweet
+lavender, very pleasing to the nostrils of the Misses Boggs, who stood
+looking at her in gentle and unprotesting surprise.
+
+"I beg your pardon," began Miss Prudence, the younger of the Misses
+Boggs, "but--"
+
+But at this moment the Daguerrotype became a blur, and Miss Prudence
+found herself addressing space. The Misses Boggs were irritated. They
+had never encountered any mysteries in Iowa. They began an impatient
+search behind doors and portières, and even under sofas, though
+it was quite absurd to suppose that a lady recognizing the merits of the
+Carew Wedgewood would so far forget herself as to crawl under a sofa.
+
+When they had given up all hope of discovering the intruder, they saw
+her standing at the far end of the drawing-room critically examining a
+water-color marine. The elder Miss Boggs started toward her with stern
+decision, but the little Daguerrotype turned with a shadowy smile,
+became a blur and an imperceptibility.
+
+Miss Boggs looked at Miss Prudence Boggs.
+
+"If there were ghosts," she said, "this would be one."
+
+"If there were ghosts," said Miss Prudence Boggs, "this would be the
+ghost of Lydia Carew."
+
+The twilight was settling into blackness, and Miss Boggs nervously lit
+the gas while Miss Prudence ran for other tea-cups, preferring, for
+reasons superfluous to mention, not to drink out of the Carew china that
+evening.
+
+The next day, on taking up her embroidery frame, Miss Boggs found a
+number of oldfashioned cross-stitches added to her Kensington. Prudence,
+she knew, would never have degraded herself by taking a cross-stitch,
+and the parlor-maid was above taking such a liberty. Miss Boggs
+mentioned the incident that night at a dinner given by an ancient friend
+of the Carews.
+
+"Oh, that's the work of Lydia Carew, without a doubt!" cried the
+hostess. "She visits every new family that moves to the house, but she
+never remains more than a week or two with any one."
+
+"It must be that she disapproves of them," suggested Miss Boggs.
+
+"I think that's it," said the hostess. "She doesn't like their china, or
+their fiction."
+
+"I hope she'll disapprove of us," added Miss Prudence.
+
+The hostess belonged to a very old Philadelphian family, and she shook
+her head.
+
+"I should say it was a compliment for even the ghost of Miss Lydia Carew
+to approve of one," she said severely.
+
+The next morning, when the sisters entered their drawing-room there were
+numerous evidences of an occupant during their absence. The sofa pillows
+had been rearranged so that the effect of their grouping was less
+bizarre than that favored by the Western women; a horrid little Buddhist
+idol with its eyes fixed on its abdomen, had been chastely hidden behind
+a Dresden shepherdess, as unfit for the scrutiny of polite eyes; and
+on the table where Miss Prudence did work in water colors, after the
+fashion of the impressionists, lay a prim and impossible composition
+representing a moss-rose and a number of heartsease, colored with that
+caution which modest spinster artists instinctively exercise.
+
+"Oh, there's no doubt it's the work of Miss Lydia Carew," said Miss
+Prudence, contemptuously. "There's no mistaking the drawing of that
+rigid little rose. Don't you remember those wreaths and bouquets framed,
+among the pictures we got when the Carew pictures were sent to us? I
+gave some of them to an orphan asylum and burned up the rest."
+
+"Hush!" cried Miss Boggs, involuntarily. "If she heard you, it would
+hurt her feelings terribly. Of course, I mean--" and she blushed. "It
+might hurt her feelings--but how perfectly ridiculous! It's impossible!"
+
+Miss Prudence held up the sketch of the moss-rose.
+
+"THAT may be impossible in an artistic sense, but it is a palpable
+thing."
+
+"Bosh!" cried Miss Boggs.
+
+"But," protested Miss Prudence, "how do you explain it?"
+
+"I don't," said Miss Boggs, and left the room.
+
+That evening the sisters made a point of being in the drawing-room
+before the dusk came on, and of lighting the gas at the first hint of
+twilight. They didn't believe in Miss Lydia Carew--but still they meant
+to be beforehand with her. They talked with unwonted vivacity and in
+a louder tone than was their custom. But as they drank their tea even
+their utmost verbosity could not make them oblivious to the fact that
+the perfume of sweet lavender was stealing insidiously through the room.
+They tacitly refused to recognize this odor and all that it indicated,
+when suddenly, with a sharp crash, one of the old Carew tea-cups
+fell from the tea-table to the floor and was broken. The disaster was
+followed by what sounded like a sigh of pain and dismay.
+
+"I didn't suppose Miss Lydia Carew would ever be as awkward as that,"
+cried the younger Miss Boggs, petulantly.
+
+"Prudence," said her sister with a stern accent, "please try not to be a
+fool. You brushed the cup off with the sleeve of your dress."
+
+"Your theory wouldn't be so bad," said Miss Prudence, half laughing and
+half crying, "if there were any sleeves to my dress, but, as you see,
+there aren't," and then Miss Prudence had something as near hysterics as
+a healthy young woman from the West can have.
+
+"I wouldn't think such a perfect lady as Lydia Carew," she ejaculated
+between her sobs, "would make herself so disagreeable! You may
+talk about good-breeding all you please, but I call such intrusion
+exceedingly bad taste. I have a horrible idea that she likes us and
+means to stay with us. She left those other people because she did not
+approve of their habits or their grammar. It would be just our luck to
+please her."
+
+"Well, I like your egotism," said Miss Boggs.
+
+However, the view Miss Prudence took of the case appeared to be the
+right one. Time went by and Miss Lydia Carew still remained. When the
+ladies entered their drawing-room they would see the little lady-like
+Daguerrotype revolving itself into a blur before one of the family
+portraits. Or they noticed that the yellow sofa cushion, toward which
+she appeared to feel a peculiar antipathy, had been dropped behind the
+sofa upon the floor, or that one of Jane Austen's novels, which none of
+the family ever read, had been removed from the book shelves and left
+open upon the table.
+
+"I cannot become reconciled to it," complained Miss Boggs to Miss
+Prudence. "I wish we had remained in Iowa where we belong. Of course I
+don't believe in the thing! No sensible person would. But still I cannot
+become reconciled."
+
+But their liberation was to come, and in a most unexpected manner.
+
+A relative by marriage visited them from the West. He was a friendly
+man and had much to say, so he talked all through dinner, and afterward
+followed the ladies to the drawing-room to finish his gossip. The gas in
+the room was turned very low, and as they entered Miss Prudence caught
+sight of Miss Carew, in company attire, sitting in upright propriety in
+a stiff-backed chair at the extremity of the apartment.
+
+Miss Prudence had a sudden idea.
+
+"We will not turn up the gas," she said, with an emphasis intended to
+convey private information to her sister. "It will be more agreeable to
+sit here and talk in this soft light."
+
+Neither her brother nor the man from the West made any objection. Miss
+Boggs and Miss Prudence, clasping each other's hands, divided their
+attention between their corporeal and their incorporeal guests. Miss
+Boggs was confident that her sister had an idea, and was willing to
+await its development. As the guest from Iowa spoke, Miss Carew bent a
+politely attentive ear to what he said.
+
+"Ever since Richards took sick that time," he said briskly, "it seemed
+like he shed all responsibility." (The Misses Boggs saw the Daguerrotype
+put up her shadowy head with a movement of doubt and apprehension.) "The
+fact of the matter was, Richards didn't seem to scarcely get on the way
+he might have been expected to." (At this conscienceless split to the
+infinitive and misplacing of the preposition, Miss Carew arose trembling
+perceptibly.) "I saw it wasn't no use for him to count on a quick
+recovery--"
+
+The Misses Boggs lost the rest of the sentence, for at the utterance of
+the double negative Miss Lydia Carew had flashed out, not in a blur, but
+with mortal haste, as when life goes out at a pistol shot!
+
+The man from the West wondered why Miss Prudence should have cried at so
+pathetic a part of his story:
+
+"Thank Goodness!"
+
+And their brother was amazed to see Miss Boggs kiss Miss Prudence with
+passion and energy.
+
+It was the end. Miss Carew returned no more.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Shape of Fear, by Elia W. Peattie
+
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