"That school-teacher from Acton is coming to-day," said the elder Miss
Gill, Sophia.
"So she is," assented the younger Miss Gill, Amanda.
"I have decided to put her in the southwest chamber," said Sophia.
Amanda looked at her sister with an expression of mingled doubt and
terror. "You don't suppose she would--" she began hesitatingly.
"Would what?" demanded Sophia, sharply. She was more incisive than her
sister. Both were below the medium height, and stout, but Sophia was
firm where Amanda was flabby. Amanda wore a baggy old muslin (it was a
hot day), and Sophia was uncompromisingly hooked up in a starched and
boned cambric over her high shelving figure.
"I didn't know but she would object to sleeping in that room, as long
as Aunt Harriet died there such a little time ago," faltered Amanda.
"Well!" said Sophia, "of all the silly notions! If you are going to
pick out rooms in this house where nobody has died, for the boarders,
you'll have your hands full. Grandfather Ackley had seven children;
four of them died here to my certain knowledge, besides grandfather and
grandmother. I think Great-grandmother Ackley, grandfather's mother,
died here, too; she must have; and Great-grandfather Ackley, and
grandfather's unmarried sister, Great-aunt Fanny Ackley. I don't
believe there's a room nor a bed in this house that somebody hasn't
passed away in."
"Well, I suppose I am silly to think of it, and she had better go in
there," said Amanda.
"I know she had. The northeast room is small and hot, and she's stout
and likely to feel the heat, and she's saved money and is able to board
out summers, and maybe she'll come here another year if she's well
accommodated," said Sophia. "Now I guess you'd better go in there and
see if any dust has settled on anything since it was cleaned, and open
the west windows and let the sun in, while I see to that cake."
Amanda went to her task in the southwest chamber while her sister
stepped heavily down the back stairs on her way to the kitchen.
"It seems to me you had better open the bed while you air and dust,
then make it up again," she called back.
"Yes, sister," Amanda answered, shudderingly.
Nobody knew how this elderly woman with the untrammeled imagination of
a child dreaded to enter the southwest chamber, and yet she could not
have told why she had the dread. She had entered and occupied rooms
which had been once tenanted by persons now dead. The room which had
been hers in the little house in which she and her sister had lived
before coming here had been her dead mother's. She had never reflected
upon the fact with anything but loving awe and reverence. There had
never been any fear. But this was different. She entered and her
heart beat thickly in her ears. Her hands were cold. The room was a
very large one. The four windows, two facing south, two west, were
closed, the blinds also. The room was in a film of green gloom. The
furniture loomed out vaguely. The gilt frame of a blurred old
engraving on the wall caught a little light. The white counterpane on
the bed showed like a blank page.
Amanda crossed the room, opened with a straining motion of her thin
back and shoulders one of the west windows, and threw back the blind.
Then the room revealed itself an apartment full of an aged and worn but
no less valid state. Pieces of old mahogany swelled forth; a
peacock-patterned chintz draped the bedstead. This chintz also covered
a great easy chair which had been the favourite seat of the former
occupant of the room. The closet door stood ajar. Amanda noticed that
with wonder. There was a glimpse of purple drapery floating from a peg
inside the closet. Amanda went across and took down the garment
hanging there. She wondered how her sister had happened to leave it
when she cleaned the room. It was an old loose gown which had belonged
to her aunt. She took it down, shuddering, and closed the closet door
after a fearful glance into its dark depths. It was a long closet with
a strong odour of lovage. The Aunt Harriet had had a habit of eating
lovage and had carried it constantly in her pocket. There was very
likely some of the pleasant root in the pocket of the musty purple gown
which Amanda threw over the easy chair.
Amanda perceived the odour with a start as if before an actual
presence. Odour seems in a sense a vital part of a personality. It can
survive the flesh to which it has clung like a persistent shadow,
seeming to have in itself something of the substance of that to which
it pertained. Amanda was always conscious of this fragrance of lovage
as she tidied the room. She dusted the heavy mahogany pieces
punctiliously after she had opened the bed as her sister had directed.
She spread fresh towels over the wash-stand and the bureau; she made
the bed. Then she thought to take the purple gown from the easy chair
and carry it to the garret and put it in the trunk with the other
articles of the dead woman's wardrobe which had been packed away there;
BUT THE PURPLE GOWN WAS NOT ON THE CHAIR!
Amanda Gill was not a woman of strong convictions even as to her own
actions. She directly thought that possibly she had been mistaken and
had not removed it from the closet. She glanced at the closet door and
saw with surprise that it was open, and she had thought she had closed
it, but she instantly was not sure of that. So she entered the closet
and looked for the purple gown. IT WAS NOT THERE!
Amanda Gill went feebly out of the closet and looked at the easy chair
again. The purple gown was not there! She looked wildly around the
room. She went down on her trembling knees and peered under the bed,
she opened the bureau drawers, she looked again in the closet. Then
she stood in the middle of the floor and fairly wrung her hands.
"What does it mean?" she said in a shocked whisper.
She had certainly seen that loose purple gown of her dead Aunt
Harriet's.
There is a limit at which self-refutation must stop in any sane person.
Amanda Gill had reached it. She knew that she had seen that purple
gown in that closet; she knew that she had removed it and put it on the
easy chair. She also knew that she had not taken it out of the room.
She felt a curious sense of being inverted mentally. It was as if all
her traditions and laws of life were on their heads. Never in her
simple record had any garment not remained where she had placed it
unless removed by some palpable human agency.
Then the thought occurred to her that possibly her sister Sophia might
have entered the room unobserved while her back was turned and removed
the dress. A sensation of relief came over her. Her blood seemed to
flow back into its usual channels; the tension of her nerves relaxed.
"How silly I am," she said aloud.
She hurried out and downstairs into the kitchen where Sophia was making
cake, stirring with splendid circular sweeps of a wooden spoon a creamy
yellow mass. She looked up as her sister entered.
"Have you got it done?" said she.
"Yes," replied Amanda. Then she hesitated. A sudden terror overcame
her. It did not seem as if it were at all probable that Sophia had
left that foamy cake mixture a second to go to Aunt Harriet's chamber
and remove that purple gown.
"Well," said Sophia, "if you have got that done I wish you would take
hold and string those beans. The first thing we know there won't be
time to boil them for dinner."
Amanda moved toward the pan of beans on the table, then she looked at
her sister.
"Did you come up in Aunt Harriet's room while I was there?" she asked
weakly.
She knew while she asked what the answer would be.
"Up in Aunt Harriet's room? Of course I didn't. I couldn't leave this
cake without having it fall. You know that well enough. Why?"
"Nothing," replied Amanda.
Suddenly she realized that she could not tell her sister what had
happened, for before the utter absurdity of the whole thing her belief
in her own reason quailed. She knew what Sophia would say if she told
her. She could hear her.
"Amanda Gill, have you gone stark staring mad?"
She resolved that she would never tell Sophia. She dropped into a
chair and begun shelling the beans with nerveless fingers. Sophia
looked at her curiously.
"Amanda Gill, what on earth ails you?" she asked.
"Nothing," replied Amanda. She bent her head very low over the green
pods.
"Yes, there is, too! You are as white as a sheet, and your hands are
shaking so you can hardly string those beans. I did think you had more
sense, Amanda Gill."
"I don't know what you mean, Sophia."
"Yes, you do know what I mean, too; you needn't pretend you don't. Why
did you ask me if I had been in that room, and why do you act so queer?"
Amanda hesitated. She had been trained to truth. Then she lied.
"I wondered if you'd noticed how it had leaked in on the paper over by
the bureau, that last rain," said she.
"What makes you look so pale then?"
"I don't know. I guess the heat sort of overcame me."
"I shouldn't think it could have been very hot in that room when it had
been shut up so long," said Sophia.
She was evidently not satisfied, but then the grocer came to the door
and the matter dropped.
For the next hour the two women were very busy. They kept no servant.
When they had come into possession of this fine old place by the death
of their aunt it had seemed a doubtful blessing. There was not a cent
with which to pay for repairs and taxes and insurance, except the
twelve hundred dollars which they had obtained from the sale of the
little house in which they had been born and lived all their lives.
There had been a division in the old Ackley family years before. One
of the daughters had married against her mother's wish and had been
disinherited. She had married a poor man by the name of Gill, and
shared his humble lot in sight of her former home and her sister and
mother living in prosperity, until she had borne three daughters; then
she died, worn out with overwork and worry.
The mother and the elder sister had been pitiless to the last. Neither
had ever spoken to her since she left her home the night of her
marriage. They were hard women.
The three daughters of the disinherited sister had lived quiet and
poor, but not actually needy lives. Jane, the middle daughter, had
married, and died in less than a year. Amanda and Sophia had taken the
girl baby she left when the father married again. Sophia had taught a
primary school for many years; she had saved enough to buy the little
house in which they lived. Amanda had crocheted lace, and embroidered
flannel, and made tidies and pincushions, and had earned enough for her
clothes and the child's, little Flora Scott.
Their father, William Gill, had died before they were thirty, and now
in their late middle life had come the death of the aunt to whom they
had never spoken, although they had often seen her, who had lived in
solitary state in the old Ackley mansion until she was more than
eighty. There had been no will, and they were the only heirs with the
exception of young Flora Scott, the daughter of the dead sister.
Sophia and Amanda thought directly of Flora when they knew of the
inheritance.
"It will be a splendid thing for her; she will have enough to live on
when we are gone," Sophia said.
She had promptly decided what was to be done. The small house was to
be sold, and they were to move into the old Ackley house and take
boarders to pay for its keeping. She scouted the idea of selling it.
She had an enormous family pride. She had always held her head high
when she had walked past that fine old mansion, the cradle of her race,
which she was forbidden to enter. She was unmoved when the lawyer who
was advising her disclosed to her the fact that Harriet Ackley had used
every cent of the Ackley money.
"I realize that we have to work," said she, "but my sister and I have
determined to keep the place."
That was the end of the discussion. Sophia and Amanda Gill had been
living in the old Ackley house a fortnight, and they had three
boarders: an elderly widow with a comfortable income, a young
congregationalist clergyman, and the middle-aged single woman who had
charge of the village library. Now the school-teacher from Acton, Miss
Louisa Stark, was expected for the summer, and would make four.
Sophia considered that they were comfortably provided for. Her wants
and her sister's were very few, and even the niece, although a young
girl, had small expenses, since her wardrobe was supplied for years to
come from that of the deceased aunt. There were stored away in the
garret of the Ackley house enough voluminous black silks and satins and
bombazines to keep her clad in somber richness for years to come.
Flora was a very gentle girl, with large, serious blue eyes, a
seldom-smiling, pretty mouth, and smooth flaxen hair. She was delicate
and very young--sixteen on her next birthday.
She came home soon now with her parcels of sugar and tea from the
grocer's. She entered the kitchen gravely and deposited them on the
table by which her Aunt Amanda was seated stringing beans. Flora wore
an obsolete turban-shaped hat of black straw which had belonged to the
dead aunt; it set high like a crown, revealing her forehead. Her dress
was an ancient purple-and-white print, too long and too large except
over the chest, where it held her like a straight waistcoat.
"You had better take off your hat, Flora," said Sophia. She turned
suddenly to Amanda. "Did you fill the water-pitcher in that chamber
for the schoolteacher?" she asked severely. She was quite sure that
Amanda had not filled the water-pitcher.
Amanda blushed and started guiltily. "I declare, I don't believe I
did," said she.
"I didn't think you had," said her sister with sarcastic emphasis.
"Flora, you go up to the room that was your Great-aunt Harriet's, and
take the water-pitcher off the wash-stand and fill it with water. Be
real careful, and don't break the pitcher, and don't spill the water."
"In THAT chamber?" asked Flora. She spoke very quietly, but her face
changed a little.
"Yes, in that chamber," returned her Aunt Sophia sharply. "Go right
along."
Flora went, and her light footstep was heard on the stairs. Very soon
she returned with the blue-and-white water-pitcher and filled it
carefully at the kitchen sink.
"Now be careful and not spill it," said Sophia as she went out of the
room carrying it gingerly.
Amanda gave a timidly curious glance at her; she wondered if she had
seen the purple gown.
Then she started, for the village stagecoach was seen driving around to
the front of the house. The house stood on a corner.
"Here, Amanda, you look better than I do; you go and meet her," said
Sophia. "I'll just put the cake in the pan and get it in the oven and
I'll come. Show her right up to her room."
Amanda removed her apron hastily and obeyed. Sophia hurried with her
cake, pouring it into the baking-tins. She had just put it in the
oven, when the door opened and Flora entered carrying the blue
water-pitcher.
"What are you bringing down that pitcher again for?" asked Sophia.
"She wants some water, and Aunt Amanda sent me," replied Flora.
Her pretty pale face had a bewildered expression.
"For the land sake, she hasn't used all that great pitcherful of water
so quick?"
"There wasn't any water in it," replied Flora.
Her high, childish forehead was contracted slightly with a puzzled
frown as she looked at her aunt.
"Wasn't any water in it?"
"No, ma'am."
"Didn't I see you filling the pitcher with water not ten minutes ago, I
want to know?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"What did you do with that water?"
"Nothing."
"Did you carry that pitcherful of water up to that room and set it on
the washstand?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Didn't you spill it?"
"No, ma'am."
"Now, Flora Scott, I want the truth! Did you fill that pitcher with
water and carry it up there, and wasn't there any there when she came
to use it?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Let me see that pitcher." Sophia examined the pitcher. It was not
only perfectly dry from top to bottom, but even a little dusty. She
turned severely on the young girl. "That shows," said she, "you did
not fill the pitcher at all. You let the water run at the side because
you didn't want to carry it upstairs. I am ashamed of you. It's bad
enough to be so lazy, but when it comes to not telling the truth--"
The young girl's face broke up suddenly into piteous confusion, and her
blue eyes became filmy with tears.
"I did fill the pitcher, honest," she faltered, "I did, Aunt Sophia.
You ask Aunt Amanda."
"I'll ask nobody. This pitcher is proof enough. Water don't go off
and leave the pitcher dusty on the inside if it was put in ten minutes
ago. Now you fill that pitcher full quick, and you carry it upstairs,
and if you spill a drop there'll be something besides talk."
Flora filled the pitcher, with the tears falling over her cheeks. She
sniveled softly as she went out, balancing it carefully against her
slender hip. Sophia followed her.
"Stop crying," said she sharply; "you ought to be ashamed of yourself.
What do you suppose Miss Louisa Stark will think. No water in her
pitcher in the first place, and then you come back crying as if you
didn't want to get it."
In spite of herself, Sophia's voice was soothing. She was very fond of
the girl. She followed her up the stairs to the chamber where Miss
Louisa Stark was waiting for the water to remove the soil of travel.
She had removed her bonnet, and its tuft of red geraniums lightened the
obscurity of the mahogany dresser. She had placed her little beaded
cape carefully on the bed. She was replying to a tremulous remark of
Amanda's, who was nearly fainting from the new mystery of the
water-pitcher, that it was warm and she suffered a good deal in warm
weather.
Louisa Stark was stout and solidly built. She was much larger than
either of the Gill sisters. She was a masterly woman inured to command
from years of school-teaching. She carried her swelling bulk with
majesty; even her face, moist and red with the heat, lost nothing of
its dignity of expression.
She was standing in the middle of the floor with an air which gave the
effect of her standing upon an elevation. She turned when Sophia and
Flora, carrying the water-pitcher, entered.
"This is my sister Sophia," said Amanda tremulously.
Sophia advanced, shook hands with Miss Louisa Stark and bade her
welcome and hoped she would like her room. Then she moved toward the
closet. "There is a nice large closet in this room--the best closet in
the house. You might have your trunk--" she said, then she stopped
short.
The closet door was ajar, and a purple garment seemed suddenly to swing
into view as if impelled by some wind.
"Why, here is something left in this closet," Sophia said in a
mortified tone. "I thought all those things had been taken away."
She pulled down the garment with a jerk, and as she did so Amanda
passed her in a weak rush for the door.
"I am afraid your sister is not well," said the school-teacher from
Acton. "She looked very pale when you took that dress down. I noticed
it at once. Hadn't you better go and see what the matter is? She may
be going to faint."
"She is not subject to fainting spells," replied Sophia, but she
followed Amanda.
She found her in the room which they occupied together, lying on the
bed, very pale and gasping. She leaned over her.
"Amanda, what is the matter; don't you feel well?" she asked.
"I feel a little faint."
Sophia got a camphor bottle and began rubbing her sister's forehead.
"Do you feel better?" she said.
Amanda nodded.
"I guess it was that green apple pie you ate this noon," said Sophia.
"I declare, what did I do with that dress of Aunt Harriet's? I guess
if you feel better I'll just run and get it and take it up garret.
I'll stop in here again when I come down. You'd better lay still.
Flora can bring you up a cup of tea. I wouldn't try to eat any supper."
Sophia's tone as she left the room was full of loving concern.
Presently she returned; she looked disturbed, but angrily so. There was
not the slightest hint of any fear in her expression.
"I want to know," said she, looking sharply and quickly around, "if I
brought that purple dress in here, after all?"
"I didn't see you," replied Amanda.
"I must have. It isn't in that chamber, nor the closet. You aren't
lying on it, are you?"
"I lay down before you came in," replied Amanda.
"So you did. Well, I'll go and look again."
Presently Amanda heard her sister's heavy step on the garret stairs.
Then she returned with a queer defiant expression on her face.
"I carried it up garret, after all, and put it in the trunk," said,
she. "I declare, I forgot it. I suppose your being faint sort of put
it out of my head. There it was, folded up just as nice, right where I
put it."
Sophia's mouth was set; her eyes upon her sister's scared, agitated
face were full of hard challenge.
"Yes," murmured Amanda.
"I must go right down and see to that cake," said Sophia, going out of
the room. "If you don't feel well, you pound on the floor with the
umbrella."
Amanda looked after her. She knew that Sophia had not put that purple
dress of her dead Aunt Harriet in the trunk in the garret.
Meantime Miss Louisa Stark was settling herself in the southwest
chamber. She unpacked her trunk and hung her dresses carefully in the
closet. She filled the bureau drawers with nicely folded linen and
small articles of dress. She was a very punctilious woman. She put on
a black India silk dress with purple flowers. She combed her
grayish-blond hair in smooth ridges back from her broad forehead. She
pinned her lace at her throat with a brooch, very handsome, although
somewhat obsolete--a bunch of pearl grapes on black onyx, set in gold
filagree. She had purchased it several years ago with a considerable
portion of the stipend from her spring term of school-teaching.
As she surveyed herself in the little swing mirror surmounting the
old-fashioned mahogany bureau she suddenly bent forward and looked
closely at the brooch. It seemed to her that something was wrong with
it. As she looked she became sure. Instead of the familiar bunch of
pearl grapes on the black onyx, she saw a knot of blonde and black hair
under glass surrounded by a border of twisted gold. She felt a thrill
of horror, though she could not tell why. She unpinned the brooch, and
it was her own familiar one, the pearl grapes and the onyx. "How very
foolish I am," she thought. She thrust the pin in the laces at her
throat and again looked at herself in the glass, and there it was
again--the knot of blond and black hair and the twisted gold.
Louisa Stark looked at her own large, firm face above the brooch and it
was full of terror and dismay which were new to it. She straightway
began to wonder if there could be anything wrong with her mind. She
remembered that an aunt of her mother's had been insane. A sort of
fury with herself possessed her. She stared at the brooch in the glass
with eyes at once angry and terrified. Then she removed it again and
there was her own old brooch. Finally she thrust the gold pin through
the lace again, fastened it and turning a defiant back on the glass,
went down to supper.
At the supper table she met the other boarders--the elderly widow, the
young clergyman and the middle-aged librarian. She viewed the elderly
widow with reserve, the clergyman with respect, the middle-aged
librarian with suspicion. The latter wore a very youthful shirt-waist,
and her hair in a girlish fashion which the school-teacher, who twisted
hers severely from the straining roots at the nape of her neck to the
small, smooth coil at the top, condemned as straining after effects no
longer hers by right.
The librarian, who had a quick acridness of manner, addressed her,
asking what room she had, and asked the second time in spite of the
school-teacher's evident reluctance to hear her. She even, since she
sat next to her, nudged her familiarly in her rigid black silk side.
"What room are you in, Miss Stark?" said she.
"I am at a loss how to designate the room," replied Miss Stark stiffly.
"Is it the big southwest room?"
"It evidently faces in that direction," said Miss Stark.
The librarian, whose name was Eliza Lippincott, turned abruptly to Miss
Amanda Gill, over whose delicate face a curious colour compounded of
flush and pallour was stealing.
"What room did your aunt die in, Miss Amanda?" asked she abruptly.
Amanda cast a terrified glance at her sister, who was serving a second
plate of pudding for the minister.
"That room," she replied feebly.
"That's what I thought," said the librarian with a certain triumph. "I
calculated that must be the room she died in, for it's the best room in
the house, and you haven't put anybody in it before. Somehow the room
that anybody has died in lately is generally the last room that anybody
is put in. I suppose YOU are so strong-minded you don't object to
sleeping in a room where anybody died a few weeks ago?" she inquired of
Louisa Stark with sharp eyes on her face.
"No, I do not," replied Miss stark with emphasis.
"Nor in the same bed?" persisted Eliza Lippincott with a kittenish
reflection.
The young minister looked up from his pudding. He was very spiritual,
but he had had poor pickings in his previous boarding place, and he
could not help a certain abstract enjoyment over Miss Gill's cooking.
"You would certainly not be afraid, Miss Lippincott?" he remarked, with
his gentle, almost caressing inflection of tone. "You do not for a
minute believe that a higher power would allow any manifestation on the
part of a disembodied spirit--who we trust is in her heavenly home--to
harm one of His servants?"
"Oh, Mr. Dunn, of course not," replied Eliza Lippincott with a blush.
"Of course not. I never meant to imply--"
"I could not believe you did," said the minister gently. He was very
young, but he already had a wrinkle of permanent anxiety between his
eyes and a smile of permanent ingratiation on his lips. The lines of
the smile were as deeply marked as the wrinkle.
"Of course dear Miss Harriet Gill was a professing Christian," remarked
the widow, "and I don't suppose a professing Christian would come back
and scare folks if she could. I wouldn't be a mite afraid to sleep in
that room; I'd rather have it than the one I've got. If I was afraid
to sleep in a room where a good woman died, I wouldn't tell of it. If
I saw things or heard things I'd think the fault must be with my own
guilty conscience." Then she turned to Miss Stark. "Any time you feel
timid in that room I'm ready and willing to change with you," said she.
"Thank you; I have no desire to change. I am perfectly satisfied with
my room," replied Miss Stark with freezing dignity, which was thrown
away upon the widow.
"Well," said she, "any time, if you should feel timid, you know what to
do. I've got a real nice room; it faces east and gets the morning sun,
but it isn't so nice as yours, according to my way of thinking. I'd
rather take my chances any day in a room anybody had died in than in
one that was hot in summer. I'm more afraid of a sunstroke than of
spooks, for my part."
Miss Sophia Gill, who had not spoken one word, but whose mouth had
become more and more rigidly compressed, suddenly rose from the table,
forcing the minister to leave a little pudding, at which he glanced
regretfully.
Miss Louisa Stark did not sit down in the parlour with the other
boarders. She went straight to her room. She felt tired after her
journey, and meditated a loose wrapper and writing a few letters
quietly before she went to bed. Then, too, she was conscious of a
feeling that if she delayed, the going there at all might assume more
terrifying proportions. She was full of defiance against herself and
her own lurking weakness.
So she went resolutely and entered the southwest chamber. There was
through the room a soft twilight. She could dimly discern everything,
the white satin scroll-work on the wall paper and the white counterpane
on the bed being most evident. Consequently both arrested her
attention first. She saw against the wall-paper directly facing the
door the waist of her best black satin dress hung over a picture.
"That is very strange," she said to herself, and again a thrill of
vague horror came over her.
She knew, or thought she knew, that she had put that black satin dress
waist away nicely folded between towels in her trunk. She was very
choice of her black satin dress.
She took down the black waist and laid it on the bed preparatory to
folding it, but when she attempted to do so she discovered that the two
sleeves were firmly sewed together. Louisa Stark stared at the sewed
sleeves. "What does this mean?" she asked herself. She examined the
sewing carefully; the stitches were small, and even, and firm, of black
silk.
She looked around the room. On the stand beside the bed was something
which she had not noticed before: a little old-fashioned work-box with
a picture of a little boy in a pinafore on the top. Beside this
work-box lay, as if just laid down by the user, a spool of black silk,
a pair of scissors, and a large steel thimble with a hole in the top,
after an old style. Louisa stared at these, then at the sleeves of her
dress. She moved toward the door. For a moment she thought that this
was something legitimate about which she might demand information; then
she became doubtful. Suppose that work-box had been there all the
time; suppose she had forgotten; suppose she herself had done this
absurd thing, or suppose that she had not, what was to hinder the
others from thinking so; what was to hinder a doubt being cast upon her
own memory and reasoning powers?
Louisa Stark had been on the verge of a nervous breakdown in spite of
her iron constitution and her great will power. No woman can teach
school for forty years with absolute impunity. She was more credulous
as to her own possible failings than she had ever been in her whole
life. She was cold with horror and terror, and yet not so much horror
and terror of the supernatural as of her own self. The weakness of
belief in the supernatural was nearly impossible for this strong
nature. She could more easily believe in her own failing powers.
"I don't know but I'm going to be like Aunt Marcia," she said to
herself, and her fat face took on a long rigidity of fear.
She started toward the mirror to unfasten her dress, then she
remembered the strange circumstance of the brooch and stopped short.
Then she straightened herself defiantly and marched up to the bureau
and looked in the glass. She saw reflected therein, fastening the lace
at her throat, the old-fashioned thing of a large oval, a knot of fair
and black hair under glass, set in a rim of twisted gold. She
unfastened it with trembling fingers and looked at it. It was her own
brooch, the cluster of pearl grapes on black onyx. Louisa Stark placed
the trinket in its little box on the nest of pink cotton and put it
away in the bureau drawer. Only death could disturb her habit of order.
Her fingers were so cold they felt fairly numb as she unfastened her
dress; she staggered when she slipped it over her head. She went to
the closet to hang it up and recoiled. A strong smell of lovage came
in her nostrils; a purple gown near the door swung softly against her
face as if impelled by some wind from within. All the pegs were filled
with garments not her own, mostly of somber black, but there were some
strange-patterned silk things and satins.
Suddenly Louisa Stark recovered her nerve. This, she told herself, was
something distinctly tangible. Somebody had been taking liberties with
her wardrobe. Somebody had been hanging some one else's clothes in her
closet. She hastily slipped on her dress again and marched straight
down to the parlour. The people were seated there; the widow and the
minister were playing backgammon. The librarian was watching them.
Miss Amanda Gill was mending beside the large lamp on the centre table.
They all looked up with amazement as Louisa Stark entered. There was
something strange in her expression. She noticed none of them except
Amanda.
"Where is your sister?" she asked peremptorily of her.
"She's in the kitchen mixing up bread," Amanda quavered; "is there
anything--" But the school-teacher was gone.
She found Sophia Gill standing by the kitchen table kneading dough with
dignity. The young girl Flora was bringing some flour from the pantry.
She stopped and stared at Miss Stark, and her pretty, delicate young
face took on an expression of alarm.
Miss Stark opened at once upon the subject in her mind.
"Miss Gill," said she, with her utmost school-teacher manner, "I wish
to inquire why you have had my own clothes removed from the closet in
my room and others substituted?"
Sophia Gill stood with her hands fast in the dough, regarding her. Her
own face paled slowly and reluctantly, her mouth stiffened.
"What? I don't quite understand what you mean, Miss Stark," said she.
"My clothes are not in the closet in my room and it is full of things
which do not belong to me," said Louisa Stark.
"Bring me that flour," said Sophia sharply to the young girl, who
obeyed, casting timid, startled glances at Miss Stark as she passed
her. Sophia Gill began rubbing her hands clear of the dough. "I am
sure I know nothing about it," she said with a certain tempered
asperity. "Do you know anything about it, Flora?"
"Oh, no, I don't know anything about it, Aunt Sophia," answered the
young girl, fluttering.
Then Sophia turned to Miss Stark. "I'll go upstairs with you, Miss
Stark," said she, "and see what the trouble is. There must be some
mistake." She spoke stiffly with constrained civility.
"Very well," said Miss Stark with dignity. Then she and Miss Sophia
went upstairs. Flora stood staring after them.
Sophia and Louisa Stark went up to the southwest chamber. The closet
door was shut. Sophia threw it open, then she looked at Miss Stark.
On the pegs hung the schoolteacher's own garments in ordinary array.
"I can't see that there is anything wrong," remarked Sophia grimly.
Miss Stark strove to speak but she could not. She sank down on the
nearest chair. She did not even attempt to defend herself. She saw
her own clothes in the closet. She knew there had been no time for any
human being to remove those which she thought she had seen and put hers
in their places. She knew it was impossible. Again the awful horror
of herself overwhelmed her.
"You must have been mistaken," she heard Sophia say.
She muttered something, she scarcely knew what. Sophia then went out
of the room. Presently she undressed and went to bed. In the morning
she did not go down to breakfast, and when Sophia came to inquire,
requested that the stage be ordered for the noon train. She said that
she was sorry, but was ill, and feared lest she might be worse, and she
felt that she must return home at once. She looked ill, and could not
take even the toast and tea which Sophia had prepared for her. Sophia
felt a certain pity for her, but it was largely mixed with indignation.
She felt that she knew the true reason for the school-teacher's illness
and sudden departure, and it incensed her.
"If folks are going to act like fools we shall never be able to keep
this house," she said to Amanda after Miss Stark had gone; and Amanda
knew what she meant.
Directly the widow, Mrs. Elvira Simmons, knew that the school-teacher
had gone and the southwest room was vacant, she begged to have it in
exchange for her own. Sophia hesitated a moment; she eyed the widow
sharply. There was something about the large, roseate face worn in
firm lines of humour and decision which reassured her.
"I have no objection, Mrs. Simmons," said she, "if--"
"If what?" asked the widow.
"If you have common sense enough not to keep fussing because the room
happens to be the one my aunt died in," said Sophia bluntly.
"Fiddlesticks!" said the widow, Mrs. Elvira Simmons.
That very afternoon she moved into the southwest chamber. The young
girl Flora assisted her, though much against her will.
"Now I want you to carry Mrs. Simmons' dresses into the closet in that
room and hang them up nicely, and see that she has everything she
wants," said Sophia Gill. "And you can change the bed and put on fresh
sheets. What are you looking at me that way for?"
"Oh, Aunt Sophia, can't I do something else?"
"What do you want to do something else for?"
"I am afraid."
"Afraid of what? I should think you'd hang your head. No; you go
right in there and do what I tell you."
Pretty soon Flora came running into the sitting-room where Sophia was,
as pale as death, and in her hand she held a queer, old-fashioned
frilled nightcap.
"What's that?" demanded Sophia.
"I found it under the pillow."
"What pillow?"
"In the southwest room."
Sophia took it and looked at it sternly.
"It's Great-aunt Harriet's," said Flora faintly.
"You run down street and do that errand at the grocer's for me and I'll
see that room," said Sophia with dignity. She carried the nightcap
away and put it in the trunk in the garret where she had supposed it
stored with the rest of the dead woman's belongings. Then she went into
the southwest chamber and made the bed and assisted Mrs. Simmons to
move, and there was no further incident.
The widow was openly triumphant over her new room. She talked a deal
about it at the dinner-table.
"It is the best room in the house, and I expect you all to be envious
of me," said she.
"And you are sure you don't feel afraid of ghosts?" said the librarian.
"Ghosts!" repeated the widow with scorn. "If a ghost comes I'll send
her over to you. You are just across the hall from the southwest room."
"You needn't," returned Eliza Lippincott with a shudder. "I wouldn't
sleep in that room, after--" she checked herself with an eye on the
minister.
"After what?" asked the widow.
"Nothing," replied Eliza Lippincott in an embarrassed fashion.
"I trust Miss Lippincott has too good sense and too great faith to
believe in anything of that sort," said the minister.
"I trust so, too," replied Eliza hurriedly.
"You did see or hear something--now what was it, I want to know?" said
the widow that evening when they were alone in the parlour. The
minister had gone to make a call.
Eliza hesitated.
"What was it?" insisted the widow.
"Well," said Eliza hesitatingly, "if you'll promise not to tell."
"Yes, I promise; what was it?"
"Well, one day last week, just before the school-teacher came, I went
in that room to see if there were any clouds. I wanted to wear my gray
dress, and I was afraid it was going to rain, so I wanted to look at
the sky at all points, so I went in there, and--"
"And what?"
"Well, you know that chintz over the bed, and the valance, and the easy
chair; what pattern should you say it was?"
"Why, peacocks on a blue ground. Good land, I shouldn't think any one
who had ever seen that would forget it."
"Peacocks on a blue ground, you are sure?"
"Of course I am. Why?"
"Only when I went in there that afternoon it was not peacocks on a blue
ground; it was great red roses on a yellow ground."
"Why, what do you mean?"
"What I say."
"Did Miss Sophia have it changed?"
"No. I went in there again an hour later and the peacocks were there."
"You didn't see straight the first time."
"I expected you would say that."
"The peacocks are there now; I saw them just now."
"Yes, I suppose so; I suppose they flew back."
"But they couldn't."
"Looks as if they did."
"Why, how could such a thing be? It couldn't be."
"Well, all I know is those peacocks were gone for an hour that
afternoon and the red roses on the yellow ground were there instead."
The widow stared at her a moment, then she began to laugh rather
hysterically.
"Well," said she, "I guess I sha'n't give up my nice room for any such
tomfoolery as that. I guess I would just as soon have red roses on a
yellow ground as peacocks on a blue; but there's no use talking, you
couldn't have seen straight. How could such a thing have happened?"
"I don't know," said Eliza Lippincott; "but I know I wouldn't sleep in
that room if you'd give me a thousand dollars."
"Well, I would," said the widow, "and I'm going to."
When Mrs. Simmons went to the southwest chamber that night she cast a
glance at the bed-hanging and the easy chair. There were the peacocks
on the blue ground. She gave a contemptuous thought to Eliza
Lippincott.
"I don't believe but she's getting nervous," she thought. "I wonder if
any of her family have been out at all."
But just before Mrs. Simmons was ready to get into bed she looked again
at the hangings and the easy chair, and there were the red roses on the
yellow ground instead of the peacocks on the blue. She looked long and
sharply. Then she shut her eyes, and then opened them and looked. She
still saw the red roses. Then she crossed the room, turned her back to
the bed, and looked out at the night from the south window. It was
clear and the full moon was shining. She watched it a moment sailing
over the dark blue in its nimbus of gold. Then she looked around at
the bed hangings. She still saw the red roses on the yellow ground.
Mrs. Simmons was struck in her most vulnerable point. This apparent
contradiction of the reasonable as manifested in such a commonplace
thing as chintz of a bed-hanging affected this ordinarily unimaginative
woman as no ghostly appearance could have done. Those red roses on the
yellow ground were to her much more ghostly than any strange figure
clad in the white robes of the grave entering the room.
She took a step toward the door, then she turned with a resolute air.
"As for going downstairs and owning up I'm scared and having that
Lippincott girl crowing over me, I won't for any red roses instead of
peacocks. I guess they can't hurt me, and as long as we've both of us
seen 'em I guess we can't both be getting loony," she said.
Mrs. Elvira Simmons blew out her light and got into bed and lay staring
out between the chintz hangings at the moonlit room. She said her
prayers in bed always as being more comfortable, and presumably just as
acceptable in the case of a faithful servant with a stout habit of
body. Then after a little she fell asleep; she was of too practical a
nature to be kept long awake by anything which had no power of actual
bodily effect upon her. No stress of the spirit had ever disturbed her
slumbers. So she slumbered between the red roses, or the peacocks, she
did not know which.
But she was awakened about midnight by a strange sensation in her
throat. She had dreamed that some one with long white fingers was
strangling her, and she saw bending over her the face of an old woman
in a white cap. When she waked there was no old woman, the room was
almost as light as day in the full moonlight, and looked very peaceful;
but the strangling sensation at her throat continued, and besides that,
her face and ears felt muffled. She put up her hand and felt that her
head was covered with a ruffled nightcap tied under her chin so tightly
that it was exceedingly uncomfortable. A great qualm of horror shot
over her. She tore the thing off frantically and flung it from her
with a convulsive effort as if it had been a spider. She gave, as she
did so, a quick, short scream of terror. She sprang out of bed and was
going toward the door, when she stopped.
It had suddenly occurred to her that Eliza Lippincott might have
entered the room and tied on the cap while she was asleep. She had not
locked her door. She looked in the closet, under the bed; there was no
one there. Then she tried to open the door, but to her astonishment
found that it was locked--bolted on the inside. "I must have locked it,
after all," she reflected with wonder, for she never locked her door.
Then she could scarcely conceal from herself that there was something
out of the usual about it all. Certainly no one could have entered the
room and departed locking the door on the inside. She could not
control the long shiver of horror that crept over her, but she was
still resolute. She resolved that she would throw the cap out of the
window. "I'll see if I have tricks like that played on me, I don't
care who does it," said she quite aloud. She was still unable to
believe wholly in the supernatural. The idea of some human agency was
still in her mind, filling her with anger.
She went toward the spot where she had thrown the cap--she had stepped
over it on her way to the door--but it was not there. She searched the
whole room, lighting her lamp, but she could not find the cap. Finally
she gave it up. She extinguished her lamp and went back to bed. She
fell asleep again, to be again awakened in the same fashion. That time
she tore off the cap as before, but she did not fling it on the floor
as before. Instead she held to it with a fierce grip. Her blood was
up.
Holding fast to the white flimsy thing, she sprang out of bed, ran to
the window which was open, slipped the screen, and flung it out; but a
sudden gust of wind, though the night was calm, arose and it floated
back in her face. She brushed it aside like a cobweb and she clutched
at it. She was actually furious. It eluded her clutching fingers.
Then she did not see it at all. She examined the floor, she lighted
her lamp again and searched, but there was no sign of it.
Mrs. Simmons was then in such a rage that all terror had disappeared
for the time. She did not know with what she was angry, but she had a
sense of some mocking presence which was silently proving too strong
against her weakness, and she was aroused to the utmost power of
resistance. To be baffled like this and resisted by something which
was as nothing to her straining senses filled her with intensest
resentment.
Finally she got back into bed again; she did not go to sleep. She felt
strangely drowsy, but she fought against it. She was wide awake,
staring at the moonlight, when she suddenly felt the soft white strings
of the thing tighten around her throat and realized that her enemy was
again upon her. She seized the strings, untied them, twitched off the
cap, ran with it to the table where her scissors lay and furiously cut
it into small bits. She cut and tore, feeling an insane fury of
gratification.
"There!" said she quite aloud. "I guess I sha'n't have any more
trouble with this old cap."
She tossed the bits of muslin into a basket and went back to bed.
Almost immediately she felt the soft strings tighten around her throat.
Then at last she yielded, vanquished. This new refutal of all laws of
reason by which she had learned, as it were, to spell her theory of
life, was too much for her equilibrium. She pulled off the clinging
strings feebly, drew the thing from her head, slid weakly out of bed,
caught up her wrapper and hastened out of the room. She went
noiselessly along the hall to her own old room: she entered, got into
her familiar bed, and lay there the rest of the night shuddering and
listening, and if she dozed, waking with a start at the feeling of the
pressure upon her throat to find that it was not there, yet still to be
unable to shake off entirely the horror.
When daylight came she crept back to the southwest chamber and
hurriedly got some clothes in which to dress herself. It took all her
resolution to enter the room, but nothing unusual happened while she
was there. She hastened back to her old chamber, dressed herself and
went down to breakfast with an imperturbable face. Her colour had not
faded. When asked by Eliza Lippincott how she had slept, she replied
with an appearance of calmness which was bewildering that she had not
slept very well. She never did sleep very well in a new bed, and she
thought she would go back to her old room.
Eliza Lippincott was not deceived, however, neither were the Gill
sisters, nor the young girl, Flora. Eliza Lippincott spoke out bluntly.
"You needn't talk to me about sleeping well," said she. "I know
something queer happened in that room last night by the way you act."
They all looked at Mrs. Simmons, inquiringly--the librarian with
malicious curiosity and triumph, the minister with sad incredulity,
Sophia Gill with fear and indignation, Amanda and the young girl with
unmixed terror. The widow bore herself with dignity.
"I saw nothing nor heard nothing which I trust could not have been
accounted for in some rational manner," said she.
"What was it?" persisted Eliza Lippincott.
"I do not wish to discuss the matter any further," replied Mrs. Simmons
shortly. Then she passed her plate for more creamed potato. She felt
that she would die before she confessed to the ghastly absurdity of
that nightcap, or to having been disturbed by the flight of peacocks
off a blue field of chintz after she had scoffed at the possibility of
such a thing. She left the whole matter so vague that in a fashion she
came off the mistress of the situation. She at all events impressed
everybody by her coolness in the face of no one knew what nightly
terror.
After breakfast, with the assistance of Amanda and Flora, she moved
back into her old room. Scarcely a word was spoken during the process
of moving, but they all worked with trembling haste and looked guilty
when they met one another's eyes, as if conscious of betraying a common
fear.
That afternoon the young minister, John Dunn, went to Sophia Gill and
requested permission to occupy the southwest chamber that night.
"I don't ask to have my effects moved there," said he, "for I could
scarcely afford a room so much superior to the one I now occupy, but I
would like, if you please, to sleep there to-night for the purpose of
refuting in my own person any unfortunate superstition which may have
obtained root here."
Sophia Gill thanked the minister gratefully and eagerly accepted his
offer.
"How anybody with common sense can believe for a minute in any such
nonsense passes my comprehension," said she.
"It certainly passes mine how anybody with Christian faith can believe
in ghosts," said the minister gently, and Sophia Gill felt a certain
feminine contentment in hearing him. The minister was a child to her;
she regarded him with no tincture of sentiment, and yet she loved to
hear two other women covertly condemned by him and she herself thereby
exalted.
That night about twelve o'clock the Reverend John Dunn essayed to go to
his nightly slumber in the southwest chamber. He had been sitting up
until that hour preparing his sermon.
He traversed the hall with a little night-lamp in his hand, opened the
door of the southwest chamber, and essayed to enter. He might as well
have essayed to enter the solid side of a house. He could not believe
his senses. The door was certainly open; he could look into the room
full of soft lights and shadows under the moonlight which streamed into
the windows. He could see the bed in which he had expected to pass the
night, but he could not enter. Whenever he strove to do so he had a
curious sensation as if he were trying to press against an invisible
person who met him with a force of opposition impossible to overcome.
The minister was not an athletic man, yet he had considerable strength.
He squared his elbows, set his mouth hard, and strove to push his way
through into the room. The opposition which he met was as sternly and
mutely terrible as the rocky fastness of a mountain in his way.
For a half hour John Dunn, doubting, raging, overwhelmed with spiritual
agony as to the state of his own soul rather than fear, strove to enter
that southwest chamber. He was simply powerless against this uncanny
obstacle. Finally a great horror as of evil itself came over him. He
was a nervous man and very young. He fairly fled to his own chamber
and locked himself in like a terror-stricken girl.
The next morning he went to Miss Gill and told her frankly what had
happened, and begged her to say nothing about it lest he should have
injured the cause by the betrayal of such weakness, for he actually had
come to believe that there was something wrong with the room.
"What it is I know not, Miss Sophia," said he, "but I firmly believe,
against my will, that there is in that room some accursed evil power at
work, of which modern faith and modern science know nothing."
Miss Sophia Gill listened with grimly lowering face. She had an inborn
respect for the clergy, but she was bound to hold that southwest
chamber in the dearly beloved old house of her fathers free of blame.
"I think I will sleep in that room myself to-night," she said, when the
minister had finished.
He looked at her in doubt and dismay.
"I have great admiration for your faith and courage, Miss Sophia," he
said, "but are you wise?"
"I am fully resolved to sleep in that room to-night," said she
conclusively. There were occasions when Miss Sophia Gill could put on
a manner of majesty, and she did now.
It was ten o'clock that night when Sophia Gill entered the southwest
chamber. She had told her sister what she intended doing and had been
proof against her tearful entreaties. Amanda was charged not to tell
the young girl, Flora.
"There is no use in frightening that child over nothing," said Sophia.
Sophia, when she entered the southwest chamber, set the lamp which she
carried on the bureau, and began moving about the rooms pulling down
the curtains, taking off the nice white counterpane of the bed, and
preparing generally for the night.
As she did so, moving with great coolness and deliberation, she became
conscious that she was thinking some thoughts that were foreign to her.
She began remembering what she could not have remembered, since she was
not then born: the trouble over her mother's marriage, the bitter
opposition, the shutting the door upon her, the ostracizing her from
heart and home. She became aware of a most singular sensation as of
bitter resentment herself, and not against the mother and sister who
had so treated her own mother, but against her own mother, and then she
became aware of a like bitterness extended to her own self. She felt
malignant toward her mother as a young girl whom she remembered, though
she could not have remembered, and she felt malignant toward her own
self, and her sister Amanda, and Flora. Evil suggestions surged in her
brain--suggestions which turned her heart to stone and which still
fascinated her. And all the time by a sort of double consciousness she
knew that what she thought was strange and not due to her own volition.
She knew that she was thinking the thoughts of some other person, and
she knew who. She felt herself possessed.
But there was tremendous strength in the woman's nature. She had
inherited strength for good and righteous self-assertion, from the evil
strength of her ancestors. They had turned their own weapons against
themselves. She made an effort which seemed almost mortal, but was
conscious that the hideous thing was gone from her. She thought her
own thoughts. Then she scouted to herself the idea of anything
supernatural about the terrific experience. "I am imagining
everything," she told herself. She went on with her preparations; she
went to the bureau to take down her hair. She looked in the glass and
saw, instead of her softly parted waves of hair, harsh lines of
iron-gray under the black borders of an old-fashioned head-dress. She
saw instead of her smooth, broad forehead, a high one wrinkled with the
intensest concentration of selfish reflections of a long life; she saw
instead of her steady blue eyes, black ones with depths of malignant
reserve, behind a broad meaning of ill will; she saw instead of her
firm, benevolent mouth one with a hard, thin line, a network of
melancholic wrinkles. She saw instead of her own face, middle-aged and
good to see, the expression of a life of honesty and good will to
others and patience under trials, the face of a very old woman scowling
forever with unceasing hatred and misery at herself and all others, at
life, and death, at that which had been and that which was to come.
She saw instead of her own face in the glass, the face of her dead Aunt
Harriet, topping her own shoulders in her own well-known dress!
Sophia Gill left the room. She went into the one which she shared with
her sister Amanda. Amanda looked up and saw her standing there. She
had set the lamp on a table, and she stood holding a handkerchief over
her face. Amanda looked at her with terror.
"What is it? What is it, Sophia?" she gasped.
Sophia still stood with the handkerchief pressed to her face.
"Oh, Sophia, let me call somebody. Is your face hurt? Sophia, what is
the matter with your face?" fairly shrieked Amanda.
Suddenly Sophia took the handkerchief from her face.
"Look at me, Amanda Gill," she said in an awful voice.
Amanda looked, shrinking.
"What is it? Oh, what is it? You don't look hurt. What is it,
Sophia?"
"What do you see?"
"Why, I see you."
"Me?"
"Yes, you. What did you think I would see?"
Sophia Gill looked at her sister. "Never as long as I live will I tell
you what I thought you would see, and you must never ask me," said she.
"Well, I never will, Sophia," replied Amanda, half weeping with terror.
"You won't try to sleep in that room again, Sophia?"
"No," said Sophia; "and I am going to sell this house."