"Oh, little booke--how darst thou put thyself in press for
drede?"--CHAUCER.
We sat quietly waiting. I had drawn a chair near Desire. Phillida and
Vere were together, chairs touching, her right hand curled into his
left. Bagheera the cat had slipped into the room before the door was
closed, and lay pressed against his mistress's stout little boot. Our
small garrison was assembled, surely for as strange a defense as ever
sober moderns undertook. For my part, it was wonder enough to study that
captive who was at once so strange yet so intimately well known to me.
The Tiffany clock on the mantel shelf chimed midnight. Soon after, we
began to experience the first break in the heavy monotony of heat and
fog that had overlaid the place for three days. The temperature began to
fall. The fog did not lift. The flowered cretonne curtains hung straight
from their rods unstirred by any movement of air. But the atmosphere in
the room steadily grew colder. I saw Phillida shiver in the chill
dampness and pull closer the collar of her thin blouse. When Desire
finally spoke, we three started as if her low tones had been the clang
of a hammer.
"I have tried to judge what is best," she said, not raising her face
from its shadowing veil of hair. "I am not very wise. But it seems
better that there should be no ignorance between us. If I had been
either wise or good, I should never have come down from the convent to
draw another into danger and horror without purpose or hope of any good
ending."
"The convent?" I echoed, memory turning to the bleak building far up the
hillside. "You came from there?"
"There is a path through the woods. I am very strong and vigorous. But I
had to wait until all there were asleep before I could come. Sometimes I
could not come at all. For this house, I had my father's old key. It was
only for this little time while I am being taught. Soon I will put on a
nun's dress and cut my hair, and--and never--never leave there any
more."
Stupefied, I thought of the black loneliness of the wooded hillside
behind us. No wonder the fog was wet upon her hair! Her slight feet had
traversed that path night after night, had brought her to the door her
key fitted, had come through the dark house to the door of the room
upstairs. When she left me, she had toiled that desolate way back. For
what? Humility bent me, and bewilderment.
"But why?" Phillida gasped. "Why? Cousin Roger hunted everywhere to find
you. He would have gone anywhere you told him to see you. Didn't you
know that?"
"I never meant him to see me."
"Why not?"
"I am Desire Michell, fourth of that name; all women who brought
misfortune upon those who cared for them," she answered, her voice lower
still. "How shall I make you understand? I was brought up to know the
wrath and doom upon me, yet I myself can scarcely understand. My father
knew all, yet he fell in weakness."
"Your father?" I questioned, recalling Mrs. Hill's positive genealogy of
the Michells in which there was no place for this daughter of the line.
"He was the last of his family. When he was very young the conviction
came to him that his duty was never to marry, so our race might cease to
exist. He lived here and preached against evil. He studied the ancient
learning that he might be fitted to wrestle with sin. But in the end
horror of what was here gained upon him so that he closed the house and
went abroad to work as a missionary. There was a girl; the daughter of
the clergyman who was leaving the mission. My father--fell in love. He
forgot all his convictions and married her. He knew it was a sin, but it
was stronger than he was. She only lived one year. When I was born, she
died. He prayed that I would die, too. But--I----"
Her voice died into silence. I ventured to lean nearer and take her hand
into mine.
"Desire," I said, "why should you be a sufferer for the actions of a
woman who died over two centuries ago? What is the long dead Desire
Michell to you?"
A strange and solemn hush followed my question. The words seemed to take
a significance and importance beyond their simple meaning. The hand I
held trembled in my clasp. She answered at last, just audibly:
"You know. You said that you had read her book."
"But the book tells so little, Desire. Just such a chronicle of
superstition as may be found in a hundred old records."
She shook her head slightly.
"Not that! Bring me the book."
The book was upstairs in the room from which I had carried her half an
hour before in something very like a panic flight. Before I could
release her hand and rise, before I comprehended his intention, Vere was
out of the living room and upon the stairs. It was too late to overtake
him. The man who had been a professional skater covered the stairs in a
few easy, swinging strides. We heard his light tread on the floor
overhead, heard him stop beside the table where the book lay. Then, he
was returning. My door closed. His step sounded on the stairs again; in
a moment he was back among us, and quietly offering the volume to our
guest. His dark eyes met mine reassuringly, deprecating the thoughts I
am sure my face expressed.
"Lights burning and all serene up there," he announced.
Desire touched the book with a curious repugnance.
"I was looking for this, the first night I came here," she murmured.
"That is why I came to America after my father died. I had promised him
to destroy this record. When I heard that the house was sold to a
gentleman from New York, I came down from the convent on the hill to
find the bookcase holding the old history. I did not know anyone was
here, that night, until you touched my hair."
I remembered the bookcase near the bed, where I stood my candle and
matches. Unaware, I had prevented her finding the thing she sought, and
so forced her to return. Afterward, the house had been full of workmen
making alterations and improvements, until later still Phillida had
transferred the bookcase and its contents to her sewing room. If I had
not taken the whim to sleep in the old house on the night of my
purchase, or if I had chosen another room, the existence of Desire
Michell might never have been known to me.
Would the creature from the Barrier have appeared to me, if I had not
known her?
She was drawing something from behind the portrait of the first Desire
Michell; a thin, small book that had lain concealed between the cover of
the larger volume and the page bearing the woodcut, where a sort of
pocket was formed that had escaped our notice. Laid upon the table, the
little book rolled away from the girl's fingers and lay curled upon
itself in the lamplight. The limp morocco cover was spotted with mildew
and half-revealed pages of close, fine writing blotched in places with
rusty stains. It gave out an odor of mould and age in an atmosphere made
sweet by Desire's presence.
Phillida, who had been silent even when Vere left her to go upstairs,
shrank away from the book on the table. She darted a glance over her
shoulder at the curtained windows behind her.
"Drawls, I cannot help what everybody thinks of me," she said
plaintively. "I am cold. The fire is ready laid in the grate. Will you
put a match to it, please?"
No one smiled at the request. Her husband uttered some soothing phrase
of compliance. We all looked on while the flame caught and began to
creep up among the apple-logs. Bagheera rose and changed his position to
one before the hearth. When Vere stood erect, Desire leaned toward him.
"Will you read, aloud, sir?" she asked of him, and made a gesture toward
the morocco book.
She surprised us all by that choice. I was unreasoning enough to feel
slighted, although the task was one for which I felt a strong dislike. I
fancied Vere liked the idea no better, from his expression. However, he
offered no demur, but sat down at the table and began to flatten the
warped pages that perversely sprang back and clung about his fingers.
Desire slowly turned her lovely eyes to me, eyes that looked by gift of
nature as if their long corners had been brushed with kohl. She said
nothing, yet somehow conveyed her meaning and intent. I understood that
she did not wish to hear me read those pages; that it was painful to her
that they should be read at all.
Vere was ready. He glanced around our circle, then began with the simple
directness that gave him a dignity peculiarly his own.
"'Mistress Desire Michell, her booke, Beginning at the nineteenth year
of her Age,'" he read, in his leisurely voice.
The living Desire Michell and I were regarding one another. I smiled at
the quaint wording, but she shuddered, and put her hands across her
eyes.
Yet there was nothing in those first pages except a girl's chronicle of
village life. This book evidently carried on a diary kept from early
childhood; a diary written out of loneliness. Apparently the bare
colonial life pressed heavily upon the writer; who, having no companions
of the intellect, turned to this record of her own mind as a prisoner
might talk to his reflection in a mirror rather than go mad from sheer
silence. Discontent and restlessness beat through the lines like
fluttering wings. She wrote of her own beauty with a cool appraisal
oddly removed from vanity, almost with resentment of a possession she
could not use.
"Like a man who finds treasure in a desert isle, I am rich in coin that
I may not spend," she wrote. "I stand before my mirror and take a tress
of my hair in either hand; I spread wide my arms full reach, yet I
cannot touch the end of those tresses. Nor can my two hands clasp the
bulk of them. There have been other women who had such hair, who were of
body straight and white, and had the eyes--but I cannot read that they
stayed poor and obscure."
There followed some quotations from the classics of which I was able to
give but vague translations when Vere passed the book to me, both
because my knowledge was scanty and because of their daring
unconventionality. There were allusions, too, to ladies of later history
who had found fairness a broad staircase for ambition to mount. Of the
writer's learning, there could be no question; a learning amazing in one
so young and so situated. The source of this became apparent. Her father
was consumed with the passion of scholarship, and the girl's hungry mind
fed in the pastures where he led the way.
Here crept into view an anomaly of character. The austere Puritan
divine, whose life was open and blank, bare and cold as a winter field,
cherished a secret dissipation of the mind. He labored upon a book on
the errors of magic. So laboring, he became snared by the thing he
denounced. He believed in the hidden lore while he condemned it. Deeper
and deeper into forbidden knowledge his eagerness for research led him.
Unsanctioned by any church were the books Dr. Michell starved his body
to buy from Jews or other furtive dealers in unusual wares. The titles
in his library comprehended the names of more charlatans than bishops.
He could define the distinctions between necromancy, sorcery, and magic.
The marvelous calculations of the Pythagoreans engaged him, and the lost
mysteries of the Cabiri.
From such studies he would arise on the Sabbath to preach sermons that
held his dull flock agape. Bitter draughts of salvation he poured for
their spiritual drinking. He scarcely saw how any man might escape
hell-fire, all being so vile. Against witchcraft and tampering with
Satan's agents he was eloquent. He rode sixty miles in midwinter to see
a Quaker whipped and a woman hung who had been convicted as a witch.
Of all this, his daughter wrote with an elfin mockery. Her brilliant eye
of youth saw through the inconsistency of the beliefs he strove to
reconcile. She learned his lore, read his books, and discarded his
doctrine.
"I study with him, but I think alone," she set down her independence.
Without his knowledge, she proceeded to actual experiment with rude
crucible and alembic in her own chamber. She essayed some age-old
recipes of blended herbs and ingredients within her reach, handled at
certain hours of the night and phases of the moon. All were innocent
enough, it seemed. She cured a beloved old dog of rheumatism and partial
blindness. She discovered an exquisite perfume which she named Rose of
Jerusalem.
But the experiments were not fortunate, she made obscure complaint. The
dog, cured, lived only a few weeks. The perfume, in which she revelled
with a fierce, long-denied appetite, steeping her rich hair in it and
her severely dull garments, awoke many whispers in a community where
sweet odors were unknown and disapproved. She alluded, with a mingling
of freezing scorn and triumph, to the young men who followed after
her--"seeking a wife who would be at their hearth as fatal a guest as
that fair woman sent by an enemy to Alexander the Great, whose honey
breath was deadly poison to who so kissed there."
Into this situation rode the fine gentleman from the colonial world of
fashion who was to fix the fate of Desire Michell and his own.
From this point on, the diary was a record of the same story as the
"History of Ye foule Witch, Desire Michell."
The love affair that followed Sir Austin's visit to the clergyman's
house leaped hot and instant as flame from oil and fire brought
together. The girl was parched with thirst for life, yet despised all
around her. The man was dazzled by a beauty and mentality foreign as a
bird of paradise found nested in Connecticut snow. A mad, wild passion
linked them that was more than half a duel. For Sir Austin was already
betrothed. Honor might not have chained him for long, but his need of
his betrothed's fortune proved more enduring. He was a man bred to
wealth, who did not possess it. He offered Desire Michell his left hand.
He was turned out of her father's house with a red weal struck across
his face like a brand.
Of course he returned. The arrow was firmly fixed. He asked her to marry
him, and was refused with savage contempt. He would not take the
refusal. Her heart and ambition were hidden traitors to his cause. In
the end she surrendered and the marriage day was set.
Sir Austin rode away to set his house in order, while Desire turned from
alchemy to make her wedding garments.
The entries during this interval were sweetly gentle and feminine. Her
Rose of Jerusalem fragrance was all her own, and was kept so, but she
made less-rare essences and sold them through a pedlar in order to buy
fine linen and brocade for a trousseau not designed to be worn in a
Puritan village. She was happy and at rest in expectation.
On her wedding day the destroying news fell. Sir Austin hid a weak
spirit within a strong and handsome body. Away from Desire's glamour,
back in New York, he had not broken his engagement to the heiress.
Instead, he had married her on the day arranged before he met the
clergyman's daughter.
There was never again a connected record in the diary. Pages were torn
out in places, entries were broken off, half-made. But the story Vere's
slow, steady voice conveyed to us was the one we knew; the one my Desire
had told to me the first night I slept in this house. The half-mad girl
turned to her father's deadly books. Sir Austin died as his waxen image
dissolved before the fire, where the girl sat watching with merciless
hate. He died, raving and frothing, on her door-sill. She never saw him
after the day he rode away to prepare for their marriage. She set open
her window that she might hear his progress to that hard death, but
never deigned to turn her glance upon him.
The clergyman was dead, now; of shame, or perhaps of terror at the child
he had reared. The girl was alone.
The diary grew wilder, with gaps of weeks where there were no entries.
More frequently, pages were missing and paragraphs obliterated by the
reddish blotches like rust or blood. There were accounts of weird,
half-told experiments ranging through the three degrees of magic set
forth by Talmud and Cabala. She wrote of legions of kingdoms between
earth and heaven, and the twelve unearthly worlds of Plato. She alluded
to a Barrier between men and other orders of beings, beyond which dwelt
Those whom the magicians of old glimpsed after long toil and
incantation.
"Those of whom Vertabied, the Armenian, says: '_Their orders differ from
one another in situation and degree of glory, just as there are
different ranks among men, though they are all of one nature._' They
cannot cross nor overthrow this Wall, nor can man alone; but if they and
man join together----One there beyond whispers to me of power, splendor,
victory----"
Days later, there was entered a passage of mad triumph and terror. The
Barrier was broken through. Out of the breach issued the One whom she
had invited to her silver lamps; colossal, formless, whose approach
froze blood and spirit. Eyes of unspeakable meaning glared across the
dark, whispers unbearable to humanity beat upon her intelligence and
named her comrade.
Now as Vere read this, I felt again that quiver of the house or air he
had likened to an earth shock and held responsible for the fall of the
willow tree that had destroyed our hope of escape by automobile. I
looked at my companions and saw no evidence of anyone having noticed
what I had seemed to feel. Vere indeed was pale; while Phillida, who sat
beside him, was highly flushed with excitement and wonder as she
listened. Desire had not stirred in her chair, except to bend her head
so her face was shaded by the loosened richness of her hair. Seeing them
so undisturbed, I kept silence. A storm might be approaching, but I made
no pretense to myself of believing that shock either thunder or
earthquake.
The tone of the diary altered rapidly. At first, the unknown from beyond
the wall appalled the woman only by its unhuman strangeness, the
repugnance of flesh and blood for its loathly neighborhood. Fear
emanated from its presence, seen yet unseen, a blackness moving in the
black of night when it visited her. Yet she had courage to endure those
awful colloquies. She listened. She strove by the spell and incantation
to subdue This to her service, as the demon Orthone served the Lord of
Corasse, as Paracelsus was served by his Familiar, or Gyges by the
spirit of his ring.
Alas for the sorceress, misguided by legend and fantasy! She had evoked
no phantom, but a fact actual as nature always is even if nature is not
humanly understood. The Thing was real.
The awe of the magician became the stricken panic of the woman. She had
unloosed what she could not bind. She had called a servant, and gained a
master. Gone forever were the dreams of power and splendor and triumph.
Now she learned that only pure magic can discharge the spirits it has
summoned, nor could a murderess attain that lofty art.
We were given a glimpse of a frantic girl crouched in the useless
pentagram traced on the floor for her protection, covering her beauty
with the cloak of her hair against the eyes that burned upon her between
the overturned silver lamps.
A deepening horror gathered about the house of Mistress Desire Michell.
The old dame who had been the girl's nurse and caretaker fled the place
and fell into mumbling dotage in a night. No child would come near the
garden, though fruit and nuts rotted away where they dropped from
overripeness. No neighbor crossed the doorstep where Sir Austin had
died. She lived in utter solitude by day. By night she waged hideous
battle against her Visitor; using woman's cunning, essaying every
expedient and art her books suggested to her desperate need.
With each conflict, her strength and resource waned, while That which
she held at bay knew no weariness. Time was not, for it, nor change of
purpose.
"I faint, I fail!" she wrote. "The Sea of Dread breaks about my feet. It
is midnight. The pentagram fades from the floor--the nine lamps die--the
breath of the One at the casement is upon me----"
Vere stopped.
"A handful of pages have been torn out here," he stated. "The next entry
that I can read is in the middle of a stained page, and must be
considerably later on."
Phillida made an odd little noise like a whimper, clutching at his
sleeve. The third shock for which I had been waiting shuddered through
the house, this time distinctly enough for all to feel. A gust of wind
went through the wet trees outside like a gasp.
"Ethan, what was that?" she stammered. "Oh, I'm afraid! Cousin
Roger----?"
I had no voice to answer her. In my ears was the rush and surge of that
sea whose waters had gripped me in the past night. I felt the icy
death-tide hiss around me in its first returning wave, rise to my knee's
height, then sink away down its unearthly beach. What I had dimly known
all day, underlying Vere's sturdy cheerfulness and our plans and
efforts, was the truth. Through those intervening hours of daylight I
had remained my enemy's prisoner, bound on that shore we both knew well,
until It pleased or had power to return and finish with me. No doubt It
was governed by laws, as we are.
As before, the cold struck a paralysis across my senses. Vere's
reassurance sounded faint and distant.
"The thunder is getting closer," he said. "That was a storm wind, all
right! Would you rather go upstairs and lie down, and not hear any more
of this stuff tonight?"
"No! Oh, no! I could not bear to be alone," she refused. "Just, just go
on, dear. Of course it is the coming storm that makes the room so cold."
He put his left arm around her as she nestled against him. His right
hand held the diary flattened on the table under the light.
"The next entry is just one line in the middle of a page where
everything else is blotted out," Vere repeated. "It reads: 'The child is
a week old today.'"
The wave crashed foaming in tumult up the strand, flowing higher,
drenching me in cold sharp as fire. The tide rose faster tonight. The
silence that held the others dumb before the significance of that last
sentence covered my silence from notice. Desire's face was quite hidden;
lamplight and firelight wavered and gleamed across her bent head. I
wanted to arise and go to her, to take her hands and tell her to have
patience and courage. But when this wave ebbed, my strength drained away
with the receding water. Moreover, the darkness curdled and moved beyond
the window opposite me. The curtains hung between were no bar to my
vision, as the light and presence of my companions were no bar to the
Thing that kept rendezvous with me. Since last night, we were nearer to
one another.
A breath of chill foulness crept across the pungent odor of the burning
apple-log in the fireplace. A whisper spoke to my intelligence.
"Man conquered by me, fall down before me. Beg my forbearance. Beg life
of me--and take the gift!"
"No," my thought answered Its.
"You die, Man."
"All men die."
"Not as they die who are mine."
"I am not yours. You kill me, as a wild beast might. But I am not yours;
not dying nor dead am I yours."
"Would you not live, pygmy?"
"Not as your pensioner."
The logs on the hearth crackled and sank down with a soft rustle, burned
through to a core of glowing red. Phillida spoke with a hushed urgency,
drawing still closer to her husband, so that her forehead rested against
his shoulder.
"Go on, Ethan. Finish and let us be done."
Vere bent his head above the book on the table to obey her. Across the
dark I suddenly saw the Eyes glare in upon him.
"On the next page, the writing begins again," he said. "It says:
"'I am offered the kingdoms of earth. But I crave that kingdom of myself
which I cast away. The child is sent to England. The circle is drawn.
The names are traced and the lamps filled. Tonight I make the last
essay. There remains untried one mighty spell. This Mystery----'"
A clap of thunder right over the house overwhelmed the reader's voice.
Phillida screamed as a violent wind volleyed through the place with a
crashing of doors and shutters, upstairs and down. The diary was ripped
from beneath Vere's hand and hurled straight to the center of that nest
of fire formed by the settling of the logs. A long tongue of flame
leaped high in the chimney as the spread leaves of the book caught and
flared, fanned by wind and draft. Vere sprang up, but Phillida's
clinging arms delayed him. When he reached the fire-tongs there was
nothing to rescue except a charring mass half-way toward ashes.
He turned toward me, perhaps at last surprised by my immobility.
"I am sorry, Mr. Locke," he apologized.
Desire had started up with the others when the sudden uproar of the
storm burst upon them. Now she cried out, breaking Vere's excuse of the
loss. Her small face blanched, she ran a few steps toward me.
"It has come! He will die--he is dying. Look, look!"