disposed of all his property--it was in securities of various
kinds--and we have never been able to find out what he did with the
money he received. Thousands and thousands of dollars took wing
somehow. It was never brought here, so she could not have stolen it
actually, but I am as sure that Asenath knows where that money is as
I am that I live.”
“Now, Helen, be sensible, do.”
“Mother Glen was a sensible woman, and she believed as I do. She
said the girl was uncanny. Moreover, she declared to me that Asenath
had set out to conquer her as she did Paul, and that it was only by
constant resistance that she prevented her from gaining her object.
There was a psychic contest between them. Mother Glen’s brain was in
a condition of siege for months. It could not stand the strain. She
was seized with paralysis and died. I blame Asenath for her death.”
I did not say much in reply. My odd experience of a few minutes
before puzzled me. Helen’s account of the girl threw a weird light
upon what I felt bound, as a reasonable man, to consider merely
curious phenomena, subjective in character and due to some
unexplained physical cause. I determined to say a few decided words
to Robert Glen about the culpability of allowing his delicate wife
to contend with such an annoyance as Asenath, who, if not a
sorceress, certainly was a fractious and troublesome servant.
“It is strange that Robert does not remove her,” said I.
Helen’s face flushed and was drawn by a momentary spasm. She looked
at me in troubled silence, as if she could not decide to speak what
she wished to tell me.
“I am afraid for Robert,” she said at length, almost in a whisper;
“there is something in that girl’s demeanor to him that it sickens
me to think of--and which I dare not try to explain, even to myself.
It seems impossible that she can dare to think that he”--she went on
hurriedly, after a pause--“you see, he believes in no psychic powers
and is not on his guard. He calls her unearthly pranks mere mischief
that a few years’ discipline will take out of her. Robert intends
her to marry Lucas.”
She spoke the last sentence quite loudly, and, as the girl and her
driver were passing by the window, they overheard. Lucas, a squat,
stolid-looking mulatto, with a face like that of a satiated animal,
chuckled and poked at Asenath with the gad.
The girl stopped. She threw down her burden, flung back her head,
and turned upon Helen a wild and vicious stare. Her face, streaming
with perspiration, was full of threat. She gasped for breath from
emotion or the heaviness of her toil. She raised one hand, wiped her
brow with its open palm, and flung the drops of sweat in a shower at
Helen.
“May every drop curse you!” she said, between her labored breaths.
Helen looked at her with quiet scorn. “Go on, Lucas,” she said,
calmly.
Asenath shook herself, like a chained animal. She ground her teeth
and turned upon Lucas in fury, as if she would rend him. He did not
quail, but raised his gad threateningly and pointed to the
barrow-handles, and, after a momentary struggle with herself, the
girl took them up and went on, panting under her toil.
“She shall continue that until she drops,” said my sister.
“But, Helen, that surely is cruel.”
“Not more so than drawing the fangs of a snake. I have discovered
that she is psychically powerless when physically exhausted. All the
negroes on the place know this and are rejoicing now--they all feel
more secure for knowing that she has been disciplined.”
While she was speaking, I saw Robert Glen coming along the walk to
the house. Helen saw him, too. Leaning out the window, she called to
Lucas and bade him take his charge “to the old barn.” He hurriedly
departed, driving the girl--who now seemed doubly unwilling to drag
her load--literally like an ox, and very unsparing of the gad.
Robert greeted me cordially; but it was evident to me that there was
a cloud between his wife and him. His ruddy face assumed a stern
expression when he looked at her, and his voice had a hard tone when
he addressed her. Her manner to him had an appealing, almost
fawning, air, which it distressed me to see.
It was some days before I found a chance to speak to Robert on the
subject of the girl. I had better have held my tongue, for he was
nettled in an instant, shrugged his shoulders, and curled his lip.
“You Northern people know nothing whatever about the management of
slaves. Helen leads that girl the life of a toad under a harrow,
because the other darkies say she ‘hoodoos’ them, and because my
mother had some irrational ideas about demoniacal possession. I
declare to you, Tom, that if I did not know Helen’s delicate
condition and nervousness were much to blame, I should be ashamed of
her treatment of Asenath, who is a good house-servant, and
valuable.”
“But she is an annoyance that Helen should not have to contend with
now.”
“How is she to be got rid of?” he demanded, impatiently. “We never
sell any of the people on this estate, and she won’t take her
freedom as a gift. I can’t kill her.”
Then I dropped the subject. When I next saw Helen, she had been
crying, and she begged me not to speak to Robert about the girl
again.
I saw no more of Asenath for some time, and learned that she had
been put steadily to work at the loom, the day following my arrival.
One morning, news came that the loom-house had been entered in the
night, all the yarn carried off, the woven cloth cut to pieces, and
the loom and wheels so shattered that new ones would be necessary.
Even the walls of the building were half-destroyed.
“This is some of Asenath’s work,” said Helen.
Robert, who had been annoyed by the news, now seemed additionally
so.
“Pshaw, Helen!” he said sharply; “it would take the strength of
several men to do some of this mischief.”
“She has it at command. Lucas shall take her in hand again.”
“No, we will have no more of that,” Robert said, sternly. “Now, hear
me, Helen; I have told Lucas that if he obeys you in that respect
again he shall be flogged within an inch of his life, and I mean
it.”
Helen’s face turned very white, her hands fell into her lap, and she
sat as if stricken helpless and hopeless. I hastened away to avoid
hearing more, comprehending now what the trouble in my sister’s life
was, and with a presentiment of coming evil that would be greater.
It was that very night that, having strolled into the shrubbery to
smoke my cigar, I fell asleep upon a rustic bench there and awoke to
find it was late at night, with the wind moaning as if a storm were
brewing in the cloudy heavens.
As I arose to go to the house, something--that was not
visible--seemed to come from every quarter at once and smite me. I
felt a sharp, electric thrill, which was followed by a sensation as
if I had been flung from a height and raised up again, with some of
my faculties benumbed by the fall. My hair stood up, but I felt no
fear, only a passive wonder, mixed with expectation. Turning, I saw,
by a transient gleam of moonlight, the girl Asenath, standing in the
path near by, pointing at me with a long, slender rod. The ray
passed and left a black Shadow there, which moved slowly away,
beckoning to me. I followed.
The Shadow led me out of the shrubbery and along the wide avenue
between the two rows of huts occupied by the negroes, and ended at
the mansion house. I had no will or thought but to follow it
exactly. It stopped before one of the huts and bent itself nearly
double. I, too, bent over, involuntarily, and every muscle of my
body seemed to become tense. The perspiration started out of me, and
my will was like a bar of steel ending in great fingers, which
grasped something and pulled upon it with such force that my inner
self was a-tremble with weakness when the tension relaxed, which it
did at the opening of the cottage door and the coming out of a
little lad--a mere child--who looked ghastly, as one of the dead
walking. He placed himself beside me, we followed the shadowy woman
to another house, dragged at the invisible cords of another human
soul, and brought it out into the night. It was a woman, this time,
in scantiest of night-robes.
And so we went on, stopping at every door, and from every door some
one came forth, except from that of Lucas. There, grasp as it would,
the steel fingers clutched nothing, and the door remained shut.
The woman Asenath muttered to herself, and all the crowd of
followers muttered, too. With them, my own lips formed words, of
which I did not then comprehend the meaning: “Soulless beast!” We
went on beyond the quarters, stopped at the mansion, and dragged at
something that resisted with all its strength, which was weaker than
ours, for it yielded at last, and came slowly, slowly down the steps
and stood among us. It was my sister Helen.
Asenath laughed, and ghastly laughter broke from all, even from
Helen herself.
I had no feeling of compassion for her, nor of fear for her or
myself, but was simply a force which another exerted. The wills of
those who followed Asenath were but strands in the cable of her
power, and their strength was in her hands for good or ill.
We followed again--out of the plantation, through a forest of pines,
over a bridge that spanned slow-crawling, black water, past a fallen
church, surrounded by forgotten graves, to the top of a hill where
there were stones laid in the form of a serpent--a great cleft
stone, like open jaws, forming the head. There Asenath paused and
cast down her rod. She stretched out her hands, and in a moment we
were formed into a circle about the rod.
And then once again those fingers of steel grasped
something--something that all their strength seemed unable to move.
Our breath came in gasps, our forms shook like the leaves of the
aspen tree, and in the heart was a fear, too great to be measured,
of failure. Long, long the effort lasted--lasted until the will
seemed to discard its own puerile strength and to fling itself upon
the bosom of impersonal force, seize the reservoir of the universal
will, and turn its power in a mighty stream upon the burden of one
desire--one unyielding demand that the door be opened. And with that
borrowed force came the sense of unlimited strength. Faith was born.
We stretched out our arms in gestures of which I can only remember
that they were first those of invitation, then of welcome. Nature
began to pulsate. There was a sound like the slow, regular beating
of a heart, in the chambers of which we were inclosed. The inner
life throbbed with it so fiercely that the blood seemed almost to
leap from my body. All about us were the movements of awakening
birds and insects; from afar came the lowing of kine, the crowing of
cocks, and the crying of children, as if they were suddenly startled
into fear.
In the centre of the circle appeared a square of strange light. We
looked upon it and beheld a place of which the darkness and the
light of this world are but the envelopes. We saw there, afar off, a
vast crystalline globe, from which extended, in all directions,
millions of filaments of clear light. The globe scintillated as a
diamond does, and its sparks floated away upon the endless filaments
of light. Nearer to us, moving about, were beings not human, and not
resembling each other further than that they were all gigantic and
all possessed of some human attributes. Some were beautiful, some
hideous; but upon every one was stamped--in strange characters that
I somehow understood--the words “_I only am God_.” Upon some the
writing was fantastic, as if put on in mockery. Upon others it shone
with a clear and cruel radiance that pained the sight. Some bore it
faded and dim, as if the pretension it set up had fallen like a leaf
into the stream of the ages and been almost forgotten. A great awe
fell upon us all, so great that all, except the woman Asenath and
myself, fell down and seemed as if dead. The woman trembled and
murmured to herself, and again my lips formed her words: “Is it
worth while, when human desires are so poor, human life so short?”
Through that door there floated not a voice, for the silence was
only broken by a faint, soft hum, like very distant music, but an
unspoken command that impressed itself upon the spirit.
“_Speak!_”
Still the woman hesitated. Suddenly her lips moved again, mine
following them: “But only through this can _he_ be won.”
“I would have the desire of my heart,” she said aloud.
“_It is thine_,” was the silent answer; “_to him who knocks at this
door shall it be opened, and what he asks for there shall he
receive, whether for good or ill. It is the law._”
“I would be fair, like those who enslave me. All that she has”--she
pointed to my sister--“I would take from her and have for my own.”
“_The power to obtain thy will is thine, whether thou be of the just
or of the unjust. The spirit which commands shall be obeyed. It is
the law._”
“And is there a penalty to be paid?”
“_Thy act is the seed from which its penalty shall grow._”
The woman sighed.
“What penalty?”
“_Thou knowest the law._”
Sighing again, bitterly, Asenath stretched out her hand. The square
of light went out. Across the spot where it had been, drifted
indistinct forms which passed into invisibility on either side.
Under their feet ran a serpent of fire, which leaped at the woman.
She grasped it, and it seemed to become the rod she had cast down.
I remembered nothing more until I came slowly to myself, stretched
upon the bench in the shrubbery, with the morning sun shining into
my face. My limbs were stiff, my head ached, and my heart was heavy
with a foreboding of evil. It was impossible for me to decide
whether the experience of the night was a dream or a reality, but I
was sorely troubled; I could not think of Asenath without a creeping
of the flesh.
On approaching the house, I saw Robert standing in the doorway. My
first glimpse of him set me to trembling with fear of evil tidings,
he looked so agitated and distressed. When he perceived me, he wrung
his hands and burst into tears.
“Oh, Tom!” he cried, “Helen is dying. She was taken with convulsions
early this morning. She does not know me. The baby was born dead,
and Helen can not live. I must lose her! Oh, God, I must lose her!”
He ran through the hall and up the stairs, like a wild man. I
followed, but the heaviness of the shock was so great that it was
but slowly and with a feeling as if the floor was rising up to my
face. Asenath was moving stealthily about the hall. I bade her
begone. She looked at me like a startled cat, but did not go. A
black girl, coming down the stairs, passed me, and I recognized her
as the first of the women who had joined our ghastly crowd the night
before. She gazed straight before her, with wide-open, horrified
eyes, and her face had the same pinched look the hall mirror had
shown me upon my own as I glanced into it involuntarily when passing
it. At the top of the stairs, Belinda, Helen’s poor little maid,
flung herself at my feet and clasped my knees.
“Oh, Massa Tom,” she cried, “she am ’witched. Go an’ git d’ witch
doctah t’--tak’--de spell off’n her. Nuffin’ll save her ef yo’ don’t
do dat.”
As I stopped to put the poor creature aside, old Mammy Clara, her
face streaming with tears, came up to me.
“Massa Tom,” she said, solemnly, “de good God hab tooken Miss Helen.
She’s in heben wid her li’l’ baby.”
The blow overcame me. It will be best to pass over that time. I shut
myself into my room and bore my agony alone. I went once into the
room where Helen lay and looked at her face. It was the face of one
in peaceful rest, but it had aged twenty years in twelve hours. Her
maids, directed by Mrs. Grayson, an old friend of the family, were
ready to prepare her for the grave.
“They think,” whispered Mrs. Grayson, “that she had walked in her
sleep. Her feet are scratched and torn, as if she had been among
briars barefoot, and the doctors say that her convulsions probably
came on from the shock of awakening. She was found at daybreak,
unconscious, in the hall, and the outer door was wide open.”
I left the plantation a few days after the funeral, and for years
neither saw nor heard directly from Robert Glen. I never could
forgive his indifference to Helen’s peace of mind while she lived,
nor get over a certain disgust with which his lack of self-control
at the time of her death inspired me. I never liked him, and, after
that sad time, I had less regard for him than ever. I never told him
the story I have written. He would only have pronounced me mad, and
I did not wish to obtain that reputation for the mere sake of
warning him. Besides, I tried with all my mind to believe the
experience of that night a dream, but I found that impossible and
was always looking for a sequel to it. The sequel came in its
appointed time.
Years passed away. At the outbreak of the war, the Graysons came
North. From them, I learned that Asenath had disappeared from the
plantation long before, and was supposed to have drowned herself in
the black creek and to haunt the plantation in the form of a
black-and-white snake. Dr. Grayson blamed himself for her death.
“Some of the Glen negroes,” he said, “told some of mine that the
girl was turning white, and that, with the exception of her face and
hands, her whole body had changed its color. Now I had heard of such
cases, but never had seen one, and in spite of what Buffon and other
naturalists say on the subject, felt doubtful of the possibility of
such a thing taking place. I rode over to Glen’s one day to
investigate the matter. Glen was not at home; but, presuming upon
old friendship with him, I saw the girl and told her the object of
my call. I wish you had seen her; she flew into an outrageous
passion, called me vile names, said there was not a white spot on
her person, and that if I touched her it should cost me dear. Of
course, I paid no attention to her threats, and called that Lucas of
Glen’s to help me turn up her sleeves. Her arms really were white,
but before I could half-examine them, she broke away from us and
tore out of the house. We followed, but lost sight of her in the
shrubbery, and to this day she has never been seen again. The
negroes say she drowned herself. Glen, when he returned, seemed to
believe so. He took me to task in a most ungentlemanly manner for
what had happened, and we have not been on speaking terms since. He
has now gone abroad to stay until this little war squall blows over,
I hear.”
“I trust that he may--and longer,” I said. The doctor chuckled a
little and changed the subject. In secret, I said to myself: “I
don’t believe the girl is dead, and I do believe that Robert Glen
knows where she is. The sequel will come.”
In ’68, Robert returned home, bringing a wife with him. He wrote me
a formal announcement of his marriage, to which I replied with equal
formality.
It was rumored that the new wife was rich in her own right; that she
was of English parentage, but born and reared in Calcutta. Later, I
heard that Robert’s old neighbors had not taken to her at all, and
that she had an ungovernable temper, being unable to keep any
servant under her roof, except a couple of East Indian women, whom
she berated continually in their own tongue, but who could not speak
English enough to impart any information about their mistress to her
neighbors.
The year after Robert’s marriage, I accepted an invitation to spend
a few days with the Graysons. Feeling that I owed Robert the
courtesy of a call, I rode over to the plantation, not so much to
discharge a social duty as to see the new Mrs. Glen, about whom I
noticed, on the part of the Graysons, a marked reluctance to speak.
They edged away from the subject, when I brought it up, with nervous
looks at each other.
Leaving my horse at the outer gate, I walked along the wide avenue
nearly to the house. There was a spectral stillness upon the place.
Sadness exhaled from everything, to be drawn in with every breath.
The old servants were all gone. I had met the once sleek and stolid
Lucas, now rheumatic and ragged, begging in the village. Belinda was
in the county asylum, and the others were scattered or dead. The
scent of the lilacs was gone from the air--the very bushes were
rooted up, and lay, sear and dead, by little heaps of earth. A
triangle of cloud in the sky cast upon the earth a triangle of
shadow, in the midst of which Robert Glen’s home lay as if it were
entranced. No sign of happy life met me; but, as I turned aside to
look at a certain bench in the shrubbery, a black-and-white snake
ran over my foot.
I went no further. A woman was seated upon the bench--a fair woman,
with hair like dull copper reflecting sullen fire, with a face and
form perfect as those of the goddesses of old, a face which
betokened an indomitable soul which knew the secret of the power
wielded by the gods. She was bending over her clasped hands, her
face was turned aside in an attitude of eager waiting, and wore a
smile that transfigured it. Slowly approaching her, walking as a man
walks in his sleep, came Robert Glen. He threw himself at her feet
and laid his head upon her knee. She bent to him with a little
rapturous caress, and both faces were as happy as those of the
people in Paradise.
I turned and went away from the place, and entered its precincts no
more. From that hour, I was self-devoted to one purpose--to seek the
knowledge that should open the door to her degradation and
destruction. In the midst of her success, and in the height of her
pride, she should turn black as she was in the day when Lucas drove
her. I swore it. So should my friend and my sister, whom she robbed
and slew, be avenged.
OLD “HARD LUCK”
By E. Munson
Every one admitted he had a good heart in him. Even his bitterest
enemy, Kid Alderson, was willing to make that concession, but
qualified it by adding that he “was so blamed unlucky and peculiar,
a body never knowed when he _was_ in to clear.”
This singularity extended to his name. “H-o-s-s-e-l-k-u-s, accent on
the _sel_,” he was wont to explain, with something like a shade of
weariness, when a new operator faltered on his long patronymic.
Eben J. Hosselkus was engineer of Engine Seventeen-Forty-Three.
With the meagre data available, it is difficult to determine whether
the name Hosselkus belongs to the Anglo-Saxon, Indo-European, or
Teutonic family; but no such uncertainty attached to the origin of
its unfortunate bearer. He was an unmistakable Yankee; rather below
the medium height, lean and wiry; his mild, light-blue eyes were
overshadowed by bushy and frowning eyebrows, and his grizzled
mustache bristled with a singular ferocity, which the weakness of
mouth and chin immediately belied. The whole man was decidedly
contradictory. When first addressed, his manner was brusque and his
voice gruff; but, after a few terrible expletives, his tone would
soften and his most positive assertions invariably ended with an
appeal for confirmation. “Now ain’t it so, for a fact? Now wouldn’t
you say so, ’f you’uz me?” he would ask, while his wistful eyes
wandered from face to face in search of support or sympathy,
perhaps.
He was the oldest engineer on the division, and the most
unfortunate. Two decades of brakemen and conductors had twisted and
distorted his luckless surname in every conceivable way; but to all
appellations, from “Old Hoss” to “Hustle-Cuss,” he ever accorded the
same ready response.
Of late years he had been known simply as “Hard Luck.” When a
train-crew would reach the end of the division, wan and famished
from a protracted sojourn at some desert-siding, the first inquiry
of their sympathetic brethren would be: “Who was pullin’ you?” “Old
Hard Luck, of course,” was the seldom varied reply.
Old Hosselkus had probably suffered more “moving accidents by flood
and field” than any other man ever lived through. And yet he was a
thoroughly competent engineer. He was an earnest student of
mechanical engineering, and could explain the mysteries of “link
motion,” the principles of the “injector,” and the working of the
Westinghouse automatic air-brake in a singularly lucid manner.
Nothing pleased him better than to enlighten a green fireman upon
some knotty point, and the walls of the roundhouse and bunkhouse are
still covered with his elaborate chalk and pencil diagrams of the
different parts of the locomotive.