her face was turned away again as if drawn irresistibly toward some
secret object of dread. Was there anyone or anything at the top of the
dim staircase I could faintly see in the distance? It would not do for
me to ask, nor was it wise for me to show that I thought this reception
a strange one. Stepping into the room she pointed out, I waited for her
to follow me, which she did with manifest reluctance. But when she was
once out of the atmosphere of the hall, or out of reach of the sight or
sound of whatever it was that frightened her, her face took on a smile
that ingratiated her with me at once and gave to her very delicate
aspect, which up to that moment had not suggested the remotest likeness
to her mother, a piquant charm and subtle fascination that were not
unworthy of the daughter of Althea Burroughs.
"You must not mind the poverty of your welcome," she said, with a
half-proud, half-apologetic look around her, which I must say the
bareness and shabby character of the room we were in fully justified.
"We have not been very well off since father died and mother left us.
Had you given us a chance we should have written you that our home would
not offer many inducements to you after your own, but you have come
unexpectedly and----"
"There, there," I put in, for I saw that her embarrassment would soon
get the better of her, "do not speak of it. I did not come to enjoy your
home, but to see you. Are you the eldest, my dear, and where are your
sister and brother?"
"I am not the eldest," she said. "I am Lucetta. My sister"--here
her head stole irresistibly back to its old position of
listening--"will--will come soon. My brother is not in the house."
"Well," said I, astonished that she did not ask me to take off my
things, "you are a pretty girl, but you do not look very strong. Are you
quite well, my dear?"
She started, looked at me eagerly, almost anxiously, for a moment, then
straightened herself and began to lose some of her abstraction.
"I am not a strong person," she smiled, "but neither am I so very weak
either. I was always small. So was my mother, you know."
I was glad to have her talk of her mother. I therefore answered her in a
way to prolong the conversation.
"Yes, your mother was small," I admitted, "but never thin or pallid. She
was like a fairy among us schoolgirls. Does it seem odd to hear so old a
woman as I speak of herself as a schoolgirl?"
"Oh, no!" she said, but there was no heart in her voice.
"I had almost forgotten those days till I happened to hear the name of
Althea mentioned the other day," I proceeded, seeing I must keep up the
conversation if we were not to sit in total silence. "Then my early
friendship with your mother recurred to me, and I started up--as I
always do when I come to any decision, my dear--and sent that telegram,
which I hope I have not followed by an unwelcome presence."
"Oh, no," she repeated, but this time with some feeling; "we need
friends, and if you will overlook our shortcomings--But you have not
taken off your hat. What will Loreen say to me?"
And with a sudden nervous action as marked as her late listlessness, she
jumped up and began busying herself over me, untying my bonnet and
laying aside my bundles, which up to this moment I had held in my hands.
"I--I am so absent-minded," she murmured. "I--I did not think--I hope
you will excuse me. Loreen would have given you a much better welcome."
"Then Loreen should have been here," I said, with a smile. I could not
restrain this slight rebuke, yet I liked the girl; notwithstanding
everything I had heard and her own odd and unaccountable behavior, there
was a sweetness in her face, when she chose to smile, that proved an
irresistible attraction. And then, for all her absent-mindedness and
abstracted ways, she was such a lady! Her plain dress, her restrained
manner, could not hide this fact. It was apparent in every line of her
thin but graceful form and in every inflection of her musical but
constrained voice. Had I seen her in my own parlor instead of between
these bare and moldering walls, I should have said the same thing: "She
is such a lady!" But this only passed through my mind at the time. I was
not studying her personality, but trying to understand why my presence
in the house had so visibly disturbed her. Was it the embarrassment of
poverty, not knowing how to meet the call made so suddenly upon it? I
hardly thought so. Fear would not enter into a sensation of this kind,
and fear was what I had seen in her face before the front door had
closed upon me. But that fear? Was it connected with me or with
something threatening her from another portion of the house?
The latter supposition seemed the probable one. The way her ear was
turned, the slight start she gave at every sound, convinced me that her
cause of dread lay elsewhere than with myself, and therefore was worthy
of my closest attention. Though I chatted and tried in every way to
arouse her confidence, I could not help asking myself between the
sentences, if the cause of her apprehension lay with her sister, her
brother, or in something entirely apart from either, and connected with
the dreadful matter which had drawn me to X. Or another supposition
still, was it merely the sign of an habitual distemper which,
misunderstood by Mr. Gryce, had given rise to the suspicions which it
was my possible mission here to dispel?
Anxious to force things a little, I remarked, with a glance at the
dismal branches that almost forced their way into the open casements:
"What a scene for young eyes like yours! Do you never get tired of these
pine-boughs and clustering shadows? Would not a little cottage in the
sunnier part of the town be preferable to all this dreary grandeur?"
She looked up with sudden wistfulness that made her smile piteous.
"Some of my happiest days have been passed here and some of my saddest.
I do not think I should like to leave it for any sunny cottage. We were
not made for bonny homes," she continued. "The sombreness of this old
house suits us."
"And of this road," I ventured. "It is the darkest and most picturesque
I ever rode through. I thought I was threading a wilderness."
For a moment she forgot her cause of anxiety and looked at me quite
intently, while a subtle shade of doubt passed slowly over her features.
"It is a solitary one," she acquiesced. "I do not wonder it struck you
as dismal. Have you heard--has any one ever told you that--that it was
not considered quite safe?"
"Safe?" I repeated, with--God forgive me!--an expression of mild wonder
in my eyes.
"Yes, it has not the best of reputations. Strange things have happened
in it. I thought that some one might have been kind enough to tell you
this at the station."
There was a gentle sort of sarcasm in the tone; only that, or so it
seemed to me at the time. I began to feel myself in a maze.
"Somebody--I suppose it was the station-master--did say something to me
about a boy lost somewhere in this portion of the woods. Do you mean
that, my dear?"
She nodded, glancing again over her shoulder and partly rising as if
moved by some instinct of flight.
"They are dark enough, for more than one person to have been lost in
their recesses," I observed with another look toward the heavily
curtained windows.
"They certainly are," she assented, reseating herself and eying me
nervously while she spoke. "We are used to the terrors they inspire in
strangers, but if you"--she leaped to her feet in manifest eagerness and
her whole face changed in a way she little realized herself--"if you
have any fear of sleeping amid such gloomy surroundings, we can procure
you a room in the village where you will be more comfortable, and where
we can visit you almost as well as we can here. Shall I do it? Shall I
call----"
My face must have assumed a very grim look, for her words tripped at
that point, and a flush, the first I had seen on her cheek, suffused her
face, giving her an appearance of great distress.
"Oh, I wish Loreen would come! I am not at all happy in my suggestions,"
she said, with a deprecatory twitch of her lip that was one of her
subtle charms. "Oh, there she is! Now I may go," she cried; and without
the least appearance of realizing that she had said anything out of
place, she rushed from the room almost before her sister had entered it.
But not before their eyes had met in a look of unusual significance.
V
A STRANGE HOUSEHOLD
Had I not surprised this look of mutual understanding, I might have
received an impression of Miss Knollys which would in a measure have
counteracted that made by the more nervous and less restrained Lucetta.
The dignified reserve of her bearing, the quiet way in which she
approached, and, above all, the even tones in which she uttered her
welcome, were such as to win my confidence and put me at my ease in the
house of which she was the nominal mistress. But that look! With that in
my memory, I was enabled to pierce below the surface of this placid
nature, and in the very constraint she put upon herself, detect the
presence of the same secret uneasiness which had been so openly, if
unconsciously, manifested by her sister.
She was more beautiful than Lucetta in form and feature, and even more
markedly elegant in her plain black gown and fine lawn ruffles, but she
lacked her sister's evanescent charm, and though admirable to all
appearance, was less lovable on a short acquaintance.
But this delays my tale, which is one of action rather than reflection.
I had naturally expected that with the appearance of the elder Miss
Knollys I should be taken to my room; but, on the contrary, she sat down
and with an apologetic air informed me that she was sorry she could not
show me the customary attentions. Circumstances over which she had no
control had made it impossible, she said, for her to offer me the
guest-chamber, but if I would be so good as to accept another for this
one night, she would endeavor to provide me with better accommodations
on the morrow.
Satisfied of the almost painful nature of their poverty and determined
to submit to privations rather than leave a house so imbued with
mystery, I hastened to assure her that any room would be acceptable to
me; and with a display of good feeling not wholly insincere, began to
gather up my wraps in anticipation of being taken at once up-stairs.
But Miss Knollys again surprised me by saying that my room was not yet
ready; that they had not been able to complete all their arrangements,
and begged me to make myself at home in the room where I was till
evening.
As this was asking a good deal of a woman of my years, fresh from a
railroad journey and with natural habits of great neatness and order, I
felt somewhat disconcerted, but hiding my feelings in consideration of
reasons before given, replaced my bundles on the table and endeavored to
make the best of a somewhat trying situation.
Launching at once into conversation, I began, as with Lucetta, to talk
about her mother. I had never known, save in the vaguest way, why Mrs.
Knollys had taken the journey which had ended in her death and burial in
a foreign land. Rumor had it that she had gone abroad for her health
which had begun to fail after the birth of Lucetta; but as Rumor had not
added why she had gone unaccompanied by her husband or children, there
remained much which these girls might willingly tell me, which would be
of the greatest interest to me. But Miss Knollys, intentionally or
unintentionally, assumed an air so cold at my well meant questions, that
I desisted from pressing them, and began to talk about myself in a way
which I hoped would establish really friendly relations between us and
make it possible for her to tell me later, if not at the present moment,
what it was that weighed so heavily upon the household, that no one
could enter this home without feeling the shadow of the secret terror
enveloping it.
But Miss Knollys, while more attentive to my remarks than her sister had
been, showed, by certain unmistakable signs, that her heart and interest
were anywhere but in that room; and while I could not regard this as
throwing any discredit upon my powers of pleasing--which have rarely
failed when I have exerted them to their utmost,--I still could not but
experience the dampening effect of her manner. I went on chatting, but
in a desultory way, noting all that was odd in her unaccountable
reception of me, but giving, as I firmly believe, no evidence of my
concern and rapidly increasing curiosity.
The peculiarities observable in this my first interview with these
interesting but by no means easily-to-be-understood sisters continued
all day. When one sister came in, the other stepped out, and when dinner
was announced and I was ushered down the bare and dismal hall into an
equally bare and unattractive dining-room, it was to find the chairs set
for four, and Lucetta only seated at the table.
"Where is Loreen?" I asked wonderingly, as I took the seat she pointed
out to me with one of her faint and quickly vanishing smiles.
"She cannot come at present," my young hostess stammered with an
unmistakable glance of distress at the large, hearty-looking woman who
had summoned me to the dining-room.
"Ah," I ejaculated, thinking that possibly Loreen had found it necessary
to assist in the preparation of the meal, "and your brother?"
It was the first time he had been mentioned since my first inquiries. I
had shrunk from the venture out of a motive of pure compassion, and they
had not seen fit to introduce his name into any of our conversations.
Consequently I awaited her response, with some anxiety, having a secret
premonition that in some way he was at the bottom of my strange
reception.
Her hasty answer, given, however, without any increase of embarrassment,
somewhat dispelled this supposition.
"Oh, he will be in presently," said she. "William is never very
punctual."
But when he did come in, I could not help seeing that her manner
instantly changed and became almost painfully anxious. Though it was my
first meeting with the real head of the house, she waited for an
interchange of looks with him before giving me the necessary
introduction, and when, this duty performed, he took his seat at the
table, her thoughts and attention remained so fixed upon him that she
well-nigh forgot the ordinary civilities of a hostess. Had it not been
for the woman I have spoken of, who in her good-natured attention to my
wants amply made up for the abstraction of her mistress, I should have
fared ill at this meal, good and ample as it was, considering the
resources of those who provided it.
She seemed to dread to have him speak, almost to have him move. She
watched him with her lips half open, ready, as it appeared, to stop any
inadvertent expression he might utter in his efforts to be agreeable.
She even kept her left hand disengaged, with the evident intention of
stretching it out in his direction if in his lumbering stupidity he
should utter a sentence calculated to open my eyes to what she so
passionately desired to have kept secret. I saw it all as plainly as I
saw his heavy indifference to her anxiety; and knowing from experience
that it is in just such stolid louts as these that the worst passions
are often hidden, I took advantage of my years and forced a conversation
in which I hoped some flash of his real self would appear, despite her
wary watch upon him.
Not liking to renew the topic of the lane itself, I asked with a very
natural show of interest, who was their nearest neighbor. It was William
who looked up and William who answered.
"Old Mother Jane is the nearest," said he; "but she's no good. We never
think of her. Mr. Trohm is the only neighbor I care for. Such peaches as
the old fellow raises! Such grapes! Such melons! He gave me two of the
nicest you ever saw this morning. By Jupiter, I taste them yet!"
Lucetta's face, which should have crimsoned with mortification, turned
most unaccountably pale. Yet not so pale as it had previously done when,
a few minutes before, he began to say, "Loreen wants some of this soup
saved for"--and stopped awkwardly, conscious perhaps that Loreen's wants
should not be mentioned before me.
"I thought you promised me that you would never again ask Mr. Trohm for
any of his fruit," remonstrated Lucetta.
"Oh, I didn't ask! I just stood at the fence and looked over. Mr. Trohm
and I are good friends. Why shouldn't I eat his fruit?"
The look she gave him might have moved a stone, but he seemed perfectly
impervious to it. Seeing him so stolid, her head drooped, and she did
not answer a word. Yet somehow I felt that even while she was so
manifestly a prey to the deepest mortification, her attention was not
wholly given over to this one emotion. There was something else she
feared. Hoping to relieve her and lighten the situation, I forced myself
to smile on the young man as I said:
"Why don't you raise melons yourself? I think if I possessed your land I
should be anxious to raise everything I could on it."
"Oh, you're a woman!" he retorted, almost roughly. "It's good business
for women; and for men, too, perhaps, who love to see fruit hang, but I
only care to eat it."
"Don't," Lucetta put in, but not with the vigor I had expected.
"I like to hunt, train dogs, and enjoy other people's fruit," he
laughed, with a nod at the blushing Lucetta. "I don't see any use in a
man's putting himself out for things he can get for the asking. Life's
too short for such folly. I mean to have a good time while I'm on this
blessed sphere."
"William!"
The cry was irresistible, yet it was not the cry I had been looking for.
Painful as was this exhibition of his stupidity and utter want of
feeling, it was not the one thing she stood in dread of, or why was her
protest so much weaker than her appearance had given token of?
"Oh!" he shouted in great amusement, while she shrunk back with a
horrified look. "Lucetta don't like to hear me say that. She thinks a
man ought to work, plow, harrow, dig, make a slave of himself, to keep
up a place that's no good anyway. But I tell her that work is something
she'll never get out of me. I was born a gentleman, and a gentleman I
will live if the place tumbles down over our heads. Perhaps it would be
the best way to get rid of it. Then I could go live with Mr. Trohm, and
have melons from early morn till late at night." And again his coarse
laugh rang out.
This, or was it his words, seemed to rouse her as nothing had done
before. Thrusting out her hand, she laid it on his mouth, with a look of
almost frenzied appeal at the woman who was standing at his back.
"Mr. William, how can you!" that woman protested; and when he would have
turned upon her angrily, she leaned over and whispered in his ear a few
words that seemed to cow him, for he gave a short grunt through his
sister's trembling fingers and, with a shrug of his heavy shoulders,
subsided into silence.
To all this I was a simple spectator, but I did not soon forget a single
feature of the scene.
The remainder of the dinner passed quietly, William and myself eating
with more or less heartiness, Lucetta tasting nothing at all. In mercy
to her I declined coffee, and as soon as William gave token of being
satisfied, we hurriedly rose. It was the most uncomfortable meal I ever
ate in my life.
VI
A SOMBRE EVENING
The evening, like the afternoon, was spent in the sitting-room with one
of the sisters. One event alone is worth recording. I had become
excessively tired of a conversation that always languished, no matter on
what topic it started, and, observing an old piano in one corner--I once
played very well--I sat down before it and impulsively struck a few
chords from the yellow keys. Instantly Lucetta--it was Lucetta who was
with me then--bounded to my side with a look of horror.
"Don't do that!" she cried, laying her hand on mine to stop me. Then,
seeing my look of dignified astonishment, she added with an appealing
smile, "I beg pardon, but every sound goes through me to-night."
"Are you not well?" I asked.
"I am never very well," she returned, and we went back to the sofa and
renewed our forced and pitiful attempts at conversation.
Promptly at nine o'clock Miss Knollys came in. She was very pale and
cast, as usual, a sad and uneasy look at her sister before she spoke to
me. Immediately Lucetta rose, and, becoming very pale herself, was
hurrying toward the door when her sister stopped her.
"You have forgotten," she said, "to say good-night to our guest."
Instantly Lucetta turned, and, with a sudden, uncontrollable impulse,
seized my hand and pressed it convulsively.
"Good-night," she cried. "I hope you will sleep well," and was gone
before I could say a word in response.
"Why does Lucetta go out of the room when you come in?" I asked,
determined to know the reason for this peculiar conduct. "Have you any
other guests in the house?"
The reply came with unexpected vehemence. "No," she cried, "why should
you think so? There is no one here but the family." And she turned away
with a dignity she must have inherited from her father, for Althea
Burroughs had every interesting quality but that. "You must be very
tired," she remarked. "If you please we will go now to your room."
I rose at once, glad of the prospect of seeing the upper portion of the
house. She took my wraps on her arm, and we passed immediately into the
hall. As we did so, I heard voices, one of them shrill and full of
distress; but the sound was so quickly smothered by a closing door that
I failed to discover whether this tone of suffering proceeded from a man
or a woman.
Miss Knollys, who was preceding me, glanced back in some alarm, but as I
gave no token of having noticed anything out of the ordinary, she
speedily resumed her way up-stairs. As the sounds I had heard proceeded
from above, I followed her with alacrity, but felt my enthusiasm
diminish somewhat when I found myself passing door after door down a
long hall to a room as remote as possible from what seemed to be the
living portion of the house.
"Is it necessary to put me off quite so far?" I asked, as my young
hostess paused and waited for me to join her on the threshold of the
most forbidding room it had ever been my fortune to enter.
The blush which mounted to her brow showed that she felt the situation
keenly.
"I am sure," she said, "that it is a matter of great regret to me to be
obliged to offer you so mean a lodging, but all our other rooms are out
of order, and I cannot accommodate you with anything better to-night."
"But isn't there some spot nearer you?" I urged. "A couch in the same
room with you would be more acceptable to me than this distant room."
"I--I hope you are not timid," she began, but I hastened to disabuse her
mind on this score.
"I am not afraid of any earthly thing but dogs," I protested warmly.
"But I do not like solitude. I came here for companionship, my dear. I
really would like to sleep with one of you."
This, to see how she would meet such urgency. She met it, as I might
have known she would, by a rebuff.
"I am very sorry," she again repeated, "but it is quite impossible. If I
could give you the comforts you are accustomed to, I should be glad, but
we are unfortunate, we girls, and--" She said no more, but began to busy
herself about the room, which held but one object that had the least
look of comfort in it. That was my trunk, which had been neatly placed
in one corner.
"I suppose you are not used to candles," she remarked, lighting what
struck me as a very short end, from the one she held in her hand.
"My dear," said I, "I can accommodate myself to much that I am not used
to. I have very few old maid's ways or notions. You shall see that I am
far from being a difficult guest."
She heaved a sigh, and then, seeing my eye travelling slowly over the
gray discolored walls which were not relieved by so much as a solitary
print, she pointed to a bell-rope near the head of the bed, and
considerately remarked:
"If you wish anything in the night, or are disturbed in any way, pull
that. It communicates with my room, and I will be only too glad to come
to you."
I glanced up at the rope, ran my eye along the wire communicating with
it, and saw that it was broken sheer off before it even entered into the
wall.
"I am afraid you will not hear me," I answered, pointing to the break.
She flushed a deep scarlet, and for a moment looked as embarrassed as
ever her sister had done.
"I did not know," she murmured. "The house is so old, everything is more
or less out of repair." And she made haste to quit the room.
I stepped after her in grim determination.
"But there is no key to the door," I objected.
She came back with a look that was as nearly desperate as her placid
features were capable of.