"They say--
What say they?
Let thame say!"
--OLD SCOTTISH INSCRIPTION.
After luncheon, I drove over to the village with Phillida, who had some
housewifely orders to give at the shops. On second thoughts, Vere and I
had agreed to tell her nothing about the venture we planned for tonight.
We had satisfied her by the assurance that I meant to start for New York
before the dangerous hours after midnight. Reassured, she regained her
usual spirits with the buoyancy of her few years and healthy nerves. I
gathered her secret belief was that no "ghost" would dare face Ethan.
Which may have been quite true!
On our way home, we stopped at the shop of Mrs. Hill to add to our
supply of eggs, Phillida's hens having unaccountably failed to supply
their quota. I went in, leaving my companion in the car.
No one else was in the shop. An impulse prompted me to put a question to
the little woman whose life had been spent in this neighborhood.
"Mrs. Hill, did you ever hear of anyone named Desire Michell?" I asked.
She stopped counting eggs and blinked up at me. Her sallow, wrinkled
face lightened with curiosity and an absurd primness.
"Now, Mr. Locke! I'd like to know where a young city feller like you got
that old story from?"
"I have not got it. I want you to tell it to me. She was a witch?"
"She was a hussy," said Mrs. Hill severely. "I was a little girl when
she ran away from her father's respectable house, fifty-odd years ago.
The disgrace killed him, being a clergyman. An' the gossip that came
back, later, an' pictures of her in such dresses! Dear! Dear! The wicked
certainly have opportunities."
"Fifty years ago!" I echoed, dazed by this intrusion of a third Desire
Michell.
"Ah! Nearly seventy she'd be if she was alive today; which she ain't.
Why, she changed her name to one fancier that you might have heard talk
of? She was----"
The name she gave me I shall not set down. It is enough to say it was
that of a super-woman whose beauty, genius and absolute lack of
conscience set Europe ablaze for a while. A torch of womanhood, quenched
at the highest-burning hour of her career by a sudden and violent death.
"There was an older house once, on your place," she added pensively.
"Did you know that? It stood in the hollow where your lake is now.
Two--three hundred years old, folks say it was. One night it burned down
in a big thunderstorm. The Michells then living had your house built
over by the orchard, then, an' had a dam built across so as to cover up
the old site with water. All the Michells lived there till the last one
went missionary abroad an' died in foreign parts. I mean the hussy's
brother. He took up his father's work, feelin' a strong call. He was
only a young boy when his sister went off, but he felt it dreadful. He
was a hard man on the sinner. Preached hell and damnation all his days,
he did. Lean over the pulpit, he would, his eyes flamin' fire an' his
tongue shrivellin' folks in their pews, I can tell you!"
"He left children?" I asked.
"No, sir! Rev'rund never married. He felt women a snare. Land, not much
snarin' with what farm women get to wear around here! I've kind of
thought of one of those blue foulard silks with white spots into it
since before I married Hill, but never came any nearer than pricin' it
an' bringin' home a sample. He was death on sweet odors an' soft
raiment. Only sweet odors I ever get are the ten-cent bottles Hill makes
the pedlar throw in when we trade. I do fancy _Jockey Club_ for special
times, an' I've got a reasonable hope of salvation, too. I notice your
cousin, Mrs. Vere, has scent on her handkerchief week days as well as
when she's goin' somewhere, so I guess you don't hold with the Rev'rund
Michell in New York?"
I laughed with her as I took up the bag of eggs.
"Did the runaway sister leave any children?" I queried.
"Not a Michell alive anywhere," she asserted positively. "Dead, all
dead! The Rev'rund was buried at his mission in some outlandish place.
An' if those heathen women dress like I've seen in the movin' picture
palace in the village, I don't know how he makes out to rest with them
flauntin' past his grave!"
I went thoughtfully out to the car. Indeed, I drove home in such
abstraction that Phillida reproved me.
"'The cat has stolen your tongue,'" she teased. "Or did Mrs. Hill vamp
you and make roast meat of your heart with her eyes?"
"Phil, do you put scent on your handkerchief week days as well as
Sundays?" I shook off thought to inquire.
"No; I keep sachet in my handkerchief box. Why?"
"Next time you are in town, will you buy a blue silk foulard dress with
white spots in it and the largest bottle of Jockey Club Extract on sale,
and give them to Mrs. Hill for a Christmas present? I'll give you a
blank check."
"Cousin Roger? Why?"
So I told her why. But I did not tell her the story of the second Desire
Michell; nor of the original house that stood in the hollow now filled
by our lake.
Why had a peculiar horror crept through me when Mrs. Hill told me what
ruins that water covered? Why had I remembered the inexplicable,
repugnant sound that on several occasions had preceded the coming of the
Monster; a sound like the smack of huge lips, or some body withdrawn
from thick slime? Was entrance into human air open to the alien Thing
only through the ruins of the house where It had first been called by
the sorceress of long ago?
We were walking across from the garage, after putting away the car, when
a recollection flashed upon me. The Metropolitan Museum, in New York,
held a portrait by a famous French artist of that incendiary beauty
whose name it now appeared cloaked the identity of Desire Michell,
daughter and sister of New England clergymen. I had seen the portrait.
And piled in an intricate magnificence of curls, puffs and coils about
the haughty little head of the lady, was her gold-bronze hair; the color
of the braid upstairs in my chiffonier drawer.
I went up to my room and opened the work of Master Abimelech
Fetherstone. Yes, there was likeness between the poor, coarse woodcut
and the French portrait. The long, dark eyes with their expression of
blended drowsiness and watchfulness were too individual to have escaped
either record. Moreover, both pictures resembled that face of ivory and
dusk I had glimpsed in the ray of the electric torch, all clouded and
surrounded by swirls of gray vapor shot with gold.
Who and what was the girl Desire Michell whom I had come to love through
a more profound darkness than that of the sight?
It seemed wisest to keep busy for the rest of the afternoon. I sorted my
music. There was the score of a musical comedy so nearly completed that
it could be sent to those who waited for it. Vere would attend to that,
if tonight made it necessary. I reflected with disappointment that the
first rehearsals would begin in a couple of weeks, and I had looked
forward to this production with especial interest. There was the
symphony, still unfinished, that I had hoped might be more enduring than
popular music. If I was to be less enduring than either, we must go
glimmering on our ways. If I snatched Desire out of her path into mine,
she and I would see all those things together.
I finished at last, and set my room in order. There was a fire laid
ready for lighting in my hearth, a mere artistic flourish in such
weather. I kindled it, and put in the flames three of the volumes from
the ancient bookcase. The others were oddities in occult science. Those
three were vile and poisonous. No doubt other copies exist, but at least
I refused to be guilty of leaving these to wreak their mischief in
Phillida's household. They burned quietly enough, and meekly fell to
ashes under my poker.
Our round dinner-table was cheerful as usual, with yellow-shaded candles
flanking a bowl of yellow and scarlet nasturtiums. But I found its
mistress suffering from a nervous headache.
"It is only the fog," she answered our sympathy. "It came on with the
evening, somehow. Never mind me. Cristina has made a cream-of-lettuce
bisque, and she will never forgive us if we do not eat every bit. Yes,
Ethan; of course I'll take mine. I only wish every bush and tree would
not drip, drip like a horrid kind of clock ticking; and the foghorns
over at the lighthouses _moo_ regularly every half minute. And I never
heard the waterfall over the dam so loud!"
"We've had a wet summer," Vere observed, soothingly tranquil as ever.
"The lake and creek are full. There is more water going over to make a
noise."
"Please do not be so frightfully sensible, Drawls. You know I mean a
different loudness. It sort of rises up and swims all over one, then
dies away."
"Even a fountain will seem to do that if a wind shifts the spray," I
suggested.
"Yes, Cousin Roger. But there is no wind tonight."
A discomfort stirred me at the simple reminder. I fancied Vere was
similarly affected. If something moved under the water----?
We changed the conversation to a pergola planned for building next
spring, that was to be overrun by grapevines and honeysuckle.
"The grapes shall hang through like an Italian picture," Phillida
anticipated, headache forgotten in her enthusiasm. She shook her hair
about her pink cheeks, leaning over to outline a pergola with four
spoons. "Here in the middle we must have a birdbath. Or no! The birds
might peck the grapes. We could have one of those big silver-colored
looking-balls on a pedestal to reflect wee views of the garden and lake
and sky, with people moving no bigger than dolls. Imagine a reflection
of Ethan like a Lilliputian _so_ high!"
So I was able to leave her eagerly hunting catalogues of garden
ornaments in her sewing-room, when the time came for me to keep my
rendezvous with Death or the lady. In spite of my warning gesture, Vere
followed me into the hall. His dark face was distressed and anxious.
"Let me go with you," he urged.
"No, thanks. Stay with Phil, and keep her too busy to suspect where I
am."
"If I'm doing wrong to let you go," he began.
"You cannot stop me. It is still too early for danger, I think. If you
like, you can stroll out on the lawn from time to time and look up at my
windows. As long as the lamps are lighted in the room, I am all right.
Nothing is happening."
"Your lamps were all three lighted when I found you last night," he
said.
The darkness had been only for my eyes, then? Certainly I had seemed to
see light withdrawn from the lamps. I mastered a tremor of the nerves,
and covered it by stroking Bagheera, who sat on a hall chair making an
after-dinner toilet with tongue and paw.
"Well, take care of Phil," I repeated, evading argument.
He detained me.
"The young lady might not come if there were two people, Mr. Locke. I
can see that! But I'll go instead. I guess I'd be safer than you, with
the--the----You know what I mean! It would be the first time for me. And
if I sat waiting in the dark, the lady couldn't tell you were not there.
Of course I'd bring her right to you."
No one could appreciate the courage of that offer so well as we who had
both felt the intolerable horror of the nearness of the Thing whose
nature was beyond our nature to endure.
"She would come to no one except me," I refused. "But, thank you. And
Vere, if what you have said about my feeling toward Phillida's husband
was true once, it is true no longer."
His clasp was still warm on my hand when I went into my room and
switched on the lights. Soft and colorful, the haunted room sprang into
view. The writing-table and piano gleamed bare without their usual
burdens of scattered papers and music, removed that afternoon. For lack
of familiar occupation, when I sat down in my favorite place, I took up
the gold pomander and fell to studying the intricate designs worked in
the metal.
"_Containing a rare herb of Jerusalem called Lady's Rose, resembling
spikenard, with vervain, and cedar, and secret simples----_"
"_Vervain, which is powerful against evil spirits----_"
The strange fragrance, heady as the bouquet of rich wine, never cloying,
exquisite, might well have seemed magical to the dry Puritans, I mused.
It should stay by me tonight, like a promise of her coming.
After I had sat there a while, I turned out the lights.