"There is nothing unusual in the room but that crutch," I said.
"What crutch, you dolt? I see no crutch," he ejaculated, in a tone of
sudden but suppressed fury.
"Why, _that_ crutch," I answered (for somehow I neither felt nor resented
his rudeness), turning and pointing to the spot where I had seen it. It
was gone!--it was neither there nor anywhere else. It must have been an
illusion--rather an odd one, to be sure. And yet I could at this moment,
with a safe conscience, _swear_ that I never saw an object more
distinctly than I had seen it but a second before.
My companion was muttering fast to himself as we withdrew; his presence
rather scared than reassured me; and I felt something almost amounting to
horror, as, holding the candle above his cadaverous and sable figure, he
stood at his threshold, while I descended the stairs, and said, in a sort
of whisper--
"Why, but that I am, like yourself, a philosopher, I should say that your
house is--is--a--ha! ha! ha!--HAUNTED!"
"You look very pale, my love," said my wife, as I entered the
drawing-room, where she had been long awaiting my return. "Nothing
unpleasant has happened?"
"Nothing, nothing, I assure you. Pale!--_do_ I look pale?" I answered.
"We are excellent friends, I assure you. So far from having had the
smallest disagreement, there is every prospect of our agreeing but too
well, as you will say; for I find that he holds all my opinions upon
speculative subjects. We have had a great deal of conversation this
evening, I assure you; and I never met, I think, so scholarlike and
able a man."
"I am sorry for it, dearest," she said, sadly. "The greater his talents,
if such be his opinions, the more dangerous a companion is he."
We turned, however, to more cheerful topics, and it was late before we
retired to rest. I believe it was pride--perhaps only vanity--but, at all
events, some obstructive and stubborn instinct of my nature, which I
could not overcome--that prevented my telling my wife the odd occurrences
which had disturbed my visit to our guest. I was unable or ashamed to
confess that so slight a matter had disturbed me; and, above all, that
any accident could possibly have clouded, even for a moment, the frosty
clearness of my pure and lofty scepticism with the shadows of
superstition.
Almost every day seemed to develop some new eccentricity of our strange
guest. His dietary consisted, without any variety or relief, of the
monotonous bread and milk with which he started; his bed had not been
made for nearly a week; nobody had been admitted into his room since my
visit, just described; and he never ventured down stairs, or out of
doors, until after nightfall, when he used sometimes to glide swiftly
round our little enclosed shrubbery, and at others stand quite
motionless, composed, as if in an attitude of deep attention. After
employing about an hour in this way, he would return, and steal up stairs
to his room, when he would shut himself up, and not be seen again until
the next night--or, it might be, the night after that--when, perhaps, he
would repeat his odd excursion.
Strange as his habits were, their eccentricity was all upon the side
least troublesome to us. He required literally no attendance; and as to
his occasional night ramble, even _it_ caused not the slightest
disturbance of our routine hour for securing the house and locking up the
hall-door for the night, inasmuch as he had invariably retired before
that hour arrived.
All this stimulated curiosity, and, in no small degree, that of my wife,
who, notwithstanding her vigilance and her anxiety to see our strange
inmate, had been hitherto foiled by a series of cross accidents. We were
sitting together somewhere about ten o'clock at night, when there came a
tap at the room-door. We had just been discussing the unaccountable
Smith; and I felt a sheepish consciousness that he might be himself at
the door, and have possibly even overheard our speculation--some of them
anything but complimentary, respecting himself.
"Come in," cried, I, with an effort; and the tall form of our lodger
glided into the room. My wife was positively frightened, and stood
looking at him, as he advanced, with a stare of manifest apprehension,
and even recoiled mechanically, and caught my hand.
Sensitiveness, however, was not his fault: he made a kind of stiff nod as
I mumbled an introduction; and seating himself unasked, began at once to
chat in that odd, off-hand, and sneering style, in which he excelled, and
which had, as he wielded it, a sort of fascination of which I can pretend
to convey no idea.
My wife's alarm subsided, and although she still manifestly felt some
sort of misgiving about our visitor, she yet listened to his
conversation, and, spite of herself, soon began to enjoy it. He stayed
for nearly half an hour. But although he glanced at a great variety of
topics, he did not approach the subject of religion. As soon as he was
gone, my wife delivered judgment upon him in form. She admitted he was
agreeable; but then he was such an unnatural, awful-looking object: there
was, besides, something indescribably frightful, she thought, in his
manner--the very tone of his voice was strange and hateful; and, on the
whole, she felt unutterably relieved at his departure.
A few days after, on my return, I found my poor little wife agitated and
dispirited. Mr. Smith had paid her a visit, and brought with him a book,
which he stated he had been reading, and which contained some references
to the Bible which he begged of her to explain in that profounder and
less obvious sense in which they had been cited. This she had endeavoured
to do; and affecting to be much gratified by her satisfactory exposition,
he had requested her to reconcile some discrepancies which he said had
often troubled him when reading the Scriptures. Some of them were quite
new to my good little wife; they startled and even horrified her. He
pursued this theme, still pretending only to seek for information to
quiet his own doubts, while in reality he was sowing in her mind the
seeds of the first perturbations that had ever troubled the sources of
her peace. He had been with her, she thought, no more than a quarter of
an hour; but he had contrived to leave her abundant topics on which to
ruminate for days. I found her shocked and horrified at the doubts which
this potent Magus had summoned from the pit--doubts which she knew not
how to combat, and from the torment of which she could not escape.
"He has made me very miserable with his deceitful questions. I never
thought of them before; and, merciful Heaven! I cannot answer them! What
am I to do? My serenity is gone; I shall never be happy again."
In truth, she was so very miserable, and, as it seemed to me, so
disproportionately excited, that, inconsistent in me as the task would
have been, I would gladly have explained away her difficulties, and
restored to her mind its wonted confidence and serenity, had I possessed
sufficient knowledge for the purpose. I really pitied her, and heartily
wished Mr. Smith, for the nonce, at the devil.
I observed after this that my wife's spirits appeared permanently
affected. There was a constantly-recurring anxiety, and I thought
something was lying still more heavily at her heart than the
uncertainties inspired by our lodger.
One evening, as we two were sitting together, after a long silence, she
suddenly laid her hand upon my arm, and said--
"Oh, Richard, my darling! would to God you could pray for me!"
There was something so agitated, and even terrified, in her manner,
that I was absolutely startled. I urged her to disclose whatever preyed
upon her mind.
"You can't sympathise with me--you can't help me--you can scarcely
compassionate me in my misery! Oh, dearest Richard! Some evil influence
has been gaining upon my heart, dulling and destroying my convictions,
killing all my holy affections, and--and absolutely transforming me. I
look inward upon myself with amazement, with terror--with--oh, God!--with
actual despair!"
Saying this, she threw herself on her knees, and wept an agonised flood
of tears, with her head reposing in my lap.
Poor little thing, my heart bled for her! But what could I do or say?
All I could suggest was what I really thought, that she was
unwell--hysterical--and needed to take better care of her precious self;
that her change of feeling was fancied, not real; and that a few days
would restore her to her old health and former spirits and serenity.
"And sometimes," she resumed, after I had ended a consolatory discussion,
which it was but too manifest had fallen unprofitably upon her ear, "such
dreadful, impious thoughts come into my mind, whether I choose it or not;
they come, and stay, and return, strive as I may; and I can't pray
against them. They are forced upon me with the strength of an independent
will; and oh!--horrible--frightful--they blaspheme the character of God
himself. They upbraid the Almighty upon his throne, and I can't pray
against them; there is something in me now that resists prayer."
There was such a real and fearful anguish in the agitation of my gentle
companion, that it shook my very soul within me, even while I was
affecting to make light of her confessions. I had never before witnessed
a struggle at all like this, and I was awe-struck at the spectacle.
At length she became comparatively calm. I did gradually succeed, though
very imperfectly, in reassuring her. She strove hard against her
depression, and recovered a little of her wonted cheerfulness.
After a while, however, the cloud returned. She grew sad and earnest,
though no longer excited; and entreated, or rather implored, of me to
grant her one special favour, and this was, to avoid the society of
our lodger.
"I never," she said, "could understand till now the instinctive dread
with which poor Margaret, in _Faust_, shrinks from the hateful presence
of Mephistopheles. I now feel it in myself. The dislike and suspicion I
first felt for that man--Smith, or whatever else he may call himself--has
grown into literal detestation and terror. I hate him--I am afraid of
him--I never knew what anguish of mind was until he entered our doors;
and would to God--would to God he were gone."
I reasoned with her--kissed her--laughed at her; but could not dissipate,
in the least degree, the intense and preternatural horror with which she
had grown to regard the poor philosophic invalid, who was probably, at
that moment, poring over some metaphysical book in his solitary
bedchamber.
The circumstance I am about to mention will give you some notion of the
extreme to which these excited feelings had worked upon her nerves. I was
that night suddenly awakened by a piercing scream--I started upright in
the bed, and saw my wife standing at the bedside, white as ashes with
terror. It was some seconds, so startled was I, before I could find words
to ask her the cause of her affright. She caught my wrist in her icy
grasp, and climbed, trembling violently, into bed. Notwithstanding my
repeated entreaties, she continued for a long time stupified and dumb. At
length, however, she told me, that having lain awake for a long time, she
felt, on a sudden, that she could pray, and lighting the candle, she had
stolen from beside me, and kneeled down for the purpose. She had,
however, scarcely assumed the attitude of prayer, when somebody, she
said, clutched her arm violently near the wrist, and she heard, at the
same instant, some blasphemous menace, the import of which escaped her
the moment it was spoken, muttered close in her ear. This terrifying
interruption was the cause of the scream which had awakened me; and the
condition in which she continued during the remainder of the night
confirmed me more than ever in the conviction, that she was suffering
under some morbid action of the nervous system.
After this event, which _I_ had no hesitation in attributing to fancy,
she became literally afraid to pray, and her misery and despondency
increased proportionately.
It was shortly after this that an unusual pressure of business called me
into town one evening after office hours. I had left my dear little wife
tolerably well, and little Fanny was to be her companion until I
returned. She and her little companion occupied the same room in which we
sat on the memorable evening which witnessed the arrival of our eccentric
guest. Though usually a lively child, it most provokingly happened upon
this night that Fanny was heavy and drowsy to excess. Her mamma would
have sent her to bed, but that she now literally feared to be left alone;
although, however, she could not so far overcome her horror of solitude
as to do this, she yet would not persist in combating the poor child's
sleepiness.
Accordingly, little Fanny was soon locked in a sound sleep, while her
mamma quietly pursued her work beside her. They had been perhaps some
ten minutes thus circumstanced, when my wife heard the window softly
raised from without--a bony hand parted the curtains, and Mr. Smith
leaned into the room.
She was so utterly overpowered at sight of this apparition, that even had
it, as she expected, climbed into the room, she told me she could not
have uttered a sound, or stirred from the spot where she sate transfixed
and petrified.
"Ha, ha!" he said gently, "I hope you'll excuse this, I must admit, very
odd intrusion; but I knew I should find you here, and could not resist
the opportunity of raising the window just for a moment, to look in upon
a little family picture, and say a word to yourself. I understand that
you are troubled, because for some cause you cannot say your
prayers--because what you call your 'faith' is, so to speak, dead and
gone, and also because what _you_ consider bad thoughts are constantly
recurring to your mind. Now, all that is very silly. If it is really
impossible for you to believe and to pray, what are you to infer from
that? It is perfectly plain your Christian system can't be a true
one--faith and _prayer_ it everywhere represents as the conditions of
grace, acceptance, and salvation; and yet your Creator will not _permit_
you either to believe or pray. The Christian system is, forsooth, a
_free_ gift, and yet he who formed _you_ and _it_, makes it absolutely
impossible for you to accept it. _Is_ it, I ask you, from your own
experience--is it a free gift? And if your own experience, in which you
can't be mistaken, gives its pretensions the lie, why, in the name of
common sense, will you persist in believing it? I say it is downright
blasphemy to think it has emanated from the Good Spirit--assuming that
there is one. It tells you that you must be tormented hereafter in a way
only to be made intelligible by the image of eternal fires--pretty
strong, we must all allow--unless you comply with certain conditions,
which it pretends are so easy that it is a positive pleasure to embrace
and perform them; and yet, for the life of you, you can't--physically
_can't_--do either. Is this truth and mercy?--or is it swindling and
cruelty? Is it the part of the Redeemer, or that of the tyrant, deceiver,
and tormentor?"
Up to that moment, my wife had sate breathless and motionless, listening,
in the catalepsy of nightmare, to a sort of echo of the vile and impious
reasoning which had haunted her for so long. At the last words of the
sentence his voice became harsh and thrilling; and his whole manner
bespoke a sort of crouching and terrific hatred, the like of which she
could not have conceived.
Whatever may have been the cause, she was on a sudden disenchanted. She
started to her feet; and, freezing with horror though she was, in a
shrill cry of agony commanded him, in the name of God, to depart from
her. His whole frame seemed to darken; he drew back silently; the
curtains dropped into their places, the window was let down again as
stealthily as it had just been raised; and my wife found herself alone in
the chamber with our little child, who had been startled from her sleep
by her mother's cry of anguish, and with the fearful words, "tempter,"
"destroyer," "devil," still ringing in her ears, was weeping bitterly,
and holding her terrified mother's hand.
There is nothing, I believe, more infectious than that species of
nervousness which shows itself in superstitious fears. I began--although
I could not bring myself to admit anything the least like it--to partake
insensibly, but strongly of the peculiar feelings with which my wife, and
indeed my whole household, already regarded the lodger up stairs. The
fact was, beside, that the state of my poor wife's mind began to make me
seriously uneasy; and, although I was fully sensible of the pecuniary and
other advantages attendant upon his stay, they were yet far from
outweighing the constant gloom and frequent misery in which the
protracted sojourn was involving my once cheerful house. I resolved,
therefore, at whatever monetary sacrifice, to put an end to these
commotions; and, after several debates with my wife, in which the subject
was, as usual, turned in all its possible and impossible bearings, we
agreed that, deducting a fair proportion for his five weeks' sojourn, I
should return the remainder of his £100, and request immediate possession
of his apartments. Like a man suddenly relieved of an insufferable load,
and breathing freely once more, I instantly prepared to carry into effect
the result of our deliberations.
In pursuance of this resolution, I waited upon Mr. Smith. This time my
call was made in the morning, somewhere about nine o'clock. He
received me at his door, standing as usual in the stealthy opening
which barely admitted his lank person. There he stood, fully equipped
with goggles and respirator, and swathed, rather than dressed, in his
puckered black garments.
As he did not seem disposed to invite me into his apartment, although
I had announced my visit as one of business, I was obliged to open my
errand where I stood; and after a great deal of fumbling and
muttering, I contrived to place before him distinctly the resolution
to which I had come.
"But I can't think of taking back any portion of the sum I have paid
you," said he, with a cool, dry emphasis.
"Your reluctance to do so, Mr. Smith, is most handsome, and I assure you,
appreciated," I replied. "It is very generous; but, at the same time, it
is quite impossible for me to accept what I have no right to take, and I
must beg of you not to mention that part of the subject again."
"And why should _I_ take it?" demanded Mr. Smith.
"Because you have paid this hundred pounds for six months, and you are
leaving me with nearly five months of the term still unexpired," I
replied. "I expect to receive fair play myself, and always give it."
"But who on earth said that I was going away so soon?" pursued Mr. Smith,
in the same dry, sarcastic key. "_I_ have not said so--because I really
don't intend it; I mean to stay here to the last day of the six months
for which I have paid you. I have no notion of vacating my hired
lodgings, simply because you say, _go_. I shan't quarrel with you--I
never quarrel with anybody. I'm as much your friend as ever; but, without
the least wish to disoblige, I can't do this, positively I cannot. Is
there anything else?"
I had not anticipated in the least the difficulty which thus
encountered and upset our plans. I had so set my heart upon effecting
the immediate retirement of our inauspicious inmate, that the
disappointment literally stunned me for a moment. I, however, returned
to the charge: I urged, and prayed, and almost besought him to give up
his apartments, and to leave us. I offered to repay every farthing of
the sum he had paid me--reserving nothing on account of the time he had
already been with us. I suggested all the disadvantages of the house. I
shifted my ground, and told him that my wife wanted the rooms; I
pressed his gallantry--his good nature--his economy; in short, I
assailed him upon every point--but in vain, he did not even take the
trouble of repeating what he had said before--he neither relented, nor
showed the least irritation, but simply said--
"I can't do this; here I am, and here I stay until the half-year has
expired. You wanted a lodger, and you have got one--the quietest, least
troublesome, least expensive person you could have; and though your
house, servants, and furniture are none of the best, I don't care for
that. I pursue my own poor business and enjoyments here entirely to my
satisfaction."
Having thus spoken, he gave me a sort of nod, and closed the door.
So, instead of getting rid of him the next day, as we had hoped, we had
nearly five months more of his company in expectancy; I hated, and my
wife dreaded the prospect. She was literally miserable and panic-struck
at her disappointment--and grew so nervous and wretched that I made up my
mind to look out for lodgings for her and the children (subversive of all
our schemes of retrenchment as such a step would be), and surrendering
the house absolutely to Mr. Smith and the servants during the remainder
of his term.
Circumstances, however, occurred to prevent our putting this plan in
execution. My wife, meanwhile, was, if possible, more depressed and
nervous every day. The servants seemed to sympathise in the dread and
gloom which involved ourselves; the very children grew timid and
spiritless, without knowing why--and the entire house was pervaded with
an atmosphere of uncertainty and fear. A poorhouse or a dungeon would
have been cheerful, compared with a dwelling haunted unceasingly with
unearthly suspicions and alarms. I would have made any sacrifice short of
ruin, to emancipate our household from the odious mental and moral
thraldom which was invisibly established over us--overcasting us with
strange anxieties and an undefined terror.
About this time my wife had a dream which troubled her much, although
she could not explain its supposed significance satisfactorily by any
of the ordinary rules of interpretation in such matters. The vision was
as follows.
She dreamed that we were busily employed in carrying out our scheme of
removal, and that I came into the parlour where she was making some
arrangements, and, with rather an agitated manner, told her that the
carriage had come for the children. She thought she went out to the hall,
in consequence, holding little Fanny by one hand, and the boy--or, as we
still called him, "baby,"--by the other, and feeling, as she did so, an
unaccountable gloom, almost amounting to terror, steal over her. The
children, too, seemed, she thought, frightened, and disposed to cry.
So close to the hall-door as to exclude the light, stood some kind of
vehicle, of which she could see nothing but that its door was wide open,
and the interior involved in total darkness. The children, she thought,
shrunk back in great trepidation, and she addressed herself to induce
them, by persuasion, to enter, telling them that they were only "going to
their new home." So, in a while, little Fanny approached it; but, at the
same instant, some person came swiftly up from behind, and, raising the
little boy in his hands, said fiercely, "No, the baby first"; and placed
him in the carriage. This person was our lodger, Mr. Smith, and was gone
as soon as seen. My wife, even in her dream, could not act or speak; but
as the child was lifted into the carriage-door, a man, whose face was
full of beautiful tenderness and compassion, leaned forward from the
carriage and received the little child, which, stretching his arms to the
stranger, looked back with a strange smile upon his mother.
"He is safe with me, and I will deliver him to you when you come."
These words the man spoke, looking upon her, as he received him, and
immediately the carriage-door shut, and the noise of its closing wakened
my wife from her nightmare.
This dream troubled her very much, and even haunted my mind unpleasantly
too. We agreed, however, not to speak of it to anybody, not to divulge
any of our misgivings respecting the stranger. We were anxious that
neither the children nor the servants should catch the contagion of those
fears which had seized upon my poor little wife, and, if truth were
spoken, upon myself in some degree also. But this precaution was, I
believe, needless, for, as I said before, everybody under the same roof
with Mr. Smith was, to a certain extent, affected with the same nervous
gloom and apprehension.
And now commences a melancholy chapter in my life. My poor little Fanny
was attacked with a cough which soon grew very violent, and after a time
degenerated into a sharp attack of inflammation. We were seriously
alarmed for her life, and nothing that care and medicine could effect
was spared to save it. Her mother was indefatigable, and scarcely left
her night or day; and, indeed, for some time, we all but despaired of
her recovery.
One night, when she was at the worst, her poor mother, who had sat for
many a melancholy hour listening, by her bedside, to those plaintive
incoherences of delirium and moanings of fever, which have harrowed so
many a fond heart, gained gradually from her very despair the courage
which she had so long wanted, and knelt down at the side of her sick
darling's bed to pray for her deliverance.
With clasped hands, in an agony of supplication, she prayed that God
would, in his mercy, spare her little child--that, justly as she herself
deserved the sorest chastisement his hand could inflict, he would yet
deal patiently and tenderly with her in this one thing. She poured out
her sorrows before the mercy-seat--she opened her heart, and declared her
only hope to be in his pity; without which, she felt that her darling
would only leave the bed where she was lying for her grave.
Exactly as she came to this part of her supplication, the child, who had
grown, as it seemed, more and more restless, and moaned and muttered with
increasing pain and irritation, on a sudden started upright in her bed,
and, in a thrilling voice, cried--
"No! no!--the baby first."
The mysterious sentence which had secretly tormented her for so long,
thus piercingly uttered by this delirious, and, perhaps, dying child,
with what seemed a preternatural earnestness and strength, arrested her
devotions, and froze her with a feeling akin to terror.
"Hush, hush, my darling!" said the poor mother, almost wildly, as she
clasped the attenuated frame of the sick child in her arms; "hush, my
darling; don't cry out so loudly--there--there--my own love."
The child did not appear to see or hear her, but sate up still with
feverish cheeks, and bright unsteady eyes, while her dry lips were
muttering inaudible words.
"Lie down, my sweet child--lie down, for your own mother," she said;
"if you tire yourself, you can't grow well, and your poor mother will
lose you."
At these words, the child suddenly cried out again, in precisely the same
loud, strong voice--"No! no! the baby first, the baby first"--and
immediately afterwards lay down, and fell, for the first time since her
illness into a tranquil sleep.
My good little wife sate, crying bitterly by her bedside. The child was
better--_that_ was, indeed, delightful. But then there was an omen in the
words, thus echoed from her dream, which she dared not trust herself to
interpret, and which yet had seized, with a grasp of iron, upon every
fibre of her brain.
"Oh, Richard," she cried, as she threw her arms about my neck, "I am
terrified at this horrible menace from the unseen world. Oh! poor,
darling little baby, I shall lose you--I am sure I shall lose you.
Comfort me, darling, and say he is not to die."
And so I did; and tasked all my powers of argument and persuasion to
convince her how unsubstantial was the ground of her anxiety. The little
boy was perfectly well, and, even were he to die before his sister that
event might not occur for seventy years to come. I could not, however,
conceal from myself that there was something odd and unpleasant in the
coincidence; and my poor wife had grown so nervous and excitable, that a
much less ominous conjecture would have sufficed to alarm her.
Meanwhile, the unaccountable terror which our lodger's presence inspired
continued to increase. One of our maids gave us warning, solely from her
dread of our queer inmate, and the strange accessories which haunted him.
She said--and this was corroborated by her fellow-servant--that Mr. Smith
seemed to have constantly a companion in his room; that although they
never heard them speak, they continually and distinctly heard the tread
of two persons walking up and down the room together, and described
accurately the peculiar sound of a stick or crutch tapping upon the
floor, which my own ears had heard. They also had seen the large,
ill-conditioned cat I have mentioned, frequently steal in and out of the
stranger's room; and observed that when our little girl was in greatest
danger, the hateful animal was constantly writhing, fawning, and crawling
about the door of the sick room after nightfall. They were thoroughly
persuaded that this ill-omened beast was the foul fiend himself, and I
confess I could not--sceptic as I was--bring myself absolutely to the
belief that he was nothing more than a "harmless, necessary cat." These
and similar reports--implicitly believed as they palpably were by those
who made them--were certainly little calculated to allay the perturbation
and alarm with which our household was filled.
The evenings had by this time shortened very much, and darkness often
overtook us before we sate down to our early tea. It happened just at
this period of which I have been speaking, after my little girl had begun
decidedly to mend, that I was sitting in our dining-parlour, with my
little boy fast asleep upon my knees, and thinking of I know not what, my
wife having gone up stairs, as usual, to sit in the room with little
Fanny. As I thus sate in what was to me, in effect, total solitude,
darkness unperceived stole on us.
On a sudden, as I sate, with my elbow leaning upon the table, and my
other arm round the sleeping child, I felt, as I thought, a cold
current of air faintly blowing upon my forehead. I raised my head, and
saw, as nearly as I could calculate, at the far end of the table on
which my arm rested, two large green eyes confronting me. I could see
no more, but instantly concluded they were those of the abominable cat.
Yielding to an impulse of horror and abhorrence, I caught a water-croft
that was close to my hand, and threw it full at it with all my force. I
must have missed my object, for the shining eyes continued fixed for a
second, and then glided still nearer to me, and then a little nearer
still. The noise of the glass smashed with so much force upon the table
called in the servant, who happened to be passing. She had a candle in
her hand, and, perhaps, the light alarmed the odious beast, for as she
came in it was gone.
I had had an undefined idea that its approach was somehow connected with
a designed injury of some sort to the sleeping child. I could not be
mistaken as to the fact that I had plainly seen the two broad, glaring,
green eyes. Where the cursed animal had gone I had not observed: it
might, indeed, easily have run out at the door as the servant opened it,
but neither of us had seen it do so; and we were every one of us in such
a state of nervous excitement, that even this incident was something in
the catalogue of our ambiguous experiences.
It was a great happiness to see our darling little Fanny every day
mending, and now quite out of danger: this was cheering and delightful.
It was also something to know that more than two months of our lodger's
term of occupation had already expired; and to realise, as we now could
do, by anticipation, the unspeakable relief of his departure.
My wife strove hard to turn our dear child's recovery to good account for
me; but the impressions of fear soon depart, and those of religious
gratitude must be preceded by religious faith. All as yet was but as seed
strewn upon the rock.
Little Fanny, though recovering rapidly, was still very weak, and her
mother usually passed a considerable part of every evening in her
bedroom--for the child was sometimes uneasy and restless at night. It
happened at this period that, sitting as usual at Fanny's bedside, she
witnessed an occurrence which agitated her not a little.
The child had been, as it seems, growing sleepy, and was lying
listlessly, with eyes half open, apparently taking no note of what was
passing. Suddenly, however, with an expression of the wildest terror, she
drew up her limbs, and cowered in the bed's head, gazing at some object;
which, judging from the motion of her eyes, must have been slowly
advancing from the end of the room next the door.
The child made a low shuddering cry, as she grasped her mother's hand,
and, with features white and tense with terror, slowly following with her
eyes the noiseless course of some unseen spectre, shrinking more and more
fearfully backward every moment.
"What is it? Where? What is it that frightens you, my darling?" asked the
poor mother, who, thrilled with horror, looked in vain for the apparition
which seemed to have all but bereft the child of reason.
"Stay with me--save me--keep it away--look, look at it--making signs to
me--don't let it hurt me--it is angry--Oh! mamma, save me, save me!"
The child said this, all the time clinging to her with both her hands, in
an ecstasy of panic.
"There--there, my darling," said my poor wife, "don't be afraid; there's
nothing but me--your own mamma--and little baby in the room; nothing, my
darling; nothing indeed."
"Mamma, mamma, don't move; don't go near him"; the child continued
wildly. "It's only his back now; don't make him turn again; he's untying
his handkerchief. Oh! baby, baby; he'll _kill_ baby! and he's lifting up
those green things from his eyes; don't you see him doing it? Mamma,
mamma, why does he come here? Oh, mamma, poor baby--poor little baby!"
She was looking with a terrified gaze at the little boy's bed, which lay
directly opposite to her own, and in which he was sleeping calmly.
"Hush, hush, my darling child," said my wife, with difficulty
restraining an hysterical burst of tears; "for God's sake don't speak so
wildly, my own precious love--there, there--don't be frightened--there,
darling, there."
"Oh! poor baby--poor little darling baby," the child continued as before;
"will no one save him--tell that wicked man to go away--oh--there--why,
mamma--don't--oh, sure you won't let him--don't--don't--he'll take the
child's life--will you let him lie down that way on the bed--save poor
little baby--oh, baby, baby, waken--his head is on your face."
As she said this she raised her voice to a cry of despairing terror which
made the whole room ring again.
This cry, or rather yell, reached my ears as I sate reading in the
parlour by myself, and fearing I knew not what, I rushed to the
apartment; before I reached it, the sound had subsided into low but
violent sobbing; and, just as I arrived at the threshold I heard, close
at my feet, a fierce protracted growl, and something rubbing along the
surbase. I was in the dark, but, with a feeling of mingled terror and
fury, I stamped and struck at the abhorred brute with my feet, but in
vain. The next moment I was in the room, and heard little Fanny, through
her sobs, cry--
"Oh, poor baby is killed--that wicked man has killed him--he uncovered
his face, and put it on him, and lay upon the bed and killed poor baby. I
knew he came to kill him. Ah, papa, papa, why did you not come up before
he went?--he is gone, he went away as soon as he killed our poor little
darling baby."