A year has passed, and I am beginning to ask myself if the thing
actually happened? The whole episode, seen in clear perspective, is
obviously incredible. There are, of course, no haunted houses in this
age of science; there are merely hallucinations, neurotic symptoms, and
optical illusions. Any one of these practical diagnoses would, no doubt,
cover the impossible occurrence, from my first view of that dusky sunset
on James River to the erratic behaviour of Mildred during the spring we
spent in Virginia. There is—I admit it readily!—a perfectly rational
explanation of every mystery. Yet, while I assure myself that the
supernatural has been banished, in the evil company of devils, black
plagues, and witches, from this sanitary century, a vision of Dare’s
Gift, amid its clustering cedars under the shadowy arch of the sunset,
rises before me, and my feeble scepticism surrenders to that invincible
spirit of darkness. For once in my life—the ordinary life of a
corporation lawyer in Washington—the impossible really happened.
It was the year after Mildred’s first nervous breakdown, and Drayton,
the great specialist in whose care she had been for some months, advised
me to take her away from Washington until she recovered her health. As a
busy man I couldn’t spend the whole week out of town; but if we could
find a place near enough—somewhere in Virginia! we both exclaimed, I
remember—it would be easy for me to run down once a fortnight. The
thought was with me when Harrison asked me to join him for a week’s
hunting on James River; and it was still in my mind, though less
distinctly, on the evening when I stumbled alone, and for the first
time, on Dare’s Gift.
I had hunted all day—a divine day in October—and at sunset, with a bag
full of partridges, I was returning for the night to Chericoke, where
Harrison kept his bachelor’s house. The sunset had been wonderful; and I
had paused for a moment with my back to the bronze sweep of the land,
when I had a swift impression that the memories of the old river
gathered around me. It was at this instant—I recall even the trivial
detail that my foot caught in a brier as I wheeled quickly about—that I
looked past the sunken wharf on my right, and saw the garden of Dare’s
Gift falling gently from its almost obliterated terraces to the
scalloped edge of the river. Following the steep road, which ran in
curves through a stretch of pines and across an abandoned pasture or
two, I came at last to an iron gate and a grassy walk leading, between
walls of box, to the open lawn planted in elms. With that first glimpse
the Old World charm of the scene held me captive. From the warm red of
its brick walls to the pure Colonial lines of its doorway, and its
curving wings mantled in roses and ivy, the house stood there, splendid
and solitary. The rows of darkened windows sucked in without giving back
the last flare of daylight; the heavy cedars crowding thick up the short
avenue did not stir as the wind blew from the river; and above the
carved pineapple on the roof, a lonely bat was wheeling high against the
red disc of the sun. While I had climbed the rough road, and passed more
slowly between the marvelous walls of the box, I had told myself that
the place must be Mildred’s and mine at any cost. On the upper terrace,
before several crude modern additions to the wings, my enthusiasm
gradually ebbed, though I still asked myself incredulously, “Why have I
never heard of it? To whom does it belong? Has it a name as well known
in Virginia as Shirley or Brandon?” The house was of great age, I knew,
and yet from obvious signs I discovered that it was not too old to be
lived in. Nowhere could I detect a hint of decay or dilapidation. The
sound of cattle bells floated up from a pasture somewhere in the
distance. Through the long grass on the lawn little twisted paths, like
sheep tracks, wound back and forth under the fine old elms, from which a
rain of bronze leaves fell slowly and ceaselessly in the wind. Nearer at
hand, on the upper terrace, a few roses were blooming; and when I passed
between two marble urns on the right of the house, my feet crushed a
garden of “simples” such as our grandmothers used to grow.
As I stepped on the porch I heard a child’s voice on the lawn, and a
moment afterwards a small boy, driving a cow, appeared under the two
cedars at the end of the avenue. At sight of me he flicked the cow with
the hickory switch he held, and bawled, “Ma! thar’s a stranger out here,
an’ I don’t know what he wants.”
At his call the front door opened, and a woman in a calico dress, with a
sunbonnet pushed back from her forehead, came out on the porch.
“Hush yo’ fuss, Eddy!” she remarked authoritatively. “He don’t want
nothin’.” Then, turning to me, she added civilly, “Good evenin’, suh.
You must be the gentleman who is visitin’ over at Chericoke?”
“Yes, I am staying with Mr. Harrison. You know him, of course?”
“Oh, Lordy, yes. Everybody aroun’ here knows Mr. Harrison. His folks
have been here goin’ on mighty near forever. I don’t know what me and my
children would come to if it wa’n’t for him. He is gettin’ me my divorce
now. It’s been three years and mo’ sence Tom deserted me.”
“Divorce?” I had not expected to find this innovation on James River.
“Of course it ain’t the sort of thing anybody would want to come to. But
if a woman in the State ought to have one easy, I reckon it’s me. Tom
went off with another woman—and she my own sister—from this very house—”
“From this house—and, by the way, what is the name of it?”
“Name of what? This place? Why, it’s Dare’s Gift. Didn’t you know it?
Yes, suh, it happened right here in this very house, and that, too, when
we hadn’t been livin’ over here mo’ than three months. After Mr. Duncan
got tired and went away he left us as caretakers, Tom and me, and I
asked Tilly to come and stay with us and help me look after the
children. It came like a lightning stroke to me, for Tom and Tilly had
known each other all their lives, and he’d never taken any particular
notice of her till they moved over here and began to tend the cows
together. She wa’n’t much for beauty, either. I was always the handsome
one of the family—though you mightn’t think it now, to look at me—and
Tom was the sort that never could abide red hair—”
“And you’ve lived at Dare’s Gift ever since?” I was more interested in
the house than in the tenant.
“I didn’t have nowhere else to go, and the house has got to have a
caretaker till it is sold. It ain’t likely that anybody will want to
rent an out-of-the-way place like this—though now that automobiles have
come to stay that don’t make so much difference.”
“Does it still belong to the Dares?”
“Naw, suh; they had to sell it at auction right after the war on account
of mortgages and debts—old Colonel Dare died the very year Lee
surrendered, and Miss Lucy she went off somewhere to strange parts.
Sence their day it has belonged to so many different folks that you
can’t keep account of it. Right now it’s owned by a Mr. Duncan, who
lives out in California. I don’t know that he’ll ever come back here—he
couldn’t get on with the neighbours—and he is trying to sell it. No
wonder, too, a great big place like this, and he ain’t even a
Virginian—”
“I wonder if he would let it for a season?” It was then, while I stood
there in the brooding dusk of the doorway, that the idea of the spring
at Dare’s Gift first occurred to me.
“If you want it, you can have it for ’most nothing, I reckon. Would you
like to step inside and go over the rooms?”
That evening at supper I asked Harrison about Dare’s Gift, and gleaned
the salient facts of its history.
“Strange to say, the place, charming as it is, has never been well known
in Virginia. There’s historical luck, you know, as well as other kinds,
and the Dares—after that first Sir Roderick, who came over in time to
take a stirring part in Bacon’s Rebellion, and, tradition says, to
betray his leader—have never distinguished themselves in the records of
the State. The place itself, by the way, is about a fifth of the
original plantation of three thousand acres, which was given—though I
imagine there was more in that than appears in history—by some Indian
chief of forgotten name to this notorious Sir Roderick. The old chap—Sir
Roderick, I mean—seems to have been something of a fascinator in his
day. Even Governor Berkeley, who hanged half the colony, relented, I
believe, in the case of Sir Roderick, and that unusual clemency gave
rise, I suppose, to the legend of the betrayal. But, however that may
be. Sir Roderick had more miraculous escapes than John Smith himself,
and died at last in his bed at the age of eighty from overeating
cherry-pie.”
“And now the place has passed away from the family?”
“Oh, long ago—though not so long, after all, when one comes to think of
it. When the old Colonel died the year after the war, it was discovered
that he had mortgaged the farm up to the last acre. At that time real
estate on James River wasn’t regarded as a particularly profitable
investment, and under the hammer Dare’s Gift went for a song.”
“Was the Colonel the last of his name?”
“He left a daughter—a belle, too, in her youth, my mother says—but she
died—at least I think she did—only a few months after her father.”
Coffee was served on the veranda, and while I smoked my cigar and sipped
my brandy—Harrison had an excellent wine-cellar—I watched the full moon
shining like a yellow lantern through the diaphanous mist on the river.
Downshore, in the sparkling reach of the water, an immense cloud hung
low over the horizon, and between the cloud and the river a band of
silver light quivered faintly, as if it would go out in an instant.
“It is over there, isn’t it?”—I pointed to the silver light—“Dare’s
Gift, I mean.”
“Yes, it’s somewhere over yonder—five miles away by the river, and
nearly seven by the road.”
“It is the dream of a house, Harrison, and there isn’t too much history
attached to it—nothing that would make a modern beggar ashamed to live
in it.”
“By Jove! so you are thinking of buying it?” Harrison was beaming. “It
is downright ridiculous, I declare, the attraction that place has for
strangers. I never knew a Virginian who wanted it; but you are the third
Yankee of my acquaintance—and I don’t know many—who has fallen in love
with it. I searched the title and drew up the deed for John Duncan
exactly six years ago—though I’d better not boast of that transaction, I
reckon.”
“He still owns it, doesn’t he?”
“He still owns it, and it looks as if he would continue to own it unless
you can be persuaded to buy it. It is hard to find purchasers for these
old places, especially when the roads are uncertain and they happen to
be situated on the James River. We live too rapidly in these days to
want to depend on a river, even on a placid old fellow like the James.”
“Duncan never really lived here, did he?”
“At first he did. He began on quite a royal scale; but, somehow, from
the very start things appeared to go wrong with him. At the outset he
prejudiced the neighbours against him—I never knew exactly why—by
putting on airs, I imagine, and boasting about his money. There is
something in the Virginia blood that resents boasting about money.
However that may be, he hadn’t been here six months before he was at
odds with every living thing in the county, white, black, and
spotted—for even the dogs snarled at him.
“Then his secretary—a chap he had picked up starving in London, and had
trusted absolutely for years—made off with a lot of cash and securities,
and that seemed the last straw in poor Duncan’s ill luck. I believe he
didn’t mind the loss half so much—he refused to prosecute the fellow—as
he minded the betrayal of confidence. He told me, I remember, before he
went away, that it had spoiled Dare’s Gift for him. He said he had a
feeling that the place had come too high; it had cost him his belief in
human nature.”
“Then I imagine he’d be disposed to consider an offer?”
“Oh, there isn’t a doubt of it. But, if I were you, I shouldn’t be too
hasty. Why not rent the place for the spring months? It’s beautiful here
in the spring, and Duncan has left furniture enough to make the house
fairly comfortable.”
“Well, I’ll ask Mildred. Of course Mildred must have the final word in
the matter.”
“As if Mildred’s final word would be anything but a repetition of
yours!” Harrison laughed slyly—for the perfect harmony in which we lived
had been for ten years a pleasant jest among our friends. Harrison had
once classified wives as belonging to two distinct groups—the group of
those who talked and knew nothing about their husbands’ affairs, and the
group of those who knew everything and kept silent. Mildred, he had
added politely, had chosen to belong to the latter division.
The next day I went back to Washington, and Mildred’s first words to me
in the station were, “Why, Harold, you look as if you had bagged all the
game in Virginia!”
“I look as if I had found just the place for you!” When I told her about
my discovery, her charming face sparkled with interest. Never once, not
even during her illness, had she failed to share a single one of my
enthusiasms; never once, in all the years of our marriage, had there
been so much as a shadow between us. To understand the story of Dare’s
Gift, it is necessary to realize at the beginning all that Mildred meant
and means in my life.
Well, to hasten my slow narrative, the negotiations dragged through most
of the winter. At first, Harrison wrote me, Duncan couldn’t be found,
and a little later that he was found, but that he was opposed, from some
inscrutable motive, to the plan of renting Dare’s Gift. He wanted to
sell it outright, and he’d be hanged if he’d do anything less than get
the place clean off his hands. “As sure as I let it”—Harrison sent me
his letter—“there is going to be trouble, and somebody will come down on
me for damages. The damned place has cost me already twice as much as I
paid for it.”
In the end, however—Harrison has a persuasive way—the arrangements were
concluded. “Of course,” Duncan wrote after a long silence, “Dare’s Gift
may be as healthy as heaven. I may quite as easily have contracted this
confounded rheumatism, which makes life a burden, either in Italy or
from too many cocktails. I’ve no reason whatever for my dislike for the
place; none, that is, except the incivility of my neighbours—where, by
the way, did you Virginians manufacture your reputation for manners?—and
my unfortunate episode with Paul Grymes. That, as you remark, might, no
doubt, have occurred anywhere else, and if a man is going to steal he
could have found all the opportunities he wanted in New York or London.
But the fact remains that one can’t help harbouring associations,
pleasant or unpleasant, with the house in which one has lived, and from
start to finish my associations with Dare’s Gift are frankly unpleasant.
If, after all, however, your friend wants the place, and can afford to
pay for his whims—let him have it! I hope to Heaven he’ll be ready to
buy it when his lease has run out. Since he wants it for a hobby, I
suppose one place is as good as another; and I can assure him that by
the time he has owned it for a few years—especially if he undertakes to
improve the motor road up to Richmond—he will regard a taste for Chinese
porcelain as an inexpensive diversion.” Then, as if impelled by a twist
of ironic humour, he added, “He will find the shooting good anyhow.”
By early spring Dare’s Gift was turned over to us—Mildred was satisfied,
if Duncan wasn’t—and on a showery day in April, when drifting clouds
cast faint gauzy shadows over the river, our boat touched at the old
wharf, where carpenters were working, and rested a minute before
steaming on to Chericoke Landing five miles away. The spring was early
that year—or perhaps the spring is always early on James River. I
remember the song of birds in the trees; the veil of bright green over
the distant forests; the broad reach of the river scalloped with silver;
the dappled sunlight on the steep road which climbed from the wharf to
the iron gates; the roving fragrance from lilacs on the lower terrace;
and, surmounting all, the two giant cedars which rose like black crags
against the changeable blue of the sky—I remember these things as
distinctly as if I had seen them this morning.
We entered the wall of box through a living door, and strolled up the
grassy walk from the lawn to the terraced garden. Within the garden the
air was perfumed with a thousand scents—with lilacs, with young box,
with flags and violets and lilies, with aromatic odours from the garden
of “simples,” and with the sharp sweetness of sheep-mint from the mown
grass on the lawn.
“This spring is fine, isn’t it?” As I turned to Mildred with the
question, I saw for the first time that she looked pale and tired—or was
it merely the green light from the box wall that fell over her features?
“The trip has been too much for you. Next time we’ll come by motor.”
“Oh, no, I had a sudden feeling of faintness. It will pass in a minute.
What an adorable place, Harold!”
She was smiling again with her usual brightness, and as we passed from
the box wall to the clear sunshine on the terrace her face quickly
resumed its natural colour. To this day—for Mildred has been strangely
reticent about Dare’s Gift—I do not know whether her pallor was due to
the shade in which we walked or whether, at the instant when I turned to
her, she was visited by some intuitive warning against the house we were
approaching. Even after a year the events of Dare’s Gift are not things
I can talk over with Mildred; and, for my part, the occurrence remains,
like the house in its grove of cedars, wrapped in an impenetrable
mystery. I don’t in the least pretend to know how or why the thing
happened. I only know that it did happen—that it happened, word for word
as I record it. Mildred’s share in it will, I think, never become clear
to me. What she felt, what she imagined, what she believed, I have never
asked her. Whether the doctor’s explanation is history or fiction, I do
not attempt to decide. He is an old man, and old men, since Biblical
times, have seen visions. There were places in his story where it seemed
to me that he got historical data a little mixed—or it may be that his
memory failed him. Yet, in spite of his liking for romance and his
French education, he is without constructive imagination—at least he
says that he is without it—and the secret of Dare’s Gift, if it is not
fact, could have sprung only from the ultimate chaos of imagination.
But I think of these things a year afterwards, and on that April morning
the house stood there in the sunlight, presiding over its grassy
terraces with an air of gracious and intimate hospitality. From the
symbolic pineapple on its sloping roof to the twittering sparrows that
flew in and out of its ivied wings, it reaffirmed that first flawless
impression. Flaws, of course, there were in the fact, yet the
recollection of it to-day—the garnered impression of age, of formal
beauty, of clustering memories—is one of exquisite harmony. We found
later, as Mildred pointed out, architectural absurdities—wanton
excrescences in the modern additions, which had been designed apparently
with the purpose of providing space at the least possible cost of
material and labour. The rooms, when we passed through the fine old
doorway, appeared cramped and poorly lighted; broken pieces of the queer
mullioned window, where the tracery was of wood, not stone, had been
badly repaired, and much of the original detail work of the mantels and
cornices had been blurred by recent disfigurements. But these
discoveries came afterwards. The first view of the place worked like a
magic spell—like an intoxicating perfume—on our senses.
“It is just as if we had stepped into another world,” said Mildred,
looking up at the row of windows, from which the ivy had been carefully
clipped. “I feel as if I had ceased to be myself since I left
Washington.” Then she turned to meet Harrison, who had ridden over to
welcome us.
We spent a charming fortnight together at Dare’s Gift—Mildred happy as a
child in her garden, and I satisfied to lie in the shadow of the box
wall and watch her bloom back to health. At the end of the fortnight I
was summoned to an urgent conference in Washington. Some philanthropic
busybody, employed to nose out corruption, had scented legal game in the
affairs of the Atlantic & Eastern Railroad, and I had been retained as
special counsel by that corporation. The fight would be long, I knew—I
had already thought of it as one of my great cases—and the evidence was
giving me no little anxiety. “It is my last big battle,” I told Mildred,
as I kissed her good-by on the steps. “If I win, Dare’s Gift shall be
your share of the spoils; if I lose—well. I’ll be like any other general
who has met a better man in the field.”
“Don’t hurry back, and don’t worry about me. I am quite happy here.”
“I shan’t worry, but all the same I don’t like leaving you. Remember, if
you need advice or help about anything, Harrison is always at hand.”
“Yes, I’ll remember.”
With this assurance I left her standing in the sunshine, with the
windows of the house staring vacantly down on her.
When I try now to recall the next month, I can bring back merely a
turmoil of legal wrangles. I contrived in the midst of it all to spend
two Sundays with Mildred, but I remember nothing of them except the
blessed wave of rest that swept over me as I lay on the grass under the
elms. On my second visit I saw that she was looking badly, though when I
commented on her pallor and the darkened circles under her eyes, she
laughed and put my anxious questions aside.
“Oh, I’ve lost sleep, that’s all,” she answered, vaguely, with a swift
glance at the house. “Did you ever think how many sounds there are in
the country that keep one awake?”
As the day went on I noticed, too, that she had grown restless, and once
or twice while I was going over my case with her—I always talked over my
cases with Mildred because it helped to clarify my opinions—she returned
with irritation to some obscure legal point I had passed over. The
flutter of her movements—so unlike my calm Mildred—disturbed me more
than I confessed to her, and I made up my mind before night that I would
consult Drayton when I went back to Washington. Though she had always
been sensitive and impressionable, I had never seen her until that
second Sunday in a condition of feverish excitability.
In the morning she was so much better that by the time I reached
Washington I forgot my determination to call on her physician. My work
was heavy that week—the case was developing into a a direct attack upon
the management of the road—and in seeking evidence to rebut the charges
of illegal rebates to the American Steel Company, I stumbled by accident
upon a mass of damaging records. It was a clear case of somebody having
blundered—or the records would not have been left for me to discover—and
with disturbed thoughts I went down for my third visit to Dare’s Gift.
It was in my mind to draw out of the case, if an honourable way could be
found, and I could barely wait until dinner was over before I unburdened
my conscience to Mildred.
“The question has come to one of personal honesty.” I remember that I
was emphatic.
“I’ve nosed out something real enough this time. There is material for a
dozen investigations in Dowling’s transactions alone.”
The exposure of the Atlantic & Eastern Railroad is public property by
this time, and I needn’t resurrect the dry bones of that deplorable
scandal. I lost the case, as everyone knows; but all that concerns me in
it to-day is the talk I had with Mildred on the darkening terrace at
Dare’s Gift. It was a reckless talk, when one comes to think of it. I
said, I know, a great deal that I ought to have kept to myself; but,
after all, she is my wife; I had learned in ten years that I could trust
her discretion, and there was more than a river between us and the
Atlantic & Eastern Railroad.
Well, the sum of it is that I talked foolishly, and went to bed feeling
justified in my folly. Afterwards I recalled that Mildred had been very
quiet, though whenever I paused she questioned me closely, with a flash
of irritation as if she were impatient of my slowness or my lack of
lucidity. At the end she flared out for a moment into the excitement I
had noticed the week before; but at the time I was so engrossed in my
own affairs that this scarcely struck me as unnatural. Not until the
blow fell did I recall the hectic flush in her face and the quivering
sound of her voice, as if she were trying not to break down and weep.
It was long before either of us got to sleep that night, and Mildred
moaned a little under her breath as she sank into unconsciousness. She
was not well, I knew, and I resolved again that I would see Drayton as
soon as I reached Washington. Then, just before falling asleep, I became
acutely aware of all the noises of the country which Mildred said had
kept her awake—of the chirping of the crickets in the fireplace, of the
fluttering of swallows in the chimney, of the sawing of innumerable
insects in the night outside, of the croaking of frogs in the marshes,
of the distant solitary hooting of an owl, of the whispering sound of
wind in the leaves, of the stealthy movement of a myriad creeping lives
in the ivy. Through the open window the moonlight fell in a milk-white
flood, and in the darkness the old house seemed to speak with a thousand
voices. As I dropped off I had a confused sensation—less a perception
than an apprehension—that all these voices were urging me to
something—somewhere—
The next day I was busy with a mass of evidence—dull stuff, I remember.
Harrison rode over for luncheon, and not until late afternoon, when I
strolled out, with my hands full of papers, for a cup of tea on the
terrace, did I have a chance to see Mildred alone. Then I noticed that
she was breathing quickly, as if from a hurried walk. “Did you go to
meet the boat, Mildred?”
“No, I’ve been nowhere—nowhere. I’ve been on the lawn all day,” she
answered sharply—so sharply that I looked at her in surprise.
In the ten years that I had lived with her I had never before seen her
irritated without cause—Mildred’s disposition, I had once said, was as
flawless as her profile—and I had for the first time in my life that
baffled sensation which comes to men whose perfectly normal wives reveal
flashes of abnormal psychology. Mildred wasn’t Mildred, that was the
upshot of my conclusions; and, hang it all! I didn’t know any more than
Adam what was the matter with her. There were lines around her eyes, and
her sweet mouth had taken an edge of bitterness.
“Aren’t you well, dear?” I asked.
“Oh, I’m perfectly well,” she replied, in a shaking voice, “only I wish
you would leave me alone!” And then she burst into tears.
While I was trying to comfort her the servant came with the tea things,
and she kept him about some trivial orders until the big touring-car of
one of our neighbours rushed up the drive and halted under the terrace.
In the morning Harrison motored up to Richmond with me, and on the way
he spoke gravely of Mildred.
“Your wife isn’t looking well, Beckwith. I shouldn’t wonder if she were
a bit seedy—and if I were you I’d get a doctor to look at her. There is
a good man down at Chericoke Landing—old Pelham Lakeby. I don’t care if
he did get his training in France half a century ago; he knows more than
your half-baked modern scientists.”
“I’ll speak to Drayton this very day,” I answered, ignoring his
suggestion of the physician. “You have seen more of Mildred this last
month than I have. How long have you noticed that she isn’t herself?”
“A couple of weeks. She is usually so jolly, you know.” Harrison had
played with Mildred in his childhood. “Yes, I shouldn’t lose any time
over the doctor. Though, of course, it may be only the spring,” he
added, reassuringly.
“I’ll drop by Drayton’s office on my way uptown,” I replied, more
alarmed by Harrison’s manner than I had been by Mildred’s condition.
But Drayton was not in his office, and his assistant told me that the
great specialist would not return to town until the end of the week. It
was impossible for me to discuss Mildred with the earnest young man who
discoursed so eloquently of the experiments in the Neurological
Institute, and I left without mentioning her, after making an
appointment for Saturday morning. Even if the consultation delayed my
return to Dare’s Gift until the afternoon, I was determined to see
Drayton, and, if possible, take him back with me.
Mildred’s last nervous breakdown had been too serious for me to neglect
this warning.
I was still worrying over that case—wondering if I could find a way to
draw out of it—when the catastrophe overtook me. It was on Saturday
morning, I remember, and after a reassuring talk with Drayton, who had
promised to run down to Dare’s Gift for the coming week-end, I was
hurrying to catch the noon train for Richmond. As I passed through the
station, one of the _Observer’s_ sensational “war extras” caught my eye,
and I stopped for an instant to buy the paper before I hastened through
the gate to the train. Not until we had started, and I had gone back to
the dining-car, did I unfold the pink sheets and spread them out on the
table before me. Then, while the waiter hung over me for the order, I
felt the headlines on the front page slowly burn themselves into my
brain—for, instead of the news of the great French drive I was
expecting, there flashed back at me, in large type, the name of the
opposing counsel in the case against the Atlantic & Eastern. The
_Observer’s_ “extra” battened not on the war this time, but on the gross
scandal of the railroad; and the front page of the paper was devoted to
a personal interview with Herbert Tremaine, the great Tremaine, that
philanthropic busybody who had first scented corruption. It was all
there, every ugly detail—every secret proof of the illegal transactions
on which I had stumbled. It was all there, phrase for phrase, as I alone
could have told it—as I alone, in my folly, had told it to Mildred. The
Atlantic & Eastern had been betrayed, not privately, not secretly, but
in large type in the public print of a sensational newspaper. And not
only the road! I also had been betrayed—betrayed so wantonly, so
irrationally, that it was like an incident out of melodrama. It was
conceivable that the simple facts might have leaked out through other
channels, but the phrases, the very words of Tremaine’s interview, were
mine.
The train had started; I couldn’t have turned back even if I had wanted
to do so. I was bound to go on, and some intuition told me that the
mystery lay at the end of my journey. Mildred had talked indiscreetly to
someone, but to whom? Not to Harrison, surely! Harrison, I knew, I could
count on, and yet whom had she seen except Harrison? After my first
shock the absurdity of the thing made me laugh aloud. It was all as
ridiculous, I realized, as it was disastrous! It might, so easily not
have happened. If only I hadn’t stumbled on those accursed records! If
only I had kept my mouth shut about them! If only Mildred had not talked
unwisely to someone! But I wonder if there was ever a tragedy so
inevitable that the victim, in looking back, could not see a hundred
ways, great or small, of avoiding or preventing it?—a hundred trivial
incidents which, falling differently, might have transformed the event
into pure comedy?
The journey was unmitigated torment. In Richmond the car did not meet
me, and I wasted half an hour in looking for a motor to take me to
Dare’s Gift. When at last I got off, the road was rougher than ever,
plowed into heavy furrows after the recent rains, and filled with
mud-holes from which it seemed we should never emerge. By the time we
puffed exhaustedly up the rocky road from the river’s edge, and ran into
the avenue, I had worked myself into a state of nervous apprehension
bordering on panic. I don’t know what I expected, but I think I
shouldn’t have been surprised if Dare’s Gift had lain in ruins before
me. Had I found the house levelled to ashes by a divine visitation, I
believe I should have accepted the occurrence as within the bounds of
natural phenomena.
But everything—even the young peacocks on the lawn—was just as I had
left it. The sun, setting in a golden ball over the pineapple on the
roof, appeared as unchangeable, while it hung there in the glittering
sky, as if it were made of metal. From the somber dusk of the wings,
where the ivy lay like a black shadow, the clear front of the house,
with its formal doorway and its mullioned windows, shone with an intense
brightness, the last beams of sunshine lingering there before they faded
into the profound gloom of the cedars. The same scents of roses and sage
and mown grass and sheepmint hung about me; the same sounds—the croaking
of frogs and the sawing of katydids—floated up from the low grounds; the
very books I had been reading lay on one of the tables on the terrace,
and the front door still stood ajar as if it had not closed since I
passed through it.
I dashed up the steps, and in the hall Mildred’s maid met me. “Mrs.
Beckwith was so bad that we sent for the doctor—the one Mr. Harrison
recommended. I don’t know what it is, sir, but she doesn’t seem like
herself. She talks as if she were quite out of her head.”
“What does the doctor say?”
“He didn’t tell me. Mr. Harrison saw him. He—the doctor, I mean—has sent
a nurse, and he is coming again in the morning. But she isn’t herself,
Mr. Beckwith. She says she doesn’t want you to come to her—”
“Mildred!” I had already sprung past the woman, calling the beloved name
aloud as I ran up the stairs.
In her chamber, standing very straight, with hard eyes, Mildred met me.
“I had to do it, Harold,” she said coldly—so coldly that my outstretched
arms fell to my sides. “I had to tell all I knew.”
“You mean you told Tremaine—you wrote to him—you, Mildred?”
“I wrote to him—I had to write. I couldn’t keep it back any longer. No,
don’t touch me. You must not touch me. I had to do it. I would do it
again.”
Then it was, while she stood there, straight and hard, and rejoiced
because she had betrayed me—then it was that I knew that Mildred’s mind
was unhinged.
“I had to do it. I would do it again,” she repeated, pushing me from
her.