"Life hath its term, the assembly is dispersed,
And we have not described Thee from the first."
--GULISTAN.
I have come to the end of this narrative and with the end, I come to
what people of practical mind may call its explanation. Of the four of
us who were joined in living through the events of that summer, my wife
and I and Ethan Vere agree in one belief, while Phillida holds the
opinion of her father, the Professor. I think Bagheera, the cat, might
be added to our side also, if his testimony was available.
The press reports of the cloudburst and flood brought the Professor up
to Connecticut to verify with his own eyes his daughter's safety. Aunt
Caroline did not come with him, but I may here set down that she did
come later. They found their son-in-law by no means what their
forebodings menaced, so reconciled themselves at last to the marriage;
to Phillida's abiding joy.
But first the little Professor arrived alone, three days after the
storm. Characteristically, he had sent no warning of his coming, so no
one met him at the railway station. He arrived in one of those curious
products of a country livery stable known as a rig, driven by a local
reprobate whom no prohibition could sober.
I shall never forget the incredulous rapture with which Phillida
welcomed him, nor the pride with which she presented Vere.
The damages to the place were already being repaired, although weeks of
work would be needed to restore a condition of order and make the
changes we planned. The automobile had been disentangled from the
wreckage of garage and willow tree and towed away to receive expert
attention. We were awaiting the arrival of the new car I had ordered for
the honeymoon tour Desire and I were soon to take. Phillida had declared
two weeks shopping a necessary preliminary to the wedding of a bride who
was to live in New York "and meet everybody." Nor would I have shortened
the pretty orgy into which the two girls entered, transforming my
sorceress into a lady of the hour; happiness seeming to me rather to be
savored than gulped.
Needless to say, there was no more talk of the convent whose iron gates
were to have closed between the last Desire Michell and the world. She
had been directed there by the priest whose island mission was near her
father's. In her solitude and ignorance of life, the sisterhood seemed
to offer a refuge in which to keep her promise to her father. But she
had to learn the principles of the Church she was about to adopt, and
during that period of delay I had come to the old house.
On the second day of his visit, we told all the story to the Professor.
We could not have told Aunt Caroline, but we told him.
"It is perfectly simple," he pronounced at the end. "Interesting, even
unique in points, but simple of explanation."
"And what may be the explanation?" I inquired with scepticism.
"Marsh gas," he replied triumphantly. "Have none of you young people
ever considered the singular emanations from swamps and marshes where
rotting vegetation underlies shallow water? Phillida, I am astonished
that you did not enlighten your companions on this point. You, at least,
have been carefully educated, not in the light froth of modern music and
art, but in the rudiments of science. I do not intend to wound your
feelings, Roger!"
"I am not wounded, sir," I retorted. "Just incredulous!"
"Ah?" said the Professor, with the bland superiority of his tribe.
"Well, well! Yet even you know something of the evils attending people
who live in low, swampy areas; malaria, ague, fevers. In the tropics,
these take the form of virulent maladies that sweep a man from earth in
a few hours. Your lake _was_ haunted, so was the house that once stood
in its basin, as some vague instinct strove to warn the generations of
Michells as well as you. Haunted by emanations of some powerful form of
marsh gas given forth more plentifully at night, which lowered the heart
action and impeded the breathing of one drawing the poison into his
lungs through hours of sleep, producing--nightmare. Science has by no
means analyzed all the possibilities of such phenomena."
"Nightmare!" I cried. "Do you mean to account by nightmare for the wide
and repeated experiences that twice brought me to the verge of death?
And Desire? What of her knowledge of that same nightmare? What of the
legend of her family so exactly coinciding with all I felt? And why did
not Phillida and Ethan suffer the nightmare with me?"
He held up a lean hand.
"Gently, gently, Roger! Consider that of all the household you alone
slept in the side of the house toward the lake. I know that you always
have your windows open day and night--a habit that used to cause great
annoyance to your Aunt Caroline when you were a boy. Thus you were
exposed to the full effect of the water gases. That you did not feel the
effects every night I attribute to differences in the wind, that from
some directions would blow the fumes away from the house, thus relieving
you. I gather from your account that the phenomena were most pronounced
in close, foggy weather, when the poisonous air was atmospherically held
down to the earth. You have spoken of miasmic mists that hung below the
level of the tree-tops. When Mr. Vere experienced a similar unease and
depression, he was on the shore of the lake at dawn after precisely such
a close, foggy night as I have described as most dangerous. The symptoms
confirm this theory. You say you awakened on each occasion with a sense
of suffocation. Your heart labored, your limbs were cold and mind
unnaturally depressed, owing to slow circulation of the blood. You were
a man asphyxiated. After each attack you were more sensitive to the
next, as a malaria patient grows worse if he remains in the swamp
districts. It is remarkable that you did not guess the truth from the
smell of decaying vegetation and stagnant damp which you admit
accompanied the seizures! However, you did not; and in your condition
the last three days of continuous fog brought on two attacks that nearly
proved fatal. Now as to the character of your hallucinations, and their
agreement with the young lady's ideas. That is a trifle more involved
discussion, yet simple, simple!"
He put the tips of his fingers together and surveyed us with the benign
condescension of one instructing a class of small children.
"The first night that you passed in your newly purchased house, Roger,
you accidentally encountered Miss Michell; or she did you!" He smiled
humorously. "While your feelings were excited by the unusual episode,
the strange surroundings and the dark, she related to you a wild legend
of witchcraft and monsters. Later, when you suffered your first attack
of marsh-gas poisoning, your consequent hallucination took form from the
story you had just heard. Later conversations with your mysterious lady
fixed the idea into an obsession. Recurrent dreams are a common
phenomenon even in healthy persons. In this case, no doubt the exact
repetition of the physical sensations of miasmic poisoning tended to
reproduce in your mind the same sequence of ideas or semi-delirious
imaginings. These were of course varied or distorted somewhat on each
occasion, influenced by what you had been hearing or reading in advance
of them. This mental condition became more and more confirmed as you
steeped yourself more deeply in legendary lore and also--pardon me--in
the morbid fancies of the young lady; whose ghostly visits in the dark
and whose increasing interest for you put a further bias upon your
thoughts."
"What were the noises I heard from the lake, and the shocks we all
felt?" I demanded.
He nodded amiably toward Vere.
"Mr. Vere has mentioned the large bubbles which formed and burst on the
surface of the lake. That is a common manifestation of ordinary marsh
gas. Possibly the singular and unknown emanation that took place at
night came to the surface in the form of a bubble or bubbles huge enough
to produce in bursting the smacking sound of which you speak. But I am
inclined to another theory, after a walk I took about your place this
morning. When you put up your cement dam instead of the old log affair
that held back only a part of the stream, you made a greater depth and
bulk of water in the swamp basin than it has contained these many years,
if ever. As a result, I believe the sloping mud basin began to slip
toward the dam. Oh, very gradually! Probably not stirring for weeks at a
time. Just a yielding here, a parting there, until the cloudburst
precipitated the disaster. You had, my dear Roger, a miniature
landslide, which would account for sounds of shifting mud and water in
your lake, and for the shocks or trembling of your house when the earth
movements occurred."
The rest of us regarded one another. I think Vere might have spoken, if
he had not been unwilling to mar Phillida's contentment by any
appearance of dispute with her father.
"It is very cleverly worked out, sir," I conceded. "But how do you
explain that Desire knew what I experienced with the Thing from the
Barrier, if my experiences were merely delirious dreams?"
"I have not yet understood that she did know," said the Professor dryly.
"She put the suggestions into your head; innocently, of course. When you
afterward compared notes and found they agreed, you cried 'miraculous'!
How is that, Miss Michell? Did you actually know what Roger experienced
in these excursions before he told you of them?"
Desire gazed at him with her meditative eyes, so darkly lovely, yet
never quite to lose their individual difference from any other lovely
eyes I have ever seen. The eyes, I thought then and still think, of one
who has seen more, or at least seen into farther spaces, than most of
treadmill-trotting humanity. She wore one of the new frocks for which
Phillida and she had already made a flying trip to town; a most
sophisticated frock from Fifth Avenue, with frivolous French shoes to
correspond. Her hair of a Lorelei was demurely coiled and wound about
her little head. Yet some indescribable atmosphere closed her delicately
around, an impalpable wall between her and the commonplace. Even the
desiccated, material Professor was aware of this influence and took off
his spectacles uneasily, wiped them and put them on again to contemplate
her.
"I am not sure," she answered him with careful candor. "I believe that I
could always tell when the Dark One had been with him. I could feel
that, here," she touched her breast. "I knew what its visits were like,
because I was brought up to know by my father and was told the history
of the three Desire Michells. My father had studied deeply and taught
me--I shall not tell anyone all he taught me! I do not want to think of
those things. Some of them I have told to Roger. Some of them are quite
harmless and pleasant, like the secret formula for making the Rose of
Jerusalem perfume; which has virtues not common, as Roger can say who
has felt it revive him from faintness. But there are places into which
we should not thrust ourselves. It is like--like suicide. One's mind
must be perverted before certain things can be done. And that is the
true sin--to debase one's soul. All men discover and learn of science
and the universe by honest duty and effort is good, is lofty and leads
up. Nothing is forbidden to us. But if we turn aside to the low door
which only opens to crime and evil purpose, we step outside. I am
unskilful; I do not express myself well."
"Very well, young lady," the Professor condescended. "Unfortunately,
your theories are wild mysticism. The veritable fiend that has plagued
the house of Michell is the mischievous habit of rearing each generation
from childhood to a belief in doom and witchcraft. A child will believe
anything it is told. Why not, when all things are still equally
wonderful to it? Let me point out that your theory also contradicts
itself, since Roger certainly did not enter upon any path of crime, yet
he met your unearthly monster."
"Because he chose to link his fate with mine, who am linked by heredity
with the Dweller at the Frontier," she said earnestly. "He was in the
position of one who enters the lair of a wild beast to bring out a
victim who is trapped there. It may cost that rescuer his life. Roger
nearly paid his life. But he mastered It and took me away from It,
because he was not afraid and not seeking his own good. I never imagined
anyone so brave and strong and unselfish as Roger. I suppose it is
because he thinks of others instead of himself, which gives the
strongest kind of strength."
"The Thing nearly had me, though," I hastily intervened to spare my own
modesty. "And It did have me worse than afraid!"
"I seem to be arguing against an impenetrable obstinacy," snapped the
Professor. "Do you, Roger, who were educated under my own eye, in my
house, have the effrontery to tell me that you believe Miss Michell is
descended from the union of an evil spirit and a human being; as the
Eastern legends claim for Saladin the Great?"
"Your own theory, sir, being----?" I evaded.
"There is no theory about the matter," he declared. "Excuse me, Miss
Michell! The child was undoubtedly Sir Austin's son. Which accounts for
the madness of the first Desire Michell."
We were all silent for a while. Whatever thoughts each held remained
unvoiced.
"Come, Phillida, you take my sane point of view, I hope?" the Professor
finally challenged his daughter, with a glance of scorn and compassion
at the rest of our group. "You observe that I have explained every point
raised, Miss Michell's testimony being of the vaguest?"
"Yes, Papa," Phillida agreed hesitatingly. "I do believe you have solved
the whole problem. Only, if Cousin Roger was suffering from marsh-gas
poisoning last night when he seemed to be dying, I do not quite see why
Ethan's prayer should have cured him."
The Professor was momentarily posed. He looked disconcerted, took off
his glasses and put them on again, and at length muttered something
about storm-wind dissipating the miasma in the air and events being mere
coincidence.
* * * * *
The house was never again visited by the Dark Presence. Phantom or
fancy, the horror was gone as if it never had brooded about the place.
Desire Locke is a fatal companion only to my heart.
But whether all this is so because the lake is drained and the Shetland
pony of a young Vere browses over the green pasture that was once a
miasmic swamp; or whether it is so for more subtle, wilder reasons, no
one can say. I, recalling that colossal Barrier I visioned as closed and
a certain cleaving arrow of light, must at least call the coincidence
amazing.
As I have said, my wife and I, Ethan Vere and Bagheera the cat have an
understanding between us.