THE THIRD NIGHT
This was a child’s room; there were playthings on the floor.
The rain fell heavily on the low roof, blanketing the skylight and
making the loft so dark that for a few seconds I could not see.
A sound came from a far corner. High-strung with terror, I thought
it was some witless creature who had been concealed up here for many
years, waiting for death to unburden it from a life that could never
grow old.
It moved--and I saw it was the cat.
Again I could have killed it, but instead I sank down on the floor and
began to laugh and cry.
“Come here, Cat! I won’t hurt you. We’re all mad together.”
But the cat mistrusted me. She slunk away, and for a while watched me
very carefully, until, deciding that I had lost interest in her, she
sat up and licked her tail. I wondered if this was her regular abode
and if it was she whom I had heard walking above me at night, and, if
so, how she managed an entrance when the doors were closed. Perhaps
she was feline by day and by night was psychic. But she was not a
confidential cat. Something fell coldly on my hand. I looked up. The
skylight was leaking.
I could distinguish the furniture in the loft now. I saw a wash-bowl
on a little stand, and put it under the loose-paned glass in the roof
beneath which a pool was spreading. There was a low bureau in the
room and a short turned bed, painted green, with a quilt thrown over
one end, two little hand-made chairs, and one of those solid wooden
rocking-horses, awesomely brave in the dusk. An open sea-chest held
picture-books and paints and bent lead soldiers, and strewn upon the
floor were quahaug-shells and a string of buoys. The room appeared as
if its owner had just stepped out, and once more I took a cautious look
around, behind me and in all the corners. Running my hand over the
quilt I found that the dust of years was thick upon it. This attic had
not been lived in recently. Its disturbed face was only the kind of
confusion that is left after some one has died whose belongings are too
precious to touch.
I opened one of the drawers of the cherry bureau and discovered that it
was full of the clothes of a little boy, of a period so long ago that
I could not fathom the mystery of who he might have been. Tears came
to my eyes as I unfolded the little ruffled shirts made by hand out of
faded anchor-printed calico, and picked up the knitted stockings. This
had been a real child; there were real holes in the stockings.
* * * * *
My theory that it was the captain who was living up here was exploded.
Like a percussion-cap under a railroad train it had gone off when I
blundered into the room. Nothing remained of it now but a wan smile
and a sensation of relief. I only regretted that I had not broken open
both doors behind my bed after the first night and rid my mind of the
obsession at once. I walked across the room to the door at the far end
and found it was not locked after all, only that the rusty latch was
stuck. Forcing it up, I found myself, as I had expected, in the eaves
closet, where the little door ahead of me led into Mattie’s room. I
would have to go down the other way and move the bed in order to open
it, but I felt assured that no one had been before me and escaped by
retreating through here. I peered up and down the black length of the
closet, whose floor was the adjacent edge of the roof of the old part
of the house. Obviously no one was concealed. But from the rain that
filtered in and the shaking of the attic beneath the storm, I felt that
drafts alone might have caused the bending of the wall. Wind was sure
to be playing tag at midnight in this space between two partitions, and
a neurasthenic imagination could supply the rest.
I only wished that I had all those miserable hours back that I had
wasted during the day, wrestling with the mystery. The best theory that
I had evolved was that the New Captain had not died at all, but that
Mattie, watching him during that legendary week, had managed to raise
him out of his cataleptic sleep, and, although the townspeople thought
he had been buried, she had kept his life a secret for the last five
years. She could easily have hidden him in this unknown room. That
would explain why she was so loath to show the house to any one. It
would also explain why she refused to move out and why, in the end,
she committed suicide rather than do so. Not daring to abandon him and
have him discovered by the next occupant, an event which would end by
their both being incarcerated in the same poor-house, she had done
away with herself. The significance of this move would have been that
Mattie was no longer dependent on the New Captain nor enchained to him
by the spirit, as she was always reported to have been. Loving him,
she would never have deserted him. But thinking of him in the rôle
of a cataleptic old man, resuscitated after his second death, it was
plausible to suppose that he would be so loathsome as to have worn out
all her emotions, even faithfulness. He must have been no more than a
crazy man, shut up in that loft, and love, though as strong as Mattie’s
had been, cannot live forever on mere remembrance. So, according to
my solution, she had at last forsaken him, after having provisioned
him beforehand, as for a siege. It had been only the short length of a
month after her drowning that we had moved in, and during that time no
one else had been near the place. After my arrival, perhaps as before,
he had lain quiet all day. By night he had prowled around trying to get
out.
It was a grand theory--while it lasted. I did not analyse the flaws in
it, now I had given it up. Another night did that!
However, so many things had been solved by my heroic journey into the
unknown and the unknowable, and I was so interested in them, that I
forgot the rest. Here was the crux of the building of the captain’s
wing, the reason for not hiring workmen in the town, and why Mattie
alone had helped to carry lumber and worked until she fell exhausted
from her own roof. Without dwelling on the secret room that had become
a nursery, considering that room in its original aspect as part of
the passageway between Mattie’s room and the New Captain’s, here was
cause enough for not wanting any outside help. Mrs. Dove had been wrong
in her conclusion that because he had employed no village carpenters
they had afterward boycotted him. He would never have given them the
opportunity. Also, the architectural idiosyncrasies of that room were
her excuse for not showing the house when the judge had tried to sell
it. A person who would buy it as I had, without going inside the door,
was an exception. There were not many whose need was so urgent; most
house-shoppers would have poked behind her bed and pried into all the
closets before the deal was closed.
Mattie had managed to keep this room hidden all her life. Alf, at the
Sailor’s Rest, had told me squarely that there was no attic, and he
knew as much as any one else in the town about the House of the Five
Pines. Old Mis’ Hawes had died without knowing that after Mattie had
plumped up her pillows and thrust the brass warming-pan into her bed,
and taken her candle and gone upstairs, she was able to come down again
and spend the evening with the New Captain. I would keep the secret,
too, partly out of loyalty to Mattie, who had bequeathed it to me, and
partly because it would be a lark to have it known only to my dear one.
I could hear Jasper’s exclamation of pleased surprise when, some night
after he had tucked me in, I appeared again through his study-closet.
It would be a game for winter evenings.
I let myself down the steep steps behind the chimney and, going through
the study and the kitchen, came up into Mattie’s room. Shoving the
bed away from the little door in the eaves closet, I opened it and
walked straight back into the attic-chamber. That was the way of it--a
complete loop through the house!
Mattie’s room was to be mine for no other reason than its mysterious
means of egress. If I had any servants or any visiting relatives, I
would put them in the two big bedrooms on the other side of the upper
hall and turn the hall bedroom into a bath-room. But if I ever had any
babies, if _we_ ever had, I knew where I would put them. There was
a room next mine waiting for some child to play with the wall-eyed
rocking-horse and sleep in the little turned bed. Dormer-windows could
be cut on both sides and running water be brought up, and such a
nursery would bloom beneath the old roof that the art magazines would
send up representatives to take pictures of it. I could hardly restrain
my impatience to begin to make it ready, although as yet there was no
need for it. For the first time since we moved into the house I was
happy and contented.
I was in the mood to write Jasper a long and intimate letter, telling
him of my hopes for our life up here and how the House of the Five
Pines was all ready for us. Of my hallucinations about the attic I
said, “Nothing was locked in the room but my own fears.”
The tide had turned, and from my window at the big desk in the lower
room I watched the lines of foaming spray licking up the beach. There
was no longer any horizon between sea and sky. All was one blur of
moving gray water, picked out with breaking white-caps and roaring as
it fought to engulf the land. I thought, as I often had before: suppose
the tide does not pause at the crest and retreat into the ocean, but
keeps on creeping up and over, over the bank and over the road, over
the hedge and over the house. However, as always, it halted in its
race, pawed upon the stone breakwater, and I knew that by morning it
would have slunk out again, and that children would be wading where
waves had been, and Caleb Snow would be picking up winkles. Living was
like that; the tide of our passions turns. The New Captain had built
this double room for the great storm that had swept through his life,
bearing away the barricades of his traditions; but its force was spent
now, and the skeleton laid as bare as a fish-bone on the sandy flats
where strangers walked.
As I sat at the desk I smelled coffee cooking. The impression was so
strong that I went into the kitchen and walked over to the stove to
shove back the coffee-pot that I fancied had been left there since
morning. The fire must have caught on a smoldering coal and the grounds
were boiling up. But the coffee-pot was not on the stove. I found it
still on the shelf, and the coffee was safe in the can. The odor must
have come from out-of-doors.
I was too tired to figure the matter out, and ended by making some
for myself, and going to bed. This was my third night at the House of
the Five Pines, and I retired peacefully, in confidence, without any
disturbing inhibitions. Everything had been solved.
I had shut the door in the secret stairs in the study-closet and
fastened it with a piece of wire. In Mattie’s room I dropped down
on the bed where I had shoved it across the floor that afternoon.
Afterward I rose and pushed the bureau in front of the little door.
I do not know what subconscious motive impelled this, but a woman who
is living alone in a house with nine known rooms, none of which are in
their right places, and three stairs, front, back, and secret, ought to
be forgiven for locking up what she can.
Rain fell in wearied gusts; the worst was over. The wind, still high,
blew dense clouds across the face of the moon and carried them on again
over the sea, so that the waste was momentarily illumined. Whenever the
veils of mist were torn aside the oval mirror in its frame above my
bureau reflected the moonlight. I watched it for a long time on my way
to sleep.
At exactly twelve o’clock I found myself sitting up in bed.
There was moonlight in the room, that fell in quivering patches on the
bed-quilt and lightened up the dark walls, throwing into relief all the
five white doors. But there was also another light, on the ceiling,
that moved steadily up and down. Forcing my hypnotized glance away from
it, I turned to the haunted door and the bureau that I had placed in
front of it, and saw with sickening understanding that the mirror above
it was swaying on its hinges, swinging back and forth. This caused
the moonlight reflected from the water to dance like a sun-spot. The
glass turned as if it were being pushed and could not keep its balance.
I crawled over to it and put my hand out to steady it, and the whole
thing turned.
As I drew back, the pressure on the other side of the wall withdrew.
I could hear footsteps receding until they fell away down what I now
knew was the stairway at the other end of the secret room. I had heard
them the night before and I was sure. Whatever was in there had given
up trying to get out at this side and was going back to try and get out
of the door in the study-closet. I had wired that; the footsteps would
return.
There was no use in trying to convince myself for the third time that
this phenomenon was caused by the cat. I had put her out in the rain.
And if I were mistaken, if after all, I had locked her up in the loft,
could the weight of a cat shake a wall so that a mirror would swing on
its hinges? This was the footstep of something larger than a cat and,
Heaven help me, smaller than a man!
I heard it coming back, stealthily, walking softly, picking a
barefooted course across the upper chamber toward the thin partitions
that separated its room from mine. I knew that in a second more it
would try one door and then the other, and that the whole wall would
shake and give and the mirror I was clutching would tip again and throw
fantastic lights. I heard it lift the latch.