“I shall have to begin,” said he, when they were all seated and ready to
listen, “by giving you some idea, not so much of the family tradition,
as of the effect of this tradition upon all who bore the name of Van
Broecklyn. This is not the only house, even in America, which contains
a room shut away from intrusion. In England there are many. But there is
this difference between most of them and ours. No bars or locks forcibly
held shut the door we were forbidden to open. The command was enough;
that and the superstitious fear which such a command, attended by a long
and unquestioning obedience, was likely to engender.
“I know no more than you do why some early ancestor laid his ban upon
this room. But from my earliest years I was given to understand that
there was one latch in the house which was never to be lifted; that any
fault would be forgiven sooner than that; that the honour of the whole
family stood in the way of disobedience, and that I was to preserve that
honour to my dying day. You will say that all this is fantastic, and
wonder that sane people in these modern times should subject themselves
to such a ridiculous restriction, especially when no good reason was
alleged, and the very source of the tradition from which it sprung
forgotten. You are right; but if you look long into human nature,
you will see that the bonds which hold the firmest are not material
ones--that an idea will make a man and mould a character--that it lies
at the source of all heroisms and is to be courted or feared as the case
may be.
“For me it possessed a power proportionate to my loneliness. I don’t
think there was ever a more lonely child. My father and mother were
so unhappy in each other’s companionship that one or other of them was
almost always away. But I saw little of either even when they were at
home. The constraint in their attitude towards each other affected their
conduct towards me. I have asked myself more than once if either of them
had any real affection for me. To my father I spoke of her; to her
of him; and never pleasurably. This I am forced to say, or you cannot
understand my story. Would to God I could tell another tale! Would
to God I had such memories as other men have of a father’s clasp, a
mother’s kiss--but no! my grief, already profound, might have become
abysmal. Perhaps it is best as it is; only, I might have been a
different child, and made for myself a different fate--who knows.
“As it was, I was thrown almost entirely upon my own resources for any
amusement. This led me to a discovery I made one day. In a far part of
the cellar behind some heavy casks, I found a little door. It was so
low--so exactly fitted to my small body, that I had the greatest desire
to enter it. But I could not get around the casks. At last an expedient
occurred to me. We had an old servant who came nearer loving me than any
one else. One day when I chanced to be alone in the cellar, I took out
my ball and began throwing it about. Finally it landed behind the casks,
and I ran with a beseeching cry to Michael, to move them.
“It was a task requiring no little strength and address, but he managed,
after a few herculean efforts, to shift them aside and I saw with
delight, my way opened to that mysterious little door. But I did not
approach it then; some instinct deterred me. But when the opportunity
came for me to venture there alone, I did so, in the most adventurous
spirit, and began my operations by sliding behind the casks and testing
the handle of the little door. It turned, and after a pull or two the
door yielded. With my heart in my mouth, I stooped and peered in. I
could see nothing--a black hole and nothing more. This caused me a
moment’s hesitation. I was afraid of the dark--had always been. But
curiosity and the spirit of adventure triumphed. Saying to myself that I
was Robinson Crusoe exploring the cave, I crawled in, only to find that
I had gained nothing. It was as dark inside as it had looked to be from
without.
“There was no fun in this, so I crawled back, and when I tried the
experiment again, it was with a bit of candle in my hand, and a
surreptitious match or two. What I saw, when with a very trembling
little hand I had lighted one of the matches, would have been
disappointing to most boys, but not to me. The litter and old boards
I saw in odd corners about me were full of possibilities, while in the
dimness beyond I seemed to perceive a sort of staircase which might
lead--I do not think I made any attempt to answer that question even
in my own mind, but when, after some hesitation and a sense of great
daring, I finally crept up those steps, I remember very well my
sensation at finding myself in front of a narrow closed door. It
suggested too vividly the one in Grandfather’s little room--the door in
the wainscot which we were never to open. I had my first real trembling
fit here, and at once fascinated and repelled by this obstruction I
stumbled and lost my candle, which, going out in the fall, left me in
total darkness and a very frightened state of mind. For my imagination
which had been greatly stirred by my own vague thoughts of the forbidden
room, immediately began to people the space about me with ghoulish
figures. How should I escape them, how ever reach my own little room
again undetected and in safety?
“But these terrors, deep as they were, were nothing to the real fright
which seized me when, the darkness finally braved, and the way found
back into the bright, wide-open halls of the house, I became conscious
of having dropped something besides the candle. My match-box was
gone--not my match-box, but my grandfather’s which I had found lying on
his table and carried off on this adventure, in all the confidence of
irresponsible youth. To make use of it for a little while, trusting to
his not missing it in the confusion I had noticed about the house that
morning, was one thing; to lose it was another. It was no common
box. Made of gold and cherished for some special reason well known to
himself, I had often hear him say that some day I would appreciate its
value, and be glad to own it. And I had left it in that hole and at
any minute he might miss it--possibly ask for it! The day was one of
torment. My mother was away or shut up in her room. My father--I don’t
know just what thoughts I had about him. He was not to be seen either,
and the servants cast strange looks at me when I spoke his name. But
I little realized the blow which had just fallen upon the house in his
definite departure, and only thought of my own trouble, and of how I
should meet my grandfather’s eye when the hour came for him to draw me
to his knee for his usual good-night.
“That I was spared this ordeal for the first time this very night first
comforted me, then added to my distress. He had discovered his loss and
was angry. On the morrow he would ask me for the box and I would have
to lie, for never could I find the courage to tell him where I had been.
Such an act of presumption he would never forgive, or so I thought as
I lay and shivered in my little bed. That his coldness, his neglect,
sprang from the discovery just made that my mother as well as my father
had just fled the house forever was as little known to me as the morning
calamity. I had been given my usual tendance and was tucked safely into
bed; but the gloom, the silence which presently settled upon the house
had a very different explanation in my mind from the real one. My sin
(for such it loomed large in my mind by this time) coloured the whole
situation and accounted for every event.
“At what hour I slipped from my bed on to the cold floor, I shall never
know. To me it seemed to be in the dead of night; but I doubt if it were
more than ten. So slowly creep away the moments to a wakeful child.
I had made a great resolve. Awful as the prospect seemed to
me,--frightened as I was by the very thought,--I had determined in
my small mind to go down into the cellar, and into that midnight hole
again, in search of the lost box. I would take a candle and matches,
this time from my own mantel-shelf, and if everyone was asleep, as
appeared from the deathly quiet of the house, I would be able to go and
come without anybody ever being the wiser.
“Dressing in the dark, I found my matches and my candle and, putting
them in one of my pockets, softly opened my door and looked out. Nobody
was stirring; every light was out except a solitary one in the lower
hall. That this still burned conveyed no meaning to my mind. How could I
know that the house was so still and the rooms dark because everyone was
out searching for some clue to my mother’s flight? If I had looked at
the clock--but I did not; I was too intent upon my errand, too filled
with the fever of my desperate undertaking, to be affected by anything
not bearing directly upon it.
“Of the terror caused by my own shadow on the wall as I made the turn
in the hall below, I have as keen a recollection today as though it
happened yesterday. But that did not deter me; nothing deterred me, till
safe in the cellar I crouched down behind the casks to get my breath
again before entering the hole beyond.
“I had made some noise in feeling my way around these casks, and I
trembled lest these sounds had been heard upstairs! But this fear soon
gave place to one far greater. Other sounds were making themselves
heard. A din of small skurrying feet above, below, on every side of me!
Rats! rats in the wall! rats on the cellar bottom! How I ever stirred
from the spot I do not know, but when I did stir, it was to go forward,
and enter the uncanny hole.
“I had intended to light my candle when I got inside; but for some
reason I went stumbling along in the dark, following the wall till I got
to the steps where I had dropped the box. Here a light was necessary,
but my hand did not go to my pocket. I thought it better to climb the
steps first, and softly one foot found the tread and then another. I
had only three more to climb and then my right hand, now feeling its
way along the wall, would be free to strike a match. I climbed the three
steps and was steadying myself against the door for a final plunge,
when something happened--something so strange, so unexpected, and so
incredible that I wonder I did not shriek aloud in my terror. The door
was moving under my hand. It was slowly opening inward. I could feel the
chill made by the widening crack. Moment by moment this chill increased;
the gap was growing--a presence was there--a presence before which I sank
in a small heap upon the landing. Would it advance? Had it feet--hands?
Was it a presence which could be felt?
“Whatever it was, it made no attempt to pass, and presently I lifted
my head only to quake anew at the sound of a voice--a human voice--my
mother’s voice--so near me that by putting out my arms I might have
touched her.
“She was speaking to my father. I knew from the tone. She was saying
words which, little understood as they were, made such a havoc in my
youthful mind that I have never forgotten the effect.
“‘I have come!’ she said. ‘They think I have fled the house and are
looking far and wide for me. We shall not be disturbed. Who would think
looking of here for either you or me.’
“Here! The word sank like a plummet in my breast. I had known for some
few minutes that I was on the threshold of the forbidden room; but they
were in it. I can scarcely make you understand the tumult which this
awoke in my brain. Somehow, I had never thought that any such braving of
the house’s law would be possible.
“I heard my father’s answer, but it conveyed no meaning to me. I also
realized that he spoke from a distance,--that he was at one end of
the room while we were at the other. I was presently to have this idea
confirmed, for while I was striving with all my might and main to
subdue my very heart-throbs so that she would not hear me or suspect my
presence, the darkness--I should rather say the blackness of the place
yielded to a flash of lightning--heat lightning, all glare and no
sound--and I caught an instantaneous vision of my father’s figure
standing with gleaming things about him, which affected me at the moment
as supernatural, but which, in later years, I decided to have been
weapons hanging on a wall.
“She saw him too, for she gave a quick laugh and said they would not
need any candles; and then, there was another flash and I saw something
in his hand and something in hers, and though I did not yet understand,
I felt myself turning deathly sick and gave a choking gasp which was
lost in the rush she made into the centre of the room, and the keenness
of her swift low cry.
“‘Garde-toi! for only one of us will ever leave this room alive!’
“A duel! a duel to the death between this husband and wife--this father
and mother--in this hole of dead tragedies and within the sight and
hearing of their child! Has Satan ever devised a scheme more hideous for
ruining the life of an eleven-year-old boy!
“Not that I took it all in at once. I was too innocent and much too
dazed to comprehend such hatred, much less the passions which engender
it. I only knew that something horrible--something beyond the conception
of my childish mind--was going to take place in the darkness before me;
and the terror of it made me speechless; would to God it had made me
deaf and blind and dead!
“She had dashed from her corner and he had slid away from his, as the
next fantastic glare which lit up the room showed me. It also showed
the weapons in their hands, and for a moment I felt reassured when I saw
that these were swords, for I had seen them before with foils in their
hands practising for exercise, as they said, in the great garret. But
the swords had buttons on them, and this time the tips were sharp and
shone in the keen light.
“An exclamation from her and a growl of rage from him were followed by
movements I could scarcely hear, but which were terrifying from their
very quiet. Then the sound of a clash. The swords had crossed.
“Had the lightning flashed forth then, the end of one of them might
have occurred. But the darkness remained undisturbed, and when the glare
relit the great room again, they were already far apart. This called out
a word from him; the one sentence he spoke--I can never forget it:
“‘Rhoda, there is blood on your sleeve; I have wounded you. Shall we
call it off and fly, as the poor creatures in there think we have, to
the opposite ends of the earth?’
“I almost spoke; I almost added my childish plea to his for them to
stop--to remember me and stop. But not a muscle in my throat responded
to my agonized effort. Her cold, clear ‘No!’ fell before my tongue was
loosed or my heart freed from the ponderous weight crushing it.
“‘I have vowed and I keep my promises,’ she went on in a tone quite
strange to me. ‘What would either’s life be worth with the other alive
and happy in this world.’
“He made no answer; and those subtle movements--shadows of movements
I might almost call them--recommenced. Then there came a sudden cry,
shrill and poignant--had Grandfather been in his room he would surely
have heard it--and the flash coming almost simultaneously with its
utterance, I saw what has haunted my sleep from that day to this, my
father pinned against the wall, sword still in hand, and before him my
mother, fiercely triumphant, her staring eyes fixed on his and--
“Nature could bear no more; the band loosened from my throat; the
oppression lifted from my breast long enough for me to give one wild
wail and she turned, saw (heaven sent its flashes quickly at this
moment) and recognizing my childish form, all the horror of her deed (or
so I have fondly hoped) rose within her, and she gave a start and fell
full upon the point upturned to receive her.
“A groan; then a gasping sigh from him, and silence settled upon the
room and upon my heart, and so far as I knew upon the whole created
world.
“That is my story, friends. Do you wonder that I have never been or
lived like other men?”
After a few moments of sympathetic silence, Mr. Van Broecklyn went on,
to say:
“I don’t think I ever had a moment’s doubt that my parents both lay dead
on the floor of that great room. When I came to myself--which may have
been soon, and may not have been for a long while--the lightning had
ceased to flash, leaving the darkness stretching like a blank pall
between me and that spot in which were concentrated all the terrors of
which my imagination was capable. I dared not enter it. I dared not take
one step that way. My instinct was to fly and hide my trembling body
again in my own bed; and associated with this, in fact dominating it and
making me old before my time, was another--never to tell; never to let
any one, least of all my grandfather--know what that forbidden room now
contained. I felt in an irresistible sort of way that my father’s and
mother’s honour was at stake. Besides, terror held me back; I felt that
I should die if I spoke. Childhood has such terrors and such heroisms.
Silence often covers in such, abysses of thought and feeling which
astonish us in later years. There is no suffering like a child’s,
terrified by a secret which it dare not for some reason disclose.
“Events aided me. When, in desperation to see once more the light and
all the things which linked me to life--my little bed, the toys on the
window-sill, my squirrel in its cage--I forced myself to retraverse the
empty house, expecting at every turn to hear my father’s voice or come
upon the image of my mother--yes, such was the confusion of my mind,
though I knew well enough even then that they were dead and that I
should never hear the one or see the other. I was so benumbed with the
cold in my half-dressed condition, that I woke in a fever next morning
after a terrible dream which forced from my lips the cry of ‘Mother!
Mother!’--only that.
“I was cautious even in delirium. This delirium and my flushed cheeks
and shining eyes led them to be very careful of me. I was told that my
mother was away from home; and when after two days of search they were
quite sure that all effort to find either her or my father were likely
to prove fruitless, that she had gone to Europe where we would follow
her as soon as I was well. This promise, offering as it did, a prospect
of immediate release from the terrors which were consuming me, had an
extraordinary effect upon me. I got up out of my bed saying that I was
well now and ready to start on the instant. The doctor, finding my pulse
equable, and my whole condition wonder fully improved, and attributing
it, as was natural, to my hope of soon joining my mother, advised
my whim to be humoured and this hope kept active till travel and
intercourse with children should give me strength and prepare me for
the bitter truth ultimately awaiting me. They listened to him and
in twenty-four hours our preparations were made. We saw the house
closed--with what emotions surging in one small breast, I leave you to
imagine--and then started on our long tour. For five years we wandered
over the continent of Europe, my grandfather finding distraction, as
well as myself, in foreign scenes and associations.
“But return was inevitable. What I suffered on reentering this house,
God and my sleepless pillow alone know. Had any discovery been made in
our absence; or would it be made now that renovation and repairs of all
kinds were necessary? Time finally answered me. My secret was safe
and likely to continue so, and this fact once settled, life became
endurable, if not cheerful. Since then I have spent only two nights out
of this house, and they were unavoidable. When my grandfather died I had
the wainscot door cemented in. It was done from this side and the
cement painted to match the wood. No one opened the door nor have I
ever crossed its threshold. Sometimes I think I have been foolish; and
sometimes I know that I have been very wise. My reason has stood firm;
how do I know that it would have done so if I had subjected myself to
the possible discovery that one or both of them might have been saved if
I had disclosed instead of concealed my adventure.”
A pause during which white horror had shone on every face; then with a
final glance at Violet, he said:
“What sequel do you see to this story, Miss Strange? I can tell the
past, I leave you to picture the future.”
Rising, she let her eye travel from face to face till it rested on the
one awaiting it, when she answered dreamily:
“If some morning in the news column there should appear an account of
the ancient and historic home of the Van Broecklyns having burned to the
ground in the night, the whole country would mourn, and the city feel
defrauded of one of its treasures. But there are five persons who would
see in it the sequel which you ask for.”
When this happened, as it did happen, some few weeks later, the
astonishing discovery was made that no insurance had been put upon this
house. Why was it that after such a loss Mr. Van Broecklyn seemed to
renew his youth? It was a constant source of comment among his friends.