Myrtle Hazard waited until the steps of Master Byles Gridley had ceased
to be heard, as he walked in his emphatic way through the long entry of
the old mansion. Then she went to her little chamber and sat down in
a sort of revery. She could not doubt his sincerity, and there was
something in her own consciousness which responded to the suspicions
he had expressed with regard to the questionable impulses of the Rev.
Joseph Bellamy Stoker.
It is not in the words that others say to us, but in those other words
which these make us say to ourselves, that we find our gravest lessons
and our sharpest rebukes. The hint another gives us finds whole trains
of thought which have been getting themselves ready to be shaped in
inwardly articulated words, and only awaited the touch of a burning
syllable, as the mottoes of a pyrotechnist only wait for a spark to
become letters of fire.
The artist who takes your photograph must carry you with him into his
“developing” room, and he will give you a more exact illustration of
the truth just mentioned. There is nothing to be seen on the glass
just taken from the camera. But there is a potential, though invisible,
picture hid in the creamy film which covers it. Watch him as he pours a
wash over it, and you will see that miracle wrought which is at once a
surprise and a charm,--the sudden appearance of your own features where
a moment before was a blank without a vestige of intelligence or beauty.
In some such way the grave warnings of Master Byles Gridley had called
up a fully shaped, but hitherto unworded, train of thought in the
consciousness of Myrtle Hazard. It was not merely their significance,
it was mainly because they were spoken at the fitting time. If they
had been uttered a few weeks earlier, when Myrtle was taking the first
stitch on the embroidered slippers, they would have been as useless as
the artist's developing solution on a plate which had never been exposed
in the camera. But she had been of late in training for her lesson in
ways that neither she nor anybody else dreamed of. The reader who has
shrugged his (or her) shoulders over the last illustration will perhaps
hear this one which follows more cheerfully. The physician in the
Arabian Nights made his patient play at ball with a bat, the hollow
handle of which contained drugs of marvellous efficacy. Whether it was
the drugs that made the sick man get well, or the exercise, is not of so
much consequence as the fact that he did at any rate get well.
These walks which Myrtle had taken with her reverend counsellor had
given her a new taste for the open air, which was what she needed just
now more than confessions of faith or spiritual paroxysms. And so it
happened that, while he had been stimulating all those imaginative and
emotional elements of her nature which responded to the keys he loved
to play upon, the restoring influences of the sweet autumnal air, the
mellow sunshine, the soothing aspects of the woods and fields and sky,
had been quietly doing their work. The color was fast returning to
her cheek, and the discords of her feelings and her thoughts gradually
resolving themselves into the harmonious and cheerful rhythms of bodily
and mental health. It needed but the timely word from the fitting lips
to change the whole programme of her daily mode of being. The word
had been spoken. She saw its truth; but how hard it is to tear away
a cherished illusion, to cast out an unworthy intimate! How hard for
any!--but for a girl so young, and who had as yet found so little to
love and trust, how cruelly hard!
She sat, still and stony, like an Egyptian statue. Her eyes were fixed
on a vacant chair opposite the one on which she was sitting. It was a
very singular and fantastic old chair, said to have been brought over by
the first emigrant of her race. The legs and arms were curiously
turned in spirals, the suggestions of which were half pleasing and half
repulsive. Instead of the claw-feet common in furniture of a later
date, each of its legs rested on a misshapen reptile, which it seemed
to flatten by its weight, as if it were squeezing the breath out of
the ugly creature. Over this chair hung the portrait of her beautiful
ancestress, her neck and arms, the specialty of her beauty, bare, except
for a bracelet on the left wrist, and her shapely figure set off by the
ample folds of a rich crimson brocade. Over Myrtle's bed hung that other
portrait, which was to her almost as the pictures of the Mater Dolorosa
to trustful souls of the Roman faith. She had longed for these pictures
while she was in her strange hysteric condition, and they had been hung
up in her chamber.
The night was far gone, as she knew by the declining of the
constellations which she had seen shining brightly almost overhead in
the early evening, when she awoke, and found herself still sitting in
the very attitude in which she was sitting hours before. Her lamp had
burned out, and the starlight but dimly illuminated her chamber. She
started to find herself sitting there, chilled and stiffened by long
remaining in one posture; and as her consciousness returned, a great
fear seized her, and she sprang for a match. It broke with the quick
movement she made to kindle it, and she snatched another as if a fiend
were after her. It flashed and went out. Oh the terror, the terror! The
darkness seemed alive with fearful presences. The lurid glare of her own
eyeballs flashed backwards into her brain. She tried one more match; it
kindled as it should, and she lighted another lamp. Her first impulse
was to assure herself that nothing was changed in the familiar objects
around her. She held the lamp up to the picture of Judith Pride. The
beauty looked at her, it seemed as if with a kind of lofty recognition
in her eyes; but there she was, as always. She turned the light upon the
pale face of the martyr-portrait. It looked troubled and faded, as it
seemed to Myrtle, but still it was the same face she remembered from her
childhood. Then she threw the light on the old chair, and, shuddering,
caught up a shawl and flung it over the spiral-wound arms and legs, and
the flattened reptiles on which it stood.
In those dead hours of the night which had passed over her sitting
there, still and stony, as it should seem, she had had strange visitors.
Two women had been with her, as real as any that breathed the breath of
life,--so it appeared to her,--yet both had long been what is called,
in our poor language, dead. One came in all the glory of her ripened
beauty, bare-necked, bare-armed, full dressed by nature in that splendid
animal equipment which in its day had captivated the eyes of all the
lusty lovers of complete muliebrity. The other,--how delicate, how
translucent, how aerial she seemed! yet real and true to the lineaments
of her whom the young girl looked upon as her hereditary protector.
The beautiful woman turned, and, with a face full of loathing and scorn,
pointed to one of the reptiles beneath the feet of the chair. And while
Myrtle's eyes followed hers, the flattened and half-crushed creature
seemed to swell and spread like his relative in the old fable, like
the black dog in Faust, until he became of tenfold size, and at last of
colossal proportions. And, fearful to relate, the batrachian features
humanized themselves as the monster grew, and, shaping themselves more
and more into a remembered similitude, Myrtle saw in them a hideous
likeness of--No! no! it was too horrible, was that the face which had
been so close to hers but yesterday? were those the lips, the breath
from which had stirred her growing curls as he leaned over her while
they read together some passionate stanza from a hymn that was as
much like a love-song as it dared to be in godly company? A shadow of
disgust--the natural repugnance of loveliness for deformity-ran all
through her, and she shrieked, as she thought, and threw herself at the
feet of that other figure. She felt herself lifted from the floor, and
then a cold thin hand seemed to take hers. The warm life went out of
her, and she was to herself as a dimly conscious shadow that glided with
passive acquiescence wherever it was led. Presently she found herself in
a half-lighted apartment, where there were books on the shelves around,
and a desk with loose manuscripts lying on it, and a little mirror with
a worn bit of carpet before it. And while she looked, a great serpent
writhed in through the half-open door, and made the circuit of the room,
laying one huge ring all round it, and then, going round again, laid
another ring over the first, and so on until he was wound all round the
room like the spiral of a mighty cable, leaving a hollow in the centre;
and then the serpent seemed to arch his neck in the air, and bring his
head close down to Myrtle's face; and the features were not those of
a serpent, but of a man, and it hissed out the words she had read that
very day in a little note which said, “Come to my study to-morrow, and
we will read hymns together.”
Again she was back in her little chamber, she did not know how, and the
two women were looking into her eyes with strange meaning in their own.
Something in them seemed to plead with her to yield to their influence,
and her choice wavered which of them to follow, for each would have
led her her own way,--whither she knew not. It was the strife of her
“Vision,” only in another form,--the contest of two lives her blood
inherited for the mastery of her soul. The might of beauty conquered.
Myrtle resigned herself to the guidance of the lovely phantom, which
seemed so much fuller of the unextinguished fire of life, and so like
herself as she would grow to be when noon should have ripened her into
maturity.
Doors opened softly before them; they climbed stairs, and threaded
corridors, and penetrated crypts, strange yet familiar to her eyes,
which seemed to her as if they could see, as it were, in darkness. Then
came a confused sense of eager search for something that she knew was
hidden, whether in the cleft of a rock, or under the boards of a floor,
or in some hiding-place among the skeleton rafters, or in a forgotten
drawer, or in a heap of rubbish, she could not tell; but somewhere there
was something which she was to find, and which, once found, was to be
her talisman. She was in the midst of this eager search when she awoke.
The impression was left so strongly on her mind that with all her fears
she could not resist the desire to make an effort to find what meaning
there was in this frightfully real dream. Her courage came back as her
senses assured her that all around her was natural, as when she left it.
She determined to follow the lead of the strange hint her nightmare had
given her.
In one of the upper chambers of the old mansion there stood a tall,
upright desk of the ancient pattern, with folding doors above and large
drawers below. “That desk is yours, Myrtle,” her uncle Malachi had once
said to her; “and there is a trick or two about it that it will pay you
to study.” Many a time Myrtle had puzzled herself about the mystery of
the old desk. All the little drawers, of which there were a considerable
number, she had pulled out, and every crevice, as she thought, she had
carefully examined. She determined to make one more trial. It was the
dead of the night, and this was a fearful old place to be wandering
about; but she was possessed with an urgent feeling which would not let
her wait until daylight.
She stole like a ghost from her chamber. She glided along the narrow
entries as she had seemed to move in her dream. She opened the folding
doors of the great upright desk. She had always before examined it by
daylight, and though she had so often pulled all the little drawers out,
she had never thoroughly explored the recesses which received them.
But in her new-born passion of search, she held her light so as to
illuminate all these deeper spaces. At once she thought she saw the
marks of pressure with a finger. She pressed her own finger on this
place, and, as it yielded with a slight click, a small mahogany pilaster
sprang forward, revealing its well-kept secret that it was the mask of a
tall, deep, very narrow drawer. There was something heavy in it, and,
as Myrtle turned it over, a golden bracelet fell into her hand. She
recognized it at once as that which had been long ago the ornament of
the fair woman whose portrait hung in her chamber. She clasped it upon
her wrist, and from that moment she felt as if she were the captive of
the lovely phantom who had been with her in her dream.
“The old man walked last night, God save us!” said Kitty Fagan to Biddy
Finnegan, the day after Myrtle's nightmare and her curious discovery.