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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Thing from the Lake, by Eleanor M. Ingram
+
+
+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 Thing from the Lake
+
+
+Author: Eleanor M. Ingram
+
+
+
+Release Date: December 4, 2007  [eBook #23738]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE THING FROM THE LAKE***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Nick Wall, Suzanne Shell, and the Project Gutenberg
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
+
+
+
+THE THING FROM THE LAKE
+
+by
+
+ELEANOR M. INGRAM
+
+Author of "From the Car Behind", "The Unafraid", etc.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Copyright, 1921, by J. B. Lippincott Company
+Printed by J. B. Lippincott Company
+at the Washington Square Press
+Philadelphia, U. S. A.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+     "As well give up the Bible at once, as our belief in
+     apparitions."--WESLEY.
+
+
+The house cried out to me for help.
+
+In the after-knowledge I now possess of what was to happen there, that
+impression is not more clearly definite than it was at my first sight of
+the place. Let me at once set down that this is not the story of a
+haunted house. It is, or was, a beleaguered house; strangely besieged as
+was Prague in the old legend, when a midnight army of spectres unfurled
+pale banners and encamped around the city walls.
+
+Of course, I did not know all this, the day that my real-estate agent
+brought his little car to a stop before the dilapidated farm. I believed
+the house only appealed to be lived in; for deliverance from the
+destroying work of neglect and time. A spring rain was whispering down
+from a gray sky, dripping from broken gutters and eaves with a patter
+like timid footsteps hurrying by, yet even in the storm the house did
+not look dreary.
+
+"There, Mr. Locke, is a bargain," the agent called back to me, where I
+sat in my car. "Finest bit in Connecticut for a city man's summer home!
+Woodland, farm land, lake and a house that only needs a few repairs to
+be up-to-date. Look at that double row of maples, sir. Shade all summer!
+Fine old orchard, too; with a trifle of attention."
+
+I nodded, surveying the house with an eagerness of interest that
+surprised myself. A box-like, fairly large structure of commonplace New
+England ugliness, it coaxed my liking as had no other place I had ever
+seen; it wooed me like a determined woman. And as one would long to
+clothe beautifully a beloved woman, I looked at the house and foresaw
+what an architect could do for it; how creamy stucco; broad white
+porches and a gay scarlet roof would transform it.
+
+"Come inside," my agent urged, hope in his voice as he observed my face;
+"let me show you the interior. I brought the keys along. Of course, the
+rooms may seem a bit musty. No one has lived in it for--some time. It's
+the old Michell property; been in the family for a couple of hundred
+years. Last Michell is dead, now, and it's being sold for the benefit of
+some religious institute the old gentleman left it to. Trifle wet to
+walk over the land today! But I've a plan and measurements in my
+portfolio."
+
+I said that we would go in. If he had but known the fact, the place was
+already sold to me; before I left my car, before I entered the house,
+before I had seen the hundred-odd acres that make up the estate.
+
+There was a narrow, flagged path to the veranda, where the planking
+moved and creaked under our weight while my companion unlocked the front
+door. Rather astonishingly, the air of the long-closed place was neither
+musty nor damp, when we stepped in. Instead, there was a faint, resinous
+odor, very pleasant and clean; perhaps from the cedar of which the
+woodwork largely consisted.
+
+The house was partially furnished. Not, of course, with much that I
+would care to retain, but a few good antiques stood out among their
+commonplace associates. A large bedroom on the north side, which I
+appointed as my own at first sight, held an old rosewood set including a
+four-posted, pineapple-carved bed. I threw open the shutters in this
+room and looked out.
+
+I received the first jar to my satisfaction. On this side of the place,
+the grounds ran down a slight slope for perhaps half a block to the
+five-acre hollow of shallow water and lush growth which the agent called
+a lake. From it flowed a considerable creek, winding behind the house
+and away on its journey to the Sound. For that under-water marsh I felt
+a shock of violent dislike.
+
+"You don't care for the lake?" my companion deprecated, at my elbow.
+"Fine trout in that stream, though! I'd like you to see it in the
+sunshine."
+
+"I should care more for it if it was a lake, not a swamp," I answered.
+
+"Oh, but that is only because the old dam is down," he exclaimed
+eagerly. "That lets all the water out, you see. Why, if the dam were put
+back, you'd have as pretty a lake for a canoe as there is in the State!
+Its natural depth is four or five feet all over, and about eight or ten
+where the stream flows through to the dam. Even yet, a few wild duck
+stop there spring and fall, and when I was a boy I've seen heron. Put
+back the dam, Mr. Locke, and I'll guarantee you'll never say swamp
+again!"
+
+"We will try it," I said. "Now let us find a lawyer and see how quickly
+I can be put in possession."
+
+We drove back to the little town from which we had that morning started
+out, and where my agent lived; my sleek car following his small one with
+somewhat the effect of a long-limbed panther striding behind an agitated
+mouse.
+
+It appeared that the sale was simply consummated. I do not mean that all
+the formalities were completed in a day. But by nightfall I could feel
+myself the owner of the place.
+
+Perhaps it was the giddiness of being a land-owner for the first time,
+or perhaps it was the abject wretchedness of the only hotel in town that
+inspired the whim which seized me during my solitary dinner. I had spent
+one night here, and did not welcome the prospect of a second. A return
+to New York was not practicable, because I had arranged to meet several
+contractors and an architect at the farm, next morning, to discuss the
+alterations I wanted made. Why not drive out to my new house this
+evening and sleep tonight in the rosewood-furnished bedroom?
+
+The idea gained favor as I contemplated it. I could go over the house
+tonight and sketch more clearly what I wanted done, while I would be on
+the ground when my men arrived next morning. There was an allure of
+camping out about it, too.
+
+In the end I went, of course.
+
+It was dark when I stabled my roadster in the barn that was part of my
+new possessions; where the car seemed to glitter disdain of the
+hay-littered, ragged shelter. Equipped with a flashlight, suitcase and
+bundle, I followed a faint path that wound its way to the house through
+wet blackberry vines whose thorns had outlived the winter. My steps
+broke the blank silence that brooded over the place. At this season
+there was no insect life; nor any other stirring thing within hearing or
+sight. But just as I stepped upon the veranda, I heard a vague sound
+from the lake that lay a few hundred feet to the north. There was no
+wind, yet the water had seemed to move with a sound like the smacking of
+soft, glutinous lips. Or as if some soft body drew itself from a bed of
+clinging mud. I wondered idly if the tide could run this far back from
+Long Island Sound.
+
+The house reiterated the impression of welcoming me. I shut and locked
+the old door behind me, and went up to the room I had chosen as my own.
+There I unshuttered and opened the windows, lighted one of the candles I
+had brought and set it on a little bookcase filled with dingy volumes,
+and threw my blankets on the bed. I had moved in!
+
+My pleasant sense of proprietorship continued to grow. Before I thought
+of sleep, I had been through the house several times from cellar to
+attic and accumulated a list of things to be done. Back in my room, an
+hour passed in revising the list, by candle-light.
+
+Near ten o'clock, I rolled myself in a dressing-gown and my blankets,
+spread an automobile robe over the four-posted bed, and fell asleep.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+     "Beware of her fair hair, for she excels
+     All women in the magic of her locks."
+                              --SHELLEY (_Trans._).
+
+
+It trailed suavely through my fingers, slipping across my palm like a
+belt of silk. It glided with the noiseless haste of a thing in flight.
+Quite naturally, even in the dazed moment of awakening I closed my hand
+upon it. It was soft in my grasp, yet resilient; solid, yet supple. If I
+may speak irrationally, it felt as if it must be fragrant. It was a
+strange visitor to my experience, yet I recognized its identity
+unerringly as a blind man gaining sight might identify a flower or a
+bird. In brief, it was--it only could be an opulent braid of hair.
+
+When I grasped it, it ceased to move.
+
+In the dense darkness of my bedroom, I lay still and considered. I was
+alone, or rather, should have been alone in the old house I had bought
+the day before. The agent assured me that it had been unoccupied for
+years. Who, then, was my guest? A passer-by seeking refuge in a
+supposedly deserted house would hardly have moved about with such silent
+caution. A tramp of this genus would be a rarity indeed. I had nothing
+with me of value to attract a thief. The usual limited masculine
+jewelry--a watch, a pair of cuff-links, a modest pin--surely were not
+sufficiently tempting to snare so dainty a bird of prey as one wearing
+such plumage as I held. I have not a small fist, yet that braid was a
+generous handful. How did it come to trail across my bed, in any case?
+And why was its owner locked in silence and immobility? Surely startled
+innocence would have cried out, questioned my grasp or struggled against
+it! My captive did neither.
+
+I began to paint a picture against the darkness; the picture of a
+crouching woman, fear-paralyzed; not daring to stir, to sob or pant or
+shiver lest she betray herself. Or, perhaps, a woman who was not hushed
+by panic, but by deliberation. A woman who slowly levelled a weapon,
+assuring her aim in the blank darkness by such guides as my breathing
+and the taut direction of her imprisoned tresses. An ugly woman could
+not have such hair as this. Or, could she? I had a doubtful recollection
+of various long-haired demonstrators glimpsed in drugshop windows, who
+were not beautiful. Yes, but they would never have found themselves in
+such a situation as this one! Only resolve or recklessness could bring a
+woman to such a pass; and with spirit and this hair no woman could be
+ugly.
+
+How quiet she was! I suddenly reflected that she must be thinking the
+same thing of me, since neither of us had moved during a considerable
+space of time. Possibly she fancied me only half-aroused, and hoped that
+I would relapse into sleep without realizing upon what my drowsy grasp
+had closed. No doubt it would have been the course of chivalry for me to
+pretend to do so, but it was not the course of curiosity.
+
+The deadlock could not last indefinitely. Apparently, though, it must be
+I who should break it. As quietly as possible, I brought my left hand
+forward to grope along that silken line which certainly must guide me to
+the intruder herself. My hand slipped along the smooth surface to the
+full reach of my arm; and encountered nothing. Check, for the first
+attempt! The candle and matches I had bought in the village were also
+beyond my reach, unless I released my captive and rolled across the bed
+toward the little bookcase where I had placed them beside the
+flashlight. If I should speak, what would she do? And--a new
+thought!--was she alone in the house?
+
+There came a gentle draw at the braid, instantly ceasing as I
+automatically tightened my hold. The pretense that I slept was ended. I
+spoke, as soothingly and kindly as I could manage.
+
+"If you will let me strike a light, we can explain to each other. Or, if
+you will agree not to escape----?"
+
+In spite of my efforts, my voice boomed startlingly through the dark,
+still room. No reply followed, but the braid quivered and suddenly
+relaxed from its tension. She must have come closer to me. Delighted by
+so much success attained and intrigued by the novelty of the adventure,
+I moved slightly, stretching my free arm in the direction of the
+flashlight.
+
+"I am not a difficult person," I essayed encouragement. "Nor too dull, I
+hope, to understand a mistake or a necessity. Nor am I affiliated with
+the police! Permit me----"
+
+I halted abruptly. A cool edge of metal had been laid across the wrist
+of my groping hand. As the hand came to rest, palm uppermost, I could
+feel, or imagined I could feel my pulse beating steadily against the
+menacing pressure of the blade. The warning was eloquent and sufficient;
+I moved no further toward my flashlight. Of course, if I had lifted my
+right hand from its guard of the braid, I could easily have pinioned the
+arm which poised the knife before I suffered much harm. But I might have
+lost my captive in the attempt; an event for which I was not ready, yet.
+
+"Check," I admitted. "Although, it is rather near a stalemate for us
+both, isn't it?"
+
+The knife pressed closer, suggestively.
+
+"No," I dissented with the mute argument. "I think not. I do not believe
+you could do it; not in cold blood, anyway!"
+
+"You do not know," insisted the closer pressing blade, as if with a
+tongue.
+
+"No, I do not know," I translated aloud. "But I am confident enough to
+chance it. What reason have you for desperate action? I would not harm
+you. Have I not a right to curiosity? This is my house, you know. Or
+perhaps you did not know that?"
+
+A sigh stirred the silence, blending with the ceaseless whisper of the
+rain that had recommenced through the night. The braid did not move in
+my right hand, nor did the blade touching my left.
+
+"Speak!" I begged, with an abrupt urgency that surprised myself. "You
+are the invader. Why? What would you have from me? If I am to let you
+go, at least speak to me, first! This is--uncanny."
+
+"There is magic in the third time of asking," came a breathed, just
+audible whisper. "Yet, be warned; call not to you that which you may
+neither hold nor forbid."
+
+"But I do call--if that will make you speak to me," I returned, my
+pulses tingling triumph. "Although, as to not holding you----"
+
+"You fancy you hold me? It is not you who are master of this moment, but
+I who am its mistress."
+
+Her voice had gained in strength; a soft voice, yet not weak, used with
+a delicate deliberation that gave her speech the effect of being a
+caprice of her own rather than a result of my compulsion. Yet, I
+thought, she must be crouched or kneeling beside me, on the floor, held
+like the Lady of the Beautiful Tresses.
+
+"Still, I doubt if you have the disposition to use your advantage," I
+began.
+
+"You mean, the cruelty," she corrected me.
+
+"I am from New York," I smiled. "Let me say, the nerve. If you pressed
+that knife, I might bleed to death, you know."
+
+"Would you hear a story of a woman of my house, and her anger, before
+you doubt too far?"
+
+"Tell me," I consented; and smiled in the darkness at the transparent
+plan to distract my attention from that imprisoned braid.
+
+She was silent for so long that I fancied the plan abandoned, perhaps
+for lack of a tale to tell. Then her voice leaped suddenly out of the
+blackness that closed us in, speaking always in muted tones, but with a
+strange, impassioned urgency and force that startled like a cry. The
+words hurried upon one another like breaking surf.
+
+"See! See! The fire leaps in the chimney; it breathes sparks like a
+dreadful beast--it is hungry; its red tongues lick for that which they
+may not yet have. Already its breath is hot upon the wax image on the
+hearth. But the image is round of limb and sound. Yes, though it is but
+toy-large, it is perfect and firm! See how it stands in the red shine:
+the image of a man, cunningly made to show his stalwartness and strength
+and bravery of velvet and lace! The image of a great man, surely; one
+high in place and power. One above fear and beyond the reach of hate!
+
+"The woman sits in her low chair, behind the image. The fire-shine is
+bright in her eyes and in her hair. On either side her hair flows down
+to the floor; her eyes look on the image and are dreadfully glad. Ha,
+was not Beauty the lure, and shall it not be the vengeance?
+
+"The nine lamps have been lighted! The feathers have been laid in a
+circle! The spell has been spoken; the spell of Hai, son of Set, first
+man to slay man by the Dark Art!
+
+"The man is at the door of the woman's house. Yes, he who came in pride
+to woo, and proved traitor to the love won--he is at her door in
+weakness and pain.
+
+"As the wax wastes, the man wastes! As the mannikin is gone, the man
+dies!
+
+"On her doorstep, he begs for life. He is coward and broken. He suffers
+and is consumed. He calls to her the love-names they both know. And the
+woman laughs, and the door is barred.
+
+"The door is barred, but what shall bar out the Enemy who creeps to the
+nine lamps?
+
+"See, the fire shines through the wax! The image is grown thin and wan.
+Three days, three nights, it has shrunk before the flames. Three days,
+three nights, the woman has watched. As the fire is not weary, she is
+not weary. As the fire is beautiful, she is beautiful.
+
+"The man is borne to her door again. He lifts up his hands and cries to
+her. But now he begs for death. Now he knows anguish stronger than fear.
+And the woman laughs, and the door is barred.
+
+"The fire shines on a lump of wax. The man is dead. From her chair the
+woman has arisen and stands, triumphant.
+
+"_But what crouches behind her, unseen? The lamps are cast down! The
+pentagram is crossed! The Horror takes its own._"
+
+The impassioned speech broke off with the effect of a snapped bar of
+thin metal. In the silence, the steady whisper of rain came to my ears
+again, continuing patiently. I became aware of a rich yet delicate
+fragrance in the air I breathed. It was not any perfume I could
+identify, either as a composition or as a flower scent. If I may hope to
+be understood it sparkled upon the senses. It produced a thirst for
+itself, so that the nostrils expanded for it with an eagerness for the
+new pleasure. I found myself breathing deeply, almost greedily, before
+answering my prisoner's story.
+
+"'Sister Helen,'" I quoted, as lightly as I could.
+
+"And do you think Rossetti had no truth to base his poem upon?" her
+quiet voice flowed out of the darkness, seeming scarcely the same speech
+as the swift, irregular utterance of a moment before. "Do you think that
+all the traditions and learning of the younger world meant--nothing?"
+
+"Are you asking me to believe in witchcraft and sorcery?"
+
+"I ask nothing."
+
+"Not even to believe that you will press the knife if I refuse to free
+you?"
+
+"Not even that; now!"
+
+Compunction smote me. Her voice sounded more faint, as if from fatigue
+or discouragement. It seemed to me that the blade against my wrist had
+relaxed its menace of pressure and just rested in position. I seemed to
+read my lady's weariness in the slackened vigilance. Perhaps she was
+really frightened, now that her brave attempt to lull me into incaution
+had failed.
+
+"Listen, please," I spoke earnestly. "I am going to set you free. I
+apologize for keeping you captive so long! But you will admit the
+provocation to my curiosity? You will forgive me?"
+
+A sigh drifted across the darkness.
+
+"I ask no questions," I urged. "But will you not trust me to make a
+light and give what help I can? You are welcome to use the house as you
+please. Or, if you are lost or stormbound, my car is in the old barn and
+I will drive you anywhere that you say. Let us not spoil our adventure
+by suspicion. In good faith----"
+
+I opened my hand, releasing the lovely rope by which I had detained my
+prisoner. Then, with a quickening pulse, I waited. Would she stay? Would
+she spring up and escape? Would she thank me, or would she reply with
+some eccentricity unpredictable as her whim to tell me that tale?
+
+She did none of these things. The braid of hair, freed entirely,
+continued to lie supinely across my open palm. The coolness of the blade
+still lightly touched my wrist. She might be debating her course of
+action, I reflected. Well, I was in no haste to conclude the episode!
+
+When the silence had lasted many moments, however, I began to grow
+restive. Anxiety tinged my speculations. Suppose she had fainted? Or did
+she doubt my intentions, and was her quietness that of one on guard? I
+stirred tentatively.
+
+Two things happened simultaneously with my movement. The braid glided
+away from me, while the knife slipped from its position and tinkled upon
+the floor. I started up, perception of the truth seizing my slow wits,
+and reached for my flashlight.
+
+There was no one in the room except myself. Down my blanket was slipping
+a severed braid of hair, perhaps a foot in length, jaggedly cut across
+at the end farthest from my hand. Leaning over, I saw on the floor
+beside the bed a paper-knife of my own; a sharp, serviceable tool that
+formed part of my writing kit. Before going to bed, I had taken it from
+my suitcase to trim a candle-wick, and had left it upon the bookstand.
+
+Now I understood why her voice had sounded more distant than seemed
+reasonable while I held her beside me. No doubt she had hacked off the
+detaining braid almost as soon as I grasped it. The knife she had
+pressed against my wrist to keep me where I lay while she made ready for
+flight; or amused herself with me. Flight? Say rather that she had
+leisurely withdrawn! Perhaps she had not even heard my magnanimous
+speech offering her the freedom that she already possessed. If she had
+stayed to hear me, probably she had laughed.
+
+Perhaps she was still in the house.
+
+I rose and lighted a candle, under the impulsion of that idea, reserving
+my flashlight for the search. But there was no one in any of the dusty,
+sparsely furnished rooms and halls through which I hunted. The ancient
+locks on doors and windows were fastened as I had left them, although my
+lady certainly had entered and left at her pleasure. Puzzled and amused,
+I finally returned to my bedchamber.
+
+There was some difference in that room. I was conscious of the fact as
+soon as I entered and closed the door behind me. The candle still burned
+where I had left it, flickering slightly in some current of air. There
+was no change that the eye could find, no sound except the rain, yet I
+felt an extreme reluctance to go on even a step from where I stood. What
+I wanted to do was to tear open the door behind me, to rush out into the
+hall and slam the door shut between this room and myself.
+
+Why? I looked around me, sending the beam of the flashlight playing over
+the quiet place. Nothing, of course! I walked over to the bookcase, took
+up the braid I had left there, and sat down in an old armchair to study
+my trophy. On principle and by habit I had no intention of being
+mastered by nerves. It was humiliating to discover that I could be made
+nervous by the mere fact of being in an unoccupied farmhouse after
+midnight.
+
+The braid was magnificent. It was as broad as my palm, yet compressed so
+tightly that it was thick and solid to the touch. If released over
+someone's shoulders, it would have been a sumptuous cloak, indeed! In
+what madness of panic had the girl sacrificed this beauty? How she must
+hate me, now the panic was past! The color, too, was unique, in my
+experience; a gold as vivid as auburn. Or was it tinged with auburn? As
+I leaned forward to catch the candle-light, a drift of that fragrance
+worn by my visitor floated from her braid.
+
+At once I knew what had changed in the room. The air that had been so
+pure when the house was opened, now was heavy with an odor of damp and
+mould that had seeped into the atmosphere as moisture will seep through
+cellar walls. One would have said that the door of some hideous vault
+had been opened into my bedchamber. This stench struggled, as it were,
+with the volatile perfume that clung about the braid; so that my senses
+were thrust back and forth between disgust and delight in the strangest
+wavering of sensation.
+
+I made the strongest effort to put away the effect this wavering had
+upon me. I forced myself to sit still and think of normal things; of the
+men whom I was to see next morning, of the plans I meant to discuss with
+them.
+
+Useless! The stench was making me ill. A wave of giddiness swept over
+me, and passed. My heart was beating slowly and heavily. Something in my
+head pulsed in unison. I felt a frightful depression, that suddenly
+burst into an attack of fear gripping me like hysteria. I wanted to
+shriek aloud like a woman, to cover my eyes and run blindly. But at the
+same time my muscles failed me. Will and strength were arrested like
+frozen water.
+
+As I sat there, facing the door of the room, I became aware of Something
+at the window behind my back. Something that pressed against the open
+window and stared at me with a hideous covetousness beside which the
+greed of a beast for its prey is a natural, innocent appetite. I felt
+that Thing's hungry malignance like a soft, dreadful mouth sucking
+toward me, yet held away from me by some force vaguely based on my own
+resistance. And I understood how a man may die of horror.
+
+Yet, presently, I turned around. Weak and sick, with dragging effort I
+turned in my chair and faced the black, uncurtained window where I felt
+It to be.
+
+Nothing was there, to sight or hearing. I sat still, and combated that
+which I knew _was_ there. In the profound stillness, I heard the wind
+stir the naked branches of the trees, the flowing water through the
+fragments of the one-time dam, the sputtering of my candle which needed
+trimming. Sweat ran down my face and body, drenching me with cold. It
+crouched against the empty window, staring at me.
+
+After a time, the presence seemed not so close. At last, I seemed to
+know It was gone. In the gush of that enormous relief my remaining
+strength was swept away like a swimmer in a torrent and I collapsed
+half-fainting in my chair.
+
+When I was able, I rose and walked through the house again. Again the
+rooms showed nothing to my flashlight except dull furniture, walls
+peeling here and there from long neglect, pictures of no merit and
+dreary subject. I had expected nothing, and I found nothing.
+
+It was on my way upstairs to my bedroom that a sentence from the
+invisible lady's story came back to my mind.
+
+"What crouches behind her, unseen? The Horror takes Its own----"
+
+The bedroom door opened quietly under my hand. The rain had ceased and a
+freshening breeze came from the west, filling the room with sweet
+country air. The candle had burned down. While I stood there, the flame
+flickered out.
+
+After a brief indecision, I made my way to the bed, rolled myself in the
+blankets, and laid down between the four pineapple-topped posts. This
+time I kept the flashlight at my hand. But almost at once I slept, and
+slept heavily far into a bright, windy March morning.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+     "Wide is the seat of the man gentle of speech."
+                             --INSTRUCTION OF KE' GEMNI.
+
+
+On the second day after my return to New York, my Aunt Caroline Knox
+called me up on the telephone.
+
+There are reasons why I always feel myself at a disadvantage with Aunt
+Caroline. The first of these brings me to a trifling matter that I
+should have set down before, but which I have made a habit of ignoring
+so far as possible in both thought and speech. As was Lord Byron, I am
+slightly lame. I admit that is the only quality in common; still, I like
+the romantic association. Now, my limp is very slight, and I never have
+found it interfered much with things I cared to do. In fact, I am
+otherwise somewhat above the average in strength and vigor. But from my
+boyhood Aunt Caroline always made a point of alluding to the physical
+fact as often as possible. She considered that course a healthful
+discipline.
+
+"My nephew," she was accustomed to introduce me. "Lame since he was
+seven. Roger, do not scowl! Yes; run over trying to save a pet dog. A
+mongrel of no value whatever!"
+
+Which would have left some doubt as to whether she referred to poor
+Tatters or to me, had it not been for her exceeding pride in our family
+tree.
+
+The second reason for my disadvantage before her, was her utter contempt
+for my profession as a composer of popular music.
+
+Today her voice came thinly to me across the long-distance wire.
+
+"Your Cousin Phillida has failed in her examinations again," she
+announced to me, with a species of tragic repose. "In view of her
+father's intellect and my--er--my family's, her mental status is
+inexplicable. Although, of course, there is your own case!"
+
+"Why, she is the most educated girl I know," I protested hastily.
+
+"I presume you mean best educated, Roger. Pray do not quite lose your
+command of language."
+
+I meant exactly what I had said. Phillida has studied since she was
+three years old, exhaustively and exhaustedly. A vision of her plain,
+pale little face rose before me when I spoke. It is a burden to be the
+only child of a professor, particularly for a meek girl.
+
+"She has studied insufficiently," Aunt Caroline pursued. "She is
+nineteen, and her position at Vassar is deplorable."
+
+"Her health----" I murmured.
+
+"Would not have hampered her had she given proper attention to
+athletics! However, I did not call up to hear you defend Phillida in a
+matter of which you are necessarily ignorant. Her father and I are
+somewhat better judges, I should suppose, than a young man who is not a
+student in any true sense of the word and ignores knowledge as a purpose
+in life. Not that I wish to wound or depreciate you, Roger. There is, I
+may say, a steadiness of moral character beneath your frivolity of mind
+and pursuit. If my poor brother had trained you more wisely; if you had
+been _my_ son----"
+
+"Thank you, Aunt," I acknowledged the benevolent intention, with an
+inward quailing at the clank of fetters suggested. "Was there something
+I can do for you?"
+
+"Will you meet Phillida at the Grand Central and bring her home? I
+cannot have her cross New York alone and take a second train out here.
+Her father has a lecture this afternoon and I have a club meeting at the
+house."
+
+"With pleasure, Aunt! What time does her train get in?"
+
+"Half after four. Thank you, Roger. And, she looks on you as an elder
+brother. I believe an attitude of cool disapproval on your part might
+impress upon her how she has disappointed the family."
+
+"Leave it to me, Aunt. May I take her to tea, between trains, and get
+out to your place on the six o'clock express?"
+
+"If you think best. You might advise her seriously over the tea."
+
+"A dash of lemon, as it were," I reflected. "Certainly, Aunt, I could."
+
+"Very well. I am really obliged!"
+
+"The pleasure is mine, Aunt."
+
+But that it was going to be Phillida's, I had already decided. She would
+need the support of tea and French pastry before facing her home. As for
+treating her with cool disapproval, I would sooner have spent a year at
+Vassar myself. It was my intention to meet her with a box of chocolates
+instead of advice. Phil was not allowed candy, her complexion being
+under cultivation. On the occasions when we were out together it had
+been my custom to provide a box of sweets, upon which she browsed
+luxuriously, bestowing the remnants upon some street child before
+reaching her home.
+
+From the telephone I turned back to that frivolous pursuit of which my
+aunt had spoken with such tactfully veiled contempt. She was not
+softened by the respectable fortune I had made from several successful
+musical comedies and a number of efforts which my publishers advertise
+as "high-class parlor pieces for the home." In fact, she felt it to be a
+grievance that my lightness should be better paid than the Professor's
+learning. In which she was no doubt right!
+
+Ever since my return from my newly purchased farm in Connecticut,
+however, I had not been working for money or popular approval, but for
+my own pleasure. There was a Work upon which I spent only special hours
+of delicious leisure and infinite labor. It held all that was forbidden
+to popular compositions; depth and sorrow and dissonances dearer than
+harmony. I called it a Symphony Polynesian, and I had spent years in
+study of barbaric music, instruments and kindred things that this
+love-child of mine might be more richly clothed by a tone or a fancy.
+Aunt Caroline had interrupted, this morning, at a very point of
+achievement toward which I had been working through the usual
+alternations of enjoyment and exasperation, elevation and dejection that
+attend most workmen. Pausing only to set my alarm-clock, I hurried into
+recording what I had found, in the tangible form of paper and ink.
+
+I always set the alarm-clock when I have an engagement, warned by dire
+experiences.
+
+Aunt Caroline had summoned me about eleven in the morning. When the
+strident voice of the clock again aroused me, I had just time to dress
+and reach the Grand Central by half-past four. I recognized that I was
+hungry, that the vicinity was snowed over with sheets of paper, that the
+piano keys had acquired another inkstain, and my pipe had charred
+another black spot on the desk top. Well, it had been a good day; and
+Phillida's tea would have to be my belated luncheon or early dinner.
+Even so, it was necessary to make haste.
+
+It was in that haste of making ready that I uncovered the braid of
+glittering hair which I had brought from Connecticut. I use no
+exaggeration when I say it glittered. It did; each hair was lustrous
+with a peculiar, shining vitality, and crinkled slightly along its full
+length. With a renewed self-reproach at sight of its humbled exile and
+captivity, I took up the trophy of my one adventure. While I am without
+much experience, such a quantity seemed unusual. Also, I had not known
+such a mass of hair could be so soft and supple in the hand. My mother
+and little sister died before I can remember; and while I have many good
+friends, I have none intimate enough to educate me in such matters.
+Perhaps a consciousness of that trifling physical disadvantage of mine
+has made me prefer a good deal of solitude in my hours at home.
+
+The faint, tenacious yet volatile perfume drifted to my nostrils, as I
+held the braid. Who could the woman be who brought that costly fragrance
+into a deserted farmhouse? For so exquisite and unique a fragrance could
+only be the work of a master perfumer. There was youth in that vigorous
+hair, coquetry in the individual perfume, panic in her useless sacrifice
+of the braid I held; yet strangest self-possession in the telling of
+that fanciful tale of sorcery to me.
+
+On that tale, told dramatically in the dark, I had next morning blamed
+the weird waking nightmare that I had suffered after her visit. The
+horror of the night could not endure the strong sun and wind of the
+March morning that followed. Like _Scrooge_, I analyzed my ghost as a
+bit of undigested beef or a blot of mustard. Certainly the thing had
+been actual enough while it lasted, but my reason had thrust it away.
+That was over, I reflected, as I laid the braid back in the drawer. But
+surely the lady was not vanished like the nightmare? Surely I should
+find her in some neighbor's daughter, when my house was finished and I
+went there for the summer? She could not hide from me, with that bright
+web about her head whose twin web I held.
+
+It had grown so late that I had to take a taxicab to the Terminal, just
+halting at a shop long enough to buy a box of the chocolates my cousin
+preferred. But when I reached the great station and found my way through
+the swirl of travelers to the track where Phil's train should come in, I
+was told the express had been delayed.
+
+"Probably half an hour late," the gateman informed me. "Maybe more! Of
+course, though, she may pull in any time."
+
+Which meant no tea for Phillida; instead, a rush across town to the
+Pennsylvania station to catch the train for her home. As I could not
+leave my post lest she arrive in my absence, it also meant nothing to
+eat for me until we reached Aunt Caroline's hospitality; which was cool
+and restrained rather than festive.
+
+I foresaw the heavy atmosphere that would brood over all like a cold
+fog, this evening of Phil's disgraceful return from the scholastic
+arena. Ascertaining from the gateman that the erring train was certain
+not to pull in during the next ten minutes, I sought a telephone booth.
+
+"Aunt Caroline, Phil's train is going to be very late, possibly an hour
+late," I misinformed my kinswoman, when her voice answered me. "I have
+had nothing to eat since breakfast, and she will be hungry long before
+we reach your house. May I not take her to dinner here in town?"
+
+"Please do not call your cousin 'Phil'," she rebuked me, and paused to
+deliberate. "You had no luncheon, you say?"
+
+"None."
+
+"Why not? Were you ill?"
+
+"No; just busy. I forgot lunch. I am beginning to feel it, now. Still,
+if you wish us to come straight home, do not consider me!"
+
+I knew of old how submission mollified Aunt Caroline. She relented, now.
+
+"Well----! You are very good, Roger, to save your uncle a trip into the
+city to meet her. I must not impose upon you. But, a quiet hotel!"
+
+"Certainly, Aunt."
+
+"Phillida does not deserve pampering enjoyment. I am consenting for your
+sake."
+
+"Thank you, Aunt. I wonder, then, if you would mind if we stopped to see
+a show that I especially want to look over, for business reasons? We
+could come out on the theatre express; as we have done before, you
+remember?"
+
+"Yes, but----"
+
+"Thank you. I'll take good care of her. Good-bye."
+
+The receiver was still talking when I hung up. There is no other form of
+conversation so incomparably convenient.
+
+The train arrived within the half-hour. With the inrush of travelers, I
+sighted Phillida's sober young figure moving along the cement platform.
+She walked with dejection. Her gray suit represented a compromise
+between fashion and her mother's opinion of decorum, thus attaining a
+length and fulness not enough for grace yet too much for jauntiness. Her
+solemn gray hat was set too squarely upon the pale-brown hair, brushed
+back from her forehead. Her nice, young-girl's eyes looked out through a
+pair of shell-rimmed spectacles. She was too thin and too pale to
+content me.
+
+When she saw me coming toward her, her face brightened and colored quite
+warmly. She waved her bag with actual abandon and her lagging step
+quickened to a run.
+
+"Cousin Roger!" she exclaimed breathlessly. "Oh, how good of you to
+come!"
+
+She gripped my hands in a candid fervor of relief and pleasure.
+
+"I am so glad it is you," she insisted. "I was sorry the train could not
+be later; I wished, almost, it would never get in--and all the time it
+was you who were waiting for me!"
+
+"It was, and now you are about to share an orgy," I told her. "I have
+your mother's permission to take you to dinner, Miss Knox."
+
+"Here? In town? Just us?"
+
+"Yes. And afterward we will take in any show you fancy. How does that
+strike you?"
+
+She gazed up at me, absorbing the idea and my seriousness. To my dismay,
+she grew pale again.
+
+"I--I really believe it will keep me from just dying."
+
+I pretended to think that a joke. But I recognized that my little cousin
+was on the sloping way toward a nervous breakdown.
+
+"No baggage?" I observed. "Good! I hope you did not eat too much
+luncheon. This will be an early dinner."
+
+She waited to take off the spectacles and put them in her little bag.
+
+"I do not need them except to study, but I didn't dare meet Mother
+without them," she explained. "No; I could not eat lunch, or breakfast
+either, Cousin Roger. Nor much dinner last night! Oh, if you knew how I
+dread--the grind! I should rather run away."
+
+"So we will; for this evening."
+
+"Yes. Where--where were you going to take me?"
+
+We had crossed the great white hall to street level, and a taxicab was
+rolling up to halt before us. Surprised by the anxiety in the eyes she
+lifted to mine, I named the staid, quietly fastidious hotel where I
+usually took her when we were permitted an excursion together.
+
+"Unless you have a choice?" I finished.
+
+"I have." She breathed resolution. "I want to go to a restaurant with a
+cabaret, instead of going to the theatre. May I? Please, may I? Will you
+take me where I say, this one time?"
+
+Her earnestness amazed me. I knew what her mother would say. I also
+knew, or thought I knew that Phillida needed the mental relaxation which
+comes from having one's own way. In her mood, no one else's way,
+however, wise or agreeable, will do it all.
+
+"All right," I yielded. "If you will promise me, faith of a gentlewoman,
+to tell Aunt Caroline that I took you there and you did not know where
+you were going. My shoulders are broader than yours and have borne the
+buffeting of thirty-two years instead of nineteen. Had you chosen the
+place, or shall I?"
+
+To my second surprise, she answered with the name of an uptown place
+where I never had been, and where I would have decidedly preferred not
+to take her.
+
+"They have a skating ballet," she urged, as I hesitated. "I know it is
+wonderful! Please, please----?"
+
+I gave the direction to the chauffeur and followed my cousin into the
+cab. It seemed a proper moment to present the chocolates from my
+overcoat pocket. When she proved too languid to unwrap the box, I was
+seriously uneasy.
+
+"You cannot possibly know how dreadful it is to be the only child of two
+intellectual people who expect one to be a credit," she excused her lack
+of appetite, nervously twitching the gilt cord about the package. "And
+to be stupid and a disappointment! Yes, as long as I can remember, I
+have been a disappointment. If only there had been another to divide all
+those expectations. If only you had been my brother!"
+
+"Heaven forbid!" I exclaimed hastily. "That is----"
+
+"Don't bother about explaining," she smiled wanly, "I understand. But
+you are distinguished, and you look it. I never will be, and I am ugly.
+Mother expects me to be an astronomer like Father and work with him, or
+to go in for club life and serious writing as she does. I never can do
+either."
+
+"Neither could I, Phil."
+
+"You are clever, successful. Everybody knows your name. When we are out,
+and people or an orchestra play your music, Mother always says: 'A
+trifle of my nephew's, Roger Locke. Very original, is it not? Of course,
+I do not understand music, but I hear that his last light opera----' And
+then she leans back and just _eats up_ all the nice things said about
+your work. She would never let you know it, but she does. And that is
+the sort of thing she wants from me. I--I want to make cookies, and I
+love fancywork."
+
+The taxicab drew up with a jerk before the gaudy entrance to Silver
+Aisles.
+
+I imagine Phillida had the vaguest ideas of what such places were like.
+When we were settled at a table in a general blaze of pink lights,
+beside a fountain that ran colored water, I regarded her humorously. But
+she seemed quite contented with her surroundings, looking about her with
+an air I can best describe as grave excitement. At this hour, the room
+was not half filled, and the jazz orchestra had withdrawn to prepare for
+a hard night's work.
+
+After I had ordered our dinner, I glanced up to see her fingers busied
+loosening the severe lines of her brushed back hair.
+
+"Everyone here looks so nice," she said wistfully. "I wish my hair did
+shine and cuddle around my face like those women's does. Do--do I look
+queer, Cousin? You are looking at me so----?"
+
+"I was thinking what pretty eyes you have."
+
+Her pale face flushed.
+
+"Really?"
+
+"Most truthfully. As for the hair, isn't that a matter of bottled polish
+and hairdressers? But you remind me of a question for you. Isn't a braid
+of hair this wide," I laid off the dimensions on the table, "this long,
+and thick, a good deal for a woman to own?"
+
+"Show me again."
+
+I obeyed, while she leaned forward to observe.
+
+"Not one girl in a hundred has so much," she pronounced judgment. "Who
+is she? Probably it isn't all her own, anyhow!"
+
+"It is not now, but it was," I said remorsefully.
+
+"How could you tell? Did you measure it?"--with sarcasm. "Do you
+remember the maxim we used to write in copybooks? 'Measure a thousand
+times, and cut once?' One has to be cautious!"
+
+"I cut it first, and then measured."
+
+"What? Tell me."
+
+At last she was interested and amused. There was no reason why I should
+not tell her of my midnight adventure. We never repeated one another's
+little confidences.
+
+She listened, with many comments and exclamations, to the story of the
+unseen lady, the legend of the fair witch, the dagger that was a
+paper-knife by day and the severed tresses. She did not hear of the
+singular nightmare or hallucination that had been my second visitor. My
+reason had accounted for the experience and dismissed it. Some other
+part of myself avoided the memory with that deep, unreasoning sense of
+horror sometimes left by a morbid dream.
+
+The dinner crowd had flowed in while we ate and talked. A burst of
+applause aroused me to this fact and the commencement of the first show
+of the evening. The orchestra had taken their places.
+
+"They will hardly begin with their best act," I remarked, surprised by
+Phillida's convulsive start and rapt intentness upon the stretch of ice
+that formed the exhibition floor. "Your ballet on skates probably will
+come later."
+
+"I did not come to see the ballet," she answered, her voice low.
+
+"No? What, then?"
+
+"A--man I know?"
+
+Once when I was a little fellow, I raced headlong into the low-swinging
+branch of a tree, the bough striking me across the forehead so that I
+was bowled over backward amid a shower of apples. I felt a twin
+sensation, now.
+
+"Here, Phillida?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Someone from your home town or your college town?" I essayed a casual
+tone.
+
+"Neither. He belongs here, and they call him Flying Vere. He--Look!
+Look, Cousin!"
+
+I turned, and saw that the first performer was upon the ice floor.
+
+He came down the center like a silver-shod Mercury. In the silence, for
+the orchestra did not accompany his entrance, the faint musical ringing
+of his skates ran softly with him. My first unwilling recognition of his
+good looks and athletic grace was followed by an equally reluctant
+admission of his skill. Reluctant, because my anger and bewilderment
+were hot against the man. My little cousin, my pathetic, unworldly
+Phillida--and this cabaret entertainer! At the mere joining of their
+names my senses revolted. What could they have in common? How had she
+seen him? Having seen him, it was easy to understand how he had
+fascinated her inexperience. Only, what was his object?
+
+He had seen us, where we sat. I saw his dark eyes fix upon her and flash
+some message. Her plain little face irradiated, her fingers
+unconsciously twisting and wringing her napkin, she leaned forward to
+watch and answer glance for glance.
+
+I would rather not put into words my thoughts. Yet, I watched his
+performance. In spite of myself, he held me with his swift, certain
+skill, his vitality and youth.
+
+He was gone, with the swooping suddenness of his appearance. The jazz
+music clattered out. Phillida turned back to me and began to speak with
+a hushed rapture that baffled and infuriated me.
+
+"You understand, Cousin Roger? Now that you have seen him, you do
+understand? No! Let me talk, please. Let me tell you, if I can. It began
+last summer, at the school where I was cramming for college work. Oh,
+how tired I was of study! How tired of it I am, and always shall be! I
+think that side of me never will get rested. Then, in the woods, I met
+him. He was stopping at a hotel not far away. I--we----"
+
+I waited for her to go on. Instead, she abruptly spread wide her hands
+in a gesture of helplessness.
+
+"After all, I cannot tell you. Not even you, Cousin! He--he liked me. He
+treated me just as a really, truly girl who would have partners at
+dances and wear fluffy frocks and curl her hair. He thought I was
+pretty!"
+
+The naïve wonder and triumph of her cry, the challenge in her brown
+eyes, to my belief, were moving things. I registered some ugly mental
+comments on the rearing of Phil and the kind of humility that is _not_
+good for the soul.
+
+"Why not?" I demanded. "Of course!"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"No. Thank you, but--no! Not pretty, except to him. Only to him, because
+he loves me."
+
+I do not know what impatience I exclaimed. She checked me, leaning
+across the table to grasp my hand in both hers.
+
+"Hush! Oh, hush, dear Cousin Roger! For it is quite too late. We were
+married six months ago; last autumn."
+
+When I could, I asked:
+
+"Married legally, beyond mistake? Were you not under eighteen years
+old?"
+
+"I was eighteen years and a half. There is no mistake at all. We walked
+over to the city hall in the nearest town, and took out our license, and
+were married."
+
+"Very well. I will take you home to your father and mother, now; then
+see this man, myself. If there is indeed no flaw in the marriage and it
+cannot be annulled, a divorce must be arranged. Any money I have or
+expect to have would be a small price to set you free from the miserable
+business. But the first thing is to get you home. We will start now."
+
+She detained my hand when I would have signalled our waiter. Her eyes,
+shining and solemn as a small child's, met mine.
+
+"No, Cousin, please! I am not going home any more. At least, not alone.
+I asked you to bring me here where he is, because I am going to stay
+with my husband."
+
+"Never," I stated firmly.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Not if I have to send for your father and take you home by force."
+
+"You cannot. I am of age."
+
+"Phillida, I am responsible for you to your parents tonight. Let me take
+you home, explain things to them, and then decide your course."
+
+"But that is what I most do not want to do!" she naïvely exclaimed.
+
+"You will not?"
+
+"I'm sorry. No."
+
+"Then I must see the man."
+
+"Not--hurt----?"
+
+I recalled the man we had just seen on the skating floor, with a qualm
+of quite unreasonable bitterness. That anxiety of Phillida's had a
+flavor of irony for me.
+
+"Hardly," I returned. "There are fortunately other means of persuasion
+than physical force."
+
+"Oh! But you cannot persuade him to give me up."
+
+I was silent. At which, being a woman, she grew troubled.
+
+"How could you?" she urged.
+
+"You have had no opportunity of judging what influence money has on some
+people, Phil."
+
+She laughed out in relief.
+
+"Is that all? Try, Cousin."
+
+"You trust him so much?"
+
+"In everything, forever!"
+
+"Then if I succeed in buying him off, promise me that you will come home
+with me."
+
+"If he takes money to leave me?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I should die. But I will promise if you want me to, because I know it
+never will happen. Just as I might promise to do anything, when I knew
+that I never would have to carry it out."
+
+"Very well," I accepted the best I could get. "I will go find him."
+
+"There is no need. He is coming here to our table as soon as he is
+free."
+
+"I will not have you seen with him in this place."
+
+"But I am going to stay here with him," she said.
+
+Her eyes, the meek eyes of Phillida, defied me. My faint authority was a
+sham. What could be done, I recognized, must be done through the man.
+
+We sat in silence, after that. Presently, her gaze fixed aslant on me as
+if to dare my interference, she drew up a thin gold chain that hung
+about her neck and ended beneath her blouse. From it she unfastened a
+wedding ring and gravely put the thing on her third finger, the
+school-girl romanticism of the gesture blended with an air of
+little-girl naughtiness. She looked more fit for a nursery than for this
+business.
+
+I could tell from the change in her expression when the man was
+approaching. I rose, meaning to meet him and turn him aside from our
+table. But Phillida halted me with one deftly planted question.
+
+"You would not leave me alone in this place, Cousin?"
+
+Certainly I would not leave her alone at a table here; not even alone in
+appearance while I had my interview with the man close at hand. Yet it
+seemed impossible to speak before her. She calmly answered my
+perplexity.
+
+"You must talk to him here, of course. I--want to listen to you both.
+Indeed, I shall not interfere at all, or be angry or hurt! I know how
+good you mean to be, dear; only, you do not understand."
+
+I sat down again, perforce. When the man's shadow presently fell across
+our table, it did not soothe me to see Phil thrust her hand in his, her
+small face enraptured, her fingers locking about his with a caress plain
+as a kiss. She said proudly, if tremulously:
+
+"Cousin Roger, this is my husband. Mr. Locke, Ethan dear."
+
+He said nothing. His hesitating movement to offer his hand I chose to
+ignore. I admit that my spirit rose against him to the point of loathing
+as he stood there, tall, correct in attire--the focus of admiring
+glances from other diners--in every way the antithesis of my poor
+Phillida.
+
+"Sit down," I bade curtly, when he did not speak. "Miss Knox insists
+that we have our interview here. I should have preferred otherwise, but
+her presence must not prevent what has to be said."
+
+"It won't prevent anything I want to say, Mr. Locke," he answered.
+
+He spoke with a drawl. Not the drawl of affectation, nor the drawl of
+South or West so cherished by the romantic, but the slow, deliberate
+speech of New England's upper coasts. It had the oddest effect, that
+honest, homely accent on the lips of a performer in this place. Phil
+drew him down to the third chair at the table. After which, she folded
+her hands on the edge of the cloth as if to signify to me how she kept
+her promise of neutrality, and looked fixedly at her glass of water
+instead of at either of us. Plainly, all action was supposed to proceed
+from me.
+
+"My cousin has just told me of her marriage," I opened, as dryly concise
+as I could manage explanation. "It is of course impossible that she
+should adopt your way of living, as she seems to have in mind. You may
+not understand, yet, that it also is impossible for you to adopt hers.
+No doubt you have supposed her to be the daughter of wealthy people, or
+at least people of whom money could be obtained. You were wrong.
+Professor Knox has nothing but his modest salary. Her parents are of the
+scholarly, not of the moneyed class. She has no kin who could or would
+support her husband or pay largely to be rid of him. Of all her people,
+I happen to be the best off, financially. It happens also that I am not
+sentimental, nor alarmed at the idea of newspaper exploitation for
+either of us. It is necessary that all this be plainly set forth before
+we go further.
+
+"Now, for your side: you have involved Miss Knox to the extent of
+marriage. To free her from this trap into which her inexperience has
+walked is worth a reasonable price. I will pay it. I shall take her home
+to her father and mother tonight, and consult my lawyer tomorrow. He
+will conduct negotiations with you. The day Miss Knox is divorced from
+you without useless scandal or trouble-making, I will pay to you the sum
+agreed upon with my lawyer. If you prefer to make yourself
+objectionable, you will get nothing, now or later."
+
+He took it all without a flicker of the eyelids, not interrupting or
+displaying any affectation of being insulted. I acknowledge, now, that
+it was an outrageous speech to make to a man of whom I knew nothing. But
+it was so intended; summing up what I considered an outrageous situation
+brought about by his playing upon a young girl's ignorance of such
+fellows as himself. Phillida's usually pale cheeks were burning. Several
+times she would have broken in upon me with protests, if Vere had not
+silenced her by the merest glances of warning. A proof of his influence
+over her which had not inclined me toward gentleness with him!
+
+When I finished there was a pause before he turned his dark eyes to
+mine, and held them there.
+
+"Honest enough!" he drawled, with that incongruous coast-of-Maine tang
+to his leisureliness. "I'll match you there, Mr. Locke. I don't care
+whether you make fifty thousand a year with your music writing, or
+whether you grind a street-piano with a tin-cup on top. It's nothing to
+me. I guess we can do without your lawyer, too. Because, you see, I
+married Mrs. Vere because I wanted her; and I figure on supporting her.
+If her folks are too cultivated to stand me, I'm sorry. But they won't
+have to see me. So that's settled!"
+
+He was honest. His glance drove that fact home to me with a fist-like
+impact. There was nothing I was so poorly prepared to meet.
+
+Phillida's hands went out to him in an impulsive movement. He covered
+them both with one of his for a moment before gently putting them in her
+lap with a gesture of reminder toward the revellers all about us. The
+delicacy of that thought for her was another disclosure of character,
+unconsciously made. Worthy or unworthy, he did love Phil.
+
+I am not too dully obstinate to recognize a mistake of my own. Whatever
+my bitterness against the man, I had to accord him some respect. I sat
+for a while striving to align my forces to attack this new front.
+
+"I don't blame you for thinking what you said, Mr. Locke," his voice
+presently spoke across my perplexity. "I can see the way things came to
+you; finding me here, and all! I'm glad to have had this chance to talk
+it out with one of my wife's relations. I'd like them to know she'll be
+taken care of. Outside of that, I guess there is nothing we have to say
+to each other."
+
+"I suppose I owe you both an apology," I said stiffly.
+
+"Oh, that's all right--for both of us! I can see how much store you set
+by her."
+
+"But what are you going to do with her, man?" I burst forth. "Do you
+expect to keep her here; sitting at a table in this place and watching
+you do your turn, making your fellow performers her friends, seeing and
+learning----?" I checked my outpouring of disgust. "Or do you propose to
+shut her up in some third-class boarding house day and night while you
+hang around here? Good heavens, Vere, do you realize what either life
+would be for an nineteen-year-old girl brought up as she has been?"
+
+He colored.
+
+"As for bringing up," he retorted, "I guess she couldn't be a lot more
+miserable than her folks worried her into being. But--you're right about
+the rest. That's why I was going to leave her with her folks yet a
+while, until I had a place for her. I mean, while I saved up enough to
+get the place."
+
+"But I wrote to him when I failed in my exams, Cousin Roger," Phillida
+broke in. "I told him that I would not go home. I could not bear it. I
+was coming to him, and he would just have to keep me with him or I
+should _die_. Indeed, I do not care about places. I think it will be
+lovely fun to sit here and watch him, or go behind the scenes with him
+and make friends with the other people. I--I am surprised that you are
+so narrow, Cousin Roger, when all your own best friends are theatrical
+people and artists and you think so highly of them."
+
+I answered nothing to that. The distance between the stage and this
+class of cabaret show was not to be traversed in a few seven-league
+words. I looked at Vere, who returned my look squarely and soberly.
+
+"You needn't worry about her being here, Mr. Locke," he said. "I know
+better than that! But she has to come to me; it's her right, don't you
+think? I'll promise you to take her to a better place as soon as I can
+manage."
+
+"What kind of a place?"
+
+"I'm saving to get a place in the country," he answered diffidently.
+"I'm a countryman, and Phillida thinks she'd like it."
+
+"You?" I exclaimed, unable to smother my derision and unbelief. My
+glance summed up his fastidious apparel and grooming, the gloss on his
+curling dark hair and the dubious diamond on his little finger.
+
+He reddened through his clear, dark skin, but his eyes were not those of
+a man taken in a lie.
+
+"Did you take notice of what I do here?" He asked me, with the first
+touch of humility I had seen in him. "I couldn't dance or sing or do
+parlor tricks. I wasn't bred to parlors or indoors. But I learned to
+skate pretty fancy from a boy up. My folks' farm was on one side of a
+lake and the schoolhouse on the other. About November that lake used to
+freeze solid. My brother and I used to skate five miles to school, and
+back again, before we were six years old. We lived on skates about half
+the year, I guess. Well--you don't care about the rest; how the farm was
+just about big enough to support my elder brother and his family, and I
+came to New York. Nor how I found New York pretty well filled up with
+folks who knew considerably more than I did. It was the manager of this
+place who advertised for expert skaters, who dressed me up like this,
+and paid me the first living wages I'd had in the city. All the same, I
+was bred a farmer, and I mean to get back to it. Always have! You're a
+man, Mr. Locke, and I'd hate you to think I was a shimmy dancer on ice
+and nothing else, or I wouldn't mention it. My father would have taken
+the buggy-whip to me, I guess, if he'd lived to see me in this rig. Soon
+as I've enough put by, I'll shed this perfumed suit and the cheap
+jewelry and take my wife where she can have a chance to forget I ever
+wore them."
+
+"But I _like_ them," put in Phillida ardently. "Please do not fuss so,
+Ethan; because I really do."
+
+"Do you?" I turned upon her. "Are you sure, then, that it is not all
+this cabaret glamour you really are in love with? Would you care for him
+as an ordinary, hard-working fellow in a pair of overalls and a flannel
+shirt? No applause, no lights, no stage?"
+
+She laughed up at me.
+
+"You have forgotten that I met Ethan while he was on a vacation from his
+work here, and roughing it. When I married him, I had hardly seen him in
+anything except his Navy flannel shirt, scrubby trousers, and funny
+blunt-toed shoes."
+
+"You served in the war?" I asked him.
+
+He nodded.
+
+"Yes. On a submarine chaser. Got pneumonia from exposure and was
+invalided home just before the Armistice."
+
+"And you came back here?"
+
+"I came here," he corrected me. "I enlisted from Maine. I was discharged
+in New York. That was when I couldn't find anything I could do, until
+this skating trick came along."
+
+I sat thinking for a time; as long thoughts as I could command. The
+obvious course was to send for Phillida's father. Yet what could that
+vague and learned gentleman do that I could not? I visioned the
+Professor standing in this riotous, gaudy restaurant, swinging his
+eye-glasses by their silk ribbon and peering at Vere in helpless
+distaste and consternation. It was practically certain that Phil would
+refuse to go home with him.
+
+What if she did go home? I could picture the scene there, when the truth
+came out. The mortification of her people, the gossip in the little
+town, her outcast position among the girls and boys with whom she had
+grown up--what a martyrdom for a sensitive spirit! Of course, the only
+possible thing considered by Aunt Caroline would be a prompt divorce.
+
+If Phillida refused to consent to a divorce, how could she live at home
+as the wife of a man her parents had pronounced unfit to receive? If she
+yielded and gave up Vere, would she be much better off? An embarrassment
+to her family, the heroine of a stolen marriage and Reno freedom, what
+chance of happiness would she have in her conventional circle?
+Especially as she neither was a beauty nor the dashing type of girl who
+might make capital of such a reputation. Probably she would bury herself
+in nunlike seclusion, stay in her room when callers came, and wear a
+veil when she went out to walk.
+
+Meanwhile, she would break her heart for Vere.
+
+Could matters be any worse if she tried life with him, even if the
+experiment eventually proved a failure and ended in a divorce instead of
+beginning there? Might not her parents be spared much they most dreaded,
+if their friends could be told simply that Phillida had made a love
+match and was with her husband?
+
+Finally, Phillida was a human creature with the right to manage her own
+life. Had any of us the right to lay hands upon her existence and mould
+it to our fancy?
+
+I looked up from my revery to find the eyes of both of them fixed on me
+as if I held their doom balanced upon my palm. Perhaps, in a sense, I
+did.
+
+"Phil, will you come home to your father and mother, and consider all
+this a bit more before you decide?" I asked her.
+
+I thought I knew the answer to this, and I did.
+
+"No, Cousin Roger," she refused firmly. "Please forgive me. I know how
+kind you mean to be, but--no! I shall stay with Ethan. If ever you love
+anyone, you will understand."
+
+I accepted the decision. There was no reason why I should think of the
+woman who had spoken to me across the darkness in a voice of melody and
+power, or why I should seem to feel again the exquisite, live softness
+of her braid within my hand. But it was so.
+
+"Very well," I said. "Vere, it is to you, then, as Phillida's husband,
+that I must address any plans. I do not pretend to like the course she
+has taken. I do not know what action her parents may take, although I
+believe they will listen to my advice. Putting all that aside, she
+refuses to come with me and you agree that she cannot stay here.
+
+"I have just bought a farm in Connecticut, intending to use it as a
+summer home. There are some alterations and repairs being made, but
+little is to be changed inside the house and it is in perfectly livable
+shape. Here is my offer. Take Phillida there, and I will make you
+manager of the place. I will pay all reasonable expenses of putting the
+land into proper condition and getting such stock and equipment as you
+judge best; all expenses and up-keep of the house and whatever salary
+usually is drawn by such managers of small estates. I shall be there, on
+and off, but you and Phillida must take charge of everything. I am
+neither a farmer nor a housekeeper, and do not wish to be either. I
+bought the place only because New York is too hot to work in during
+three months of the year, and I hate summer resorts. Keep my room ready,
+and you will find I disturb you little. Of course, hire what servants
+are necessary.
+
+"Now, if you make the place self-supporting inside of five years, I will
+deed the whole thing to you two. To put it better, if you succeed in
+making the farm pay a living for yourselves, I will make it over to you
+and withdraw. If you fail--well, I suppose you will be no worse off than
+you are now!"
+
+They were stricken speechless. Perhaps my attitude had not pointed to
+such a conclusion of our interview. Phillida told me long afterward that
+she expected me to bid them good-evening and abandon them forever, as my
+mildest course; with alternative possibilities such as summoning a
+policeman and having Vere haled to prison. Seeing their condition, I
+rose.
+
+"I will stroll about and leave you a chance to talk it over," I
+declared; although there are few ordeals I dislike more than displaying
+my limp about such public rooms.
+
+Vere stopped me, rising as I rose.
+
+"No need of that, for us," he answered, facing me across the little
+table. "About giving us your farm, Mr. Locke, that's for the future!
+Just now, the manager's job is plenty big enough to thank you for. I
+wish I could say it better. If you'll stay here with Phillida for ten
+minutes, until I can get back, I'll be obliged."
+
+"Where are you going?"
+
+"To resign here, and get my outfit into a suitcase."
+
+He had taken up my challenge like a man, at least. There were none of
+the hesitations and excuses to stay in town that I had half expected. It
+pleased me that he decided for Phil as well as himself. Some of my ideas
+about marriage are antiquated, I admit. I nodded to him, and sat down
+again.
+
+It is unnecessary to record the childish things Phillida tried to say to
+me, while he was gone.
+
+"I am so happy," was her apology for threatened tears. "I never knew
+anyone--except Ethan--could be so kind. And--and, will you tell Father
+and Mother?"
+
+"Yes." I winced, though, at that prospect. "Give me that little bag you
+carry on your wrist."
+
+She obeyed, wide-eyed.
+
+"You do tote a powder-puff. I did not know whether Aunt Caroline
+permitted it. Rub it on your nose," I advised, passing the bit of fluff
+to her.
+
+While she complied, almost like a normally frivolous girl, I used the
+moment to transfer a few banknotes to the bag, so some need might not
+find her penniless.
+
+Vere came back in not much more than the promised ten minutes. He had
+changed to gray street clothes and carried a suitcase. I noted that the
+diamond had disappeared from his finger and his curly head looked as if
+it had been held under a water-faucet and vigorously toweled to lessen
+the brilliantine gloss.
+
+"If you'll tell us where your farm is, Mr. Locke, we'll start," he
+volunteered.
+
+Phillida looked up at him with eyes of adoring trust.
+
+"I had the porter at the Terminal check my suitcase to be called for. We
+shall have to get it, dear."
+
+In spite of myself, I smiled at their amazing promptitude. There was
+both reassurance and pathos in its unconscious youth. All this eagerness
+pressing forward--where? They did not know, nor I. Certainly we did not
+dream how strange a goal awaited one of us three, or on what weird,
+desolate path that traveler's foot was already set.
+
+"You had better go to a good hotel for tonight," I modified their plan.
+"Tomorrow is time enough to go out to the farm, by daylight. Phil has
+had enough excitement for one day. I will write full directions for the
+trip, Vere, on the back of this timetable of the railroad you must
+take."
+
+They were enchanted with this suggestion. Indeed, they were in a state
+of mind to have assented if I advised them to sit out on a park bench
+until morning.
+
+Yet, when I had put them and their scanty luggage into a taxicab, I
+suffered a bad pang of misgiving. What responsibility was I assuming in
+letting my little-girl cousin go like this? What did I know of this man,
+or where he would take her? I think Phillida divined something of my
+trouble, for she leaned out the door to me and held up her face like a
+child's to be kissed.
+
+"I am so _happy_," she whispered.
+
+I turned to Vere; who had a long envelope in readiness to put in my
+hand.
+
+"I guess you might like to have these for a while, Mr. Locke," he said,
+with one of his slow, straightforward glances.
+
+With which farewells I had to be content, and watch their taxi swing out
+into the bright-dark flow of traffic where it was lost from my sight.
+After which, I entered another taxicab by my unromantic self and was
+driven to that railroad station where I would find a train bound to the
+college town that was the home of Aunt Caroline and her husband. One
+always thought of Phil's parents in that order, although the Professor
+was a moderately distinguished scientist and his spouse merely masterful
+in her own limited circle.
+
+The envelope Vere had given me contained their marriage certificate, his
+release from the Navy, and his membership card in the American Legion.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+     "Fair speech is more rare than the emerald found by slave maidens
+     on the pebbles."--PTAH-HOTEP.
+
+
+At ten o'clock, next morning, I was summoned from my sleep by the bell
+of the telephone beside my bed. It was not a pleasant sleep, although I
+had not returned to my apartment until dawn. Nightmare doubts galloped
+ruthless hoofs over any repose.
+
+Phillida's voice came over the wire to me like the morning song of a
+bird.
+
+"Good-morning, Cousin Roger. We are going to take the train in a few
+moments. But I could not leave New York without telling you how happy I
+am. Are you--did I wake you up? I was afraid that I might, but Ethan
+said you would like me to call, even so."
+
+"My dear, it was the kindest thought you ever had," I told her
+fervently.
+
+"Was it?" she hesitated. "Then--were they pretty dreadful to you at
+home?"
+
+"Quite!"
+
+"Do you suppose they will _do_ anything dreadful about us?"
+
+"No. Nothing."
+
+It did not seem necessary to tell her that Aunt Caroline did not know
+where the runaways had gone, and was thereby debarred from hasty action.
+Phillida's father had privately agreed with me in this.
+
+"I am so very happy, Cousin Roger!"
+
+"I am glad, Phil."
+
+"And you will come to the farm soon?"
+
+"Soon," I promised.
+
+So the nightmares of immediate anxiety for her galloped themselves away,
+routed for that time. Like my gold-fish when their bowl has been unduly
+shaken, I sank down again into the quieted waters of my little world and
+absorption in my own affairs. There have been hours when I wondered if I
+was of more importance than they, as a matter of cosmic fact.
+
+A month passed before I kept my promise to go to the farm in
+Connecticut.
+
+As a first reason, I wanted to leave my young couple alone for a period
+of adjustment. Also, I was curious to see how they would handle the
+business left to them. I held telephone conversations with Phillida, and
+with various contractors now and then. I sent out the furnishings for my
+own room. Everything else I purposely left to the experimenters.
+
+There was a second reason, more obscure. I wanted to keep for a while
+the little mystery of the lady who had come to the farmhouse room in the
+dark of the night. She was pure romance, a rare incident in a prosaic
+age. My table had been bare of such delicately spiced morsels, and I
+relished the savor of this one upon my palate. I was not quite ready to
+find her in the matter-of-fact daughter of some neighbor, who had sought
+shelter from the storm in that supposedly empty house and probably
+mistaken me for a tramp.
+
+Perhaps I was equally reluctant to go back and prove that the adventure
+was ended, that she had been a bird of passage who had gone on with no
+thought of return.
+
+With all these delays, and the fact that my work really kept me busy in
+town, April was verging toward May when I finally saw the last of my
+luggage put into the car and started on my fifty-mile drive to the house
+by the lake. I did not take this first visit very seriously, or intend
+it to be over long. To be a constraint upon the household I had
+established, or assume a right there, was far from the course I planned.
+It was not certain Vere and I would be comfortable housemates. But to
+stay away altogether would have hurt Phillida as much as to stay too
+long, I considered. Probably a week would be about enough for this time.
+
+So lightly, so ignorantly, I stepped from the first great division of my
+life into the second; not hearing the closing of the gate through which
+there was no turning back.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+     "The very room, coz she was in,
+     Seemed warm from floor to ceilin'."
+                         --THE COURTIN'.
+
+
+I arrived at noon, when a bright sun set the country air afloat with
+motes like dust of gold. The place seemed drenched in golden light. Even
+the young grass had gold in its green, and the lake glittered hot with
+yellow sparkles.
+
+The house was transformed. The cream-colored stucco that hid its homely
+walls, deep, arched porches that took the place of the old shallow
+affairs, scarlet Spanish tiles where bleached shingles had been--all
+united in giving it the gayest, most modern air imaginable. A gravel
+drive curved in beneath the new porte-cochère, inviting the wheels of my
+car to explore. Grass had been put in order, flower-beds laid out. The
+new dam was up, and the miniature lake no longer suggested a swamp. If
+the place had appealed to me in its dreary neglect, now it held out its
+arms to me and laughed an invitation.
+
+As I stepped from my car, I heard running feet and a girl sped around
+the veranda to meet me. She cast herself into my arms before I fairly
+realized this was Phillida. A Phillida as new to my eyes as the house!
+After the first greetings I held her off to analyze the change.
+
+She was tanned and actually rosy. The corners of her once sad little
+mouth turned up instead of down and developed--I looked twice--yes,
+developed a dimple. The dull hair I always had seen brushed plainly
+back, now was parted on one side and fluffed itself across her forehead
+and about her cheeks with an astonishing effectiveness. She was attired
+in a China-blue linen frock with a scarlet sash knotted in front quite
+daringly, for Phillida.
+
+"Why, Phil, how pretty we are!" I admired.
+
+She looked up at me like a praised little girl, and smoothed the sash. I
+noticed she wore above her wedding ring that "diamond" which once had
+adorned Vere's finger so distastefully to me. It shone bravely in the
+sunlight with quite a display of fire. Tracing my gaze, she held out her
+hand for me to see.
+
+"Yes, it was his, Cousin Roger. Of course, we have not very much money
+yet, and I do not care about all the engagement rings that ever were
+thought of. But, I was afraid people up here might notice that I had
+none and think slightingly of Ethan. So I asked him, and we went to a
+jeweler, who made it smaller to fit me. It is not a false stone, you
+know. It is a white topaz, and I love it better than the biggest
+diamond."
+
+"Then you are still happy?"
+
+"Forever and ever, world without end," she answered solemnly.
+
+We went in.
+
+Sun and sweet wind had worked white magic in the long-closed house.
+Quaint furniture, no longer dust-grimed but lustrous with cleanliness
+and polish, had quite a different air. Fresh upholstery in cheerful
+tints, fresh paper on the walls, good rugs, order and daintiness
+everywhere changed the interior out of my recognition. Already the
+atmosphere of home and cheer was established.
+
+"Come see your rooms," Phillida invited, enraptured by my admiration.
+"They are so pretty!"
+
+She ran up the stairs, around the passage, and ushered me into the room
+of graceful adventure and grotesque nightmare. I stopped on the
+threshold.
+
+I had ordered the partition removed between the two chambers on this
+side, giving me one large room. This, with the little bathroom attached,
+occupied the entire large frontage of the house. This long, spacious
+room; floors covered by my Chinese rugs, walls echoing the rugs'
+smoke-blue, my piano in a bright corner, my special easychairs and
+writing-table in their due places, welcomed me with such familiar
+comfort that I could not identify the neglected chamber where I had
+slept one night in the old bed with the four pineapple-topped posts. The
+windows were opened, and white curtains with their over-draperies of
+blue silk were swinging in and out on a fresh breeze where the Horror of
+my dream had seemed to press itself against the black panes. Decidedly,
+I must have had a bad attack of indigestion that night!
+
+"See how nice?" Phillida was urging appreciation at my side. "We swung
+those lovely old hangings from the arch, so they can be drawn across the
+bedroom end of your room, if you like. Although I do not know why you
+_should_ like, everything is so pretty! Your long Venetian mirror came
+safely, and all your darling lamps. And--and I hope you like it so well,
+Cousin Roger, that you will stay here always!"
+
+When she left me alone, I walked to the different windows, contemplating
+the stretches of lawn dotted with budding apple trees and the lake that
+lay beyond shining in the sun. Was Phillida's charming wish to become a
+fact, I wondered? Could this rest and calm hold me content here, where I
+had meant merely to pause and pass on? I looked at the yellow country
+road meandering past the lake into unseen distance. Should I ever see my
+Lady of the Beautiful Tresses come that way, or travel that road to
+where she lived? If I did meet her, would she forgive me the loss of her
+braid? There would be a test for the sweetness of her disposition!
+
+When a chiming dinner-gong summoned me downstairs, I found Vere awaiting
+me beside Phillida. We shook hands, and he made some brief, pleasant
+speech about their having expected me sooner. If pale, timid Phil had
+become a surprising butterfly, Vere had taken the reverse progress
+toward the sober grub. I like him better in outing clothes, although he
+showed even more the unusual good looks which so unreasonably prejudiced
+me against him. If he felt any strain in our meeting, his slow, tranquil
+trick of speech and manner covered it. I hope I did as well! It was then
+I discovered that his wife's pet name for him fitted like a glove. She
+called him "Drawls."
+
+The luncheon was good; cooked and served by a middle-aged Swedish woman
+named Cristina. Afterward, I was conducted into the kitchen by the lady
+of the house, to view the new fittings and improvements. Most odd and
+pretty it was to see Phillida in that rôle of housewife, and to watch
+her pride in Vere and deference to him. Let me record that I never saw
+the daughter of Aunt Caroline fail in this settled course toward her
+husband. Whether it was born of revulsion from her mother's hectoring
+domestic methods, or of consciousness that outsiders might rate Vere
+below his wife in station and education, so her respect for him must
+forbid their slight, I do not know. But I never saw her oppose him or
+speak rudely to him before other people. I suppose they may have had the
+usual conjugal differings, neither of them being angelic. If so, no
+outsider ever glimpsed the fact.
+
+We spoke of nothing serious on that first day. They both showed me the
+various improvements finished or progressing, indoors or out.
+
+We dined as agreeably as we had lunched. Quite early, afterward, I
+excused myself, and left together the two who were still on their
+honeymoon.
+
+At the door of my room, I pushed a wall-switch that lighted
+simultaneously three lamps. In this I had repeated the arrangement used
+by me for years in my city apartment. I have a demand for light
+somewhere in my make-up, and no reason for not indulging it. There
+flashed out of the dusk a large lamp upon my writing-table, a tall
+floor-lamp beside the piano, and a reading-lamp on a stand beside my bed
+at the far end of the room. All three were shaded in a smoke-blue and
+rose-color effect that long since had caught my fancy for night work;
+the shades inset with imitation semi-precious stones, rough-cut things
+of sapphire, tourmaline-pink and baroque pearl.
+
+I lay emphasis upon this, to make clear how normal, serene and even
+familiar in effect was the room into which I came. Yet, as I closed the
+door behind me and stood in that softly brilliant radiance, a shudder
+shook me from head to foot with the violence of an electric shock. A
+sense of suffocation caught at my throat like an unseen hand.
+
+Both sensations were gone in the time of a drawn breath, leaving only
+astonishment in their wake. Presently I went on with the purpose that
+had brought me upstairs; lifting a portfolio to the table and beginning
+to unpack the work which I had been doing in New York. As I laid out the
+first sheets of music, there drifted to my ears that vague sound from
+the lake I had heard on my first night visit here, while I stood on the
+tumble-down porch. The sound that was like the smack of glutinous lips,
+or some creature drawing itself out of thick, viscid slime. As before, I
+wondered what movement of the shallow waters could produce that result.
+Not the tide, now, for the new dam was up and the lake cut off from Long
+Island Sound. The pouring of the waterfall flowed on as a reminder of
+that fact.
+
+The sound was not repeated. The dusk outside the windows offered nothing
+unusual to be seen. I finished my unpacking and sat down at my
+writing-table.
+
+I am not accustomed to heed time. There never has been anyone to care
+what hours I kept, and I work best at night. Midnight was long past when
+I thought of rest.
+
+I declare that I thought of nothing more; not even recalling the vague
+unease felt on entering the room. A day spent in the fresh air, followed
+by an evening of hard work and journeyings between the piano and table,
+had left me utterly weary. When I lay down, it was to sleep at once.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+     "I have made a story that hath not been heard;
+     A great feat of arms that hath not been seen!"
+                                        --AMENEMHE'ET.
+
+
+I woke slowly. It seemed that I struggled to wakefulness as a spent
+swimmer struggles toward shore. Up, up through deep poles of sleep I
+dragged myself, driven by some dimly sensed necessity. Peril had stolen
+upon me in my unconsciousness, a stalking beast. I knew that with
+nightmare certainty. It was as if my soul stood affrighted beside my
+brain, wailing upon its ally to arouse and stand with it against the
+menace. And my brain answered, but with infinite difficulty; like a
+drugged warrior who hears the clang of battle and forces numbed limbs to
+stir, arise and grasp the sword.
+
+I was awake. Suddenly; the swimmer reaching the surface!
+
+How shall I describe Fear incarnate? The Horror was at the open window
+opposite the foot of my bed, staring in upon me with slavering
+covetousness of the prey It watched. I lay there, and felt It seek for
+me across the darkness with tentacles of evil that groped for some part
+of me upon which It might lay hold.
+
+The room was still. Between the draperies, the window showed nothing to
+the eye except a dark square faintly tinged with the night luminance of
+the sky. There was nothing to see; nothing to hear. But gradually I
+became aware of a hideous odor of mould and mildew, of must and damp
+decay that loaded the air with disgust.
+
+I lay there, and opposed the approach of the Thing with all the will of
+resistance in me. The sweat poured from my whole body, so that I lay as
+in water and the drenched linen of my sleeping-suit clung coldly to me.
+
+It could not pass the defense of my will. I felt the malevolent fury of
+Its striving. Like the antennæ of some monstrous insect brushing about
+my body, I felt Its evil desires wavering about my mental self,
+examining, searching where It might seize. It had not yet found the
+weakness It sought. If It did----?
+
+The sickening, vault-like air I must breathe fought for It. So did the
+darkness. All this time, or the time that seemed so long, I had no more
+command of my body than a cataleptic patient. Every ounce of force in me
+had rushed to support the two warriors of the battle: the brain and will
+that opposed the clutching menace. But now, as I grew more and more
+fully awake, out of very loathing and danger I drew determination.
+Slowly, painfully, I began to free my right arm and hand from this
+paralysis.
+
+As I advanced in resolution, the Thing seemed to recoil. Inch by inch, I
+moved my hand across the bed toward my reading-lamp on the stand beside
+me. In proportion as I moved, the dreadful tentacles drew back and away.
+A last effort, and the chain was in my fingers. I jerked spasmodically.
+
+Rosy light from the lamp flashed over the room. All the quiet comfort of
+the place sprang into view as if to reassure me; the piano open as I had
+left it, the table strewn with my evening's work, each bit of furniture,
+each drapery or trinket undisturbed.
+
+The Thing was gone. In the hush I heard my panting breath and the tick
+of my watch on the stand. It was two o'clock in the morning. As I
+mechanically read the hour, a cock somewhere shrilled its second call
+before dawn. The Horror had been true to the legendary time of
+apparitions.
+
+Weak and chilled, I presently made an attempt to rise. But at the
+movement, a wave of sickness swept through me. The room seemed to rock
+and swing. I had just time to recognize the grip of faintness before I
+fell back on the pillow.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Vivifying sweetness was in my nostrils, which expanded avidly for this
+new air. Perfume that was a tonic, a subtle elixir; that sparkled upon
+the senses, sank suavely and healingly through me, so that I seemed to
+draw refreshment with each breath. Reluctantly, I aroused more and more
+in response to this unusual stimulant; which somehow gave delicious rest
+yet drew me from it into life.
+
+I could have sworn someone had touched me. With some exclamation on my
+lips, I started up; to find myself in darkness. The lamps I had left
+lighted burned no longer.
+
+This time there was no terror in my awakening. No Thing of nightmare
+pressed against my window-space. The fragrance persisted; the ghastly
+smell of mould and corruption was gone. But I wanted light for all that!
+Reaching for the lamp beside me on its stand, I found the little chain.
+I felt the chain draw in my fingers and heard the click that should have
+meant light; but no answering brightness sprang up.
+
+Instead, across the dark came a voice; a voice low-pitched, soft without
+weakness, keen with exultation:
+
+"Victory! Victory! You have no need of light--who conquered in darkness!
+The Enemy has fled. It has covered the Unspeakable Eyes from the eyes of
+a man. By the will of a man Its will has been forbidden. It has dragged
+Itself back to the Barrier and cowers there for this time. Oh, soldier
+on the dreadful Frontier, be proud, putting off your armor tonight! Be
+proud, and rest."
+
+Those practical people who are never unnerved by the intangible, may
+gauge if they can the weirdness of this address following my first
+experience, and then smile their contempt of me. For I confess to a
+moment of uncanny chill. The voice was that of the woman who had trailed
+her braid of hair into my grasp, the night I first slept here. But, how
+did she know of the Thing's visit to me? I had not spoken nor uttered a
+cry throughout Its visitation. How could she have knowledge of that
+silent struggle between It and me, or of my escape so narrowly won. How,
+unless she too----?
+
+I groped for a glass of water left on my stand. I drank, and felt my dry
+throat relax.
+
+"Who are you?" I asked.
+
+A sigh trembled toward me.
+
+"I am one who stands on the threshold of your beautiful world, as a
+traveler stands outside a lighted palace, gazing where she may not
+enter, and feeling the winter about her."
+
+"Do not suppose me quite a superstitious fool," I said bruskly. "You are
+a woman. The woman who left a very real braid of hair in my hands, not
+long ago, to save herself from capture!"
+
+"Yes. Yet, I am neither more nor less real than the One which came for
+you a while since."
+
+"Then my nightmare was real? A thing of flesh and blood, or clever
+mechanism? You know it. Perhaps you produced it?"
+
+The rush of my angry suspicion dashed in useless heat against her cool
+melancholy.
+
+"Real? What is real?" she challenged me. "Turn to the sciences that you
+should understand better than I, and ask. Stretch out your arm. For a
+million years men have vowed you touch empty air. They saw and felt it
+empty. But now a child knows air swarms with life. In that thin
+nothingness, crowd and move the distributors of death, disease, health,
+vigor--existence itself. The water you have just tasted is pure and
+clear in the glass? Pure? Each drop is an ocean of inhabitants clean and
+unclean. I speak commonplaces. But is there no knowledge not yet
+commonplace? Oh man, with all the unfathomed universe about us, _dare_
+you pronounce what is real?"
+
+"What is natural," I began.
+
+She interrupted me.
+
+"Doubtless what is not natural cannot and does not exist. Have you,
+then, measured Nature? He was a great thinker, one of deep knowledge,
+who compared Man to a child wandering on the shore of a vast ocean and
+picking up a pebble here and there."
+
+"Of what would you convince me? And, why?"
+
+"Of what? Danger! Why? Would you watch a man enter a jungle where some
+hideous beast crouched in ambush, while you neither warned nor armed
+him? I am here to turn you back. I am the native of that country who
+runs to cry warning to a stranger; to put into his hand the weapon of
+understanding."
+
+So solemn, so urgent a sincerity was in her voice, that again chill
+touched me. The clammy dampness of my garments hung on my limbs as a
+reminder of the Thing, real or unreal, that twice had made Its presence
+felt beyond denial. Wild as her words might be, their incredible
+suggestion was matched by my experience. I sought with my eyes for her,
+before answering. The room was dark, yet the darker bulk of furniture
+loomed out enough to be distinguishable. No figure was visible, even
+traced by the direction of her voice. I was certain that any movement to
+seek her would mean her flight.
+
+"Do you mean that you want me to go away from this place?" I questioned.
+
+The sigh came again, just audibly.
+
+"Yes. Why should you die?"
+
+Was I wrong in fancying the sigh regretful? Did I not hear a wistful
+reluctance in her tone? Excitement ran along my veins like burning oil
+on flowing water. The woman hidden in the dark, the association of her
+voice with the strange, exquisite fragrance I breathed, the thought of
+beauty in her born of that lovely braid of hair I had seized--all
+blended in a spell of human magic. I have said I was a man much alone,
+and a lame man who craved adventure.
+
+"Just now," I said, "you spoke of some victory. You called me--soldier."
+
+"Is it not victory to have driven back the Dark One? Is he not a soldier
+who, aroused in the night to meet dreadful assault, sets his face to the
+enemy and battles front to front? Before the Eyes men and women have
+died or lost reason, or fled across half the world, broken by fear. What
+are the wars of man with man, compared with a man's battle against the
+Unknown? I honor you! I salute you! But--soldier alone on the forbidden
+Frontier, go! Join your fellows in the world alloted to you; live, nor
+seek to tread where mankind is not sent."
+
+"How can there be wrong in facing a situation that I did not cause?"
+
+"There is no wrong. There is danger."
+
+"What danger?" I persisted.
+
+"Can you ask me?" she retorted with a hint of impatience. "You who have
+felt Its grope toward your inner spirit?"
+
+I shuddered, remembering the brush of those antennæ, exploring,
+examining! But I persisted, beyond my every-day nature. Her speech was
+for me like that liquor distilled from honey that inflamed the Norsemen
+to war fury.
+
+"You say I came off victor," I reminded her.
+
+"Yes. But can you conquer again, and again, and again? Will you not feel
+strength fail, health break, madness creep close? Will you not be worn
+down by the Thing that knows no weariness and fall its prey at last?"
+
+"It will come--often?"
+
+"Until one conquers, It will come."
+
+I forced away a qualm of panic.
+
+"How can you know?" I demanded.
+
+"Ask me not. I do know."
+
+"But, look here!" I argued. "If as you say, this creature was not meant
+to meet mankind, how can It come after me this way?"
+
+She seemed to pause, finally answering with reluctance:
+
+"Because, two centuries ago one of the race of man here broke through
+the awful Barrier that rears a wall between human kind and those dark
+forms of life to which It belongs. For know that a human will to evil
+can force a breach in that Barrier, which those on the other side never
+could pass without such aid."
+
+I neither understood nor believed. At least, I told myself that I did
+not believe her wild, legendary explanation of the nightmare Thing that
+visited me. I did not want to believe. Neither did I wish to offend her
+by saying so!
+
+"You will go," she presently mistook my silence for surrender. "You are
+wise as well as brave. Good go with you! Good walk beside you in that
+happy world where you live!"
+
+"Wait!" I cried sharply. Her voice had seemed to recede from me, a
+retreating whisper at the last word. "No! I will not go. I must--I will
+know more of you. You are no phantom. Who are you? Where--when can I see
+you in daylight?"
+
+"Never."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"I came to hold a light before the dreadful path. The warning is given."
+
+"But you will come again?"
+
+"Never."
+
+"What? The Thing will come, and not you?"
+
+"What have I to do with It, who am more helpless before It than you? Go;
+and give thanks that you may."
+
+"Listen," I commanded, as firmly as I could. "I am not going away from
+this house without better reason. All this is too sudden and too new to
+me. If you have more knowledge than I, you have no right to desert me
+half-convinced of what I should do."
+
+"I can stay no longer."
+
+"Why can you not come again?"
+
+"You plan to trap me," she reproached.
+
+"No. Word of honor! You shall come and go as you please; I will not make
+a movement toward you."
+
+"Not try--to see me, even?" she hesitated.
+
+"Not even that, if you forbid."
+
+There was a long pause.
+
+"Perhaps----" drifted to me, a faint distant word on the wind that had
+begun to stir the tree-branches and flutter through my room.
+
+She was gone. There sounded a click whose meaning did not at once strike
+me, intent as I was upon the girl. Twice I spoke to her, receiving no
+reply, before judging that I might rise without breaking my promise.
+Then I recognized the click of a moment before, as that of the electric
+switch beside my door. No doubt she had turned off my lights at her
+entrance and now restored them. I pulled the chain of my reading-lamp,
+and this time light flashed over the room.
+
+I had known no one would be there, and no one was. Yet I was
+disappointed.
+
+As I drew on my dressing-gown I heard a clock downstairs strike four.
+Not a breath or a step stirred in the house. The damp freshness of
+coming dawn crept in my windows, bringing scents of tansy and
+bitter-sweet from the fields to strive against the unknown fragrance in
+my room. The melancholy depression of the hour weighed upon me. Beneath
+the gentle strife of sweet odors, my nostrils seemed to detect a lurking
+foulness of mould and decay.
+
+I sat down at my desk, to wait beside the lamp for the coming of
+sunrise.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+     "For it is well known that Peris and such delicate beings live upon
+     sweet odours as food; but all evil spirits abominate
+     perfumes."--ORIENTAL MYTHOLOGY.
+
+
+The breakfast bell, or rather Phillida's Chinese chimes, merrily
+summoned me to the dining-room; a homely spell to exercise the phantoms
+of the night.
+
+My little cousin, rosy beyond belief, trim in white middy blouse and
+blue skirt, was already in her place behind the coffeepot. Vere sat
+opposite her at the round table. They were holding hands across the
+rolls and bacon and eggs, their glances interlocked in a shining content
+that made my solitariness rather drab and dull to my own contemplation.
+At my clumsy step the picture dissolved, of course. Vere rose while
+Phillida welcomed me to my chair and went into a young housewife's
+pretty solicitude about my fruit and hot eggs.
+
+The sun glinted across the table. The very servant had a smiling air of
+enjoying the occasion. I never had a more pleasant breakfast. A big
+brindle cat purred on the window-sill beside Phillida; no dainty Persian
+or Angora, but a battered veteran whose nicked ears and scarred tail
+proved him a battling cat of ring experience.
+
+"I planned to have a wee white kitten," Phil explained, while putting a
+saucer of milk before the feline tough. "One that would wear a ribbon,
+you know. You remember, Cousin Roger, how Mother always forbade pets
+because she believed animals carry germs? I meant to have a puss, if
+ever I had a home of my own. This one just walked into the kitchen on
+the first day we came here. Ethan said it was a lucky sign when a cat
+came to a new home. He gave it the meat out of his sandwiches that we
+had brought for lunch, and it stayed. So I decided to keep it instead of
+a kitten. It really is more cat!"
+
+What footing was here for dreary terrors? In a mirror across the room I
+glimpsed my own countenance looking quite as usual. No over-night white
+hairs appeared; no upstanding look such as the legend gave to Sir
+Sintram after he met the Little Master.
+
+After the meal, Vere asked me to walk over to the lake with him.
+
+We strolled through the old orchard toward the dam. This was my side of
+the house. In passing, I looked up at the window against which the Thing
+had seemed to press Itself with sickening lust for me. Phillida was
+framed in the open square, and shook a dustcloth at us by way of
+greeting and evidence of her busyness.
+
+The wide, shallow lake lay almost without movement, except at the head
+of the dam. There the water poured over with foam and tumult, an
+amber-brown cataract some twenty-odd feet across, to rush on below in a
+winding stream that grew calmer as it flowed.
+
+"We must put our lake in order, Vere," I observed, as we stood on a
+knoll at the head of the dam. "All this growth of rank vegetation ought
+to be pulled up, the banks graded and turfed perhaps, the bottom cleaned
+up. Water-lilies would look better than cat-tails."
+
+To my surprise, he did not assent. Instead, he set his foot on a boulder
+and rested his arm upon his knee; looking into the clear water.
+
+"Mr. Locke, I just about hate saying what I have to," he told me in his
+sober, leisurely fashion. "I expect you won't like it; not at all.
+Well--best said before you get deeper in. I can't see my way to make
+farming this place pay."
+
+I was bitterly disappointed. Even at the worst estimate of Vere, I had
+imagined he would stick the thing out a little longer than this. Poor
+Phillida's time of happiness should have lasted more than these few
+weeks. But the call of New York, of the "lounge lizard's" ease and
+unhealthy excitement had won already, it seemed. I said nothing at all.
+The blow was too sore.
+
+"There are too few acres of arable land, and they're used up," Vere was
+continuing. "I've seen plenty of impoverished, run-out farms in New
+England. You could pour money into the soil out of a gold pitcher these
+five years to come, before it began to pay you back. And then your money
+might better have been put anywhere in bank, for profit! I saw that, the
+first week here. Since then I've been looking around for something
+better to do."
+
+"And have found it, of course," I said bitingly. "Or else you would be
+drawing your salary as manager and saying nothing to me of all this!
+Well, where does poor Phil go, and when?"
+
+He turned his dark-curled head and regarded me with calm surprise.
+
+"I didn't exactly know that my wife was going anywhere, Mr. Locke."
+
+"What? You do not mean to leave the farm?"
+
+"Not unless you're tired of our bargain. I've been calculating how to
+make it pay. That won't be by planting corn and potatoes and taking a
+wagon-load into town! If you think I'm wrong, call in any practical man
+who knows this sort of business. We've got to think closer to win here.
+That's why I'd like to set the lake to work instead of just prettying it
+up."
+
+"The lake, Vere? There isn't enough water-power over the dam to do any
+more than run a toy, is there?"
+
+He motioned me nearer to where he stood gazing down.
+
+"Notice what kind of water this is, Mr. Locke? Brown like forest water,
+sort of green-lighted because the bottom is like turf; neither mud nor
+sand, but a kind of under-water moss? You see? It's pure and clean, with
+a little fishy smell about it. Matter of fact, it is forest water! Comes
+from way off yonder, the stream does, before it spreads out into our
+lake, here. I borrowed a boat and followed back two miles before it got
+too shallow for me. Boys have caught trout here three times since I've
+been watching."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"My father was fish-warden in our district. I learned the business. If
+you're willing, I can start some trout-raising that ought to pay well.
+You know, the State is glad to help game preserving, free."
+
+He proceeded to give me a brief lecture on the subject, in his quiet,
+unpretentious manner; producing notes and diagrams from his pockets. He
+had written to various authorities and exhibited their replies. He knew
+exactly what the State would do, what he himself must do, and what
+investment of money would be required. I listened to him in admiration
+and astonishment.
+
+From fish raising, he went on to discuss each acre of the farm; its best
+use in view of its situation, condition, and our needs. We could afford
+so much labor, it appeared, and no more. We must have certain apparatus;
+methodically listed with prices. If we used a certain sheltered south
+field for a peach orchard, the trees planted should be such an age and
+have giant-powder blast deep beds for them in order that they might soon
+bear fruit.
+
+When at last he ended his deceptive speech that sounded so lazy while
+implying so much energy, and turned his black eyes from the papers on
+his knee to my face, I had been routed long since.
+
+"Vere," I said abruptly, "did you know that I thought you were going to
+desert the farm, when you began to speak?"
+
+He nodded.
+
+"Yes, I guess so. You don't exactly like me; haven't had any occasion
+to! You don't judge me a fit match for your cousin. Well, neither would
+anyone else, yet!"
+
+He began to gather his papers together, his attention divided with them
+while he finished his answer:
+
+"There will be plenty of time before that 'yet' runs out. Mighty
+pleasant time, thanks to you, Mr. Locke! Phillida and I expect to enjoy
+building things up as much as we'll enjoy it after they're all built.
+Meantime, I prize what you're doing all the more because I know how you
+feel. Now, if you'd be interested to look over these plans or submit
+them to someone you've confidence in, for inspection, I'll just turn
+them over to you."
+
+He had so accurately measured me that I was disconcerted. It was quite
+true that he was compelling my respect, while my first dislike of him
+still obstinately lurked in the background of my mind. I felt
+ungenerous, but I would not lie to him.
+
+"I am a queer fellow, Vere," I said. "Leave that to time, as you say! As
+for the plans, they are far beyond my scope. A city man, it has been my
+way to 'phone for an expert when anything was to be done, or to buy what
+I fancied and pay the bills. In this case, you are the expert. The plans
+seem brilliant to me. Certainly they are moderate in cost. Keep them,
+and carry them out as soon as that may be done. You are master here, not
+I."
+
+We walked back together through the sun and freshness of the early
+spring morning. As we neared the house Phillida's voice hailed us. She
+was at my window again, leaning out with her hair wind-ruffled about her
+face.
+
+"Cousin Roger," she summoned me, "I have found out what makes your room
+as sweet as a garden of spices. See what it is to be a composer
+completely surrounded by royalties, able to buy the most gorgeous scents
+to lay on one's pillow! And all enclosed in antique gold!"
+
+She held up some small object that shone in the sunlight. "Throw it
+down," I begged, startled into excitement.
+
+She complied, laughing. Vere sprang forward, but I made a quicker step
+and caught the thing.
+
+It was one of those filigree balls of gold wrought into openwork, about
+the size of a walnut, that fine ladies used to wear swung from a chain
+or ribbon and call a pomander. The toy held a chosen perfume or essence
+supposed to be reviving in case miladi felt a swoon or megrim about to
+overwhelm her; as ladies did in past centuries and do no longer.
+
+Whose gentle pity had brought this pomander to my pillow, to help me
+from that faintness which had followed my struggle with the Thing? Whose
+was the exquisite, individual fragrance contained in the ball I held? I
+had a vision of a figure, surely light and soft of movement, haloed with
+such matchless hair as the braid I had captured, stealing step by timid
+step across my room; within my reach while I lay inert. Perhaps her face
+had bent near mine in her doubt of my life or death; hidden eyes had
+studied me in the scanty starlight.
+
+Oh, for Ethan Vere's good looks and athlete's grace, to lure my lady
+from her masquerade!
+
+"Where did you buy it, Cousin Roger? 'Fess up!" Phillida's merry voice
+coaxed me.
+
+"It was given to me," I slowly answered. "I cannot offer it to you,
+Phil. But I will buy any other pretty thing you fancy, instead, next
+time I go to town."
+
+She made a gesture of disclaim.
+
+"I did not mean _that_! Only, do tell me what the perfume is?"
+
+"I was going to ask if you knew."
+
+"No. Something very expensive and imported, I suppose. Perhaps whoever
+gave it to you had it made for herself alone, as some wealthy women do.
+It is the most clinging, yet delicately refreshing scent I ever met."
+
+"Tuberose," suggested Vere.
+
+"Drawls, no. How can you? Like an old-fashioned funeral!" she cried.
+
+"Tuberose didn't always go to funerals," he corrected her teasingly, as
+she made a face at him. "I remember them growing in my Aunt Bathsheba's
+garden. Creamy looking posies, kind of kin to a gardenia, seems to me!
+Thick-petalled, like white plush, and holding their sweet smell
+everlastingly. But Mr. Locke's perfumery isn't just that, either. There
+was something else grew in that garden--I can't call to mind what I
+mean. Basil, maybe?"
+
+"The basil plant, that feeds on dead men's brains," quoted Phil with a
+mock shiver. "You _are_ happy in your ideals, Drawls!"
+
+He laughed.
+
+"Well, that garden smelled pretty fine when the dew was just warming up
+in the sun, mornings--and so does this little gilt ball! I'll guess Mr.
+Locke's lady never got it from France. Smells like old New England."
+
+There was no reason why a vague chill should creep over me, or the
+sunshine seem to darken as if a thin veil drifted between me and the
+surrounding brightness. Let me say again that no place could have been
+more unlike the traditional haunted house. There hung about it no sense
+of morbidity or depression. Yet, what was I to think? I was not sick or
+mad; and the Thing had come to me twice. I turned from the married
+lovers and made my way to the veranda, where I might be alone to
+consider the pomander whose perfume was like a diaphanous presence
+walking beside me.
+
+Seated there, in one of the deep willow-chairs Phillida had cushioned in
+peacock chintz and marked especially mine by laying my favorite
+magazines on its arm, I studied my new trophy of the night. There was a
+satisfaction in its material solidity. It was real enough, resting in my
+palm.
+
+Yes; but it was not ordinary among its quaint kind! As I picked out the
+design of the gold-work, that fact was borne in upon my mind. Here was
+no pattern of scroll or blossom or cupids and hearts. The small sphere
+was belted with the signs of the Zodiac, beautiful in minute perfection.
+All the rest of the globe was covered with lace-fine work repeating one
+group of characters over and over. I was not learned enough to tell what
+the characters were, but the whole plainly belonged to those strange,
+outcast academies of astrology, alchemy--magic, in short. It contained
+what appeared to be a pinkish ball; originally a scented paste rolled
+round and dried, I judged by peering through the interstices of the
+gold.
+
+Had the old-world trinket been left to bewilder me? Why, and by whom?
+What interest had my lady of the dark in elaborately deceiving me? Why
+muffle her identity in mystery? Why the indefinable quaintness of
+language, the choice of words that made her speech so different from
+even the college-bred Phillida's?
+
+She urged me to leave the house. If she, or anyone associated with her
+wanted the place left vacant for some reason, why did not the Thing and
+the warning come to others of our household group? Vere, Phillida, the
+Swedish woman, Cristina--all had lived here for weeks without any
+experiences like mine. I had not been told to leave my room, but the
+house. The danger, then, was only for me?
+
+Well, was I to run away, hands over my eyes, at the first alarm?
+
+The gray cat came purring about me and presently leaped upon my knee. On
+impulse, I offered the pomander to its nostrils. The unwinking yellow
+eyes shut, the beast's powerful claws closed and unclosed with
+convulsive pleasure, it breathed with that thirsty eagerness for the
+scent so familiar to my own senses.
+
+"Better than catnip, Bagheera?" I questioned. "You wouldn't bolt from
+it, either, would you?"
+
+Phillida's battered pet relaxed luxuriously, by way of answer, sniffed
+toward the hand I withdrew, and composed itself to sleep. I put the
+pomander in my waistcoat pocket.
+
+I could not deny as mere nightmare the Thing which had visited me.
+Better confront that fact! It was real. Only, real in what sense? What
+human agency could produce an effect so frightful, an illusion so
+hideous that I could scarcely bear to recall it here in full daylight,
+without the use of a sight or sound to confuse the brain?
+
+Had the girl told the truth in her wild explanation? A truth hinted at
+by alchemists, Pythagoreans, Rosicrucians, pale students of sorcery and
+magnificent charlatans, these many centuries? Were there other races
+between earth and heaven; strange tribes of the middle spaces whose
+destinies were fixed and complete as our own, but between whose lives
+and ours were fixed barriers not to be crossed? Had I met one of these
+beings, inimical to man as a cobra, intelligent as man, hunting Its
+victim by methods unknown to us?
+
+Was I a cheated fool, or a pioneer on the borders of a new country?
+
+Could I meet that Thing tonight, and tomorrow night? Could I bear the
+agony of Its presence, the stench of death and corruption that was Its
+atmosphere? At the mere memory my forehead grew wet.
+
+The postman's buggy had stopped at our mailbox. Phillida ran down to
+meet the event of the morning. Her laughing chatter came back to me
+while she waited, fists thrust in middy pockets, for the old man to sort
+our letters from his bags. It did not appear so hard to make a woman
+happy, I mused. A man might attempt it with hope, if he could but
+persuade her to try him.
+
+My lady had promised to come again. Perhaps, with patience----?
+
+Phillida came across the lawn with an armful of gaudy-covered catalogues
+and a handful of letters.
+
+"Catalogues for Ethan; letters for you," she called in advance of her
+arrival. "What an important person you are, Cousin Roger! It always
+gives me a quivery thrill to realize _who_ you are as well as how nice
+you are. Now, isn't that a jumbled speech to tumble out of me?"
+
+I took her tanned little hand along with the letters; letters that were
+so many voices summoning me back to pleasant, busy Manhattan.
+
+"It is a fine speech for a humble person to answer, Phil! But does that
+sort of thing matter to you women? What do you love Vere for, at bottom?
+Because he is strong and supple and has curly hair? No?" as she shook
+her head. "Because he has worn the uniform, then; proved his courage in
+war at sea? Because he had the glamour about him of real adventure and
+cabaret glitter? Or because he took you away from a life you hated? Or,
+perhaps, because he is kind and loves you? No! For none of these
+reasons? Why, then, love Ethan Vere?"
+
+She stopped vigorously shaking her head in repeated denial, and smiled
+at me triumphantly.
+
+"Because he _is_ Ethan Vere," she promptly responded. "Oh, Cousin Roger,
+you clever people are so stupid! It would not make any difference at all
+if Drawls were ugly, or never had been a sailor, or could not skate or
+do things, or had not been able to make me happy. It is something very
+much bigger than all that!"
+
+"And all the divorce courts, Phil? The breach of promise suits, and the
+couples who make each other miserable?"
+
+"But they never had anything," she said. "Perhaps they will have it,
+some day. Don't you know, Cousin Roger, that the most important things
+in the world are those most people never know about?"
+
+I was not sure whether I knew that, or not. After last night, I was not
+sure of many things. Still, if such gifts were given as she believed, if
+it was merely a question of being Ethan Vere--or Roger Locke----?
+
+But I had never seriously considered leaving the adventure.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+     "The heart is a small thing, but desireth great matters. It is not
+     sufficient for a kite's dinner, yet the whole world is not
+     sufficient for it."--HUGO DE ANIMA.
+
+
+That evening Vere and I settled the business details of the developments
+he had planned. Also while we three were quietly together, I launched a
+discussion that had been gathering in my mind all day while I watched
+Phillida.
+
+"You are doing as efficient work as Vere," I told her. "In fact, you are
+a most moderate pair! I gave you an open bank account, Phil; and you
+have furnished the house for so little that I am amazed. And it is all
+so gay, so freshly pretty! Being an ignorant man, the details are beyond
+me. But--one servant? Aren't you working yourself too hard? I had
+expected you to need several. Of course, we are not counting Vere's
+outdoor force."
+
+She turned in her low chair beside the lamp and glanced toward the
+window behind her, before replying. I noticed the action, because a
+moment before Vere had turned precisely the same way.
+
+"It is good of you to think of those things, Cousin Roger," she
+declared. "But, I want to be a real wife to Drawls. I do, indeed! And I
+have it all to learn because I was not brought up for that. Look at this
+dish-towel I am hemming. Cristina would laugh at the stitches if she
+dared, yet they are better than when I began. Some day I shall sew fine
+things. So it is with all my housekeeping. I think we should begin as we
+mean to go on, so I have furnished the house for--us. Perhaps if it had
+been for you alone, I should have chosen satin-wood and tapestry instead
+of willow and cretonne. The same way about Cristina. If Ethan and I are
+to save and earn this lovely place, as you offered, we cannot afford
+more than one maid. You understand what I am trying to explain, don't
+you?"
+
+"Yes," I assented. "Surely! What were you looking for, just now, behind
+you?"
+
+"I? Oh, nothing! I just fancied someone had passed by the window and
+stared in. I can't imagine what made me fancy that. Unless the cat----"
+She hesitated.
+
+"Bagheera is asleep under Mr. Locke's chair," Vere observed casually.
+
+"Truly, Cousin Roger, I love the way we are living," she resumed. "It is
+very miserable of me, I daresay, not to be more intellectual after all
+Father and Mother labored with me. But it is so! I want to live this way
+all my life; to be busy, and plan things with Ethan, and make them come
+true together."
+
+Under cover of the table she put her hand into Vere's, and silence held
+us a little while. I watched Bagheera the cat, who sat beside my chair
+staring with unblinking yellow eyes toward the window across the room.
+Did I imagine a slight uneasiness in those eyes, a wary readiness in
+gathered limbs and muscles bulking under the old cat's scant fur? Now
+the tail twitched with a lashing movement.
+
+Presently Bagheera looked away and relaxed. A moment more, and he curled
+down, composing himself to sleep.
+
+"You like the place, Phil?" I questioned. "You do not find it lonely
+here, or in any way depressing?"
+
+The candor of her surprise told me that no dweller between the worlds
+had visited her.
+
+"Cousin Roger? This darling house? Why?"
+
+I passed that question safely, and after a few minutes bade them
+good-night. They had a fashion of gazing at one another that made it a
+matter of necessary kindness to leave them alone together.
+
+As I made my solitary way upstairs, I will not deny a growing
+excitement, or that dread fought with my resolution. Who would keep
+tryst with me tonight? The Horror or the lady? Both; as each time
+before? If so, which one would come first, and what might be my measure
+of success or failure? If some trick were being played upon me, I meant
+to pluck it out of the mystery.
+
+The quietly pleasant room received me without a hint of the unusual. I
+lighted the lamps and sat down to my work.
+
+The house was still by ten o'clock, all lights out except mine. At
+midnight I lay down in the dark, the pomander under my pillow. Whether I
+put the gold ball there from sentiment, or from some absurd fancy about
+its perfume and mystic carving being somehow a talisman against evil, or
+because I feared the trinket might be taken from me during the night, I
+should be troubled to answer. I did place it there, and lay lapped in
+its sweet odor while the moments dragged past; heavy, slow-footed
+moments of strain and dreadful expectation scarcely relieved by a hope
+uneasy as fear.
+
+The cock crowed for the first hour; and for the second. I slept, at
+last. When I awoke, level sun-rays were striking across the world.
+
+Nothing had happened.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+     "These Macedonians are a rude and clownish people that call a spade
+     a spade."--PLUTARCH.
+
+
+Next morning, I took my car and began a systematic investigation of the
+neighborhood. There proved to be few houses within reasonable distance
+where such a woman as my lady could be lodged. However, I made my
+cautious inquiries even where the quest seemed useless, resolved to
+leave no chance untried. No better plan occurred to me than exhibition
+of the pomander with a vague story of wishing to return it to a young
+lady with red-gold hair. But nowhere did a native show recognition of
+the top or the description.
+
+On my way home I overtook a familiar, travel-stained buggy that inspired
+me with a fresh disrespect for my own abilities. Why had I not put my
+question to our rural mail deliverer in the beginning? Surely here was a
+man who knew everyone and went everywhere!
+
+The old white horse rolled placid eyes toward the car that drew up
+beside it, then returned to cropping the young grass by the roadside.
+The postman looked up from the leather sack open before him, and nodded
+to me.
+
+"Morning, Mr. Locke," he greeted. "Now let me get the right stuff into
+this here box, an' I'll sort your family's right out for you. There's a
+sample package of food sworn to make hens lay or kill 'em, for Cliff
+Brown here, that's gone to the bottom of the bag. I don't know but
+Cliff's poultry'd thank me to leave it be! Up it's got to come, though!"
+
+"Will it make them lay?" I asked, watching the ruddy old face peering
+into the sack.
+
+"I guess it might, if Cliff told 'em they'd have to lay or eat it,
+judgin' from the smell that sample's put in my bag."
+
+"Not as sweet as this?" I suggested, and leaned across to lay the
+pomander in his gnarled hand.
+
+The familiar expression of acute, almost greedy pleasure flowed into his
+face. His nostrils expanded with eager intake of the perfume that seemed
+an elixir of delight. He said nothing, absorbed in sensation.
+
+"Do you know of a lady who wears that scent?" I asked. "A lady with
+bright fair hair, colored like copper-bronze?"
+
+"Not I!" he denied briefly.
+
+"No one at all like that--with hair warmer in shade than ordinary gold
+color, and a lot of it?"
+
+"No. Not around here, nor anywhere I've been! What do you call this
+perfumery, Mr. Locke?"
+
+"I have no idea," I answered, sharply disappointed. "No one knows except
+the young lady I am trying to find. Are you sure you cannot help me at
+all? There is no newcomer in the neighborhood, no visitor at any house
+who might be the one I am looking for?"
+
+He shook his head, giving back the pomander with marked reluctance.
+
+"No one who might be able to tell more than yourself?" I persisted.
+
+A gleam of humor lit his eyes. He dropped a cardboard cylinder into Mr.
+Clifford Brown's mailbox and began to sort out my letters.
+
+"Far as that goes, I guess Mis' Hill don't miss much of what goes on
+around here. When she hears a good bit of tattle, she has her husband
+hitch up, and she goes drivin' all day. Ain't a house she knows that
+don't get to hear the whole yarn! You know Mis' Royal Hill? Mis' Vere
+gets butter and cheese from her. Might ask her!"
+
+I thanked him and drove on.
+
+Mrs. Hill, garrulous wife of the farmer who owned the place next to
+ours, was on her porch when I came to a halt before the house. She
+granted me more interest than the other natives upon whom I had called
+that morning; inviting me into her parlor to "set," when she had
+identified me. But she knew nothing of the object of my quest.
+
+"I guessed you must be the new owner up to the Michell place," she
+observed, her beady, faded brown eyes busy with my appearance, picking
+up details in avid, darting little glances suggestive of a bird pecking
+crumbs. "Cliff Brown said a lame feller had bought it. I don't see as
+that little limp cripples you much, the way you can rampus 'round in
+that fast automobile of yours! Now, I'm perfectly sound, and I wouldn't
+be paid to drive the thing. You'd ought to get the other fellow to run
+it for you; the handsome one. I guess you like to do it, though? Writer,
+ain't you? Books or newspapers?"
+
+I rallied my scattered faculties to answer the machine-gun attack.
+
+"Music?" she echoed, her narrow, sun-dried face wrinkling into new lines
+of inquisitiveness. "They said you had a piano in your bedroom, but I
+thought they were just foolin' me! Seems I never heard of havin' a piano
+upstairs. Most folks like to show 'em off in the parlor. Must be kind of
+funny, takin' your company upstairs to play for 'em. But then it's kind
+of a funny thing for a man to take to, anyhow! I got a niece ten years
+old next August who can play piano so good there don't seem anythin'
+left to learn her, so----! But there ain't no use of you drivin' 'round
+here lookin' for a fair-headed girl, Mr. Locke. The Slav folk down in
+the shanties by the post road are about the only light-complected ones
+in this neighborhood. Somehow, we run mostly to plain brown. Senator
+Allen has two girls, but they're only home from a boardin' school for
+vacation. How do you like your place?"
+
+"Very much," I assured her. "Only, I do not know a great deal about it,
+yet. Its history, I mean. Are there any interesting stories about the
+house? You know, we city people like a nice legend or ghost story to
+tell our friends when they come to visit us."
+
+She chuckled, swinging in her plush-covered rocking-chair, arms folded
+on her meagre breast.
+
+"Guess you'll have to make one up! I never heard of none. The Michell
+family always owned it--and they were so stiff respectable an' upright
+everyone was scared of 'em! Most of the men were clergymen in their
+time. The last, Reverend Cotton Mather Michell, went abroad to foreign
+parts for missionary work with the heathen, twenty-odd years ago; an'
+died there. He never married, so the family's run out. The Michells were
+awful hard on women; called 'em vessels of wrath an' beguilers of Adam.
+Preached it right out of the pulpit--so I guess no girl in these parts
+could have been hired to wed with him, if he'd wanted. His mother died
+when he was born, so he'd had no softenin' influence. After news came of
+his death, the house was shut up 'till you bought it. My, how you've
+changed it, already! I'd admire to go through it."
+
+When I had invited her to call on Phillida and inspect our domicile, and
+paid due thanks for information received, she followed me out to the
+car.
+
+"All this land 'round here is old and full of Indian relics," she
+remarked. "Over to the Sound where the swamps used to be, there was lots
+of fightin' with savages. An' they say a witch was stoned to death where
+the Catholic convent stands now, on the road up above your place. So I
+guess you can figure out a story to tell your company, if you like."
+
+"A convent?" I repeated, my attention caught by a new possibility. "Do
+they, perhaps, have visitors there, ladies in retreat for a time, as
+convents often do abroad?"
+
+Mrs. Hill laughed, shaking her tightly-combed head.
+
+"No hope of your girl there," she chuckled. "They're the strictest
+sisterhood in America, folks say. Poor Clares, I think they're called.
+No one, not even their relations, ever see their faces after they join.
+They're not allowed to talk to each other, even. Just stay in their
+cells, an' pray, even in the middle of the night, an' shave their heads
+an' live on a few vegetables an' dry bread."
+
+I laughed with her. Certainly no convent would harbor my lady of
+marvelous tresses and magical perfume, of wild fancies and heretical
+theories. That thought of mine was indeed far afield. But where, then,
+was I next to seek?
+
+I made a detour and used some strategy to gain a view of the Senator's
+daughters. They proved to be brunettes who wore their locks cropped
+after the fashion of certain Greenwich villagers. My disappointment was
+not great; my lady was not suggestive of a boarding-school miss. But I
+had hoped to find somewhere a trace of the copper-bronze head whose
+royalty of hair I had shorn as the traitors shore King Childeric's
+Gothic locks.
+
+I drove home with a sense of blankness upon me. Suppose she never came
+again? Suppose the episode was ended? Not even freedom from the Thing
+could compensate for the baffled adventure.
+
+Think of the lame feller with an Adventure!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+     "Plato expresses four kinds of Mania--Firstly, the musical;
+     secondly, the telestic or mystic; thirdly, the prophetic; and
+     fourthly, that which belongs to Love."--PREFACE TO ZANONI.
+
+
+For myself, I have always found that excitement stimulates imagination.
+There are others, I know, who can do no creative work except when all
+within and without is lulled and calm. Perhaps I have too much calm as
+an ordinary thing! That evening, when I went to my room, lighted my
+lamps and closed my door, I stood alone for awhile breathing the mingled
+sweetness of the country air and the pomander ball. In that interval,
+there came to me, complete and whole as a gift thrust into my hand, the
+melody which an enthusiastic publisher since assured me has reached
+every ear in America.
+
+As to that extravagant statement, I can only measure by the preposterous
+amount of money the melody has brought me. Perhaps there is a magic
+about it. For myself, I cannot hear it--ground on a street-organ, given
+on the stage, played on a phonograph record or delicately rendered by an
+orchestra--without feeling again the exaltation and enchantment of that
+night.
+
+I flung myself down at my writing-table, tossing my former work right
+and left to make room for this. If it should escape before I could set
+it down! If the least of those airy cadences should be lost!
+
+At three o'clock in the morning I came back to realization of time and
+place. The composition was finished; it stood up before me like a flower
+raised over-night. Eight hours had passed since I sat down to the work,
+after dinner. I was tired. As I began to draw into a pile the sheets of
+paper I had covered with notes, weariness gripped me like a hand.
+
+Eight hours? If I had shoveled in a ditch twice that long I could have
+felt no more exhausted. Yielding to drained fatigue of mind and body, I
+dropped my head upon the arms I folded upon the table. My hot, strained
+eyes closed with relief, my stiff fingers relaxed. Rest and content
+flowed over me; my work was done, and good.
+
+Rest passed into sleep, no doubt.
+
+The sleep could not have been long, for not many hours remained before
+dawn. When I started awake and lifted my head, I found the room in
+darkness. A perfume was in the air, and the sense of a presence scarcely
+more tangible than the perfume. Even in the first dazed moment, I knew
+my lady had come again.
+
+"Do not rise!" her murmuring voice cautioned me. "Unless you wish me to
+go?"
+
+"No!"
+
+"I am here because I promised to come. It was not wise of you to ask
+that of me."
+
+"Then I prefer folly to wisdom," I answered, steadying myself to full
+wakefulness. "Or, rather, I am not sure that you can decide for me which
+is which!"
+
+"Why? After all, why? Just--curiosity?"
+
+"You, who speak so learnedly of magic and sorcery," I retorted, smiling
+under cover of the darkness, "have you never heard of the white magic
+conjured by a tress of hair, a perfume ball, and a voice sweeter than
+the perfume? An image of wax does not melt before a witch's fire so
+easily as a man before these things."
+
+"My hair pleased you?" she questioned naïvely.
+
+"Or so easily as a woman melts before admiration!" I supplemented. "I am
+delighted to prove you human, mystic lady. Please me? Could anyone fail
+to be pleased with that most magnificent braid? But how can either you
+or I forgive the cruelty that took it from its owner? Why did you cut it
+off?"
+
+"So little of it! And I did not know you, then."
+
+"Little? That braid?"
+
+"It reached below my knee, now it is but little less," she answered with
+indifference. "We all have such hair."
+
+I gasped. My imagination painted the picture of all that shining
+richness enwrapping a slim young body. It was fantastic beyond belief to
+sit there at my desk, beneath my fingers the tools of sober, workaday
+life, and stare into the dark room that held the reality of my vision.
+She was there, but I could not rise and find her. She was opposite my
+eyes, but my promise forbade me to touch the lamp and see her.
+
+"Who are 'we'?" I slowly followed her last sentence.
+
+A sigh answered me. On the silence, a memory floated to me of the story
+she had told while I held her prisoner that first night:
+
+"_The woman sits in her low chair. The fire-shine is bright in her eyes
+and in her hair. On either side, her hair flows down to the floor._"
+
+Yes, by legend young witches had such hair; sylphs, undines and all of
+the airy race of Lilith. I thrust absurdities away from me and offered a
+quotation to fill the pause:
+
+  "'I met a lady in the meads'
+    'Full beautiful; a faery's child.'
+  'Her hair was long, her foot was light,'
+    'And her eyes were wild.'"
+
+She did not laugh, or put away the suggestion. When I had decided that
+she did not mean to reply, and was seeking my mind for new speech to
+detain her with me, she finally spoke what seemed another quotation:
+
+"'A spirit--one of the invisible inhabitants of this planet, neither
+departed souls nor angels; concerning whom Josephus and Michael Psellus
+of Constantinople may be consulted. They are very numerous, and there is
+no climate or element without one or more.' Have you read the writings
+of the learned Jew or of the Platonist, you who are so very bold?"
+
+"Neither," I meekly admitted. "But neither ancient gentleman could
+convince me that you are unhuman."
+
+Her answer was just audible:
+
+"Not I--but, It!"
+
+Now I was silenced, for dreadful and uncanny was that whisper in the
+dark to a man who had met here in this room What I had met.
+
+"Tell me more of this Thing without a name," I urged, mastering my
+reluctance to evoke even the idea of what the blood curdled to recall.
+"Why does It hate me?"
+
+"What can I tell you? Even in your world, does not evil hate good as
+naturally as good recoils from evil? But this One has another cause
+also!" She hesitated. "And you yourself? How have you challenged and
+mocked It this very night? Here, where It glooms, you have dared bring
+the high joy of the artist who creates? Oh, brave, brave!--he who could
+await alone the visit of the Unspeakable, in the chamber into which the
+Loathsome Eyes have looked, and write the music of hope and beauty!"
+
+I started, with a hot rush of surprise and pleasure. She had heard my
+work. She approved it. More than that, not to her was I the lame fellow
+who ought to get a better man to drive his car!
+
+"Nor should you, who have two worlds of your own," she added in a lower
+tone, "doubt the existence of many both dark and bright. Go, then, out
+of this haunted place where a human madness broke through the Barrier.
+Be satisfied with the victories you have had. Let the visits of the Dark
+One fade into mere nightmare; and know I am no more a living woman than
+Franchina Descartes."
+
+"Who was she?"
+
+"Have you not read that early in the seventeenth century there appeared
+in Paris the philosopher Descartes, accompanied by the figure of a
+beautiful woman? She moved, spoke, and seemed life itself; but Descartes
+declared she was an automaton, a masterpiece of mechanism he himself had
+made. Yet many refused to believe his story, declaring he had by sorcery
+compelled a spirit to serve him in this form. He called her Franchina,
+his daughter."
+
+"And the truth?"
+
+"I have told you all the record tells. She was soon lost. Descartes took
+her with him upon a journey by sea; when, a storm arising, the
+superstitious captain of the vessel threw the magic beauty into the
+Mediterranean."
+
+"Thank you. But, are you fairy or automaton?"
+
+"Do not laugh," she exclaimed with sudden passion. "You know I would say
+that I have no part in the world of men and women. Not through me shall
+the ancient dread seize a new life. A little time, now, then the doors
+will close upon me as the sea closed over Franchina. I will not take
+with me the memory of a wrong done to you. I shall never come to this
+house after tonight. If you would give me a happiness, promise me you
+will leave, too."
+
+I had known we should come to this point. After a moment, I spoke as
+quietly as I could:
+
+"Tell me your name."
+
+She had not expected that question. I think she might have withheld the
+answer, given time to reflect. But as it was, she replied docilely as a
+bidden child:
+
+"Desire Michell."
+
+The name fell quaintly on both hearing and fancy, with a rustle of early
+New England tradition. Desire! I repeated it inwardly with satisfaction
+before I answered her.
+
+"Thank you. Now, I, Roger Locke, do promise you, Desire Michell, that I
+will not leave this house until these matters are plainer to my
+understanding, whether you go or stay. But if you go and come no more,
+then I surely shall stay until I find a way to trace you or until the
+Thing kills me."
+
+"No!"
+
+"Yes."
+
+There was a pause. Then, to my utter dismay, I heard her sobbing through
+the dark.
+
+"Why do you tempt me?" she reproached. "Is it not hard enough, my duty?
+For me it is such pleasure to be here--to leave for a while the
+loneliness and chill of my narrow place! But you, so rich in all things,
+free and happy--how should it matter to you if a voice in the dark
+speaks or is silent? Let me go."
+
+Wonder and exulting sense of power filled me.
+
+"I can keep you, then?" I asked.
+
+"I am--so weak."
+
+"Desire Michell, I am as alone as you can be, in my real life. I have
+gone apart from much that occupies men and women; gaining and losing in
+different ways. One of the gains is freedom to dispose of myself without
+grief or loss to anyone, except the perfunctory regret of friends. Will
+you believe there is no risk that I would not take for a few hours with
+you? Even with your voice in the dark? Come to me as you can, let us
+take what time we may, and the chances be mine."
+
+"But that is folly! You do not know. To protect you I must go."
+
+"I refuse the protection. Stay! If there is sorrow in knowing you, I
+accept it. I understand nothing. I only beg you not to turn me back to
+the commonplace emptiness of life before I found you. Indeed, I will not
+be sent away."
+
+"If I yield, you will reproach me some day."
+
+"Never."
+
+"It could only be like this--that we should speak a few times before the
+gates close upon me."
+
+"What gates?"
+
+"I cannot tell you."
+
+"Very well," I took what the moment would grant me. "That is a bargain.
+Yet, what safety lies in secrecy between us? If we are to help each
+other, as I hope, would not plain openness be best? You will tell me no
+more about yourself? Very well. Tell me something more about the enemy
+in the dark whom I am to meet. You have hinted that It has a special
+motive for fixing hate upon me beyond mere malignance toward mankind.
+What is that motive?"
+
+"Ask me not," she faintly refused me.
+
+"I do ask you. My ignorance of everything concerned is a heavy drawback
+in this combat. Arm me with a little understanding. What moves It
+against me?"
+
+The pause following was filled with a sense of difficulty and recoil,
+her struggle against some terrible reluctance. So painful was that
+effort, somehow clearly communicated to me, that I was about to devour
+my curiosity and withdraw the question when her whisper just reached my
+hearing:
+
+"Jealousy!"
+
+"Jealousy? Of what? For whom?"
+
+"For--me."
+
+The monstrous implication sank slowly into my understanding; then
+brought me erect, gripping the edge of the table lest I forget restraint
+and move toward her.
+
+"By what right?" I cried. "By what claim? Desire Michell, what has the
+Horror to do with you?"
+
+The vehemence and heat of my cry struck a shock through the hushed room
+distinct as the shattering of crystal. There was no answer, no movement;
+no rebuke of my movement. I was alone. With that confession she had
+fled.
+
+My cry had been louder than I knew. Presently I heard a door open. Steps
+sounded along the hall from the rooms on the opposite side of the house.
+Someone knocked hesitatingly.
+
+"Are you all right, Mr. Locke?" Vere's voice came through the panels.
+
+I crossed to the door and opened it. He stood at the threshold, an
+electric torch in his hand.
+
+"We thought you called," he apologized. "I thought maybe you were sick,
+or wanted something; and no light showed around your door."
+
+I found the wall switch and turned on the lamps. As on the last
+occasion, she had switched the lights off there, beyond my reach unless
+I broke my promise not to move about the room while she remained my
+guest.
+
+"Come in," I invited him. "Much obliged to you and Phillida for looking
+me up! I had been working late and dropped asleep in my chair, with a
+nightmare as the result."
+
+It was pleasant to have his normal presence, prosaic in bathrobe and
+pajamas, in my cheerfully lighted room. His dark eyes glanced toward the
+music-scrawled papers scattered about, then returned to meet my eyes
+smilingly.
+
+"We heard some of that work," he admitted. "Phil and I--well, I guess we
+were guilty of sitting on the stairs to hear you play it over. I never
+listened to a tune that took hold of me, kind of, like that one. We'd
+certainly prize hearing all of it together, sometime, if you didn't
+mind."
+
+The warmth of achievement flowed again in me. I crossed to the piano to
+assemble the finished sheets, answering him with one of those
+expressions of thanks artists use to cloak modestly their sleek inward
+vanity. I was really grateful for this first criticism that soothed me
+back to the reality of my own world.
+
+Across the top of the uppermost sheet of music, in small, square script
+quaint as the pomander, was written a quotation strange to me:
+
+"We walk upon the shadows of hills across a level thrown, and pant like
+climbers."
+
+I did not know that I had read the words aloud until Vere answered them.
+
+"So we do! I guess there is more panting over shadows and less real
+mountain-climbing done by us humans than most folks would believe. Most
+roads turn off to easy ways before we reach the hills we make such a
+fuss about. Who wrote that, Mr. Locke?"
+
+"I don't know," I replied vaguely, intent upon Desire Michell's meaning
+in leaving this to me.
+
+He nodded, and turned leisurely to go.
+
+"Kind of seems to me as if he must have felt like you did when you wrote
+that piece tonight," he observed diffidently. "As if trouble did not
+amount to much, taken right. I'll get back to Phil, now. She might be
+anxious."
+
+Could that be what Desire had meant me to understand? Was there indeed
+some quality of courage----?
+
+That is why my most successful composition from the standpoint of money
+and popularity went to the publisher under the title, "Shadows of
+Hills." Of course no one connected the allusion. The general
+interpretation was best expressed by the cover design of the first
+printing: a sketch of a mountain-shaded lake on which floated a canoe
+containing two young persons. I was well pleased to have it so.
+
+But--in what land unknown to man towered the vast mountains in whose
+shadow I panted and strove? Or was my foot indeed upon the mountain
+itself?
+
+I did not know. I do not know, now.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+     "If the Dreamer finds himself in an unknown place, ignorant of the
+     country and the people, let him be aware that such place is to be
+     understood of the Other World."--ONEIROCRITICA ACHMETIS.
+
+
+In the morning I drove down to New York. There were affairs demanding
+attention. Also, I was pressed by an eagerness to get my over-night work
+into the hands of the publisher. To be exact, I wanted to put the
+manuscript out of reach of the Thing at the house. Without reason, I had
+awakened with that instinct strong within me.
+
+The atmosphere of the city was tonic. Merely driving through the
+friendly, crowded streets was an exhilaration. The practical employment
+of the day broomed away fantastic cobwebs. In the evening I turned
+toward Connecticut with a feeling of leaving home behind me. But I would
+not stay away from the house for a night, risking that Desire Michell
+might come and find me missing. She might believe I had been seized by
+cowardice and deserted. She might never return.
+
+I will not deny that I had lied to her. There was no intention in me of
+accepting her fleeting visits as the utmost she could give. I meant to
+snatch her out of darkness and mystery, to set her in the wholesome
+sunlight where Phillida flitted happily. If I could prevent, those gates
+of which she vaguely spoke never should close between us. But it was
+plain that I must tread warily. Once frightened away, how could she be
+found? Her home, her history, even her face, were unknown to me. Tracing
+her by a perfume and a tress of hair had been tried, and failed. Of her
+connection with the Dark Thing I refused to think too deeply. Her
+connection with me must come first.
+
+It was not until I passed the cottage of Mrs. Hill, glimmering whitely
+in the starlight, where the road made an angle toward the farm, that I
+recalled our talk in her "best room."
+
+"_The Michell family always owned it. The Reverend Cotton Mather Michell
+went to foreign parts for missionary work twenty years ago and died
+there----_"
+
+My lady of the night was Desire Michell. A clue?
+
+"_He never married, so the family's run out._"
+
+It was damp here in the hollow where the road dipped down. A chill ran
+coldly over me.
+
+Arrived at the garage which had taken the place of our tumble-down barn,
+I put the car away as quietly as possible. Ten o'clock had struck as I
+passed through the last village, and our household was asleep. Moving
+without unnecessary noise, I crossed to the house. Bagheera, the cat,
+padded across the porch to meet me and rubbed himself around my legs
+while I stooped to put the latch-key in the lock.
+
+As the key slid in place, I heard the waterfall over the dam abruptly
+change the sound of its flow, swelling and accelerating as when a gust
+of wind hurries a greater volume of water over the brink. But there was
+no wind. Immediately followed that sound from the lake which I can liken
+to nothing better than the smack of huge lips unclosing, or the suck of
+a thick body drawing itself from a bed of mud. The cat thrust himself
+violently between my feet and pressed against the house-door uttering a
+whimpering mew of urgency. Startled, I looked in the direction of the
+lake.
+
+At this distance it showed as a mere expanse of darkness, only the
+reflection of a star here and there revealing the surface as water. What
+else could be shown, I rebuked my nerves by querying of them; and turned
+the key. Bagheera rushed into the hall when the door opened wide enough
+to admit his body. I followed more sedately and closed the door behind
+us both.
+
+Now I was not acquainted with Bagheera's night privileges. Did Phillida
+allow him in the house, or not? After an instant's consideration, I bent
+and picked him up from his repose on the hall rug. He should spend the
+night shut in with me, out of mischief yet comfortable. Purring in the
+curve of my arm, he was carried upstairs without objection on his part.
+Until we reached my room! On its threshold I felt his body stiffen; his
+yellow eyes snapped open alertly. Cat antipathy to a strange place, I
+reflected, amused, as I switched on the lights.
+
+"All right, Bagheera," I spoke soothingly, and put him upon the rug.
+
+He bounded erect, fur bristling, tail lashing from side to side after
+the fashion of a miniature panther. When I stooped to stroke him, he
+eluded my hand. In a gliding run, body crouched, ears flattened, he sped
+toward the doorway, was through it and gone.
+
+Well, I decided, he could not be pursued all through the house. It would
+be easier to explain him to Phillida next morning. I was tired;
+pleasantly tired. The day had been filled with the enthusiasm and
+congratulations of my associates, with conferences and plans for
+launching the new music via theatres and advertising. It ought to "go
+big," they assured me. In my optimism of mood, I wondered if I had not
+already driven off the Dark Thing, since the girl had come to me the
+night past without It appearing before or afterward. Perhaps,
+woman-timid, she exaggerated the danger and It had retreated after the
+second failure to overpower me.
+
+I fell asleep with a tranquil conviction that nothing would disturb my
+rest this night.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Stillness enveloped me, absolute, desolate. Silence contained me. Yet
+the thought of another scorched against my understanding in a burning
+communication of intelligence.
+
+"Man," It commanded, "I am here. Fear!"
+
+And I knew that which was my body did fear to the point of death, but
+that which was myself stood up in revolt.
+
+"Crouch," It bade. "Crouch, pygmy, and beg. Fear! The blood crawls in
+the veins, the heart checks, the nerves shrink and wither--man, your
+life wanes thin and faint. Down--shall your race affront mine?"
+
+My heart did stagger and beat slow. Life crept a sluggish current. But
+there was another force that stiffened to resistance, and gathered
+itself to compact strength within me.
+
+"No," my thought refused the dark intelligence. "I am not yours. Command
+your own, not me."
+
+"Weakling, you have touched that which is mine. Into my path you have
+dared step. Back--for in my breath you die!"
+
+The air my lungs drew in was foul and poisonous. With more and more
+difficulty my heart labored. Confused memories came to me of men found
+dead in their beds in haunted rooms. Would morning find me so? Better
+that way than to yield to the Thing! Better----
+
+I struggled erect; or fancied so.
+
+Now I saw myself as one who stood with folded arms fronting a breach in
+a colossal wall. Huge, immeasurably huge that cliff reared itself beyond
+the sight and ranged away on either side into unknown distances, dully
+glistening like gray ice, unbroken save in this place. The gray strand
+on which I stood was a narrow strip following the foot of the wall.
+Behind me lay a vast, unmoving ocean banked over with an all-concealing
+mist. Not a ripple stirred along that weird beach, or a ray changed the
+fixed gray twilight. And I was afraid, for my danger was not of the
+common dangers of mankind, but that which freezes the blood of man when
+he draws near the supernatural; the ancient fear.
+
+I stood there, while sweat poured painfully from me, and fronted my
+enemy who pressed me hard.
+
+The Thing was at the breach, couched in the great cleft that split the
+Barrier, darkness within darkness. Unseen, I felt the glare of Its hate
+beat upon me. From It emanated deathly cold, like the nearness of an
+iceberg in the night, with an odor of damp and mold.
+
+"Puny earth-dweller, lost here," Its menace breathed, "what keeps you
+from destruction? For you the circle has not been traced nor the
+pentagram fixed, for you no law has been thrust down. Trespass is death.
+Die, then."
+
+Only my will held It from me, and I felt that will reel in sickened
+bewilderment. I had no strength to answer, only the steadfast instinct
+to oppose.
+
+The Thing did not pass. There in the breach It ravened for me, thrust
+Itself toward me, pressed against the thin veil of separation between
+us. I saw nothing, yet knew where It raised Itself, gigantic in
+formlessness more dreadful than any shape. Its whispered threats broke
+against me like an evil surf.
+
+"Man, the prey is mine. Would you challenge me? The woman is mine by the
+pact of centuries. Save yourself. Escape."
+
+The woman? Startled wonder filled me. Was I then fighting for Desire
+Michell?
+
+Out of the air I was answered as if her voice had spoken; certainty came
+to grip me as if with her small hands. She had no help but in me. If I
+fell, she fell. If I stood firm----? Exultant resolve flared strong and
+high within me. My will to protect leaped forward.
+
+The Thing shrank. It dwindled back through the gap in the Barrier. But
+as It fled, a last venomous message drifted to me:
+
+"Again! And again! Tire but once, pygmy----!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I was sitting up in bed in my lighted room, my fingers clutching the
+chain of the lamp beside me. Was some dark bulk just fading from beyond
+my window? Or was I still dreaming?
+
+I was trembling with cold, drenched as with water so that my relaxing
+hand made a wet mark on the table beneath the lamp. This much might have
+been caused by nightmare. But what sane man had nightmares like these?
+
+When I was able, I rose, changed to dry garments and wrapped myself in a
+heavy bathrobe. There was an electric coffee service in my room kept for
+occasions when I worked late into the night. I made strong black coffee
+now and drank it as near boiling as practicable. Presently the blood
+again moved warmly in my veins.
+
+Then I knew that the chill in the room was not a delusion of my chilled
+body. I was warm, yet the air around me remained moist and cold, unlike
+a summer night. It seemed air strangely thickened and soiled, as pure
+water may be muddied by the passage of some unclean body. In this
+atmosphere persisted a fetid smell of mold and decay, warring with the
+homely scent of coffee and the fragrance of the pomander beneath my
+pillow.
+
+I was more shaken, more exhausted by this encounter with the unknown
+than by either of my former experiences. A fact which drove home the
+grim farewell of my enemy! _Tire but once, pygmy----!_ Desire herself
+had foretold that the dark Thing would wear me down.
+
+Well, perhaps! But not without fighting for Its victory. At least I
+would be no supine victim. Already I had forced my way--where? Where was
+that Barrier before which I had stood? Awe sank coldly through me at
+memory of that colossal land where I was pygmy indeed, an insolent human
+intruder upon the unhuman. What other shapes of dread stalked and
+watched beyond that titanic wall? By what swollen conceit could I hope
+to win against Them?
+
+I would not consider escape by flight, even if the end had been certain
+destruction. But my head sank to my hands beneath the weight of a
+profound depression and discouragement.
+
+It was the hour before dawn, traditionally the worst for man. The hour
+superstition sets apart for its own, when the life flame burns lowest.
+At a distance a dog had treed some little wood creature, and bayed
+monotonously.
+
+There was a weakness at the core of my strength. I waged this combat for
+the sake of Desire Michell. _But what was she to whom the Thing laid
+claim by the pact of centuries?_
+
+Darkness began to tinge with light. Pale gray filtered into the dusk
+with grudging slowness. As day approached I saw that a fog enfolded the
+house in vapor, stealing into the room in coils and swirls like thin
+smoke. The lamps looked sickly and dim. I forced away my languor, rose
+and walked to the nearest window.
+
+Something was moving up the slope from the lake; a dim shape about which
+the fog clung in steamy billows. My shaken nerves thrilled unpleasantly.
+What stirred at this empty hour? What should loom so tall?
+
+A moment later the figure was near enough to be distinguished as Ethan
+Vere, bearing several long fishing-rods over his shoulder.
+
+"Vere!" I hailed him, with mingled relief and utter disgust with myself.
+"Anything going on so early?"
+
+He looked up at me--I never saw Vere startled--and came on to stop
+beneath the window. Taking off his cap, he ran his fingers through his
+black curls, pushing their wetness from his forehead. I noticed how the
+mists painted him with a spectral pallor.
+
+"Good morning, Mr. Locke," he greeted me. "Just as I've been thinking,
+there are some big snapping-turtles about the lake and creek. I guessed
+there'd be some war between them and me before that water was safe for
+use! One of the fellows dragged a duck under, drowned it and started
+feeding right before my eyes, just now."
+
+"We will have to get a canoe."
+
+He nodded placid assent.
+
+"That'll look pretty on the lake. Phillida will like it. But I guess
+I'll keep a homely old flat-bottomed punt out of sight around some
+corner for work. The other craft goes over too prompt for jobs like
+mine, and don't hold enough. I'm going to fetch my rifle, now. I'd
+admire to blow that duck-eater's ugly head off."
+
+"I will get into some clothes and be right with you," I invited myself
+to the hunt.
+
+"I'd like to have you," he replied with his quaint politeness. There
+were times when I could visualize Vere's New England mother as if I had
+known her.
+
+The human interlude had been enough to dispel the black humors of the
+night. When I was ready to go out, I opened the drawer that held the
+copper-bronze braid and took it into my hand. How vital with youth its
+crisp resilience felt in my clasp, I thought; young, too, were its
+luxuriance and shining color. Nonsense, indeed, to fancy ghostliness
+here or the passing of musty centuries over the head that had worn this
+tress! A flood of reassurance rose high in me. Whatever the Thing might
+be, I would trust the girl Desire Michell. Yes, and for her I would
+stand fast at that Barrier until victory declared for the enemy or for
+me. Until It passed me, It should not reach her.
+
+I went downstairs to join Vere. The brightening mist was cool and fresh.
+There was neither horror nor defeat in the promise of the morning.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+     "In vain I called on Rest to come and stay.
+     We were but seated at the festival
+     Of many covers, when One cried: 'Away!'"
+                           --ROSE GARDEN OF SA'ADI.
+
+
+Now I entered a time of experiences differing at every point, yet
+interwoven closely, so that my days might compare to a rope whose
+strands are of violently contrasted colors. The rope would be
+inharmonious, startling to the eye, but strong to bind and hold. As I
+was bound and held!
+
+All day I lived in the wholesome household atmosphere evoked by Vere and
+Phillida. It is impossible to describe the sunny charm they created
+about the commonplace. Our gay, simple breakfasts where Phillida
+presided in crisp middy blouse or flowered smock; where the gray cat sat
+on the arm of Vere's chair, speculative yellow eye observant of his
+master's carving, while the Swedish Cristina served us her good food
+with the spice of an occasional comment on farm or neighborhood
+events--how perfect a beginning for the day! How stale beside our
+breeze-swept table was any board at which I had ever sat! I do declare
+that I have never seen a more winning face than the bright one of my
+little cousin whom her world had pronounced "plain." Vere and I basked
+in her sunbeams gratefully.
+
+Afterward, we each had our work. Of the three, Vere was the most
+industrious; slow, steady and unsparing of himself to a degree that
+accomplished surprising results. Phillida flitted over the place indoors
+and out, managing the house, following Vere about, driving to village or
+town with me on purchasing trips for our supplies. I did rather more of
+my own work than usual, that summer, and consequently had more of the
+commercial side to employ me.
+
+A healthy, normal life? Yes--until the hours between midnight and dawn.
+
+I never knew when I laid down at night whether I should sleep until sun
+and morning overlay the countryside; whether the whispering call of
+Desire Michell would summon me to an hour more exquisite than reality,
+less satisfying than a dream, or whether I should leap into
+consciousness of the Loathsome Eyes fixed coldly malignant upon me while
+my enemy's inhuman hate groped toward me across the darkness Its
+presence fouled.
+
+For my two guests kept their promises.
+
+If I speak briefly of the coming of the Thing during this time, I do so
+because the mind shrinks from past pain. It came again, and again. It
+craftily used the torture of irregularity in Its coming. For days there
+might be a respite, then It would haunt me nights in succession until my
+physical endurance was almost spent.
+
+I have stood before the breach in that Barrier, fighting that nightmare
+duel, until the place of colossal desolation, last frontier the human
+race might hope to keep, became as well known to me as a landscape on
+earth. Yet the effect of the Thing's assaults upon me never lessened. On
+the contrary, the horror gained in strength. A dreadful familiarity grew
+between It and me. Communication flowed more readily between us with
+use. I will not set down, perhaps I dare not set down the intolerable
+wickedness of Its alternate menaces and offered bribes. Contact with Its
+intelligence poisoned.
+
+There were nights when It was dumb, when all Its monstrous power
+concentrated and bore upon me, Its will to destroy locked with my will.
+My victory was that I lived.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the shadow, Desire Michell and I drew closer to one another.
+
+How can I tell of a love that grew without sight? So much of the love of
+romance and history is a matter of flower-petal complexions,
+heart-consuming eyes, satin lips, and all the form and color that make
+beauty. How can I make clear a love that grew strong and passionately
+demanding, knew delicate coquetries of advance and evasion, intimacy of
+minds like the meeting of eyes in understanding--all in the dark? The
+blind might comprehend. But the blind have a physical communication we
+had not; touch has enchantments of its own.
+
+Every night, near midnight, I switched off the lights and waited in the
+chair at my writing-table, where I was accustomed to work. If she had
+not come by two o'clock, I learned to know she would not visit me that
+night. I might sleep in that certainty. A strange tryst I kept there in
+the dark; listening to the flow of the waterfall from the lake, loud in
+that dead hour's stillness, or hearing the soft, incessant sounds of
+insect life awake in trees and fields. If she came--a drift of perfume,
+a movement slight as a curtain stirred by the wind, then an hour with
+such a companion as the ancient magician might have drawn out of the air
+to his nine mystic lamps.
+
+Strange, fantastic tales she told me, spun of fancies luminous and frail
+as threads of glass. She could not speak without betraying her deep
+learning in sciences rejected and forgotten by the modern world.
+Alchemy, astrology, geomancy furnished her speech with allusions blank
+to my ignorance; which she most gently and politely enlightened when I
+confessed. I learned that the Green Lion of Paracelsus was not a beast,
+but a recipe for making gold; that Salamandar's Feather was better known
+today as asbestos; and that the Emerald Table was by no means an article
+of furniture. I give these examples merely by way of illustration.
+
+On the other side of the shield held between us, I soon discovered that
+she knew no more of modern city life than a well-taught child who has
+never left home. She listened eagerly to accounts of theatres and
+restaurants. The history of Phillida and Ethan Vere seemed to her more
+moving and wonderful than any story she could tell me. I was amazed and
+humbled to find that she rated my ability to make music as a lofty art
+among the occult sciences.
+
+Of the evil Thing that haunted me, we came to say little. To press her
+with questions meant to end her visit, I found by experience. When I
+spoke of that strand between the Barrier and the gray mist-hidden sea,
+her passion of distress closed all intercourse with the plea that I go
+away at once, while escape was possible, while life remained mine. So
+for the most part I curbed my tongue and my consuming curiosity; not
+from consideration, but of necessity.
+
+One night I asked her how the dark Thing spoke to me, by what medium of
+communication.
+
+"Spirits of all orders can speak to man in every language, so long as
+they are face to face," she answered, with a faint surprise at my lack
+of knowledge. "'_When they turn to man, they come into use of his
+language and no longer remember their own, but as soon as they turn from
+man they resume their own language, and forget his._'
+
+"But they themselves are unaware of this fact, for they utter thought to
+thought by direct intelligence. So if angel or demon turns his back to
+you, Roger, you may not make him hear you though you call with great
+force."
+
+"How do you know that, Desire?"
+
+"But by simple reading! Do not Ennemoser and many writers record it?"
+
+"Have you spoken to such beings, Desire?"
+
+The question was rash, but it escaped me before I could check the
+impulse. To my relief, she answered without resentment:
+
+"No."
+
+"No? The Thing--the enemy that comes to me has never spoken to you?"
+
+"No."
+
+I was silent in amazement and incredulity. The dark creature claimed
+her, she declared herself helpless to escape from that dominion into
+normal life, and yet It never had spoken to her? It spoke to me, a
+stranger most ignorant, and not to the seeress who was familiar with Its
+existence and the lore which linked humanity to Its fearful kind?
+
+"You do not believe me," her voice came quietly across my thoughts.
+
+"I believe you, of course," I stammered. "I was only--astonished. You
+have described It, and the Barrier, so often; from the first night----!
+I supposed you had seen all I have, and more."
+
+"All you have seen? Now tell me with what eyes you have seen the Barrier
+and the Far Frontier? The eyes of the body, or that vision by which man
+sees in a dream and which is to the sight as the speech of spirits is to
+the hearing?"
+
+"I suppose--with the inner sight."
+
+"Then understand me when I say that I have seen with the eyes of
+another, by a sight not mine and yet my own."
+
+"You mean," I floundered in vague doubts and jealousy of her human
+associations of which I knew nothing. "You mean--hypnotism?"
+
+She laughed with half-sad raillery.
+
+"How shall I answer you, Roger? Once upon a time, the jewel called beryl
+was thought unrivaled as a mirror into which a magician might look to
+see reflected events taking place at a distance, or reflections of the
+future. But by and by magicians grew wiser. They found any crystal would
+serve as well as a beryl. Later still, they found a little water poured
+in a basin or held in the hollow of the hand showed as true a fantasm.
+So one wrote: '_There is neither crystallomancy nor hydromancy, but the
+magick is in the Seer himself._'"
+
+"Well, Desire?"
+
+"Well, Roger--if to see with the sight of another is hypnotism, then
+every man who writes a book or tells a good tale is a hypnotist; every
+historian who makes us see the past is a necromancer."
+
+"You read of the Thing----?"
+
+"No," she replied, after a long pause. "I knew It through sympathy with
+one who died as I would not have you to die, my friend Roger, of whom I
+shall think long in that place to which I go presently. Question me no
+more. When the time comes for you to throw a certain braid of hair and a
+pomander into the fire----"
+
+"I will never do that!"
+
+"No? Well, you might keep the pomander, which is pure gold engraved with
+ancient signs and the name of the Shining Dawn, Dahana, in Sanskrit
+characters. Also the perfume it contains is precious, being blent with
+the herb vervain which is powerful against evil spirits."
+
+"It is not the pomander that I should keep, nor the pomander that holds
+the powerful spell."
+
+"You--value the braid so much?"
+
+"I value only one other beauty as highly."
+
+"Yes, Roger?"
+
+"Yes, Desire. And that beauty is she who wore the braid."
+
+Now the darkness in the room was dense. Yet I thought I sensed a
+movement toward me as airy as the flutter of a bird's wing. The
+fragrance in the atmosphere eddied as if stirred by her passing. But
+when I spoke to her again, after a moment's waiting, she had gone.
+
+I am sure no housekeeper was ever more nice in her ideas of neatness
+than my little Cousin Phillida, and no maid more exact in carrying out
+orders than Cristina. Nevertheless, automobiles pass on the quietest
+roads, and my windows are always wide open. There is the fireplace, too,
+with possibilities of soot. Anyhow, there was a light gray dust
+overlaying the writing-table on the following morning. And in the dust
+was a print as if a small hand had rested there, a yard from my chair.
+
+A slim hand it must have been. I judged the palm had been daintily
+cupped, the fingers slender, smooth and long in proportion to the absurd
+size of the whole affair. My hand covered it without brushing an
+outline.
+
+I could not put this souvenir away with the braid and the pomander. But
+I could put its evidence with their witness of Desire Michell's reality.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+     "For may not the divell send to their fantasie, their senses being
+     dulled and as it were asleep, such hills and glistering courts
+     whereunto he pleaseth to delude them?"--KING JAMES' "DEMONOLOGY."
+
+
+Now I have to record how I walked into the oldest snare in the world.
+
+Perhaps it was the sense of her near presence brought home to me by her
+hand-print on the table so close to where my hand rested; perhaps it was
+her speech of presently leaving me to return no more. Or perhaps both
+these joined in urging on my determination to learn more of Desire
+Michell before some unknown bar fell between us. I only know that I
+passed into a mood of trapped exasperation at my helplessness and lack
+of knowledge. It seemed imperative that I should act to save us both,
+act soon and surely; yet inaction was bound upon me by my ignorance. Who
+was she? Where did she live? What bond held her subject to the Thing
+from the Barrier? What gates were to close between us? Why could she not
+put her hand in mine, any night, and let me take her away from this
+haunted place? Why, at least, not come to me in the light, and let me
+see her face to face? I was a man groping in a labyrinth while outside
+something precious to him is being stolen.
+
+For the first time I found myself unable to work, unable to share our
+household life with Phillida and Vere, or to find relaxation in driving
+about the countryside. Anger against Desire herself stirred at the
+bottom of my mind; Desire, who hampered me by the word of honor in which
+she had netted me so securely.
+
+It was then that my enemy from the unknown places began to whisper of
+the book.
+
+I encountered that enemy in a new mood. We did not meet at the breach in
+the mighty wall, confronted in death conflict between Its will and mine.
+Instead, night after night It crept to my window as at our first
+meeting. I started awake to find Its awful presence blackening the
+starlight where It crouched opposite me, Its intelligence breathing
+against mine. As always, my human organism shrank from Its unhuman
+neighborhood. Chill and repugnance shook my body, while that part of me
+which was not body battled against nightmare paralysis of horror. But
+now It did not menace or strive against me. It displayed a dreadful
+suavity I might liken to the coiling and uncoiling of those great snakes
+who are reported to mesmerize their prey by looping movements and
+figures melting from change to change in the Hunger Dance of Kaa.
+
+There was a book that held all I longed to know, It whispered to me. A
+book telling of the woman! She did not wish me to read, for fear I
+should grow overwise and make her mine. The book was here, in my house.
+I might arise and find--if I would be guided by It----!
+
+I thrust the whispers away. How could I trust my enemy? If such a book
+existed, which seemed improbable, there was a taint of disloyalty to
+Desire in the thought of reading without her knowledge.
+
+The Thing was not turned away. How could I do harm by learning what she
+was, unless she had evil to conceal? Did I fear to know the truth? As
+for the book's existence, I had only to accept guidance from It----?
+
+I persisted in refusal. But the idea of the book followed me through my
+days like a wizard's familiar dogging me. Where could such a volume be
+hidden, in what secret nook in wall or floor? How came a book to be
+written about the girl I supposed young, unknown and set apart from the
+world? Was I letting slip an opportunity by my fastidious notions of
+delicacy?
+
+Indecision and curiosity tormented me beyond rest. Phillida and Vere
+began to consider me with puzzled eyes. Cristina developed a habit of
+cooking individual dishes of especial succulence and triumphantly
+setting them before me as a "surprise"; a kindness which of course
+obliged me to eat whether I was hungry or not. I suspect my little
+cousin abetted her in this transparent ruse. I pleaded the heat as an
+excuse for all. We were in late August now. Cicadas sang their dry chant
+in the fields, where the sun glared down upon Vere's crops and painted
+him the fine bronze of an Indian. Our lake scarcely stirred under the
+hot, still air.
+
+It was after a day of such heat, succeeded by a night hardly more cool,
+that the lights in my room quietly went out. I was sitting at my table,
+some letters which required answers spread before me while I brooded,
+pen between my fingers, upon the mystery which had become my life. For
+the moment I attributed the sudden failure of light to some accident at
+the powerhouse.
+
+Not for long! The hateful cold that crept like freezing vapor into the
+room, the foul air of damp and corruption pouring into the scented
+country atmosphere, the frantic revolt of body and nerves--before I
+turned my eyes to the window I knew the monster from the Frontier
+crouched there.
+
+"Weakling!" It taunted me. "Puny from of old, how should you prevail? By
+your fear, the woman stays mine. Miserable earth-crawler, in whose hand
+the weapon was laid and who shrinking let it fall unused, the end
+comes."
+
+"The book?" I gasped, against my better judgment.
+
+"The book was the weapon."
+
+"No, or you would not have offered it to me."
+
+"Coward, believe so. Hug the belief while you may. The offer is past."
+
+Past? A madness of bafflement and frustrated curiosity gripped and shook
+me.
+
+"I take the offer," I cried in passion and defiance. "If there is such a
+book, show it to me!"
+
+The Thing was gone. Light quietly filled the lamps--or was it that I had
+opened my eyes? I gripped the arms of my chair, waiting. For what? I did
+not know. Only, all the horror I ever had felt in the presence of the
+Thing was slight compared to the fear that presently began to flow upon
+me as an icy current. There in the pleasantly lighted room, alone, I
+sank through depths of dread, down into an abyss of despair, down----
+
+A long sigh of rising wind passed through the house like a sucked breath
+of triumph. Windows and doors drew in and out against their frames with
+a rattling crash, then hung still with unnatural abruptness. Absolute
+stillness succeeded. I felt a very slight shock, as if the ground at my
+feet was struck.
+
+I fled from the terror for the first time. Yes, coward at last, deserter
+from that unseen Frontier's defense, I found myself in the hall outside
+my room, leaning sick and faint against the wall. Behind me the door
+shut violently, yet I felt no current of air to move it.
+
+From the other side of the house there sounded the click of latch, then
+a patter of soft-shod feet. Phillida came hurrying down the hall toward
+me. She was wrapped in some silky pink-flowered garment. Her short hair
+stood out around her head like a little girl's well-brushed crop. She
+presented as endearingly natural a figure, I thought, as any man could
+seek or imagine. The wisdom of Ethan Vere who had garnered his love
+here!
+
+"Cousin?" she exclaimed. "The hall light is so dim! You almost
+frightened me when I glimpsed you standing there. Did the wind wake you,
+too? I think we are going to have a thunder storm, it is so hot and
+gusty. I heard poor Bagheera mewing and scratching at the door, so I was
+just going down to let him in before the rain comes."
+
+"Yes," I achieved. Then, finding my voice secure: "I will let in the
+cat. Where is Vere?"
+
+"He did not wake up, so I tiptoed out. Why?"
+
+"I do not like to have you going about the house alone at this hour."
+
+Her eyes widened and she laughed outright.
+
+"Why, Cousin Roger! What a funny idea to have about our very own house!
+I have one of the electric flashlights you bought for us all; see?"
+
+What could I tell her of my vision of her womanly softness and timidity
+brought to bay by the Thing of horror, down in those empty lower rooms?
+How did I know It stalked no prey but me? Its clutch was upon Desire
+Michell. These were Its hours, between midnight and dawn.
+
+"Tramps," I explained evasively. "Give me the light."
+
+But she pattered down the stairs beside me, kimono lifted well above her
+pink-flowered slippers, one hand on the balustrade. The light glinted in
+the white topaz that guarded her wedding ring, a richer jewel than any
+diamond in the sight of one who knew the tender thought with which she
+had set it there. No! The horror was not for her, clothed in her
+wholesome goodness as in armor of proof. Surely for such as she the
+Barrier stood unbreached and strong.
+
+When I opened the front door, Bagheera darted in like a hunted cat. A
+drift of mist entered with him. Looking out, I saw the night was heavy
+with a low-hanging fog that scarcely rose to the tree tops; a
+ground-mist that eddied in smoke-like waves of gray where our light fell
+upon it. Such mists were common here, yet I shivered and shut it out
+with relief. While I refastened the lock, Bagheera purred around my
+ankles, pressing caressingly against me as if thanking me after the
+manner of cats. I remembered this was not the first time he had shown
+this anxiety and gratitude for shelter.
+
+"Bagheera does love you," Phillida commented, stooping to pat him.
+"Isn't it funny, though, that he never will go into your room? He is
+always petting around you downstairs. When Cristina or I are doing up
+your quarters, he will follow us right up to the door-sill, but we can't
+coax him inside. Perhaps he doesn't like that perfume you always have
+about."
+
+A qualm ran through me, recalling the night I had taken the cat there by
+force and its frantic escape. But I snapped the key fast and
+straightened myself with sharp self-contempt. Had I fallen so low as to
+heed the caprices of a pet cat? Was it not enough that I had fled from
+my enemy after accepting the knowledge It had striven so long to force
+upon me?
+
+For I had that knowledge. When I had halted in the passage outside my
+room, in the moment before Phillida had joined me, there had been
+squarely set before my mental sight the place to seek the book.
+
+"Phillida, there was a bookcase in this house when it was bought," I
+said. "I believe it stood in my room before the place was altered. A
+small stand; I remember putting my candle on its top the first night I
+slept here. Have you seen it?"
+
+Some tone in my question seemed to touch her expression with surprise as
+she lifted her eyes to mine; or perhaps it was the hour I chose for the
+inquiry.
+
+"Oh, yes," she answered readily. "I supposed you had noticed it long
+ago; I mean, where it stands. The quaintest bit, a genuine antique! And
+holding the stuffiest collection of old books, too! I believe they may
+be valuable, out-of-print, early editions. If," her voice faltered
+wistfully, "if Father ever forgives me for being happy with Ethan, and
+comes to visit us, he would love every musty old volume. Do you think
+Mother and he ever will, Cousin Roger?"
+
+"I am sure they will, Phil. Feuds and tragic parents are out of date.
+They must adjust themselves gradually when they realize Vere
+is--himself. Before you go upstairs to him, will you tell me where to
+find that bookcase?"
+
+"Now? Why, of course!"
+
+She led me across the hall to her sewing room. I cannot say that she
+sewed there very much, but she had chosen that title in preference to
+boudoir or study as more becoming a housewife. She had assembled here a
+spinning-wheel from the attic, some samplers, a Hepplewhite sewing-table
+and chairs discovered about the house. Her canaries' cage hung above a
+great punch-bowl of flowered ware in which she kept gold-fish. A pipe of
+Vere's balanced beside the bowl showed that his masculine presence was
+not excluded.
+
+In a corner stood the bookcase. Phillida pulled the chain of a lamp
+bright under a shade of peacock chintz, and watched me stoop to look at
+the faded bindings.
+
+"Thank you, Phil," I said. "It may take some time to find the book I
+want. You had better hurry back to bed before Vere comes hunting for a
+missing wife."
+
+"Are you going to stay and hunt for the book tonight, then?"
+
+"Unless you are afraid I shall disturb your canaries?"
+
+She did not laugh. Drawing nearer, she stroked my sleeve with a
+caressing doubt and remonstrance.
+
+"But you have not been to bed at all, and soon it will be morning! Do
+you have to write your lovely music at night, Cousin Roger? You have
+been growing thin and tired, this summer. Are you quite well? You are so
+good that you should be happy, but--are you?"
+
+"Good, Phil?" I wondered, touched. "Why, how did your lazy,
+tune-spinning, frivolous cousin get that reputation in this branch of
+the family?"
+
+"You are so kind," she said simply. "Ethan says so. You know, Cousin
+Roger, that I was over-educated in my childhood; my brain choked with
+little, little stupid knowledge that hardly matters at all. We went to
+church Sundays because that was the correct thing to do. But I was
+almost a heathen when Ethan married me. He doesn't trouble about church.
+He doesn't trouble about the past, or life after death, or punishment
+for sin. He believes if one tries to be kind and straight, the big
+Kindness and Straightness takes care of everything. So I have learned to
+feel that way, too. It is a--a calm sort of feeling all the time, if you
+know what I mean. And that is the way you are good, although perhaps you
+never thought of it."
+
+"Thank you, Phillida," I acknowledged; and walked with her to the foot
+of the stairs.
+
+When her pink-clad figure had vanished behind her bedroom door, I went
+back to the sewing room and drew up a chair before the case of books.
+
+Phillida had not unreasonably stigmatized them as stuffy. They were a
+sober collection. Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy," an ancient copy of
+the Apocrypha, and a three-volume Life of Martin Luther loaded the first
+shelf. I looked at the second shelf and found it filled with the bound
+sermons of a divine of whom I had never heard.
+
+The lowest shelf held strange companions for the sedate volumes above.
+Erudite works on theosophy, magic, the interpretation of dreams and
+demonology huddled together here. Not all of them were readable by my
+humble store of learning. There was a Latin copy of Artemidorus,
+Mesmer's "Shepherd," Mathew Paris, some volumes in Greek, and some I
+judged to be Arabian and Hebrew. At the end of the row stood a thin,
+dingy book whose title had passed out of legibility. I took it out and
+opened the covers.
+
+Fronting the first page was a faded woodcut, the portrait of a woman.
+Beneath in old long-s type, dim on the yellowed paper, was printed the
+legend:
+
+"_Desire Michell, ye foule witch._"
+
+Closing the book, I forced reason to come forward. I was resolved that
+panic should not drive me again nor my defense fall from within its
+walls. Master of my enemy I might never be; master of my own inner
+kingdom I must and should be. But I was glad to be here instead of
+upstairs while I read; glad of the interlude in Phillida's company, and
+of the presence of the three sleepy canaries who blinked down at the
+disturbing lamp.
+
+The date stamped into the back of the book in Roman numerals was of a
+year in the seventeen hundreds. What connection could its Desire Michell
+have with the girl I knew? Perhaps she had adopted the name to mystify
+me. Or at most, she might be of the family of that unfortunate woman
+branded witch by a bigoted generation.
+
+Reopening the book, I studied the dim, stiff portrait. The face was
+young, delicate of line, with long eyes set wide apart; eyes that even
+in this wretched picture kept a curious drowsy watchfulness. The
+inevitable white Puritan cap was worn, but curls clustered about the
+brow and two massive braids descended over either shoulder. The perfumed
+bronze-colored braid up in my drawer----?
+
+The volume was entitled "Some Manifestations of Satan in Witchcraft in
+Ye Colonies," by Abimelech Fetherstone. Disregarding the satanic
+manifestations set forth in the other four chronicles, I turned to "Ye
+Foule Witch, Desire Michell."
+
+As I began to read, another breath of wind sighed through the house,
+sucking windows and doors in and out with the shock of sound, instantly
+ended, that is produced by a distant explosion. I thought a flash of
+lightning whipped across my eyes. But when I glanced toward the windows
+I saw only the smoke-like fog banked in drifts against the panes.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+     "Beauty is a witch--"
+             --MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING.
+
+
+I will tear the core out of many yellow pages of diffuse writing spiced
+with smug moral reflections.
+
+Desire Michell had been no traditional old hag, hideous and malevolent;
+no pallid, raving epileptic to accuse herself in shrieking tales of
+Black Men, and Sabbats, and harm done to neighbors' cattle or crops. Her
+father was a clergyman who brought his goods and his motherless daughter
+from England to the Colonies, and settled in "ye Pequot Marsh country."
+There he found a congregation, and they lived much respected. Their
+culture appeared to be far beyond that of their few, hard-working
+neighbors. Young Mistress Michell was reputed learned in the use of
+simples, among other arts, and to have been "of a beauty exceeding the
+custom among godly women, to so great degree that sorcery should have
+been suspected of her."
+
+However, sorcery was not suspected; not even when her fame spread among
+near-dwelling Indian tribes who gave her a name signifying _Water on
+which the Sun is Shining_. Admiration was her portion, then, with all
+the suitors the vicinity held. But from fastidiousness or ambition she
+refused every proposal made to her father for her. She walked aloof and
+alone, until another sort of wooer came to the gate of the minister's
+house.
+
+This man's full name was not given, apparently through the writer's
+cautious respect for place and influence. He was vaguely described as
+goodly in appearance, of high family, but not abundantly supplied with
+riches. However he chanced to come to the obscure settlement was not
+stated. He did come, saw Desire Michell, and fell as abjectly prostrate
+before her as any youth who never had left the village.
+
+He pressed his courtship hard and eagerly. At first he was welcome at
+the minister's house. But a day came when Master Michell forbade him to
+cross that door and rumor whispered, scandalized, that Sir Austin's suit
+had not been honorable to the maid.
+
+Sir Austin sulked a week at the village inn. Then he broke under the
+torment of not seeing Desire Michell. Their betrothal was made public,
+and he rode away to prepare his home for their marriage in the spring.
+
+Travel was slow in the winter, news trickled slowly across snowbound
+distances. With spring came no bridegroom; instead word arrived of his
+affair with an heiress recently come to New York from England. She was
+rich in gold and grants of land from the Crown. Her husband would be a
+man of weight and influence, it seemed.
+
+Sir Austin had married her.
+
+Desire Michell shut herself in her father's house. The clergyman did not
+live many months after the humiliation. Alone, the girl lived.
+"Student," wrote Abimelech Fetherstone, "of black and bitter arts. Or as
+some say, having, like Bombastus de Hohenheim, a devil's bird enchained
+to do her will."
+
+In his distant home, Sir Austin sickened. He burned with fever, anguish
+consumed him. Physicians were called to the bedside of the rich man.
+They could not diagnose his ailment or help him. He screamed for water.
+When it was brought, his throat locked and he could not swallow. He
+raved of Desire Michell, beseeching her mercy. In his times of sanity,
+he begged and commanded his wife and servants to send for the girl. In
+her pardon he saw his sole hope of life.
+
+Finally, he was obeyed. Messengers were sent to the village. They were
+not even admitted to the house they sought, or to sight of Mistress
+Michell.
+
+"Your master came himself to woo; let him come himself to plead."
+
+That was the answer they received to carry back to the sick man.
+
+Sir Austin heard, and submitted with trembling hope. Writhing in the
+anguish wasting him by day and night, he made the journey by coach and
+litter to Desire Michell's house. At her door-sill he implored entrance
+and pity. The door did not open.
+
+It never opened for him. For three days in succession he was borne to
+her threshold, calling on her in his pain and fear. His servants and
+physician clustered about staring at the house which stood locked and
+blank of response. At night fire-shine was seen from an upper room; some
+declared they heard wild, melodious laughter.
+
+On the third day Sir Austin died. A stern-faced deputation of men went
+to the house of the late clergymen. They found the door unlatched and
+open to their entrance. In the upper room they found Mistress Michell
+seated before her hearth where a dying fire fell to embers, her hair
+"flowing down in grate bewty."
+
+"What have I to do with Sir Austin, or he with me?" she calmly asked the
+men who gaped upon her. "How should I have harmed him, who came not near
+him, as ye know? Bury him, and leave me in peace."
+
+If she had been aged and ugly, she might have been hung. Gossip ran rife
+through the countryside. But indignation was strong against the man who
+had jilted the local beauty, there existed no proof of harm done, and
+the matter slept for a time.
+
+New matters came. A horror grew up around the house. The girl was seen
+flitting across the fields at dawn, a monstrous shadow following. Her
+voice was heard from the room where she locked herself alone, raised in
+unknown speech. Strange lights moved in her windows in the deep night.
+The old woman who had served in the house for years was stricken with a
+palsy and was taken away mumbling unintelligible things that iced the
+blood of superstitious hearers.
+
+There was a young man of the neighborhood whose love for Mistress
+Michell had been long and constant. One morning he was found dead on her
+doorstep, his face fixed in drawn terror. Under his hand four words were
+scrawled in the snow: "_Sara daughter of Ruel----_"
+
+There were those who could finish that quotation. Next Sabbath the new
+minister took as his text: "Ye shall not suffer a witch to live." And he
+spoke of Sara the daughter of Ruel, who was wed to ten bridegrooms, each
+of whom was dead on the wedding eve; for she was beloved by an evil
+spirit that suffered none to come to her. Authority moved at last
+against Desire Michell. But when the officers came to arrest her, she
+was found dead in her favorite seat before the hearth.
+
+"Fair and upright in her place, scented with a perfume she herself
+distilled of her learning in such matters; which was said to contain a
+rare herb of Jerusalem called Lady's Rose, resembling spikenard, with
+vervain and cedar and secret simples; in which she steeped her hair so
+that wherever she abode were sweet odours. So did she escape Justice,
+but shall not escape Hell's Damnation and Heaven's casting out."
+
+I closed the book and laid it down.
+
+Reading those dim, closely printed pages had taken time. I was
+astonished to find the window spaces gray with dawn, when I glanced that
+way. The night was past. Neither from Desire nor from the Thing without
+a name which had sent me to this book could I find out what I was
+expected to glean from the narration.
+
+My enemy had made no conditions on directing me to the book. It had
+asked no price, uttered no menace. Why, then, had I so solemn a
+certainty that a crisis in our affair had been reached. I had come to an
+end; a corner had been turned. I had opened a door that could not be
+closed. How did I know this? Why?
+
+Why was the fog against the windows this morning so like the fog that
+shrouded the unearthly sea opposite the Barrier?
+
+By and by Cristina came downstairs and busied herself in the kitchen.
+Bagheera, who had slept beside my chair all night, rose and padded out
+to the region of breakfast and saucers of milk. Next, the voices of
+Phillida and Vere drifted from above.
+
+To have Phillida find me there in her sewing-room, finishing an
+all-night vigil, involved too many explanations. I did an unwise thing.
+From the lowest shelf of the bookcase I gathered such books as were
+readable by my knowledge, and carried the armful up to my room. After a
+hot bath and breakfast I would look over these companions of the New
+England witch book.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+     "Not a drop of her blood was human,
+     But she was made like a soft sweet woman."
+                                           --LILITH.
+
+
+The fog stayed all day. The mist was so dense that it gave the effect of
+a solid mass enclosing the house. No wind stirred it, no cheering beam
+of sun pierced it. Through it sounds reached the ear distorted and
+magnified. All day I sat in my room reading.
+
+There are books which should not be preserved. I, who am a lover of
+books, who detest any form of censorship, I do seriously set down my
+belief that there exist chronicles which would be better destroyed. With
+this few people will agree. My answer to them is simple: they have not
+read the books I mean.
+
+Not all the volumes from the old bookcase were of that character, of
+course. Nearly all of them were well known to classical students, at
+least by name. Obscure, fantastic, cast aside by the world they were,
+but harmless to a fairly steady head. But there were two that clung to
+the mind like pitch. I have no intention of giving their titles.
+
+Ugly and sullen, early night closed in when I was in a mood akin to it.
+Dinner with Phillida and Vere was an ordeal hurried through. We were out
+of touch. I felt remote from them; fenced apart by a heavy sense of
+guilt and defilement left by those hateful books, most incongruously
+blended with contempt for my companions' childish light-heartedness. As
+soon as possible, I left them.
+
+Alone in my room, in my chair behind the writing-table again, I pushed
+aside the pile of books and sank into sombre thought. What should I say
+to Desire Michell if she came tonight?
+
+Who was she, who was claimed by the Unspeakable and who did not deny Its
+claim? Was I confronted with two beings from places unknown to normal
+humanity? If she was the woman that she had seemed to be throughout our
+intercourse, how could the dark enemy control her? Even I, a common man
+with full measure of mankind's common faults and weaknesses, could hold
+Its clutch from me by right of the law that protects each in his place.
+
+Was she one of those who have stepped from the permitted places?
+
+"_Sara the daughter of Ruel--who was beloved by an evil spirit who
+suffered none to come to her_."
+
+"_There was a young gentlewoman of excellent beauty, daughter of a
+nobleman of Mar, who loved a foule monstrous thing verie horrible to
+behold, and for it refused rich marriages.... Until the Gospel of St.
+John being said suddenlie the wicked spirit flue his waies with sore
+noise_."
+
+I put out my hand and thrust the pile of books aside from my direct
+sight. But I could not so easily thrust from my mind the thoughts these
+books had implanted. I could not forget that Desire Michell herself had
+alleged jealousy as the Thing's reason for attacking me.
+
+What if we came to an explanation tonight and ended this long delirium?
+Was it not time? Had not my weeks of endurance earned me this right?
+Resolution mounted in me, defiant and strong.
+
+The evening had passed to an hour when I might look for the girl to
+come. I switched off the lights, and sat down to keep our nightly tryst.
+
+In the darkness of the haunted room, the thoughts I would have held at
+bay rushed upon me as clamorous besiegers.
+
+Desire! Desire of the world! Desire of mine and of the unhuman Thing,
+did we grasp at Eve or Lilith? At the fire on the hearth or the cold
+phosphorescence of swamp and marsh?
+
+A drift of fragrance was afloat on the air. A delicate stir of movement
+passed by me. I raised my head from my hands, expectant.
+
+"I am here," her familiar voice told me.
+
+"Desire, you had to come, tonight."
+
+Some quality in my voice carried to her a message beyond the words. But
+she did not break into exclamation or question as another woman might.
+She was mute, as one who stands still to find the path before taking a
+step.
+
+"You are angry," she said at last. "Something here has gone badly for
+you; I knew that before I entered this room."
+
+"How can you say that?" I challenged. "If you are like other men and
+women, how can you know what happens when you are absent? How do you
+know what passes between the Thing from the Frontier and me?"
+
+"I do not know unless you tell me, Roger. If I feel from afar when you
+are in sorrow, why, so do many people feel with another in sympathy."
+
+"You feel more than ordinary sympathy can," I retorted.
+
+"Then, perhaps it is not an ordinary sympathy I have for you, Roger."
+
+Her very gentleness struck wrong on my perverted mood. Was she trying to
+turn me from my purpose with her soft speech? She had never granted me
+anything so near an admission of love until now.
+
+"It is not an ordinary trial that I have borne for these meagre meetings
+where I do not see your face or touch your hand," I answered. "But that
+must end. Put your hand in mine, Desire, and come with me. Let us go out
+of this room where shadows make our thoughts sickly. You shall stay with
+my cousin. Or if you choose, we will go straight to New York or Boston.
+I am asking you to be my wife. Let us have done with phantoms and
+spectres. I love you."
+
+"No," she whispered. "You do not love me tonight. Tonight you distrust
+me. Why?"
+
+"Is it distrusting you to ask you to marry me?"
+
+"Not this way would you have asked that of me when I last came! But I
+will answer you more honestly than you do me. To go with you would be
+the greatest happiness the world could give. To think of it dazzles the
+heart. But it is not for me. Have you forgotten, Roger, that my life is
+not mine? That I am a prisoner who has crept out for a little while? The
+gates soon close, now, upon me."
+
+"What gates?" I demanded.
+
+"Sacrifice and expiation."
+
+"Expiation of what?" I exclaimed, exasperated. "Desire, I have read the
+book of Desire Michell, downstairs."
+
+I heard her gasp and shrink in the darkness. Silence bound us both. In
+the hush, it seemed to me that the house suddenly trembled as it had
+done the night before, a slight shock as from some distant explosion. In
+my intentness upon the woman opposite me the tremor passed unheeded. She
+must answer me now, surely! Now----
+
+She spoke with a breathless difficulty, spacing her words apart:
+
+"How did you--find--the book?"
+
+"It told me--the Thing from out there," I admitted, sullenly defiant of
+her opinion.
+
+She cried out sharply.
+
+"You? You took Its gift? You did that fatal madness--and you are here?
+Oh, you are lost, and the guilt mine! Yet I warned you that danger
+flowed from knowing me. You accepted the risk and the sorrow--yet you
+have thrown down all for a bribe of knowledge. Do you not know what it
+means to take a gift from the Dark Ones of the Borderland? To brave the
+Loathesome Eyes so long--and fall this way at last! Yet--there may be a
+hope--since you still live. But go. Not tomorrow, not at dawn, but go
+now. By all that man can dread for soul or body, go now."
+
+"Not without you."
+
+"Me? Oh, how can I make you understand! I shall never come here again.
+Take with you my gratitude for our hours together, my prayers for all
+the years to come. There is no blame to you because you could not trust
+a woman on whom falls the shadow of the awful Watcher that stalks behind
+me. I make no reproach--if only you will go. Do not linger. I do most
+solemnly warn you not to stay alone in this room one moment after I have
+gone."
+
+"Desire!" I exclaimed. "Wait. Forgive me. I trust you. I did not mean
+what you believe. Do not leave me this way. Desire----"
+
+I can say honestly that my next action was without intention. On my
+table lay, as usual, a small electric torch. Every member of our
+household was provided with one for use in emergencies likely to occur
+in a country house, the time of candles being past. Now, rising in
+agitation and repentance, my hand pressed by chance upon the
+flashlight's button. A beam of light poured across the darkness.
+
+What did I see, starting out of the black gloom? A spirit or a woman?
+Were those a woman's draperies or part of the night fog that showed mere
+swirl upon swirl of pale gray twisting in the path of light? I glimpsed
+a face colorless as pearl, the shine of eyes dark and almond shaped,
+then a drifting mass of gray smoke, all intermingled with glittering
+gold flashes, seemed to close between us. The whole apparition sank down
+out of vision, as aghast, I lifted my hand and the torch went out.
+
+Shaken out of all ability to speak, I stood in my place. Did I hear a
+movement, or only a stirring of the orchard trees beyond the windows?
+
+"Desire?" I ventured, my voice hoarse to my ears.
+
+No answer. I felt myself alone.
+
+I would not at once turn on the lamps. My haste might seem an attempt to
+break faith with her a second time. I sat down again, folding my arms
+upon the table and resting my forehead upon them.
+
+Well, I had seen her at last--but how? A wan loveliness seemingly
+painted upon the canvas of the dark by a brush dipped in moonlight. A
+white moth caught fluttering in the ray of the torch. Seen at the
+instant of her leaving me forever; insulted by my suspicions, my love
+hurled coarsely at her like a command, my promise of security for her
+visits apparently broken. How dared I even hope for her return?
+
+Now I knew why my enemy had guided me to those books, that I might read,
+fill my mind with the poison of vile thoughts, and destroy the
+comradeship that bound me to Desire Michell. How should I find her? How
+free us both?
+
+The clock in the hall downstairs struck a single bell. With dull
+surprise I realized that considerable time had passed while I sat there.
+Still I did not move, weighed down by a profound discouragement.
+
+Suddenly, as a wave will run up a beach in advance of the incoming tide,
+impelled by some deep stir in the ocean's secret places, an icy surge
+rushed about my feet. Deathly cold from that current struck through my
+whole body. My heart shuddered and staggered in its beating from pure
+shock.
+
+"_Go! Not tomorrow, not at dawn, but now!_"
+
+The wave seeped back, receded away from me down its invisible beach.
+Desire's warning hammered at my mind, striving to burst some barred door
+to reach the consciousness within that had loitered too long. This was
+the new peril. This was what I had fled from, unknowing the source of my
+panic, the night before.
+
+This was death.
+
+A second surge struck me with the heavy shock of a veritable wave from
+some bitter ocean. This time the tide rose to my knees; boiling and
+hissing in its rush. Blood and nerves seemed to freeze. I felt my heart
+stop, then reel on like a broken thing. Flecks of crimson spattered like
+foam against my eyelids.
+
+The wave broke. The mass poured down the beach, tugging at me in its
+retreat. With the last strength ebbing away from me with that receding
+current, I dragged the chain of the lamp beside me.
+
+The comfort of light springing up in the room! The relief of seeing
+normal, pleasant surroundings! Truly light is an elixir of courage to
+man.
+
+That cold had paralyzed me. I had no force to rise. Nor did I altogether
+wish to rise and go. I had lost Desire tonight. Was I to lose my
+self-respect also? Was I to run a beaten man from this peril, after
+standing against my enemy so long?
+
+Should I not rather stand on this my ground where I was not the "lame
+feller"?
+
+Down by the lake, the snarling cry of a terrified cat broke the night
+stillness. It was Bagheera's voice. The cry was followed by sounds
+indicating a small animal's frantic flight through the thickets of
+goldenrod and willow that edged the banks of the stream below the dam.
+The series of progressive crashes passed back of the house and continued
+on, dying away down the creek.
+
+As I braced my startled nerves after this outbreak of noise, the light
+was withdrawn from every lamp in the room. At the same moment, the
+electric torch rolled off my table and fell to the floor. I heard its
+progress across the muffling softness of the rug, across the polished
+wood beyond, and final stoppage at some point out of my reach.
+
+As vapor rises from some unseen source and forms in vague growing mass
+within the curdled air, so blackening dark the hideous bulk reared
+Itself in the night and stared in upon me. As so many times, I felt the
+Eyes I could not see; the pressure of a colossal hate loomed over me,
+poised to crush, yet withheld by a force greater than either of us. The
+venom of Its malevolence flowed into the atmosphere about me, fouling
+the breath I drew. My lungs labored.
+
+"Pygmy," Its intelligence thrust against mine. "Frail and presumptuous
+Will that has dared oppose mine, you are conquered. This is the hour
+foretold to you, the hour of your weakness and my strength. Weakling,
+feel the death surf break upon you. Fall down before me. Cower--plead!"
+
+Now indeed I felt a sickness of self-doubt, for the wash of the
+invisible sea never had come to me until tonight. And there was Desire's
+saying that I had destroyed myself by accepting the Thing's gift of
+knowledge of the book. But I summoned my forces.
+
+"Never," my thought refused It. "Have we not met front to front these
+many nights? And who has drawn back, Breaker of the Law? You return, but
+I live. The duel is not lost."
+
+"It is lost, Man, and to me. Have you not taken my gift that you might
+spy meanly on the secret of your beloved? Have you not opened your mind
+to the evil thoughts that creep upon the citadel of strength within and
+tear down its power? Of your own deed, you are mine. My breath drinks
+your breath. Your life falls down as a lamp that is thrown from its
+pedestal. Your spirit rises from its seat and looks toward those spaces
+where it shall take flight tonight. Man, you die."
+
+Again the surge and shock of that frigid sea rushed upon me. I felt the
+swirl and hiss of the broken wave higher about me before it sank away
+down whatever dreadful strand it owned. My life ebbed with it, draining
+low. My enemy spoke the truth. One more such wave----
+
+My imagination sprang ahead of the event. In fancy, I saw bright dawn
+filling this room of mine, shining on the figure of a man who had been
+myself. His head rested on his folded arms so that his face was hidden.
+On the table beside him a vase was overturned; a spray of heliotrope lay
+near and water had trickled over scattered sheets of music, staining the
+paper. By and by Vere would come to summon that unanswering figure to
+the gay little breakfast-table. Phillida would leave her place behind
+the burnished copper percolator she prized so highly and come running up
+the stairs. In her gentleness she would grieve, no doubt. I was sorry
+for that. But it was a contentment and pleasure for me to recall that I
+had settled my financial affairs so that my little cousin would never
+lack money or know any care that I could spare her. Strange, how she had
+been rated below more beautiful or more clever women until the waif
+Ethan Vere had set her dearness in full sun for us to wonder at!
+
+"Pygmy, will you think of another pygmy now?" raged the Thing.
+"Yourself! Think of yourself! Crouch! Think of death, corruption, the
+vileness of the grave. Think how you are of the grave. Think how you are
+alone with me. Think how you are abandoned to me."
+
+But with that tenderness for Phillida a warmth had flowed through me
+like strength.
+
+"Not so," my defiance answered It. "For where I am, I stand by my own
+will. With where I shall stand, you have nothing to do. Back, then, for
+with the death of my body your power ends. Back--or else face me, Thing
+of Darkness, while we stand in one place."
+
+At this mad challenge of mine silence closed down like a shutting trap.
+Consciousness sank away from me with a sense of swooning quietness.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I stood before the Barrier on the ghostly frontier; erect, arms folded,
+fronting the Breach in that inconceivably mighty wall. Above, away out
+of vision on either hand stretched the gray glimmering cliffs.
+
+This I had seen before. But behind me lay that which I had not seen. The
+mists I believed to be eternal had lifted. Naked, a vast gray sea
+stretched parallel with the Barrier; like it, without end or even a
+horizon to bound its enormous desolation. Between these two immensities
+on the narrow strand at the foot of the wall, I stood, pygmy indeed. In
+the Breach, as of old, the Thing whose home was there reared Itself
+against me.
+
+"Man," It spat, "would you see me? Would you see the Eyes once seen by
+the witch-woman, who fell blasted out of human ken? Creature of clay,
+crumbling now in the sea of mortality, do you brave my immemorial age?"
+
+It reared up, up, a towering formlessness. It stooped, a lowering
+menace.
+
+"Man, whenever man has summoned Evil since the youngest days of the
+world have I not answered? Have I not brought my presence to the
+magician's lamp? Have I not shadowed the alchemist at his crucible? When
+the woman called upon me with ancient knowledge, did I not come. I am
+the guardian of the Barrier. Whoever would pass this way must pass me.
+Have you the power? Die, then, and begone."
+
+With a long heaving sound of waters in movement, the gray sea stirred
+from its stillness. As if drawn to some center out of sight, the tide
+began to recede down that strange beach. Then realization came to me
+that here was the ocean which, invisible, had surged icy death upon me a
+while past. The ocean now gathered for the final wave that should
+overwhelm the defeated.
+
+"Braggart!" my thought answered the taunt. "If the witch-woman was
+yours, the girl Desire is mine. This I know: as little as man has to do
+with you, so little have you to do with the human and the good. Living
+or dead, our path is not yours. I did not summon you. I do dare look
+upon you, if you have visible form."
+
+Now in the hush a sound that I had faintly heard as a continuing thing
+seemed to draw nearer. A sound of light, swift footsteps hurrying,
+hurrying; the steps of one in pitiful eagerness and haste. But I heeded
+this slightly. My gaze was upon that which took place within the cleft
+in the great wall. For there the cold darkness was writhing and turning,
+visible, yet obscure; as the rapids of a glassy, twisting river might
+look by night. And as one might glimpse beneath the smooth boil and
+heave of such a river the dim shape of crocodile or water-monster, so in
+that moving dark there seemed to lie Something from which the mind
+shrank, appalled. Now gigantic tentacles rolled about a central mass,
+groping out in unsatisfied greed. Now an ape-like shape seemed to stalk
+there, rearing up its monstrous stature until all that Breach was choked
+with it. It fell down into vagueness, where huge coils upraised and sank
+their loops. But through all change steadily fixed upon me I felt the
+eyes of the Unseen.
+
+I stood my ground. With what pain and draining cost to my poor endurance
+there is no need to say. Each instant I anticipated the surge of that
+returning sea whose flood should smother out the human spark upon its
+shore. This I had brought upon myself. Yes, and would again to help
+Desire Michell! If I had sheltered her for one hour----!
+
+The Thing halted, stooped.
+
+"Man, cast off the woman," It snarled at me. "Fool, evil goes with her.
+For her you suffer. Thrust her from your breast."
+
+I looked down. Wavering against my breast, just above my heart glimmered
+a spot of light. The little hurrying steps had ceased. I thought, if the
+bright head of Desire Michell were rested there against me, how I would
+strive to shield her from sight of the Thing yonder. In the sweep of
+that will to protect, I drew my coat about the spot of hovering
+brightness.
+
+I felt her press warm against me. I heard the roar of the death-wave far
+out in that sea. Before me----
+
+Oh Horror of the Frontier, what broke through the dread Breach. What
+formed there, more inhuman from Its likeness to humanity? What Hand
+reached for me--for--us----
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+     "I have had a dream past the wit of man to say what dream
+     it was."--MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM.
+
+
+"Mr. Locke! Mr. Locke!"
+
+I opened heavy eyes to meet the eyes of Ethan Vere, who bent over me.
+Phillida was there, too, pale of face. But what was That just vanishing
+into the darkness beyond my window-sill? What malignant glare seared
+disappointment and grim promise across my consciousness? Had I brought
+with me or did I hear now a whispered: "_Pygmy, again!_"
+
+"Cousin, Cousin, are you very ill?" Phillida was half sobbing. "Won't
+you drink the brandy, please? Oh, Ethan, how cold he is to touch!"
+
+"Hush, dear," Vere bade, in his slow steadfast way. "Mr. Locke, can you
+swallow some of this?"
+
+I became aware that his arm supported me upright in my chair while he
+held a glass to my lips. Mechanically I drank some of the cordial. Vere
+put down the glass and said a curious thing. He asked me:
+
+"Shall I get you out of this room?"
+
+Why should he ask that, since the spectre was for me alone? Or if he had
+not seen It, how did he know this room was an unsafe area? My stupefied
+brain puzzled over these questions while I managed a sign of refusal.
+Any effort was impossible to me. The cold of the unearthly sea still
+numbed my body. My heart labored, staggering at each beat.
+
+Vere's support and nearness were welcome to me. His tact let me rest in
+the mute inaction necessary to recovery, while my body, astonished that
+it still lived, hesitatingly resumed the task of life. Somehow he
+reassured and directed Phillida. Presently she was busied with the
+coffee apparatus in the corner of the room.
+
+It was too much weariness even to turn my eyes aside from the expanse of
+the table before me. The vase was upset, I noted, as I had seemed to see
+it. The spray of purple heliotrope Phillida had put there the day before
+lay among the wet sheets of music. The Book of Hermas lay open at the
+page I had last turned, the rosy lamplight upon the text.
+
+"_Behold, I saw a great Beast that he might devour a city--whose name is
+Hegrin. Thou hast escaped--because thou didst not fear for so terrible a
+Beast. If, therefore, ye shall have prepared yourselves, yet may
+escape----_"
+
+What did they mean, the old, old words men have rejected? What had
+Hermas glimpsed in his visions? How many men are written down liars
+because they traveled in strange lands indeed, and explorers, strove to
+report what they had seen? Who before me had stood at the Barrier and
+set foot on the Frontier between the worlds?
+
+The fog still dense outside was whitening with daybreak. A few hours
+while the sun ran its course once more for me, then night again,
+bringing completion of the menace. I recognized that this delay could
+not affect the end. Perhaps it would have been easier if all had
+finished for me tonight, easier if Vere and Phillida had not found me in
+time to bring me back.
+
+How had they found out my condition? Wonder stirred under my lethargy.
+Had I called or cried out? It did not seem that I could have done so.
+Certainly I had not tried! I was not quite so poor an adventurer as
+that.
+
+Phillida was back with a cup of steaming black coffee, tiptoeing in her
+anxiety and questioning Vere with her eyes. He took the cup, stooping to
+receive my glance of assent to the new medicine.
+
+The brandy had stimulated, but sickened me. The coffee revived me so
+much that I was able to take the second cup without Vere's help. When I
+had walked up and down the room a few times, leaning on his arm, life
+had taken me back, if only for a little while.
+
+The two nurses were so good in their care of me that our first words
+were of my gratitude to them. Then my curiosity found voice.
+
+"How did you happen to come in at this hour?" I asked. "How did you know
+I was--ill?"
+
+"I cannot imagine what made Ethan wake up," said Phillida, with a
+puzzled look toward her husband. "He woke me by rushing out of the room
+and letting the door slam behind him. Of course I knew something must be
+wrong to make Drawls hurry like that. Usually he does such a tremendous
+lot in a day while looking positively lazy. So I came rushing after and
+found him in here, trying to waken you. I--I thought at first that you
+were not living, Cousin Roger. It was horrible! You were all white and
+cold----" she shivered.
+
+Vere poured another cup of coffee. He said nothing on the subject,
+merely observing that the stimulant would hardly hurt me and some might
+be good for Phil. I asked her to bring cups for them both.
+
+"I am not sure I really care about the coffee, but I'll make some more,"
+she nodded, dimpling. "I love to drink from your wee porcelain cups with
+their gold holders. You do have pretty things, you bachelors from town."
+
+When she was across the room, I asked quietly:
+
+"What was it, Vere? What sent you to me?"
+
+He answered in as subdued a tone, looking at the tinted shade of the
+lamp instead of at my face.
+
+"The young lady woke me, Mr. Locke. She came to the bedside, whispering
+that you were dying--would be dead if I didn't get to help you in time.
+She was gone before Phillida roused up so she doesn't know anything
+about it."
+
+My heart, so nearly stopped forever and so lethargic still, leaped in a
+strong beat. Desire, then, had come back to save me. For all my doubt
+and seemingly broken faith, she had brought her slight power to help me
+in my hour of danger. For my sake she had broken through her mysterious
+seclusion to call Vere and send him to my rescue.
+
+Neither he nor I being unsophisticated, I understood what Vere believed,
+and why he looked at the lamp rather than at me. But even that matter
+had to yield precedence to my first eagerness.
+
+"You saw her?" I demanded. "You call her young. You saw her face, then?"
+
+"I could forget it if I had," he said dryly. "As it happened, I didn't.
+She was wrapped in a lot of floating thin stuff; gray, I guess? The room
+was pretty dark, and I was jumping out of sleep. I don't know why she
+seemed young unless it was the easy, light way she moved. By the time I
+got what she was saying and sat up, she was gone."
+
+"Gone?"
+
+"She went out the door like a puff of smoke. I just saw a gray figure in
+the doorway, where the hall lamp made it brighter than in the room. When
+I came into the hall there wasn't a sign of anybody about. Nor
+afterward, either!"
+
+I considered briefly.
+
+"I suppose I know what you are thinking, Vere. It is natural, but wrong.
+The lady----"
+
+"Mr. Locke," he checked me, "I'm not--thinking. I guess you're as good a
+judge as I am about what goes on in this house. After the way you've
+treated us from the first, I'd be pretty dull not to know you're as
+choice of Phillida as I am; and she is all that matters."
+
+"Who is?" demanded Phillida, returning. "Me? I haven't the least idea
+what you are talking about, Drawls, but I think Cousin Roger matters a
+great deal more than I do, just now. Perhaps now he is able to tell us
+about this attack, and if he should have a doctor. I have noticed for
+weeks how thin and grave he has been growing to be. If only he _would_
+drink buttermilk!"
+
+I looked into the candid, affectionate face she turned to me. From her,
+I looked to her husband, whose New England steadiness had been tempered
+by a sailor's service in the war and broadened by the test of his
+experience in a city cabaret. A new thought cleaved through my
+perplexities like an arrow shot from a far-off place.
+
+"How much do you both trust me?" I slowly asked. "I do not mean trust my
+character or my good intentions, but how much confidence have you in my
+sanity and commonsense? Would you believe a thing because I told it to
+you? Or would you say: 'This is outside usual experience. He is
+deceiving us, or mad'?"
+
+They regarded one another, smiling with an exquisite intimacy of
+understanding.
+
+"Don't you see yourself one little, little bit, Cousin?" she wondered at
+me.
+
+"Anything you say, goes all the way with us," Vere corroborated.
+
+"Wait," I bade. "Drink your coffee while I think."
+
+"Please drink yours, Cousin Roger, all fresh and hot."
+
+I emptied the cup she urged upon me, then leaned my forehead in my hands
+and tried to review the situation. They obeyed like well-bred children,
+settling down on a cushioned seat together and taking their coffee as
+prettily as a pair of parakeets. They seemed almost children to me,
+although there was little difference in years between Vere and myself.
+But then, I stood on the brink where years stopped.
+
+With the next night, my triumphant enemy could be put off no longer.
+That I could not doubt. I cannot say that I was unafraid, yet fear
+weighed less upon me than a heavy sense of solemnity and realization of
+the few hours left during which I could affect the affairs of life. What
+remained to be done?
+
+On one of my visits to New York, I had called on my lawyer and made my
+will. There were a few pensioners for whom provision should continue
+after my death. The aged music master under whom I developed such
+abilities as I had, who was crippled now by rheumatism and otherwise
+dependent on a hard-faced son-in-law; the three small daughters of a
+dead friend, an actor, whose care and education at a famous school of
+classic dancing I had promised him to finance--a few such obligations
+had been provided for, and the rest was for Phillida.
+
+But now, what of Desire Michell?
+
+She had seemed so apart from common existence that I never had thought
+of her possible needs any more than of the needs of a bird that darted
+in and out of my windows. Until tonight, when I had seen her and she had
+proved herself all woman by her appeal to Ethan Vere. It was not a
+spirit or a seeress or "ye foule witch, Desire Michell" who had fled to
+him for help in rescuing me. It was simply a terrified girl. What was to
+become of this girl? Under what circumstances did she dwell? Had she a
+home, or did she need one? Could I care for this matter while I was
+here?
+
+Day was so far advanced that a clamor of birds came in to us along with
+a freshening air. The strangely persistent fog had not lifted, but the
+lamps already looked wan and faded in the new light. I switched them out
+before speaking to the pair who watched me.
+
+"I have a story to tell you both," I said. "The beginning of it Phillida
+has already heard. Perhaps----Have you told Vere about the woman who
+visited this room, the first night I spent in the house? Who cut her
+hair and left the braid in my hand to escape from me?"
+
+"Yes," she nodded, wide-eyed.
+
+"Will you go to my chiffonier, there in the alcove, and bring a package
+wrapped in white silk from the top drawer?"
+
+She did as she was asked and laid the square of folded silk before me. I
+put back the covering, showing that sumptuous braid. The rich fragrance
+of the gold pomander wrapped with it filled the air like a vivifying
+elixir. Phillida gathered up the braid with a cry of envious rapture.
+
+"Oh! The gorgeous thing! How do some lucky girls have hair like that? If
+it was unbound, my two hands could not hold it all. What a pity to have
+cut it! Look, Ethan, how it crinkles and glitters."
+
+She held it out to him, extended across her palms. Vere refrained from
+touching the braid, surveying it where it lay. Being a mere bachelor, I
+had no idea of Phillida's emotions, until Vere's usual gravity broke in
+a mischievous, heart-warming smile into the brown eyes uplifted to him.
+
+"Beautiful," he agreed politely.
+
+No more. But as I saw the wistful envy pass quite away from my little
+cousin's plain face and leave her content, I advanced in respect for
+him.
+
+In the beginning, it was even harder to speak than I had anticipated.
+When Phillida laid the braid back in its wrapping, I left it uncovered
+before me and looked at its reassuring reality rather than at my
+listeners. How, I wondered, could anyone be expected to credit the story
+I had to tell? How should I find words to embody it?
+
+Only at first! Whether there clung about me some atmosphere of that land
+between the worlds where I so recently had stood; or the room indeed
+kept, as I fancied, the melancholy chill of the unseen tide that had
+washed through it, I met no scepticism from the two who heard my tale of
+wild experience. They did not interrupt me. Phillida crept close to her
+husband, putting her hand in his, but she did not exclaim or question.
+
+Silence held us all for a while after I had finished. I had a
+discouraged sense of inadequacy. After all, they had received but a
+meagre outline. The color and body of the events escaped speech. How
+could they feel what I had felt? How could they conceive the charm of
+Desire Michell, the white magic of her voice in the dark, the force of
+her personality that could impress her image "sight unseen" beyond all
+time to erase? How convey to a listener that, understanding her so
+little, I yet knew her so well?
+
+"I have told you all this because I need your help," I said presently.
+"Will you give it to me?"
+
+"Go away!" Phillida burst forth. She beat her palms together in her
+earnestness. "Cousin Roger, take your car and go away--far off! Go
+where--nothing--can reach you. You must not spend another single night
+here. Ethan will go with you. I will, too, if you want us. You must not
+be left alone until you are quite safe; perhaps in New York?"
+
+"And, Desire Michell?"
+
+"She is in no danger, I suppose. She is not my cousin, anyhow. And even
+she told you to go away."
+
+"You believe my story, then? You do not think me suffering from
+delusions?"
+
+"Ethan saw the girl, too. If he had not come here in time to save you, I
+believe you would have died in that terrible stupor. Besides, I have
+seen for weeks that something was changing you."
+
+"What does Vere say?" I questioned, studying the absorbed gravity of his
+expression. I wondered what I myself would have said if anyone had
+brought me such a story.
+
+He passed his arm around Phillida and drew her to him with a quieting,
+protective movement. His regard met mine with more significance than he
+chose to voice.
+
+"I'm satisfied to take the thing as you tell it, Mr. Locke," he
+answered. "Phil is right, it seems to me, about you not staying here. I
+don't think the young lady ought to stay, either."
+
+"She refuses to leave, Vere. What can I offer her that I have not
+offered? How can I find her? You have heard how I searched the
+countryside for a hint of such a girl's presence. No one has ever seen
+her; or else someone lies very cleverly."
+
+In the pause, Phillida hesitatingly ventured an idea:
+
+"Perhaps she is not--real. If the monster is a ghost thing, may not she
+be one, too? If we are to believe in such things at all----? She almost
+seems to intend that you shall believe her the ghost of the witch girl
+in that old book."
+
+I shook my head with the helpless feeling of trying to explain some
+abstruse knowledge to a child. I had spoken of the colossal spaces, the
+solemn immensities of the place where I had set my human foot. I had
+tried to paint the desolate bleakness of that Borderland where the
+unnamed Thing and I met, each beyond his own law-decreed boundary, and
+locked in combat bitter and strong. Phillida had listened; and talked of
+ghosts the bugbears of grave-yard superstition. Did Vere comprehend me
+better? Did he visualize the struggle, weirdly akin to legends of knight
+and dragon, as prize of which waited Desire Michell; forlornly helpless
+as white Andromeda chained to her black cliff? Could the Maine
+countryman, the cabaret entertainer, seize the truths glimpsed by
+Rosicrucians and mystics of lost cults, when the highly bred college
+girl failed?
+
+It seemed so. At least his dark eyes met mine with intelligence; hers
+held only bewilderment and fear.
+
+"They are not ghosts," I said only.
+
+"But how can you be sure?" she persisted.
+
+Beneath the braid and the pomander lay the sheet of paper on which
+Desire had written weeks before; the first page of that composition now
+pouring gold into my hands. This I passed to Phillida.
+
+"Do ghosts write?" I queried.
+
+She read the lines aloud.
+
+"'We walk upon the shadows of hills, across a level thrown, and pant
+like climbers.'"
+
+"They do write, people say, with ouija boards and mediums," she
+murmured.
+
+I looked at Vere with despair of sustaining this argument. He stood up
+as if my appeal had been spoken, drawing her with him.
+
+"Now that it's a decent hour, don't you think Cristina might give us
+some breakfast?" he suggested. "I guess bacon and eggs would be sort of
+restoring. If you feel up to taking my arm as far as the porch, Mr.
+Locke, the fresh air might be good medicine, too."
+
+I have speculated sometimes upon how civilized man would get through
+days not spaced by his recurrent meals into three divisions. Those meals
+are hyphens between his mind and his body, as it were. What sense of
+humor can view too intensely a creature who must feed himself three
+times a day? Are we not pleasantly urged out of our heroics and into the
+normal by breakfast, luncheon and dinner? Deny it as we will, when we do
+not heed them we are out of touch with nature.
+
+We went downstairs.
+
+After breakfast was over, Vere and I walked across the orchard to a seat
+placed near the lake. There I sat down, while he remained standing in
+his favorite attitude: one foot on a low boulder, his arm resting on his
+knee as he gazed into the shallow, amber-tinted water. Fog still overlay
+the countryside, but without bringing coolness. The damp heat was
+stifling, almost tropical as the sun mounted higher in the hidden sky.
+
+I watched my companion, waiting for him to speak. He appeared intent
+upon the darting movements of a group of tiny fish, but I knew his
+thoughts were afar.
+
+"Mr. Locke, I didn't want to speak before Phillida, because it would not
+do any good for her to hear what I have to say," he finally began. "It
+is properly the answer to what you asked upstairs, about our believing
+you had not imagined that story. Did anything slip out over the
+window-sill when you were waking up?"
+
+Startled, for I had not spoken of this, I met his gaze.
+
+"Yes. Did you see----"
+
+"Nothing, exactly. Something, though! Like--well, like something pouring
+itself along; a big, thick mass. Something sort of smooth and
+glistening; like black, oily molasses slipping over. Only alive,
+somehow; drawing coils of itself out of the dark into the dark. I can't
+put it very plain."
+
+"What did you think?"
+
+"The air in the room was bad and close, hard to breathe. I guessed maybe
+I was a little dizzy, jumping out of bed the way I did and finding you
+like dead, almost." He paused, and returned his contemplation to the
+fish darting in the lake.
+
+"That is what I thought," he concluded. "What I felt--well, it was the
+kind of scare I didn't use to know you could feel outside of bad dreams;
+the kind you wake up from all shaking, with your face and hands dripping
+sweat. That isn't all, either!"
+
+This time the pause was so long that I thought he did not mean to
+continue.
+
+"My excuse for speaking of such matters before Phillida is that I may
+need a woman friend for Desire Michell," I reverted to the implied
+rebuke I acknowledged his right to give. "I wanted her help, and yours.
+More than ever, since you have shared my experience so far, I want your
+advice."
+
+"I'll be proud to give it, in a minute. First, it's only fair to say
+I've felt enough wrong around here to be able to understand a lot that
+once I might have laughed at. Nothing compared to you! But--I've been
+working about the lake sometimes after dark or before daylight was
+strong, when a kind of horror would come over me--well, I'd feel I had
+to get away and into the house or go crazy. That morning when you called
+from your window to ask where I'd been so early, and I told you looking
+for turtles--that was one time. I had gone out looking for turtles, but
+that horror drove me in. When you hailed me, I had it so bad that I
+could just about make out not to run for the house like a scared cat,
+yelling all the way. Turning back to the lake with you was a poser. But
+I did; and the feeling was all gone as quick as it came. We had a nice
+morning's shooting. Once in a while I've felt it sort of driving me
+indoors when I stepped off the porch or over to the barn at night.
+That's a funny thing: the fear was always outside, not in the house. I
+thought of that while you were telling us how the Thing at the window
+kept trying to get in at you. We haven't got a haunted house, but a
+haunted place!"
+
+"Why have you not spoken of this before?" I asked, deeply stirred.
+
+He made a gesture, too American to be called a shrug. He said nothing,
+watching a large bubble rise through the pure, brown-green water, float
+an instant on the surface, then vanish with the abrupt completeness of a
+miniature explosion. I watched also, with an always fresh interest in
+the pretty phenomenon. Then I repeated my question, rather impatiently
+as I considered what a relief his companionship in experience would have
+afforded all these weeks.
+
+"Why not, Vere?"
+
+"Mr. Locke, I don't like to keep saying that you never exactly got used
+to me as your cousin's husband," he reluctantly replied. "But I can see
+it's a kind of surprise to you right along that I don't break down or
+break out in some fashion. Of course I haven't known that you were
+meeting queer times, too! If you hadn't been through any of this, what
+would you have thought if I'd come to you with stories of the place
+being haunted by something nobody could see? You would have judged I was
+a liar, trying to fix up an excuse for getting away from the work here
+and shoving off. I don't want to go away. I don't intend to go. I can't
+see any need of it for Phil and me. But--and this is the advice you
+spoke of! I think you ought to leave and leave now. It's little better
+than suicide to stay."
+
+"And abandon Desire Michell?"
+
+He turned his dark observant eyes toward me.
+
+"If I said yes, you wouldn't do it. Phil and I will take care of the
+young lady, if she will let us. Couldn't a note be left for her, telling
+her to come to us?"
+
+I shook my head.
+
+"She would not come. Now, less than ever----" I broke off, shot with
+sharp self-reproach at the memory of how I had driven her from me last
+night.
+
+"You won't be any help to her if you're dead," he bluntly retorted.
+
+At that I rose and walked a few paces to knock out my post-breakfast
+pipe against an apple-tree. I was not so sure that he was right,
+self-evident as his statement appeared. Ideas moved confusedly in my
+mind, convictions somehow impressed when that golden-bronze spot of
+light so gently came to rest above my heart when I last stood at the
+Barrier; the light so like the bright imagined head of Desire. To fly
+from my place now, herded like a cowardly sheep by the Thing of the
+Frontier, would that not be to thrust her away to save myself?
+
+No! Not myself, my life!
+
+I had the answer now. I walked back to Vere and took my seat again.
+
+"Both of us, or neither," I told him. "If you can help me make it both
+by any ingenuity, I shall be mighty glad. It's a pleasant world! But we
+will not talk any more of my running for New York like a kicked pup. The
+question is, will you and Phillida take care of the lady who calls
+herself Desire Michell, if tomorrow morning finds her free, but alone
+and friendless?"
+
+"As long as we live, Mr. Locke," he answered. "But I guess there isn't
+any disgrace in your going to New York, running or not, if you take her
+with you. And that is what ought to have been done long ago."
+
+"Vere?"
+
+He nodded.
+
+"You've got me! Just pick the lady up, carry her out of that room, and
+have a show-down. Put her in your car and take her to town."
+
+"I gave her my word not----"
+
+"People can't stand bowing to each other when the ship's afire. If she
+is worth dying for, she doesn't want you to die for her."
+
+The simplicity of it! And, leaping the breach of faith, the temptation!
+
+What harm could I do Desire by this plan of Vere's? What good might I
+not do her? Was it mere slavishness of mind on my part not to overrule
+her timid will? She must pardon me when she realized my desperate case.
+A dying man might be excused for some roughness of haste, surely.
+Whether flight could save us I did not know. I did know absolutely that
+my enemy had crossed the Barrier last night, and I was prey merely
+withheld from It by the chance respite of a few daylight hours.
+
+Suppose our escape succeeded? A whole troup of pictures flitted across
+the screen of my fancy. Desire beside me in the city, my wife. Desire in
+those delightful shops that make Fifth Avenue gay as a garden of tulips,
+where I might buy for her frocks and hats, shoes of conspicuous
+frivolity and those long white gloves that seem to caress a woman's
+arm--everything fair and fine. Restaurants I had described for her,
+where she might dine in silken ease and perhaps hear played the music
+she had named----
+
+I aroused myself and looked at Vere.
+
+"You'll do it?" he translated my expression.
+
+"I will, if she gives me the opportunity."
+
+"Do you judge she will?"
+
+"I hope so. Since she went so far as to show herself to you in order to
+send help to me when I was in danger, I believe she will come to my room
+tonight if I wait there----"
+
+He looked at me silently. The consternation and protest in his face were
+speech enough.
+
+"If I wait there alone," I finished somewhat hurriedly. "If she comes in
+time, we will try the plan. Have the car ready. You and Phillida will be
+prepared, of course. We will waste no time in getting away as far as
+possible."
+
+"And if that Thing comes before she does, Mr. Locke?"
+
+"Is there any other way?"
+
+"I guess you haven't considered that you're inviting me to stand by
+while you get yourself killed," he said stiffly. "I'm not an educated
+man. I never heard the names you mentioned this morning of people who
+used to study out things like this. I never heard of any worlds except
+earth and heaven and hell. But then I couldn't explain how an electric
+car runs. I know the car does run; and I know you nearly died last
+night. If you go back and stay alone in that room, we both know what you
+are going to meet."
+
+I turned away from him because I sickened at the prospect he evoked. The
+memory of that death-tide was too near and rolled too coldly across the
+future. If the trial had been hard when mercifully unanticipated, what
+would it be to meet my enemy now that I knew myself conquered? Would It
+not deliberately forestall Desire's coming, tonight?
+
+"Mightn't you help the lady more if you went away now, and came back?"
+he urged.
+
+The deserter's argument, time without end! Was I to fall as low as that?
+
+Phillida's voice called to Vere from the veranda, summoning him to some
+need of farm or household.
+
+"In a moment, Pretty," he called assent.
+
+But he did not move. I guessed that he hoped much from my silence and
+would not disturb me lest my decision be hindered or changed.
+
+By and by I stood up.
+
+"Vere, in your varied experiences in peace and war, did you ever chance
+to meet a coward?"
+
+"Once," he answered briefly.
+
+"And, did you like the sight?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Then," I said, "let us not invite one another to that display. Shall we
+go in to Phillida?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+     "They say--
+     What say they?
+     Let thame say!"
+              --OLD SCOTTISH INSCRIPTION.
+
+
+After luncheon, I drove over to the village with Phillida, who had some
+housewifely orders to give at the shops. On second thoughts, Vere and I
+had agreed to tell her nothing about the venture we planned for tonight.
+We had satisfied her by the assurance that I meant to start for New York
+before the dangerous hours after midnight. Reassured, she regained her
+usual spirits with the buoyancy of her few years and healthy nerves. I
+gathered her secret belief was that no "ghost" would dare face Ethan.
+
+Which may have been quite true!
+
+On our way home, we stopped at the shop of Mrs. Hill to add to our
+supply of eggs, Phillida's hens having unaccountably failed to supply
+their quota. I went in, leaving my companion in the car.
+
+No one else was in the shop. An impulse prompted me to put a question to
+the little woman whose life had been spent in this neighborhood.
+
+"Mrs. Hill, did you ever hear of anyone named Desire Michell?" I asked.
+
+She stopped counting eggs and blinked up at me. Her sallow, wrinkled
+face lightened with curiosity and an absurd primness.
+
+"Now, Mr. Locke! I'd like to know where a young city feller like you got
+that old story from?"
+
+"I have not got it. I want you to tell it to me. She was a witch?"
+
+"She was a hussy," said Mrs. Hill severely. "I was a little girl when
+she ran away from her father's respectable house, fifty-odd years ago.
+The disgrace killed him, being a clergyman. An' the gossip that came
+back, later, an' pictures of her in such dresses! Dear! Dear! The wicked
+certainly have opportunities."
+
+"Fifty years ago!" I echoed, dazed by this intrusion of a third Desire
+Michell.
+
+"Ah! Nearly seventy she'd be if she was alive today; which she ain't.
+Why, she changed her name to one fancier that you might have heard talk
+of? She was----"
+
+The name she gave me I shall not set down. It is enough to say it was
+that of a super-woman whose beauty, genius and absolute lack of
+conscience set Europe ablaze for a while. A torch of womanhood, quenched
+at the highest-burning hour of her career by a sudden and violent death.
+
+"There was an older house once, on your place," she added pensively.
+"Did you know that? It stood in the hollow where your lake is now.
+Two--three hundred years old, folks say it was. One night it burned down
+in a big thunderstorm. The Michells then living had your house built
+over by the orchard, then, an' had a dam built across so as to cover up
+the old site with water. All the Michells lived there till the last one
+went missionary abroad an' died in foreign parts. I mean the hussy's
+brother. He took up his father's work, feelin' a strong call. He was
+only a young boy when his sister went off, but he felt it dreadful. He
+was a hard man on the sinner. Preached hell and damnation all his days,
+he did. Lean over the pulpit, he would, his eyes flamin' fire an' his
+tongue shrivellin' folks in their pews, I can tell you!"
+
+"He left children?" I asked.
+
+"No, sir! Rev'rund never married. He felt women a snare. Land, not much
+snarin' with what farm women get to wear around here! I've kind of
+thought of one of those blue foulard silks with white spots into it
+since before I married Hill, but never came any nearer than pricin' it
+an' bringin' home a sample. He was death on sweet odors an' soft
+raiment. Only sweet odors I ever get are the ten-cent bottles Hill makes
+the pedlar throw in when we trade. I do fancy _Jockey Club_ for special
+times, an' I've got a reasonable hope of salvation, too. I notice your
+cousin, Mrs. Vere, has scent on her handkerchief week days as well as
+when she's goin' somewhere, so I guess you don't hold with the Rev'rund
+Michell in New York?"
+
+I laughed with her as I took up the bag of eggs.
+
+"Did the runaway sister leave any children?" I queried.
+
+"Not a Michell alive anywhere," she asserted positively. "Dead, all
+dead! The Rev'rund was buried at his mission in some outlandish place.
+An' if those heathen women dress like I've seen in the movin' picture
+palace in the village, I don't know how he makes out to rest with them
+flauntin' past his grave!"
+
+I went thoughtfully out to the car. Indeed, I drove home in such
+abstraction that Phillida reproved me.
+
+"'The cat has stolen your tongue,'" she teased. "Or did Mrs. Hill vamp
+you and make roast meat of your heart with her eyes?"
+
+"Phil, do you put scent on your handkerchief week days as well as
+Sundays?" I shook off thought to inquire.
+
+"No; I keep sachet in my handkerchief box. Why?"
+
+"Next time you are in town, will you buy a blue silk foulard dress with
+white spots in it and the largest bottle of Jockey Club Extract on sale,
+and give them to Mrs. Hill for a Christmas present? I'll give you a
+blank check."
+
+"Cousin Roger? Why?"
+
+So I told her why. But I did not tell her the story of the second Desire
+Michell; nor of the original house that stood in the hollow now filled
+by our lake.
+
+Why had a peculiar horror crept through me when Mrs. Hill told me what
+ruins that water covered? Why had I remembered the inexplicable,
+repugnant sound that on several occasions had preceded the coming of the
+Monster; a sound like the smack of huge lips, or some body withdrawn
+from thick slime? Was entrance into human air open to the alien Thing
+only through the ruins of the house where It had first been called by
+the sorceress of long ago?
+
+We were walking across from the garage, after putting away the car, when
+a recollection flashed upon me. The Metropolitan Museum, in New York,
+held a portrait by a famous French artist of that incendiary beauty
+whose name it now appeared cloaked the identity of Desire Michell,
+daughter and sister of New England clergymen. I had seen the portrait.
+And piled in an intricate magnificence of curls, puffs and coils about
+the haughty little head of the lady, was her gold-bronze hair; the color
+of the braid upstairs in my chiffonier drawer.
+
+I went up to my room and opened the work of Master Abimelech
+Fetherstone. Yes, there was likeness between the poor, coarse woodcut
+and the French portrait. The long, dark eyes with their expression of
+blended drowsiness and watchfulness were too individual to have escaped
+either record. Moreover, both pictures resembled that face of ivory and
+dusk I had glimpsed in the ray of the electric torch, all clouded and
+surrounded by swirls of gray vapor shot with gold.
+
+Who and what was the girl Desire Michell whom I had come to love through
+a more profound darkness than that of the sight?
+
+It seemed wisest to keep busy for the rest of the afternoon. I sorted my
+music. There was the score of a musical comedy so nearly completed that
+it could be sent to those who waited for it. Vere would attend to that,
+if tonight made it necessary. I reflected with disappointment that the
+first rehearsals would begin in a couple of weeks, and I had looked
+forward to this production with especial interest. There was the
+symphony, still unfinished, that I had hoped might be more enduring than
+popular music. If I was to be less enduring than either, we must go
+glimmering on our ways. If I snatched Desire out of her path into mine,
+she and I would see all those things together.
+
+I finished at last, and set my room in order. There was a fire laid
+ready for lighting in my hearth, a mere artistic flourish in such
+weather. I kindled it, and put in the flames three of the volumes from
+the ancient bookcase. The others were oddities in occult science. Those
+three were vile and poisonous. No doubt other copies exist, but at least
+I refused to be guilty of leaving these to wreak their mischief in
+Phillida's household. They burned quietly enough, and meekly fell to
+ashes under my poker.
+
+Our round dinner-table was cheerful as usual, with yellow-shaded candles
+flanking a bowl of yellow and scarlet nasturtiums. But I found its
+mistress suffering from a nervous headache.
+
+"It is only the fog," she answered our sympathy. "It came on with the
+evening, somehow. Never mind me. Cristina has made a cream-of-lettuce
+bisque, and she will never forgive us if we do not eat every bit. Yes,
+Ethan; of course I'll take mine. I only wish every bush and tree would
+not drip, drip like a horrid kind of clock ticking; and the foghorns
+over at the lighthouses _moo_ regularly every half minute. And I never
+heard the waterfall over the dam so loud!"
+
+"We've had a wet summer," Vere observed, soothingly tranquil as ever.
+"The lake and creek are full. There is more water going over to make a
+noise."
+
+"Please do not be so frightfully sensible, Drawls. You know I mean a
+different loudness. It sort of rises up and swims all over one, then
+dies away."
+
+"Even a fountain will seem to do that if a wind shifts the spray," I
+suggested.
+
+"Yes, Cousin Roger. But there is no wind tonight."
+
+A discomfort stirred me at the simple reminder. I fancied Vere was
+similarly affected. If something moved under the water----?
+
+We changed the conversation to a pergola planned for building next
+spring, that was to be overrun by grapevines and honeysuckle.
+
+"The grapes shall hang through like an Italian picture," Phillida
+anticipated, headache forgotten in her enthusiasm. She shook her hair
+about her pink cheeks, leaning over to outline a pergola with four
+spoons. "Here in the middle we must have a birdbath. Or no! The birds
+might peck the grapes. We could have one of those big silver-colored
+looking-balls on a pedestal to reflect wee views of the garden and lake
+and sky, with people moving no bigger than dolls. Imagine a reflection
+of Ethan like a Lilliputian _so_ high!"
+
+So I was able to leave her eagerly hunting catalogues of garden
+ornaments in her sewing-room, when the time came for me to keep my
+rendezvous with Death or the lady. In spite of my warning gesture, Vere
+followed me into the hall. His dark face was distressed and anxious.
+
+"Let me go with you," he urged.
+
+"No, thanks. Stay with Phil, and keep her too busy to suspect where I
+am."
+
+"If I'm doing wrong to let you go," he began.
+
+"You cannot stop me. It is still too early for danger, I think. If you
+like, you can stroll out on the lawn from time to time and look up at my
+windows. As long as the lamps are lighted in the room, I am all right.
+Nothing is happening."
+
+"Your lamps were all three lighted when I found you last night," he
+said.
+
+The darkness had been only for my eyes, then? Certainly I had seemed to
+see light withdrawn from the lamps. I mastered a tremor of the nerves,
+and covered it by stroking Bagheera, who sat on a hall chair making an
+after-dinner toilet with tongue and paw.
+
+"Well, take care of Phil," I repeated, evading argument.
+
+He detained me.
+
+"The young lady might not come if there were two people, Mr. Locke. I
+can see that! But I'll go instead. I guess I'd be safer than you, with
+the--the----You know what I mean! It would be the first time for me. And
+if I sat waiting in the dark, the lady couldn't tell you were not there.
+Of course I'd bring her right to you."
+
+No one could appreciate the courage of that offer so well as we who had
+both felt the intolerable horror of the nearness of the Thing whose
+nature was beyond our nature to endure.
+
+"She would come to no one except me," I refused. "But, thank you. And
+Vere, if what you have said about my feeling toward Phillida's husband
+was true once, it is true no longer."
+
+His clasp was still warm on my hand when I went into my room and
+switched on the lights. Soft and colorful, the haunted room sprang into
+view. The writing-table and piano gleamed bare without their usual
+burdens of scattered papers and music, removed that afternoon. For lack
+of familiar occupation, when I sat down in my favorite place, I took up
+the gold pomander and fell to studying the intricate designs worked in
+the metal.
+
+"_Containing a rare herb of Jerusalem called Lady's Rose, resembling
+spikenard, with vervain, and cedar, and secret simples----_"
+
+"_Vervain, which is powerful against evil spirits----_"
+
+The strange fragrance, heady as the bouquet of rich wine, never cloying,
+exquisite, might well have seemed magical to the dry Puritans, I mused.
+It should stay by me tonight, like a promise of her coming.
+
+After I had sat there a while, I turned out the lights.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+     "An excellent way to get a fayrie--and when you have her, bind
+     her!"--ANCIENT ALCHEMIST'S RECIPE.
+
+
+In the darkness Time crept along like a crippled thing, slow-moving,
+hideous. Outside fell the monotonous drip, drip from trees and bushes,
+likened by Phillida to a horrid clock. The fog was a sounding-board for
+furtive noises that grew up like fungi in the moist atmosphere. The
+thought of Phillida and Vere down in the pleasant living room tempted me
+almost beyond resistance. I wanted to spring up, to rush out of the
+room; to fling myself into my car and drive full speed until strength
+failed and gasoline gave out.
+
+Was that the lake which stirred in the windless night? The lake, under
+which lay the fire-blackened ruins of the house where the first Desire
+Michell flung open an awful door that her vengeance might stride
+through!
+
+Was it too late for my Desire to come, and time for the coming of that
+Other?
+
+The step of Vere sounded on the gravel path where he walked beneath the
+window. He was making a trip of inspection, and would find no light
+shining from the room. I was about to rise and call down a word of
+reassurance to him, when a current of spiced air passed by me. I sat
+arrested in hope and expectancy.
+
+"Here, after my warning, after last night?" her soft voice panted across
+the dark. "Will you die, then? Cruel to me, and wicked to come here
+again! Oh, must I wish you were a coward!"
+
+Every vestige of her calmness gone, she was sobbing as she spoke. I
+could imagine she was wringing the little hands that once had left a
+betraying print upon my table's surface.
+
+"I was cruel to you last night, Desire; yet afterward you saved my life
+by sending Ethan Vere to wake me. Would you have had me leave without
+meeting you again, neither thanking you nor asking your forgiveness?"
+
+I thought she came nearer.
+
+"For so little, you would brave the Dread One in Its time of triumph? O
+steadfast soldier, who faces the Breach even in the hour of death, in
+all that you have done you have remembered me. Why speak of anger or
+forgiveness? Have I not injured you?"
+
+"Never. I love you."
+
+"Is not that an injury? Even though I hid my ill-omened face from you,
+reared as I was to sad knowledge of the wrath upon me, the wrong has
+been done. Weak as water in the test, I kept the letter of my promise
+and broke the intent. Yet go; keep life at least."
+
+"Desire, I do not understand you," I answered. "No matter for that, now!
+I am content to share whatever you bring. Not roughly or in challenge as
+I asked you last night, but earnestly and with humility I ask you to
+come away with me now. If trouble comes to my wife and me, I do not
+doubt we can bear it. Let us not be frightened from the attempt. Come."
+
+"I, to take happiness like that?" she marveled in desolate amazement.
+"No. At least I will go to my own place, if tardily. Roger, be kind to
+me. Give me a last gift. Let me know that somewhere you are living. Out
+of my sight, out of my knowledge, but living in the same world with me.
+Each moment you stay here is a risk."
+
+In that warning she had reason. I rose. It was time to act, but action
+must be certain. If my groping movements missed her in the dark there
+might be no second chance.
+
+"Desire, if all is as you say and we are not to meet again as we have
+done, you shall let me touch you before I go," I said firmly.
+
+"No!"
+
+"Yes. Why, would you have me live all the years to come in doubt whether
+you were a woman or a dream? Perhaps you might seem at last a phantom of
+my own sick brain to which faithfulness would be folly? Here across the
+table I stretch my arm. Lay your palm in my palm. I may die tonight."
+
+Whether she wished it also, or whether my resolve drew obedience, I do
+not know. But a vague figure moved through the dark toward me. A hand
+settled in mine with the brushing touch of an alighting bird. I closed
+my hand hotly upon that one. I sprang a step aside from the table
+between us, found her, and drew her to me.
+
+What did I hold in my arms? Softness, fragrance, draperies beneath which
+beat life and warmth. As I stooped to reassure her, her breath curled
+against my cheek. So with that guide I turned my head, and set my lips
+on the lips I had never seen.
+
+Did Something uprear Itself out there in the black fog? A cold air
+rushed across the summer heat of the fog; air foul as if issued from the
+opened door of a vault. As once before, a tremor quivered through the
+house. The hanging chains of the lamps swung with a faint tinkling
+sound.
+
+I snatched Desire Michell off her feet and sprang for the door. Somehow
+I found and opened it at the first essay. We were out into the hall.
+With one hand I dragged the door shut behind us, then carried her on to
+the head of the stairs. There I set her down, but stood before her as a
+bar against any attempt at escape.
+
+A lamp shed a subdued light above us. I looked at my captive. Never
+again after that kiss could she deny her womanhood or pose as a phantom.
+So far my victory was complete. The lady might be angry, but it must be
+woman's anger. I knew she had not suspected my intention until I lifted
+her in my arms. She had struggled then, after her defenses had fallen.
+
+She was quiet now, as though the light had quelled her resistance. She
+stood drooped and trembling; not the old-time witch, not the dazzling
+adventuress, only a small fragile girl wound and wrapped in some gray
+stuff that even covered the brightness of her hair. Her face was held
+down and showed no more color than a water-lily.
+
+"I thought," she whispered, just audibly. "I thought you--would say,
+good-bye!"
+
+"I know," I stammered. "But I could not. That way was impossible for
+us."
+
+She did not contradict me. She was so very small, I saw, that her head
+would reach no higher than where the bright spot had rested above my
+heart when I had last stood at the Barrier. One hand gripped the veils
+beneath her chin, and seemed the clenched fist of a child.
+
+The crash of my door had startled the household. I had heard Phillida
+cry out, and Vere's running steps upon the gravel path. Now he came
+springing up the stairs. At the head of the flight he stopped, staring
+at us.
+
+"Desire," I spoke as naturally as I could manage, "this is Mr. Vere.
+Vere, my fiancée, Miss Michell. Shall we go down to Phillida?"
+
+And Desire Michell did not deny my claim.
+
+I am not very sure of how we found ourselves downstairs. Nor do I
+remember in what words we made the two girls known to one another.
+Presently we were all in the living room, and Phillida had possession of
+Desire Michell while Vere and I looked on stupidly at the proceedings.
+
+Phil had placed her in a chair beside a tall floor-lamp and gently drew
+off the draperies that hooded her. With little murmurs of compassion,
+she unbound and shook free her guest's hair.
+
+"My dear, you are all damp! This awful fog! You must have been out a
+long time? You shall drink some tea before we start. Drawls, will you
+light the alcohol lamp on the tea-table? The kettle is filled."
+
+Now I could understand how Desire had appeared amid a drift of fireshot
+smoke in the beam of my electric torch, the night before. Her hair was a
+garment of flame-bright silk flowing around her, curling and eddying in
+rich abundance. Over this she had worn the gray veils to smother all
+that color and sheen into neutral sameness with night and shadows. No
+wonder her face had seemed wraith-like when her startled shrinking away
+from the light had set all that drapery billowing about her.
+
+She was the voice that had been my intimate comrade through weeks of
+strange adventure. She was the woman of the faded, yellow book, and the
+painted beauty at the Metropolitan. She was all the Desires of whom I
+had ever dreamed; and she was none of them, for she was herself. Her
+long dark eyes, suddenly lifted to me, were individual by that ancestral
+blending of drowsiness with watchfulness; yet were akin to the eyes of
+youth in all times by their innocence. Her mouth, too, was the soft
+mouth of a young girl kept apart from sordid life. But her forehead, the
+noble breadth between the black tracery of her eyebrows, expressed the
+student whose weird, lofty knowledge had so often abashed my ignorance.
+
+Only my ignorance? Now as she looked at me across the room, all
+self-confidence trickled away from me. What distinguished me from a
+thousand men she might meet on any city street? What had I ever said
+worth note in the hours we had spent together? Now she saw me in the
+light, plainly commonplace; and remembering myself lame, I stood amazed
+at the audacity with which I had laid claim to her.
+
+She was rising from the chair, gently putting aside Phillida's detaining
+hands. She had not spoken one word since her faltered speech to me,
+upstairs. Neither Vere nor Phillida had heard her voice. She had given
+her hand to each of them and submitted to Phil's care with a docility I
+failed to recognize in my companion of the dark. Her decisive movement
+now was more like the Desire Michell I knew. Only, what was she about to
+do? Repudiate my violence and me--perhaps go back to her hiding-place?
+
+She came straight to where I stood, not daring even to advance toward
+her. We might have been alone in the room. I rather think we were, to
+her preoccupation.
+
+"You must go away," she said. "If there is any hope, it is in that.
+Nothing else matters, now; nothing! If you wish, take me with you. It
+would be wiser to leave me. But nothing really matters except that you
+should not stay here. I will obey you in everything if you will only go.
+Take your car and drive--drive fast--anywhere!"
+
+It is impossible to convey the desperate urgency and fervor of her low
+voice. Phillida uttered an exclamation of fear. Vere wheeled about and
+left the room. The front door closed behind him. The gravel crunched
+under his tread on the path to the garage, and the rate at which the
+light he carried moved through the fog showed that he was running. He
+obviously accepted the warning exactly as it was given. After the
+briefest indecision, Phillida hurried out into the hall.
+
+For my part, I did nothing worth recording. I had made discovery of two
+places where I was not the "lame feller." And if the first place was the
+dreary Frontier, the second country was that rich Land of Promise in
+Desire Michell's eyes.
+
+What we said in our brief moment of solitude is not part of this
+account.
+
+Phillida was back promptly, her arms full of garments. With little
+murmurs of explanation by way of accompaniment, she proceeded to invest
+Desire in a motor coat and a dark-blue velvet hat rather like an
+artist's tam-o'shanter. I noticed then that the girl wore a plain frock
+of gray stuff, long of sleeve and skirt, fastened at the base of her
+throat with severe intent to cover from sight all loveliness of tint and
+contour. Nothing farther from the fashion of the day or the figure of my
+cousin could be imagined.
+
+"You must wear the coat because it is always cool motoring at night,"
+Phillida was murmuring. "And of course you will want it at a hotel;
+until you can do some shopping. I will just tie back your gorgeous,
+scrumptious hair with this ribbon, now. I know I haven't enough hairpins
+to put it up without wasting an awful lot of time, but we will buy them
+in the morning. We are going to take the very best care of you every
+minute, so you must not worry."
+
+"You are so kind to me," Desire began tremulously. "No one was ever so
+kind! It does not matter about me, or what people think of me, if he
+will only go from here quickly."
+
+"Right away," Phillida soothed. "My husband has gone for the car. I hear
+him coming now!"
+
+In fact, Vere was coming up the veranda steps. His hand was on the knob
+of the outer door, fumbling with it in a manner not usual to him, then
+the knob yielded and he was inside.
+
+"But how slow you are, Drawls," his wife called, with an accent of
+wonder.
+
+Vere crossed the threshold of the room, his gaze seeking mine. He was
+pale, and drops of fog moisture pearled his dark face like sweat.
+
+"I am sorry, Mr. Locke," he addressed me, ignoring the others. "Perhaps
+you felt that shake-up, a quarter-hour ago? Like a kind of earthquake,
+or the kick from a big explosion a long ways off? It didn't seem very
+strong to me. It was too strong for that old tree by the garage, though!
+Must have been decayed clear through inside. Willows are like that,
+tricky when they get old."
+
+"Ethan, what _are_ you talking about?" cried Phillida, aghast.
+
+He continued to look at me.
+
+"I guess it must have fallen just about when you slammed your door
+upstairs. Seems I do remember a sort of second crash following the noise
+you made. I was too keen on finding out what was happening up there to
+pay much heed."
+
+"Well, Vere?"
+
+"Tree smashed down through the roof of the garage," he reluctantly gave
+his report. "Everything under the hood of the automobile is wrecked.
+There is no motor left, and no radiator. Just junk, mixed up with broken
+wood and leaves and pieces of the stucco and tiles of the garage."
+
+So there was to be no going tonight from the house beside the lake. A
+frustrated group, we stood amid our preparations; the two girls wearing
+cloaks and hats for the drive that would never be taken. Had we ever
+really expected to go? Already the project was fading into the realm of
+fantastic ideas, futile as the pretended journeys of children who are
+kept in their nursery. Desire lifted her hands and took off the blue
+velvet cap with a resignation more expressive than words. Only my
+practical little cousin charged valiantly at all obstacles.
+
+"We aren't ever going to give up?" she cried protest. "Cousin Roger?
+Ethan? _You_ cannot mean to give up. Why--'phone to the nearest garage
+to send us another car. If we pay them enough they will drive anywhere.
+Or if they cannot take us to New York, they will take us to the railroad
+station where we can get a train for some place. Can't we, Drawls?"
+
+"We could," Vere admitted. "I'd admire to try it, anyhow. But the
+telephone wire came across the place right past the garage, you
+know----"
+
+"The tree tore the wire down, too?"
+
+"I'm afraid it snapped right in two, Phil."
+
+"We--we might walk," she essayed.
+
+But even her brave voice trailed into silence as she glanced toward the
+black, dripping night beyond the windows.
+
+"Or if we found a horse and wagon," she murmured a final suggestion.
+
+Vere shook his head.
+
+"Come!" I assumed charge with a cheerfulness not quite sincere. "None of
+us are ready for such desperate efforts to leave our cozy quarters here.
+Especially as I fancy Vere's 'earthquake' was the tremor of an
+approaching thunderstorm. I felt it, myself. Let us light all the lamps
+and draw the curtains to shut out the fog which has got on everyone's
+nerves by its long continuance. We are overwrought beyond reason.
+Suppose we sit here together, strong in numbers, for the few hours until
+daylight? I think that should be safeguard enough. Tomorrow we will do
+all we had planned for tonight. Come in, Vere, and close the door."
+
+He obeyed me at once. Desire Michell passively suffered me to unfasten
+and take off the coat she wore, too heavy for such a night. She had
+uttered no word since Vere announced the destruction of the car. She did
+not speak now, when I put her in the low chair beneath the lamp. I had a
+greed of light for her, as a protection and because darkness had held
+her so long.
+
+"It seems as if we should do something!" Phillida yielded unwillingly.
+
+Vere's eyes met mine as he turned from drawing the last curtain. We were
+both thinking of the force that had driven the frail old willow tree
+through tile and cement of the new building to flatten the metal of
+motor and car into uselessness. The mere weight of the tree would not
+have carried it through the roof. To "do something" by way of physical
+escape from that----
+
+The ribbon had glided from Desire's hair, almost as if the vital,
+resilient mass resentfully freed itself from restraint by the bit of
+satin. Now she put up her hands with a slow movement and drew two broad
+strands of the glittering tresses across her shoulders, veiling her
+face.
+
+"Wait," she answered Phillida, most unexpectedly. "I must be sure--quite
+sure! I must think. If you will--wait."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+     "Oh, little booke--how darst thou put thyself in press for
+     drede?"--CHAUCER.
+
+
+We sat quietly waiting. I had drawn a chair near Desire. Phillida and
+Vere were together, chairs touching, her right hand curled into his
+left. Bagheera the cat had slipped into the room before the door was
+closed, and lay pressed against his mistress's stout little boot. Our
+small garrison was assembled, surely for as strange a defense as ever
+sober moderns undertook. For my part, it was wonder enough to study that
+captive who was at once so strange yet so intimately well known to me.
+
+The Tiffany clock on the mantel shelf chimed midnight. Soon after, we
+began to experience the first break in the heavy monotony of heat and
+fog that had overlaid the place for three days. The temperature began to
+fall. The fog did not lift. The flowered cretonne curtains hung straight
+from their rods unstirred by any movement of air. But the atmosphere in
+the room steadily grew colder. I saw Phillida shiver in the chill
+dampness and pull closer the collar of her thin blouse. When Desire
+finally spoke, we three started as if her low tones had been the clang
+of a hammer.
+
+"I have tried to judge what is best," she said, not raising her face
+from its shadowing veil of hair. "I am not very wise. But it seems
+better that there should be no ignorance between us. If I had been
+either wise or good, I should never have come down from the convent to
+draw another into danger and horror without purpose or hope of any good
+ending."
+
+"The convent?" I echoed, memory turning to the bleak building far up the
+hillside. "You came from there?"
+
+"There is a path through the woods. I am very strong and vigorous. But I
+had to wait until all there were asleep before I could come. Sometimes I
+could not come at all. For this house, I had my father's old key. It was
+only for this little time while I am being taught. Soon I will put on a
+nun's dress and cut my hair, and--and never--never leave there any
+more."
+
+Stupefied, I thought of the black loneliness of the wooded hillside
+behind us. No wonder the fog was wet upon her hair! Her slight feet had
+traversed that path night after night, had brought her to the door her
+key fitted, had come through the dark house to the door of the room
+upstairs. When she left me, she had toiled that desolate way back. For
+what? Humility bent me, and bewilderment.
+
+"But why?" Phillida gasped. "Why? Cousin Roger hunted everywhere to find
+you. He would have gone anywhere you told him to see you. Didn't you
+know that?"
+
+"I never meant him to see me."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"I am Desire Michell, fourth of that name; all women who brought
+misfortune upon those who cared for them," she answered, her voice lower
+still. "How shall I make you understand? I was brought up to know the
+wrath and doom upon me, yet I myself can scarcely understand. My father
+knew all, yet he fell in weakness."
+
+"Your father?" I questioned, recalling Mrs. Hill's positive genealogy of
+the Michells in which there was no place for this daughter of the line.
+
+"He was the last of his family. When he was very young the conviction
+came to him that his duty was never to marry, so our race might cease to
+exist. He lived here and preached against evil. He studied the ancient
+learning that he might be fitted to wrestle with sin. But in the end
+horror of what was here gained upon him so that he closed the house and
+went abroad to work as a missionary. There was a girl; the daughter of
+the clergyman who was leaving the mission. My father--fell in love. He
+forgot all his convictions and married her. He knew it was a sin, but it
+was stronger than he was. She only lived one year. When I was born, she
+died. He prayed that I would die, too. But--I----"
+
+Her voice died into silence. I ventured to lean nearer and take her hand
+into mine.
+
+"Desire," I said, "why should you be a sufferer for the actions of a
+woman who died over two centuries ago? What is the long dead Desire
+Michell to you?"
+
+A strange and solemn hush followed my question. The words seemed to take
+a significance and importance beyond their simple meaning. The hand I
+held trembled in my clasp. She answered at last, just audibly:
+
+"You know. You said that you had read her book."
+
+"But the book tells so little, Desire. Just such a chronicle of
+superstition as may be found in a hundred old records."
+
+She shook her head slightly.
+
+"Not that! Bring me the book."
+
+The book was upstairs in the room from which I had carried her half an
+hour before in something very like a panic flight. Before I could
+release her hand and rise, before I comprehended his intention, Vere was
+out of the living room and upon the stairs. It was too late to overtake
+him. The man who had been a professional skater covered the stairs in a
+few easy, swinging strides. We heard his light tread on the floor
+overhead, heard him stop beside the table where the book lay. Then, he
+was returning. My door closed. His step sounded on the stairs again; in
+a moment he was back among us, and quietly offering the volume to our
+guest. His dark eyes met mine reassuringly, deprecating the thoughts I
+am sure my face expressed.
+
+"Lights burning and all serene up there," he announced.
+
+Desire touched the book with a curious repugnance.
+
+"I was looking for this, the first night I came here," she murmured.
+"That is why I came to America after my father died. I had promised him
+to destroy this record. When I heard that the house was sold to a
+gentleman from New York, I came down from the convent on the hill to
+find the bookcase holding the old history. I did not know anyone was
+here, that night, until you touched my hair."
+
+I remembered the bookcase near the bed, where I stood my candle and
+matches. Unaware, I had prevented her finding the thing she sought, and
+so forced her to return. Afterward, the house had been full of workmen
+making alterations and improvements, until later still Phillida had
+transferred the bookcase and its contents to her sewing room. If I had
+not taken the whim to sleep in the old house on the night of my
+purchase, or if I had chosen another room, the existence of Desire
+Michell might never have been known to me.
+
+Would the creature from the Barrier have appeared to me, if I had not
+known her?
+
+She was drawing something from behind the portrait of the first Desire
+Michell; a thin, small book that had lain concealed between the cover of
+the larger volume and the page bearing the woodcut, where a sort of
+pocket was formed that had escaped our notice. Laid upon the table, the
+little book rolled away from the girl's fingers and lay curled upon
+itself in the lamplight. The limp morocco cover was spotted with mildew
+and half-revealed pages of close, fine writing blotched in places with
+rusty stains. It gave out an odor of mould and age in an atmosphere made
+sweet by Desire's presence.
+
+Phillida, who had been silent even when Vere left her to go upstairs,
+shrank away from the book on the table. She darted a glance over her
+shoulder at the curtained windows behind her.
+
+"Drawls, I cannot help what everybody thinks of me," she said
+plaintively. "I am cold. The fire is ready laid in the grate. Will you
+put a match to it, please?"
+
+No one smiled at the request. Her husband uttered some soothing phrase
+of compliance. We all looked on while the flame caught and began to
+creep up among the apple-logs. Bagheera rose and changed his position to
+one before the hearth. When Vere stood erect, Desire leaned toward him.
+
+"Will you read, aloud, sir?" she asked of him, and made a gesture toward
+the morocco book.
+
+She surprised us all by that choice. I was unreasoning enough to feel
+slighted, although the task was one for which I felt a strong dislike. I
+fancied Vere liked the idea no better, from his expression. However, he
+offered no demur, but sat down at the table and began to flatten the
+warped pages that perversely sprang back and clung about his fingers.
+Desire slowly turned her lovely eyes to me, eyes that looked by gift of
+nature as if their long corners had been brushed with kohl. She said
+nothing, yet somehow conveyed her meaning and intent. I understood that
+she did not wish to hear me read those pages; that it was painful to her
+that they should be read at all.
+
+Vere was ready. He glanced around our circle, then began with the simple
+directness that gave him a dignity peculiarly his own.
+
+"'Mistress Desire Michell, her booke, Beginning at the nineteenth year
+of her Age,'" he read, in his leisurely voice.
+
+The living Desire Michell and I were regarding one another. I smiled at
+the quaint wording, but she shuddered, and put her hands across her
+eyes.
+
+Yet there was nothing in those first pages except a girl's chronicle of
+village life. This book evidently carried on a diary kept from early
+childhood; a diary written out of loneliness. Apparently the bare
+colonial life pressed heavily upon the writer; who, having no companions
+of the intellect, turned to this record of her own mind as a prisoner
+might talk to his reflection in a mirror rather than go mad from sheer
+silence. Discontent and restlessness beat through the lines like
+fluttering wings. She wrote of her own beauty with a cool appraisal
+oddly removed from vanity, almost with resentment of a possession she
+could not use.
+
+"Like a man who finds treasure in a desert isle, I am rich in coin that
+I may not spend," she wrote. "I stand before my mirror and take a tress
+of my hair in either hand; I spread wide my arms full reach, yet I
+cannot touch the end of those tresses. Nor can my two hands clasp the
+bulk of them. There have been other women who had such hair, who were of
+body straight and white, and had the eyes--but I cannot read that they
+stayed poor and obscure."
+
+There followed some quotations from the classics of which I was able to
+give but vague translations when Vere passed the book to me, both
+because my knowledge was scanty and because of their daring
+unconventionality. There were allusions, too, to ladies of later history
+who had found fairness a broad staircase for ambition to mount. Of the
+writer's learning, there could be no question; a learning amazing in one
+so young and so situated. The source of this became apparent. Her father
+was consumed with the passion of scholarship, and the girl's hungry mind
+fed in the pastures where he led the way.
+
+Here crept into view an anomaly of character. The austere Puritan
+divine, whose life was open and blank, bare and cold as a winter field,
+cherished a secret dissipation of the mind. He labored upon a book on
+the errors of magic. So laboring, he became snared by the thing he
+denounced. He believed in the hidden lore while he condemned it. Deeper
+and deeper into forbidden knowledge his eagerness for research led him.
+Unsanctioned by any church were the books Dr. Michell starved his body
+to buy from Jews or other furtive dealers in unusual wares. The titles
+in his library comprehended the names of more charlatans than bishops.
+He could define the distinctions between necromancy, sorcery, and magic.
+The marvelous calculations of the Pythagoreans engaged him, and the lost
+mysteries of the Cabiri.
+
+From such studies he would arise on the Sabbath to preach sermons that
+held his dull flock agape. Bitter draughts of salvation he poured for
+their spiritual drinking. He scarcely saw how any man might escape
+hell-fire, all being so vile. Against witchcraft and tampering with
+Satan's agents he was eloquent. He rode sixty miles in midwinter to see
+a Quaker whipped and a woman hung who had been convicted as a witch.
+
+Of all this, his daughter wrote with an elfin mockery. Her brilliant eye
+of youth saw through the inconsistency of the beliefs he strove to
+reconcile. She learned his lore, read his books, and discarded his
+doctrine.
+
+"I study with him, but I think alone," she set down her independence.
+
+Without his knowledge, she proceeded to actual experiment with rude
+crucible and alembic in her own chamber. She essayed some age-old
+recipes of blended herbs and ingredients within her reach, handled at
+certain hours of the night and phases of the moon. All were innocent
+enough, it seemed. She cured a beloved old dog of rheumatism and partial
+blindness. She discovered an exquisite perfume which she named Rose of
+Jerusalem.
+
+But the experiments were not fortunate, she made obscure complaint. The
+dog, cured, lived only a few weeks. The perfume, in which she revelled
+with a fierce, long-denied appetite, steeping her rich hair in it and
+her severely dull garments, awoke many whispers in a community where
+sweet odors were unknown and disapproved. She alluded, with a mingling
+of freezing scorn and triumph, to the young men who followed after
+her--"seeking a wife who would be at their hearth as fatal a guest as
+that fair woman sent by an enemy to Alexander the Great, whose honey
+breath was deadly poison to who so kissed there."
+
+Into this situation rode the fine gentleman from the colonial world of
+fashion who was to fix the fate of Desire Michell and his own.
+
+From this point on, the diary was a record of the same story as the
+"History of Ye foule Witch, Desire Michell."
+
+The love affair that followed Sir Austin's visit to the clergyman's
+house leaped hot and instant as flame from oil and fire brought
+together. The girl was parched with thirst for life, yet despised all
+around her. The man was dazzled by a beauty and mentality foreign as a
+bird of paradise found nested in Connecticut snow. A mad, wild passion
+linked them that was more than half a duel. For Sir Austin was already
+betrothed. Honor might not have chained him for long, but his need of
+his betrothed's fortune proved more enduring. He was a man bred to
+wealth, who did not possess it. He offered Desire Michell his left hand.
+
+He was turned out of her father's house with a red weal struck across
+his face like a brand.
+
+Of course he returned. The arrow was firmly fixed. He asked her to marry
+him, and was refused with savage contempt. He would not take the
+refusal. Her heart and ambition were hidden traitors to his cause. In
+the end she surrendered and the marriage day was set.
+
+Sir Austin rode away to set his house in order, while Desire turned from
+alchemy to make her wedding garments.
+
+The entries during this interval were sweetly gentle and feminine. Her
+Rose of Jerusalem fragrance was all her own, and was kept so, but she
+made less-rare essences and sold them through a pedlar in order to buy
+fine linen and brocade for a trousseau not designed to be worn in a
+Puritan village. She was happy and at rest in expectation.
+
+On her wedding day the destroying news fell. Sir Austin hid a weak
+spirit within a strong and handsome body. Away from Desire's glamour,
+back in New York, he had not broken his engagement to the heiress.
+Instead, he had married her on the day arranged before he met the
+clergyman's daughter.
+
+There was never again a connected record in the diary. Pages were torn
+out in places, entries were broken off, half-made. But the story Vere's
+slow, steady voice conveyed to us was the one we knew; the one my Desire
+had told to me the first night I slept in this house. The half-mad girl
+turned to her father's deadly books. Sir Austin died as his waxen image
+dissolved before the fire, where the girl sat watching with merciless
+hate. He died, raving and frothing, on her door-sill. She never saw him
+after the day he rode away to prepare for their marriage. She set open
+her window that she might hear his progress to that hard death, but
+never deigned to turn her glance upon him.
+
+The clergyman was dead, now; of shame, or perhaps of terror at the child
+he had reared. The girl was alone.
+
+The diary grew wilder, with gaps of weeks where there were no entries.
+More frequently, pages were missing and paragraphs obliterated by the
+reddish blotches like rust or blood. There were accounts of weird,
+half-told experiments ranging through the three degrees of magic set
+forth by Talmud and Cabala. She wrote of legions of kingdoms between
+earth and heaven, and the twelve unearthly worlds of Plato. She alluded
+to a Barrier between men and other orders of beings, beyond which dwelt
+Those whom the magicians of old glimpsed after long toil and
+incantation.
+
+"Those of whom Vertabied, the Armenian, says: '_Their orders differ from
+one another in situation and degree of glory, just as there are
+different ranks among men, though they are all of one nature._' They
+cannot cross nor overthrow this Wall, nor can man alone; but if they and
+man join together----One there beyond whispers to me of power, splendor,
+victory----"
+
+Days later, there was entered a passage of mad triumph and terror. The
+Barrier was broken through. Out of the breach issued the One whom she
+had invited to her silver lamps; colossal, formless, whose approach
+froze blood and spirit. Eyes of unspeakable meaning glared across the
+dark, whispers unbearable to humanity beat upon her intelligence and
+named her comrade.
+
+Now as Vere read this, I felt again that quiver of the house or air he
+had likened to an earth shock and held responsible for the fall of the
+willow tree that had destroyed our hope of escape by automobile. I
+looked at my companions and saw no evidence of anyone having noticed
+what I had seemed to feel. Vere indeed was pale; while Phillida, who sat
+beside him, was highly flushed with excitement and wonder as she
+listened. Desire had not stirred in her chair, except to bend her head
+so her face was shaded by the loosened richness of her hair. Seeing them
+so undisturbed, I kept silence. A storm might be approaching, but I made
+no pretense to myself of believing that shock either thunder or
+earthquake.
+
+The tone of the diary altered rapidly. At first, the unknown from beyond
+the wall appalled the woman only by its unhuman strangeness, the
+repugnance of flesh and blood for its loathly neighborhood. Fear
+emanated from its presence, seen yet unseen, a blackness moving in the
+black of night when it visited her. Yet she had courage to endure those
+awful colloquies. She listened. She strove by the spell and incantation
+to subdue This to her service, as the demon Orthone served the Lord of
+Corasse, as Paracelsus was served by his Familiar, or Gyges by the
+spirit of his ring.
+
+Alas for the sorceress, misguided by legend and fantasy! She had evoked
+no phantom, but a fact actual as nature always is even if nature is not
+humanly understood. The Thing was real.
+
+The awe of the magician became the stricken panic of the woman. She had
+unloosed what she could not bind. She had called a servant, and gained a
+master. Gone forever were the dreams of power and splendor and triumph.
+Now she learned that only pure magic can discharge the spirits it has
+summoned, nor could a murderess attain that lofty art.
+
+We were given a glimpse of a frantic girl crouched in the useless
+pentagram traced on the floor for her protection, covering her beauty
+with the cloak of her hair against the eyes that burned upon her between
+the overturned silver lamps.
+
+A deepening horror gathered about the house of Mistress Desire Michell.
+The old dame who had been the girl's nurse and caretaker fled the place
+and fell into mumbling dotage in a night. No child would come near the
+garden, though fruit and nuts rotted away where they dropped from
+overripeness. No neighbor crossed the doorstep where Sir Austin had
+died. She lived in utter solitude by day. By night she waged hideous
+battle against her Visitor; using woman's cunning, essaying every
+expedient and art her books suggested to her desperate need.
+
+With each conflict, her strength and resource waned, while That which
+she held at bay knew no weariness. Time was not, for it, nor change of
+purpose.
+
+"I faint, I fail!" she wrote. "The Sea of Dread breaks about my feet. It
+is midnight. The pentagram fades from the floor--the nine lamps die--the
+breath of the One at the casement is upon me----"
+
+Vere stopped.
+
+"A handful of pages have been torn out here," he stated. "The next entry
+that I can read is in the middle of a stained page, and must be
+considerably later on."
+
+Phillida made an odd little noise like a whimper, clutching at his
+sleeve. The third shock for which I had been waiting shuddered through
+the house, this time distinctly enough for all to feel. A gust of wind
+went through the wet trees outside like a gasp.
+
+"Ethan, what was that?" she stammered. "Oh, I'm afraid! Cousin
+Roger----?"
+
+I had no voice to answer her. In my ears was the rush and surge of that
+sea whose waters had gripped me in the past night. I felt the icy
+death-tide hiss around me in its first returning wave, rise to my knee's
+height, then sink away down its unearthly beach. What I had dimly known
+all day, underlying Vere's sturdy cheerfulness and our plans and
+efforts, was the truth. Through those intervening hours of daylight I
+had remained my enemy's prisoner, bound on that shore we both knew well,
+until It pleased or had power to return and finish with me. No doubt It
+was governed by laws, as we are.
+
+As before, the cold struck a paralysis across my senses. Vere's
+reassurance sounded faint and distant.
+
+"The thunder is getting closer," he said. "That was a storm wind, all
+right! Would you rather go upstairs and lie down, and not hear any more
+of this stuff tonight?"
+
+"No! Oh, no! I could not bear to be alone," she refused. "Just, just go
+on, dear. Of course it is the coming storm that makes the room so cold."
+
+He put his left arm around her as she nestled against him. His right
+hand held the diary flattened on the table under the light.
+
+"The next entry is just one line in the middle of a page where
+everything else is blotted out," Vere repeated. "It reads: 'The child is
+a week old today.'"
+
+The wave crashed foaming in tumult up the strand, flowing higher,
+drenching me in cold sharp as fire. The tide rose faster tonight. The
+silence that held the others dumb before the significance of that last
+sentence covered my silence from notice. Desire's face was quite hidden;
+lamplight and firelight wavered and gleamed across her bent head. I
+wanted to arise and go to her, to take her hands and tell her to have
+patience and courage. But when this wave ebbed, my strength drained away
+with the receding water. Moreover, the darkness curdled and moved beyond
+the window opposite me. The curtains hung between were no bar to my
+vision, as the light and presence of my companions were no bar to the
+Thing that kept rendezvous with me. Since last night, we were nearer to
+one another.
+
+A breath of chill foulness crept across the pungent odor of the burning
+apple-log in the fireplace. A whisper spoke to my intelligence.
+
+"Man conquered by me, fall down before me. Beg my forbearance. Beg life
+of me--and take the gift!"
+
+"No," my thought answered Its.
+
+"You die, Man."
+
+"All men die."
+
+"Not as they die who are mine."
+
+"I am not yours. You kill me, as a wild beast might. But I am not yours;
+not dying nor dead am I yours."
+
+"Would you not live, pygmy?"
+
+"Not as your pensioner."
+
+The logs on the hearth crackled and sank down with a soft rustle, burned
+through to a core of glowing red. Phillida spoke with a hushed urgency,
+drawing still closer to her husband, so that her forehead rested against
+his shoulder.
+
+"Go on, Ethan. Finish and let us be done."
+
+Vere bent his head above the book on the table to obey her. Across the
+dark I suddenly saw the Eyes glare in upon him.
+
+"On the next page, the writing begins again," he said. "It says:
+
+"'I am offered the kingdoms of earth. But I crave that kingdom of myself
+which I cast away. The child is sent to England. The circle is drawn.
+The names are traced and the lamps filled. Tonight I make the last
+essay. There remains untried one mighty spell. This Mystery----'"
+
+A clap of thunder right over the house overwhelmed the reader's voice.
+Phillida screamed as a violent wind volleyed through the place with a
+crashing of doors and shutters, upstairs and down. The diary was ripped
+from beneath Vere's hand and hurled straight to the center of that nest
+of fire formed by the settling of the logs. A long tongue of flame
+leaped high in the chimney as the spread leaves of the book caught and
+flared, fanned by wind and draft. Vere sprang up, but Phillida's
+clinging arms delayed him. When he reached the fire-tongs there was
+nothing to rescue except a charring mass half-way toward ashes.
+
+He turned toward me, perhaps at last surprised by my immobility.
+
+"I am sorry, Mr. Locke," he apologized.
+
+Desire had started up with the others when the sudden uproar of the
+storm burst upon them. Now she cried out, breaking Vere's excuse of the
+loss. Her small face blanched, she ran a few steps toward me.
+
+"It has come! He will die--he is dying. Look, look!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+     "Behold! Where are their abodes?
+     Their places are not, even as though they had not been."
+                                     --TOMB OF KING ENTEF.
+
+
+Desire Michell was beside me, and I could not rise or answer her. She
+bent over me, so that the Rose of Jerusalem fragrance inundated me and
+drove back the sickening air that was the breath of our enemy.
+
+"Let me go," she sobbed, her head beside my head. "If you can hear me,
+listen and leave me as It wills. You know now that I belong to It by
+heritage? You know why we can never be together as you planned? Try to
+feel horror of me. Put me away from you. No evil can come to me unless I
+seek evil. But It will not suffer you to take me. Live, dear Roger, and
+let me go."
+
+"Yield to me, Man, what you may not keep," the whisper of the Thing
+followed after her voice. "Would you take the witch-child to your
+hearth? Cast her off; and taste my pardon."
+
+"Can you hear, Roger? Roger, let me go."
+
+With an effort terrible to make as death to meet, I broke from the
+paralysis that chained me. As from the drag of a whirlpool, I tore
+myself from the tide-clutch, from the will of the Thing, from the numb
+weakness upon me. For a moment I thrust back the hand at my throat. I
+stood up and drew Desire up with me in my arms, both of us reeling with
+my unsteadiness.
+
+"I do not give you up," I said, my speech hoarse and difficult. "I claim
+you, now, and after. And my claim is good, because I pay."
+
+Desire exclaimed something. What, I do not know. Her voice was lost in
+the triumphant conviction that I was right. She was free, and the
+freedom was my gift to her. I was not vanquished, but victor. The life I
+paid was not a penalty, but a price.
+
+Her face was uplifted to mine as she clung to me; then my weight glided
+through her arms and I fell back in my chair.
+
+I was alone amid blackness and desolation that poured past me like the
+wind above the world.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For the last time, I opened my eyes on the gray shore at the foot of the
+Barrier. I, pygmy indeed, stood again before the colossal wall whose
+palisades reared up beyond vision and stretched away beyond vision on
+either side.
+
+I was alone here. No whisper of taunt or menace, no presence of horror
+troubled me. Opposite me, the Breach that split the cliff showed as a
+shadowed cañon, empty except of dread. Far out behind me the sea that
+was like no sea of earth gathered itself beneath its eternal mists as a
+tidal wave draws and gathers. With folded arms I stood there, waiting
+for the returning surge of mighty waters to overwhelm me in their flood.
+I waited in awe and solemn expectancy, beyond fear or hope.
+
+But now I became aware of a new doubleness of experience. Here on the
+Frontier, I was between the worlds, yet I also saw the room in the house
+left behind. I saw myself as an unconscious body reclined in a chair
+beside the hearth. Desire Michell knelt on the floor beside me, her
+hands grasping my arms, her gaze fixed on my face, her hair spilling its
+shining lengths across my knees. Phillida was huddled in a chair, crying
+hysterically. Vere apparently had been trying to force some stimulant
+upon the man who was myself, yet was not myself, for while I watched he
+reluctantly rose from bending above the figure and set a glass upon the
+table. I echoed his sigh. Life was good.
+
+The sea behind me began to rush in from immeasurable distances. The roar
+of the waters' thunderous approach blended with the heat and flash of
+storm all about the house into which I looked.
+
+"He dies," Desire spoke, her voice level and calm. "Has it not been so
+with all who loved the daughters of my race these two centuries past?
+Yet never did one of those die as he dies--not for passion, but for
+protection of the woman--not as a madman or one ignorant, but facing
+that which was not meant for man to face, his eyes beating back the
+intolerable Eyes. Oh, glory and grief of mine to have seen this!"
+
+Phillida cowered lower in her chair, burying her face in the cushions.
+But Vere abruptly stood erect, his fine dark face lifted and set. Just
+so some ancestors of his might have risen in a bleak New England
+meeting-house when moved powerfully to wrestle with evil in prayer. But
+it is doubtful if any Maine deacon ever addressed his Deity as Vere
+appealed to his.
+
+"Almighty, we're in places we don't understand," he spoke simply as to a
+friend within the room, his earnest, drawling speech entirely natural.
+"But You know them as You do us. If things have got to go this way, why,
+we'll make out the best we can. But if they don't, and we're just
+blundering into trouble, please save Roger Locke and this poor girl.
+Because we know You can. Amen."
+
+Now at this strange and beautiful prayer--or so it seemed to me--a ray
+of blinding light cleaved up from where Vere stood, like a shot arrow
+speeding straight through house and night into inconceivable space. Then
+the room vanished from my sight as the great wave burst out of the mist
+upon me.
+
+I went down in a smother of ghastly snarling floods cold as space is
+cold. Something fled past me up the strand, shrieking inhuman passion;
+the Eyes of my enemy glared briefly across my vision.
+
+One last view I glimpsed of that dread Barrier, amid the tumult and
+welter of my passing. The breach was closed! Unbroken, majestic, the
+enormous Wall stood up inviolate.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+     "Fancy, like the finger of a clock,
+     Runs the great circuit, and is still at home."
+                                              --COWPER.
+
+The uproar of rushing waters was still in my ears. But I was in my chair
+before the hearth in the living room of the farmhouse, and the noise was
+the din of a tempest outside.
+
+Opposite me, Phillida and Desire were clinging together, watching me
+with such looks of gladness and anxiety that I felt myself abashed
+before them. Bagheera, the cat, sat on the table beside the lamp, yellow
+eyes blinking at each flash and rattle of lightning and thunder, while
+he sleeked his recently wetted fur. Wondering where that wet had come
+from, I discovered presently that the fire was out, and the hearth
+drenched with soot-stained water. I looked toward the windows, from
+which the curtains had been drawn aside. Rain poured glistening down the
+panes, but the clean storm was empty of horror.
+
+"Drink some of this, Mr. Locke," urged Vere, whose arm was about me.
+"Sit quiet, and I guess you'll be all right in a few moments."
+
+I took the advice. Strength was flowing into me, as inexplicably as it
+had flowed away from me a while past. How can I describe the certainty
+of life that possessed me? The assurance was established, singularly
+enough, for all of us. None of my companions asked, and I myself never
+doubted whether the danger might return. The experience was complete,
+and closed. Moreover, already the Thing that had been our enemy, the
+horror that had been Its atmosphere, the mystery that haunted
+Desire--all were fading into the past. The phantoms were exorcised, and
+the house purified of fear.
+
+But there was something different from ordinary storm in this tempest.
+The tumult of rain and wind linked another, deeper roar with theirs. The
+house quivered with a steady trembling like a bridge over which a train
+is passing. Pulling myself together I turned to Vere.
+
+"What is happening outdoors?" I asked.
+
+"The cloudburst was too much for the dam," he answered regretfully. "It
+went off with a noise like a big gun, a while back. I expect the lake is
+flooding the whole place and messing up everything from our cellar to
+the chickenhouse. Daylight is due pretty soon, now, and the storm is
+dying down. We'll be able to add up the damage, after a bit."
+
+"The water came down the chimney and drowned Bagheera," Phillida bravely
+tried to summon nonchalance. "Isn't it lucky you and Desire could not
+get started in the car, after all? Fancy being out in that!"
+
+Desire Michell steadied her soft lips and gave her quota to the shelter
+of commonplace speech we raised between ourselves and emotions too
+recently felt.
+
+"It was like the tropical storms in Papua, where I lived until this
+year," she said. "Once, one blew down the mission house."
+
+Vere's weather prediction proved quite right. In an hour the storm had
+exhausted itself, or passed away to other places. Sunrise came with a
+veritable glory of crimson and gold, blazing through air washed limpidly
+pure by the rain. The east held a troop of small clouds red as
+flamingoes flying against a shining sky; last traces of our tempest.
+
+We stood on the porch together to survey an unfamiliar scene in the rosy
+light. Water overlay lawns and paths, so the house stood in a wide,
+shallow lake whose ripples lapped around the white cement steps and the
+pillars of the porte-cochère. Phillida's Pekin ducks floated and fed on
+this new waterway as contentedly as upon their accustomed pastures.
+Small objects sailed on the flood here and there; Bagheera's milk-pan
+from the rear veranda bobbed amidst a fleet of apples shaken down in the
+orchard, while some wooden garden tools nudged a silk canoe-cushion.
+
+In contrast to all this aquatic prospect, where the real lake had been
+there now lay some acres of ugly, oozing marsh; its expanse dotted with
+the bodies of dead water-creatures and such of Vere's young trout as had
+not been swept away by the outpouring flood. The dam was a mere pile of
+débris through which trickled a stream bearing no resemblance to the
+sparkling waterfall of yesterday. Already the sun's rays were drawing a
+rank, unwholesome vapor from the long-submerged surface.
+
+We contemplated the ruin for a while, without words.
+
+"Poor Drawls!" Phillida sighed at length. "All your work just rubbed
+out!"
+
+"Never mind, Vere," I exclaimed impulsively. "We will put it all back in
+the same shape as it was."
+
+But even as I spoke, I felt an odd shock of uneasiness and recoil from
+my own proposition. I did not want the lake to be there again; or to
+hear the unaccountable sounds to which it gave birth and the varying
+fall of the cataract over the dam. Did the others share my repugnance? I
+seemed to divine that they did. Even the impetuous Phil did not break
+out in welcome of my offer. Desire, who had smoothed her sober gray
+dress in some feminine fashion and stood like Marguerite or Melisande
+with a great braid over either shoulder, moved as if to speak, then
+changed her intention. A faint distress troubled her expression.
+
+As usual, Vere himself quietly lifted us out of unrest.
+
+"I'm not sure that couldn't be bettered, Mr. Locke," he demurred. "That
+is if you liked, of course! That marsh could be cleaned up and drained
+into pretty rich land, I guess. And down there beyond the barn, on the
+other side where the creek naturally widens out into a kind of basin, I
+should think might be the spot for a smaller, cleaner lake."
+
+"Doesn't it seem to you, Ethan," I said, "that we have progressed rather
+past the _Mr. Locke_ stage?"
+
+A little later, when Desire and I were alone on the porch, we walked to
+the end nearest the vanished lake. Or rather, I led her to a swinging
+couch there, and sat down beside her.
+
+"Point out the path down the hill by which you used to come," I asked of
+her.
+
+She shook her head. There are no words to paint how she looked in the
+clear morning, except that she seemed its sister.
+
+"It is only the end of a path that matters," she said. "Look instead at
+the marsh. Do you see nothing there stranger than a path through the
+woods even when trodden by a wilful woman?"
+
+Following her lifted finger, I saw a series of long mounds out there in
+the muddy floor not far from the dam. Not high, two or three feet at
+most, the mounds formed an irregular square of considerable area.
+
+"The old house!" I exclaimed.
+
+"It was set on fire by the second Desire Michell one night deep in
+winter. Her father built this house of yours and put in the dam that
+covered the ruins with water. I think he hoped to wash away the horror
+upon the place."
+
+"I know so little of your history."
+
+"You can imagine it." She turned her head from me. "The first child came
+back from England when it was a man grown, and claimed the house and
+name of the first Desire. He settled and married here. For two
+generations only sons were born to the Michells. I do not know if the
+Dark One came to them. I believe it did, but they were hard, austere men
+who beat off evil. Then, a daughter was born. She looked like the first
+Desire and she was--not good. She was a scandal to the family. She
+listened to It----! The tradition is that she set fire to the house
+after a terrible quarrel with her people, but herself perished by some
+miscalculation. There were no more girls born for another while after
+that. Not until my father's time. He had a sister who resembled the two
+Desires of the past. My grandfather brought her up in harshness and
+austerity, holding always before her the wickedness to which she was
+born. Yet it was no use. She fled from his house with a man no one knew,
+and died in Paris after a life of great splendor and heartlessness.
+Everyone who loved the Desires suffered. That is why I--covered myself
+from--you."
+
+I took her hand, so small a thing to hold and feel flutter in mine.
+
+"But what of me, Desire? The darkness covered no beauty in me, but a
+defect. You never saw me until last night and now in the morning. Now
+that you know, can you bear with a man who--limps? You, so perfect?"
+
+She turned toward me. Her kohl-dark eyes, vivid as a summer noon, opened
+to my anxious scrutiny.
+
+"But I have seen you often," she said, the heat of confession bright on
+cheek and lip. "I never meant you to know, but now----! After the first
+time you spoke to me so kindly and gayly--I was so very sorrowfully
+alone--and the convent was so dull! My father's field-glasses were in my
+trunk."
+
+"Desire?"
+
+"I fear I have no vocation for a nun. I--there is a huge rock half-way
+down the hill with a clear view of this place. I have spent hours there,
+watching these lawns and verandas, and the things you all did. It all
+seemed so amusing and, and happy. You see, where I lived there were
+almost no white people except my father and a priest at the Catholic
+mission. So I learned to know Phillida and Mr. Vere and----"
+
+"Then, all this time, Desire----"
+
+"The glasses brought you very close," she whispered. "I knew you by
+night and by day."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+     "Life hath its term, the assembly is dispersed,
+      And we have not described Thee from the first."
+                                            --GULISTAN.
+
+
+I have come to the end of this narrative and with the end, I come to
+what people of practical mind may call its explanation. Of the four of
+us who were joined in living through the events of that summer, my wife
+and I and Ethan Vere agree in one belief, while Phillida holds the
+opinion of her father, the Professor. I think Bagheera, the cat, might
+be added to our side also, if his testimony was available.
+
+The press reports of the cloudburst and flood brought the Professor up
+to Connecticut to verify with his own eyes his daughter's safety. Aunt
+Caroline did not come with him, but I may here set down that she did
+come later. They found their son-in-law by no means what their
+forebodings menaced, so reconciled themselves at last to the marriage;
+to Phillida's abiding joy.
+
+But first the little Professor arrived alone, three days after the
+storm. Characteristically, he had sent no warning of his coming, so no
+one met him at the railway station. He arrived in one of those curious
+products of a country livery stable known as a rig, driven by a local
+reprobate whom no prohibition could sober.
+
+I shall never forget the incredulous rapture with which Phillida
+welcomed him, nor the pride with which she presented Vere.
+
+The damages to the place were already being repaired, although weeks of
+work would be needed to restore a condition of order and make the
+changes we planned. The automobile had been disentangled from the
+wreckage of garage and willow tree and towed away to receive expert
+attention. We were awaiting the arrival of the new car I had ordered for
+the honeymoon tour Desire and I were soon to take. Phillida had declared
+two weeks shopping a necessary preliminary to the wedding of a bride who
+was to live in New York "and meet everybody." Nor would I have shortened
+the pretty orgy into which the two girls entered, transforming my
+sorceress into a lady of the hour; happiness seeming to me rather to be
+savored than gulped.
+
+Needless to say, there was no more talk of the convent whose iron gates
+were to have closed between the last Desire Michell and the world. She
+had been directed there by the priest whose island mission was near her
+father's. In her solitude and ignorance of life, the sisterhood seemed
+to offer a refuge in which to keep her promise to her father. But she
+had to learn the principles of the Church she was about to adopt, and
+during that period of delay I had come to the old house.
+
+On the second day of his visit, we told all the story to the Professor.
+We could not have told Aunt Caroline, but we told him.
+
+"It is perfectly simple," he pronounced at the end. "Interesting, even
+unique in points, but simple of explanation."
+
+"And what may be the explanation?" I inquired with scepticism.
+
+"Marsh gas," he replied triumphantly. "Have none of you young people
+ever considered the singular emanations from swamps and marshes where
+rotting vegetation underlies shallow water? Phillida, I am astonished
+that you did not enlighten your companions on this point. You, at least,
+have been carefully educated, not in the light froth of modern music and
+art, but in the rudiments of science. I do not intend to wound your
+feelings, Roger!"
+
+"I am not wounded, sir," I retorted. "Just incredulous!"
+
+"Ah?" said the Professor, with the bland superiority of his tribe.
+"Well, well! Yet even you know something of the evils attending people
+who live in low, swampy areas; malaria, ague, fevers. In the tropics,
+these take the form of virulent maladies that sweep a man from earth in
+a few hours. Your lake _was_ haunted, so was the house that once stood
+in its basin, as some vague instinct strove to warn the generations of
+Michells as well as you. Haunted by emanations of some powerful form of
+marsh gas given forth more plentifully at night, which lowered the heart
+action and impeded the breathing of one drawing the poison into his
+lungs through hours of sleep, producing--nightmare. Science has by no
+means analyzed all the possibilities of such phenomena."
+
+"Nightmare!" I cried. "Do you mean to account by nightmare for the wide
+and repeated experiences that twice brought me to the verge of death?
+And Desire? What of her knowledge of that same nightmare? What of the
+legend of her family so exactly coinciding with all I felt? And why did
+not Phillida and Ethan suffer the nightmare with me?"
+
+He held up a lean hand.
+
+"Gently, gently, Roger! Consider that of all the household you alone
+slept in the side of the house toward the lake. I know that you always
+have your windows open day and night--a habit that used to cause great
+annoyance to your Aunt Caroline when you were a boy. Thus you were
+exposed to the full effect of the water gases. That you did not feel the
+effects every night I attribute to differences in the wind, that from
+some directions would blow the fumes away from the house, thus relieving
+you. I gather from your account that the phenomena were most pronounced
+in close, foggy weather, when the poisonous air was atmospherically held
+down to the earth. You have spoken of miasmic mists that hung below the
+level of the tree-tops. When Mr. Vere experienced a similar unease and
+depression, he was on the shore of the lake at dawn after precisely such
+a close, foggy night as I have described as most dangerous. The symptoms
+confirm this theory. You say you awakened on each occasion with a sense
+of suffocation. Your heart labored, your limbs were cold and mind
+unnaturally depressed, owing to slow circulation of the blood. You were
+a man asphyxiated. After each attack you were more sensitive to the
+next, as a malaria patient grows worse if he remains in the swamp
+districts. It is remarkable that you did not guess the truth from the
+smell of decaying vegetation and stagnant damp which you admit
+accompanied the seizures! However, you did not; and in your condition
+the last three days of continuous fog brought on two attacks that nearly
+proved fatal. Now as to the character of your hallucinations, and their
+agreement with the young lady's ideas. That is a trifle more involved
+discussion, yet simple, simple!"
+
+He put the tips of his fingers together and surveyed us with the benign
+condescension of one instructing a class of small children.
+
+"The first night that you passed in your newly purchased house, Roger,
+you accidentally encountered Miss Michell; or she did you!" He smiled
+humorously. "While your feelings were excited by the unusual episode,
+the strange surroundings and the dark, she related to you a wild legend
+of witchcraft and monsters. Later, when you suffered your first attack
+of marsh-gas poisoning, your consequent hallucination took form from the
+story you had just heard. Later conversations with your mysterious lady
+fixed the idea into an obsession. Recurrent dreams are a common
+phenomenon even in healthy persons. In this case, no doubt the exact
+repetition of the physical sensations of miasmic poisoning tended to
+reproduce in your mind the same sequence of ideas or semi-delirious
+imaginings. These were of course varied or distorted somewhat on each
+occasion, influenced by what you had been hearing or reading in advance
+of them. This mental condition became more and more confirmed as you
+steeped yourself more deeply in legendary lore and also--pardon me--in
+the morbid fancies of the young lady; whose ghostly visits in the dark
+and whose increasing interest for you put a further bias upon your
+thoughts."
+
+"What were the noises I heard from the lake, and the shocks we all
+felt?" I demanded.
+
+He nodded amiably toward Vere.
+
+"Mr. Vere has mentioned the large bubbles which formed and burst on the
+surface of the lake. That is a common manifestation of ordinary marsh
+gas. Possibly the singular and unknown emanation that took place at
+night came to the surface in the form of a bubble or bubbles huge enough
+to produce in bursting the smacking sound of which you speak. But I am
+inclined to another theory, after a walk I took about your place this
+morning. When you put up your cement dam instead of the old log affair
+that held back only a part of the stream, you made a greater depth and
+bulk of water in the swamp basin than it has contained these many years,
+if ever. As a result, I believe the sloping mud basin began to slip
+toward the dam. Oh, very gradually! Probably not stirring for weeks at a
+time. Just a yielding here, a parting there, until the cloudburst
+precipitated the disaster. You had, my dear Roger, a miniature
+landslide, which would account for sounds of shifting mud and water in
+your lake, and for the shocks or trembling of your house when the earth
+movements occurred."
+
+The rest of us regarded one another. I think Vere might have spoken, if
+he had not been unwilling to mar Phillida's contentment by any
+appearance of dispute with her father.
+
+"It is very cleverly worked out, sir," I conceded. "But how do you
+explain that Desire knew what I experienced with the Thing from the
+Barrier, if my experiences were merely delirious dreams?"
+
+"I have not yet understood that she did know," said the Professor dryly.
+"She put the suggestions into your head; innocently, of course. When you
+afterward compared notes and found they agreed, you cried 'miraculous'!
+How is that, Miss Michell? Did you actually know what Roger experienced
+in these excursions before he told you of them?"
+
+Desire gazed at him with her meditative eyes, so darkly lovely, yet
+never quite to lose their individual difference from any other lovely
+eyes I have ever seen. The eyes, I thought then and still think, of one
+who has seen more, or at least seen into farther spaces, than most of
+treadmill-trotting humanity. She wore one of the new frocks for which
+Phillida and she had already made a flying trip to town; a most
+sophisticated frock from Fifth Avenue, with frivolous French shoes to
+correspond. Her hair of a Lorelei was demurely coiled and wound about
+her little head. Yet some indescribable atmosphere closed her delicately
+around, an impalpable wall between her and the commonplace. Even the
+desiccated, material Professor was aware of this influence and took off
+his spectacles uneasily, wiped them and put them on again to contemplate
+her.
+
+"I am not sure," she answered him with careful candor. "I believe that I
+could always tell when the Dark One had been with him. I could feel
+that, here," she touched her breast. "I knew what its visits were like,
+because I was brought up to know by my father and was told the history
+of the three Desire Michells. My father had studied deeply and taught
+me--I shall not tell anyone all he taught me! I do not want to think of
+those things. Some of them I have told to Roger. Some of them are quite
+harmless and pleasant, like the secret formula for making the Rose of
+Jerusalem perfume; which has virtues not common, as Roger can say who
+has felt it revive him from faintness. But there are places into which
+we should not thrust ourselves. It is like--like suicide. One's mind
+must be perverted before certain things can be done. And that is the
+true sin--to debase one's soul. All men discover and learn of science
+and the universe by honest duty and effort is good, is lofty and leads
+up. Nothing is forbidden to us. But if we turn aside to the low door
+which only opens to crime and evil purpose, we step outside. I am
+unskilful; I do not express myself well."
+
+"Very well, young lady," the Professor condescended. "Unfortunately,
+your theories are wild mysticism. The veritable fiend that has plagued
+the house of Michell is the mischievous habit of rearing each generation
+from childhood to a belief in doom and witchcraft. A child will believe
+anything it is told. Why not, when all things are still equally
+wonderful to it? Let me point out that your theory also contradicts
+itself, since Roger certainly did not enter upon any path of crime, yet
+he met your unearthly monster."
+
+"Because he chose to link his fate with mine, who am linked by heredity
+with the Dweller at the Frontier," she said earnestly. "He was in the
+position of one who enters the lair of a wild beast to bring out a
+victim who is trapped there. It may cost that rescuer his life. Roger
+nearly paid his life. But he mastered It and took me away from It,
+because he was not afraid and not seeking his own good. I never imagined
+anyone so brave and strong and unselfish as Roger. I suppose it is
+because he thinks of others instead of himself, which gives the
+strongest kind of strength."
+
+"The Thing nearly had me, though," I hastily intervened to spare my own
+modesty. "And It did have me worse than afraid!"
+
+"I seem to be arguing against an impenetrable obstinacy," snapped the
+Professor. "Do you, Roger, who were educated under my own eye, in my
+house, have the effrontery to tell me that you believe Miss Michell is
+descended from the union of an evil spirit and a human being; as the
+Eastern legends claim for Saladin the Great?"
+
+"Your own theory, sir, being----?" I evaded.
+
+"There is no theory about the matter," he declared. "Excuse me, Miss
+Michell! The child was undoubtedly Sir Austin's son. Which accounts for
+the madness of the first Desire Michell."
+
+We were all silent for a while. Whatever thoughts each held remained
+unvoiced.
+
+"Come, Phillida, you take my sane point of view, I hope?" the Professor
+finally challenged his daughter, with a glance of scorn and compassion
+at the rest of our group. "You observe that I have explained every point
+raised, Miss Michell's testimony being of the vaguest?"
+
+"Yes, Papa," Phillida agreed hesitatingly. "I do believe you have solved
+the whole problem. Only, if Cousin Roger was suffering from marsh-gas
+poisoning last night when he seemed to be dying, I do not quite see why
+Ethan's prayer should have cured him."
+
+The Professor was momentarily posed. He looked disconcerted, took off
+his glasses and put them on again, and at length muttered something
+about storm-wind dissipating the miasma in the air and events being mere
+coincidence.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The house was never again visited by the Dark Presence. Phantom or
+fancy, the horror was gone as if it never had brooded about the place.
+Desire Locke is a fatal companion only to my heart.
+
+But whether all this is so because the lake is drained and the Shetland
+pony of a young Vere browses over the green pasture that was once a
+miasmic swamp; or whether it is so for more subtle, wilder reasons, no
+one can say. I, recalling that colossal Barrier I visioned as closed and
+a certain cleaving arrow of light, must at least call the coincidence
+amazing.
+
+As I have said, my wife and I, Ethan Vere and Bagheera the cat have an
+understanding between us.
+
+
+
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