I was too young to reason in those days. Had I not been, had I been able
to say to myself that no act requiring such continued precaution
could take place in the heart of a great city without ultimate, if not
instant, detection, instinct would still have assured me that what I
read was true, however improbable or unheard of it might seem. That
the recognition of this fact imposed upon me two almost irreconcilable
duties I was slower to perceive. But soon, too soon, it became apparent
even to my girlish mind, that, as the wife of the man who had committed
this great and inconceivable wrong, I was bound, not only to make
an immediate attempt to release the women he so outrageously held
imprisoned in their own house, but to so release them that he should
escape the opprobrium of his own act.
That I might have time to think, and that I might be saved, if but for
one day, contact with one it was almost my duty to hate, I came back to
him with the plea that I might spend the day with the Vandykes instead
of accompanying him down town as usual. I think he was glad of the
freedom my absence offered him, for he gave me the permission I asked,
and in ten minutes I was in my old home. Mrs. Vandyke received me with
effusion. It was not the first time she had seen me since my marriage,
but it was the first time she had seen me alone.
“My dear!” she exclaimed, turning me about till my unwilling face met
the light, “is this the wild-wood lassie I gave into Mr. Allison’s
keeping a week ago!”
“It is the house!” I excitedly gasped, “the empty, lonely, echoing
house! I am afraid in it, even with my husband. It gives me creepy
feelings, _as if a murder had been committed in it_.”
She broke into a laugh; I hear the sound now, an honest, amused and
entirely reassuring laugh, that relieved me in one way and depressed me
in another. “The idea! _that_ house!” she cried. “I never thought you
a girl to have nervous fancies. Why, it is the most matter-of-fact old
mansion in the city. All its traditions are of the most respectable
kind; no skeleton in those closets! By the way, my dear, has Mr. Allison
shown you any of the curious old things those rooms must contain?”
I managed to stammer out a reply, “Mr. Allison does not consider that
his rights extend so far. I have never crossed the drawing-room floor.”
“Well! that is carrying honor to an extreme. I am afraid I should not
be able to suppress my curiosity to that extent. Is he afraid of the old
lady returning unexpectedly and catching him?”
I could not echo her laugh; I could not even smile; I could only pucker
up my brows as if angry.
“Everything is kept in shape, so that if she does return she will find
the house comfortable,” I said; then, with a rising sense of having by
this speech suggested a falsehood, I hastily dropped the topic, and,
with an entire change of manner, remarked, airily:
“Mrs. Ransome must have gone off very suddenly, to leave everything so
exposed in a house as splendid as that. Most people, however rich, see
to their choice things more carefully.”
She rose to the bait. “Mrs. Ransome is a queer woman. Her things are of
but little account to her; to save her daughter from a moment’s pain
she would part with the house itself, let alone the accumulations it
contains. That is why she left the country so suddenly.”
I waited a moment under the pretense of admiring a locket she wore, then
I suggested, quietly:
“My husband told you that?”
The answer was as careless as the speaker.
“Oh, I don’t know who told me. It’s five years ago now, but every one
at the time understood that she was angry, because some one mentioned
blindness before her daughter. Mrs. Ransome had regarded it as a
religious duty to raise her daughter in ignorance of her affliction.
When she found she could not do so among her friends and acquaintances,
she took her away to a strange land. It is the only tradition, which is
not commonplace, which belongs to the family. Let us go up and see my
new gowns. I have had two come home from Arnold’s since you went away.”
I thought the gowns would keep a minute longer. “Did Mrs. Ransome say
good-by to her friends?” I asked. “Somehow this matter strikes me as
being very romantic.”
“Oh, that shows what a puss you are. No, Mrs. Ransome did not say
good-by to her friends, that is, not to us. She just went, leaving
everything in your husband’s charge, who certainly has acquitted himself
of the obligation most religiously. And now will you see the gowns?”
I tortured myself by submitting to this ordeal, then I ventured on
another and entirely different attempt to clear up the mystery that
was fast stifling out my youth, love and hope. I professed to have an
extraordinary desire to see the city from the house-top. I had never
been any higher up than the third story of any house I had been in, and
could not, I told her, go any higher in the house in which I was then
living. Might I go up on her roof? Her eyes opened, but she was of an
amiable, inconsequent disposition and let me have my way without too
much opposition. So, together with a maid she insisted upon sending with
me, I made my way through the skylight on to the roof, and so into full
view of the neighboring house-tops.
One glance at the spot I was most interested in, and I found myself too
dizzy to look further. In the center of Mrs. Ransome’s roof there was to
be seen what I can best describe as an extended cupola without windows.
As there was no other break visible in the roof, the top of this must
have held the skylight, which, being thus lifted many feet above the
level of the garret floor, would admit air and light enough to the
boarded-up space below, but would make any effort to be heard or seen,
on the part of any one secreted there, quite ineffectual. One might, by
a great effort, fling up a bead out of this funnel-shaped opening,
but, even to my limited sense of mechanics, the chances seemed very
unfavorable towards it doing much more than roll over the spacious roof
into the huge gutters surrounding it.
Yet, if it chose to bound, it might clear the coping and fall, as one
had fallen, on the devoted head of a person walking on the lawn below.
All this I saw at a glance, and then, sick and dizzy, I crept back, and,
with but little apology for my abruptness, took leave of Mrs. Vandyke
and left the house.
The resolution I took in doing this was worthy of an older head and a
more disciplined heart. By means that were fair, or by means that were
foul, I meant to win my way into that boarded-up attic and see for
myself if the words hidden away in my vinaigrette were true. To do
this openly would cause a scandal I was yet too much under my husband’s
influence to risk; while to do it secretly meant the obtaining of keys
which I had every reason to believe he kept hidden about his person.
How was I to obtain them? I saw no way, but that did not deter me from
starting at once down town in the hope of being struck by some brilliant
idea while waiting for him in his office.
Was it instinct that suggested this, or was the hand of Providence in
all that I did at this time? I had no sooner seated myself in the little
room, where I had been accustomed to wait for him, than I saw what sent
the blood tingling to my finger-tips in sudden hope. It was my husband’s
vest hanging in one corner, the vest he had worn down town that morning.
The day was warm and he had taken it off. _If the key should be in it!_
I had never done a mean or underhanded thing before in my life, but I
sprang at that vest without the least hesitation, and fingering it with
the lightest of touches, found in the smallest of inside pockets a
key, which instinct immediately told me was that of the door I had once
endeavored to pass. Oh, the rush of feeling overwhelming me as I held
it in my hand! Would he miss it if I carried it off? Would I be able to
return to the house, see what I wanted to see, and get back in time to
restore it before he wanted his vest? It was early yet, and he was very
busy; I might succeed, and if I failed, and he detected his loss, why I
alone would be the sufferer; and was I not a sufferer now? Dropping the
key into my pocket, I went back into the outer room, and leaving word
that I had remembered a little shopping which would take me again up
town, I left the building and returned to ------ Street. My emotions
were indescribable, but I preserved as sedate an appearance as possible,
and was able to account for my return in a natural enough way to Ambrose
when he opened the door for me. To brave his possible curiosity by going
up-stairs, required a still greater effort; but the thought that my
intentions were pure and my daring legitimate, sustained me in the
ordeal, and I ran, singing, up the first flight, glad that Ambrose
had no better ear for music than to be pleased with what he probably
considered an evidence of happiness on the part of his young mistress.
I was out of breath with suspense, as well as with my rapid movements,
when I reached the shut-in staircase and carefully unlocked its narrow
door. But by the time I had reached the fourth floor, and unlocked, with
the same key, the only other door that had a streak of light under it,
I had gained a certain degree of tense composure born of the desperate
nature of the occasion. The calmness with which I pushed open the door
proved this--a calmness which made the movement noiseless, which was the
reason, I suppose, why I was enabled to suppress the shriek that rose
to my lips as I saw that the room had occupants, and that my worst fears
were thus realized.
A woman was sitting, with her back to me, at a table, and before her,
with her face turned my way, was a young girl in whom, even at first
glance, I detected some likeness to myself. Was this why Mr. Allison’s
countenance expressed so much agitation when he first saw me? The next
moment this latter lifted her head and looked directly at me, but with
no change in her mobile features; at which token of blindness I almost
fell on my knees, so conclusively did it prove that I was really looking
upon Mrs. Ransome and her daughter.
The mother, who had been directing her daughter’s hands in some
needlework, felt that the latter’s attention had been diverted.
“What is it, dear?” she asked, with an indescribable mellowness of
voice, whose tone thrilled me with a fresh and passionate pity.
“I thought I heard Mr. Allison come in, but he always knocks; besides,
it is not time for him yet.” And she sighed.
That sigh went through my heart, rousing new feelings and deeper
terrors; but I had no time to indulge in them, for the mother turned
at the gasp which left my lips, and rising up, confronted me with an
amazement which left her without any ability to speak.
“Who is it, mother?” inquired the blind girl, herself rising and beaming
upon me with the sweetest of looks.
“Let me answer,” I ventured, softly. “I am Mr. Allison’s wife. I have
come to see if there is anything I can do to make your stay here more
comfortable.”
The look that passed over the mother’s face warned me to venture no
further in the daughter’s presence. Whatever that mother had
suffered, the daughter had experienced nothing but satisfied love and
companionship in these narrow precincts. Her rounded cheeks showed this,
and the indescribable atmosphere of peace and gladness which
surrounded her. As I saw this, and realized the mother’s life and the
self-restraint which had enabled her to accept the inevitable without
raising a complaint calculated to betray to the daughter that all was
not as it should be with them, I felt such a rush of awe sweep over me
that some of my fathomless emotion showed in my face; for Mrs. Ransome’s
own countenance assumed a milder look, and advancing nearer, she
pointed out a room where we could speak apart. As I moved towards it she
whispered a few words in her daughter’s ear, then she rejoined me.
“I did not know Mr. Allison was married,” were her first words.
“Madame,” said I, “I did not know we were the guests of a lady who
chooses to live in retirement.” And opening my vinaigrette, I took out
the bead and the little note which had enwrapped it. “This was my first
warning that my husband was not what I had been led to consider him,”
I murmured. “Mrs. Ransome, I am in need of almost as much pity as
yourself. I have been married just six days.”
She gave a cry, looked me wildly in the face, and then sank upon her
knees, lifting up thanks to heaven. “Twenty-four of these notes,” said
she; “have I written, and flung upward through that lofty skylight,
weighted by the beads he left wound about my darling daughter’s neck.
This one only has brought me the least response. Does he know? Is he
willing that you should come up here?”
“I have come at the risk of my life,” I quietly answered. “He does
not know that I have surprised his secret. He would kill me if he did.
Madame, I want to free you, but I want to do it without endangering
him. I am his wife, and three hours ago I loved him.”
Her face, which had turned very pale, approached mine with a look
I hardly expected to encounter there. “I understand,” she said; “I
comprehend devotion; I have felt it for my daughter. Else I could not
have survived the wrong of this incarceration, and my forcible severance
from old associations and friends. I loved _her_, and since the
knowledge of her affliction, and the still worse knowledge that she had
been made the victim of a man’s greed to an extent not often surpassed
in this world, would have made her young life wretched without securing
the least alleviation to our fate, I have kept both facts from her, and
she does not know that closed doors mean bondage any more than she knows
that unrelieved darkness means blindness. She is absolutely ignorant
that there is such a thing as light.”
“Oh, madame!” I murmured, “Oh, madame! Show a poor girl what she can do
to restore you to your rights. The door is open and you can descend; but
that means----- Oh, madame, I am filled with terror when I think what.
He may be in the hall now. He may have missed the key and returned. If
only you were out of the house!”
“My dear girl,” she quietly replied, “we will be some day. You will see
to that, I know. I do not think I could stay here, now that I have seen
another face than his. But I do not want to go now, to-day. I want to
prepare Theresa for freedom; she has lived so long quietly with me that
I dread the shock and excitement of other voices and the pressure of
city sounds upon her delicate ears. I must train her for contact with
the world. But you won’t forget me if I allow you to lock us in again?
You will come back and open the doors, and let me go down again through
my old halls into the room where my husband died; and if Mr. Allison
objects---- My dear girl, you know now that he is an unscrupulous man,
that it is my money he begrudged me, and that he has used it and made
himself a rich man. But he has one spark of grace in him. He has never
forgotten that we needed bread and clothes. He has waited on us himself,
and never have we suffered from physical want. Therefore, he may not
object now. He may feel that he has enriched himself sufficiently to
let us go free, and if I must give my oath to let the past go without
explanation, why I am ready, my dear; nothing can undo it now, and I am
grown too old to want money except for her.” “I cannot,” I murmured, “I
cannot find courage to present the subject to him so. I do not know my
husband’s mind. It is a fathomless abyss to me. Let me think of some
other way. Oh, madam! if you were out of the house, and could then
come----” Suddenly a thought struck me. “I can do it; I see the way to
do it--a way that will place you in a triumphant position, and yet save
him from suspicion. He is weary of this care. He wants to be relieved of
the dreadful secret which anchors him to this house, and makes a hell of
the very spot in which he has fixed his love. Shall we undertake to
do his for him? Can you trust me if I promise to take an immediate
impression of this key, and have one made for myself, which shall insure
my return here?”
“My dear,” she said, taking my head between her two trembling hands, “I
have never looked upon a sweeter face than my daughter’s till I looked
upon yours to-day. If you bid me hope, I will hope, and if you bid
me trust, I will trust. The remembrance of this kiss will not let you
forget.” And she embraced me in a warm and tender manner.
“I will write you,” I murmured. “Some day look for a billet under the
door. It will tell you what to do; now I must go back to my husband.”
And, with a sudden access of fear, caused by my dread of meeting his
eyes with this hidden knowledge between us, I hastened out and locked
the door behind me.
When I reached the office, I was in a fainting condition, but all my
hopes revived again when I saw the vest still hanging where I had left
it, and heard my husband’s voice singing cheerfully in the adjoining
room.