There is, to a human being of Charlotte Carroll's type, something
unutterably terrifying about entering, especially at nightfall, an
entirely empty house. The worst of it is it does not seem to be
empty. In reality, the emptiness of it is the last thing which is
comprehended. It is full to overflowing with terrors, with spiritual
entities which are much more palpable, when one is in a certain mood,
than actual physical presences. Charlotte approaching the house, saw,
first, glimmers of light on the windows, which were merely
reflections ostensibly from the electric light in the street, not so
ostensibly from other lights.
"Oh, there is some one in there," Charlotte thought to herself, and
again that horrible, pulsing, vibrating motion of her heart overcame
her. "Who is there?" she asked herself. She remembered that terrible
tramp whom she had seen asleep in the woods that day. He might have
been riding on some freight-train which had stopped at Banbridge, and
stolen across and entered the vacant house. She stood still, staring
at the cold glimmers on the windows. Then gradually she became
convinced that they were merely reflections which she saw. Aside from
her imagination, Charlotte was not entirely devoid of a certain
bravery, or, rather, of a certain reason which came to her rescue.
"What a little goose I am!" she told herself. "Those are only
reflections. They are the reflections of the light in the street." As
she studied it more closely she saw that the light, being intercepted
by the branches of the trees on the lawn, swaying in a light wind,
produced some of the strange effects at the windows which had seemed
like people moving back and forth in the rooms. Then all at once she
saw another glimmer of light on the front window of her father's room
which she could not account for at all. She moved in front of a long,
fan-shaped ray cast by the electric light in the street, and, looking
at the window, the reflection was still there. She could not account
for that at all, unless it was produced by a light from a house
window--which was probably the case. At all events, it disquieted
her. Still, she overcame her disinclination to enter the house
because of that. She reasoned from analogy. "All the other lights are
reflections," she told herself, "and of course that must be."
However, the main cause of her terror remained: the unfounded,
world-old conviction of presences behind closed doors, the almost
impossibility for a very imaginative person to conceive of an
entirely empty room or house--that is, empty of sentient life. She
had hidden the front-door key under the mat before the front door;
she had lived long enough in the country to acquire that absurdly
innocent habit. She groped for it, thought for a second, with a gasp
of horror, that it was not there. Then she felt it with her gloved
hand, fitted it in the lock, opened the door, and went in, and the
inner darkness smote her like a hostile crowd.
It was actually to the child as if she were passing through a thick
group of mysterious, inimical things concealed by the darkness. It
was as if she heard whispers of conspiracy; it was even as if she
smelled odors of strange garments and bodies. Every sense in her was
on the alert. She even tasted something bitter in her mouth. It was
all absurd. She reiterated in her ears that it was all absurd, but
she had now passed the point wherein reason can support. She had come
through an unusually active imagination into the unknown quantities
and sequences of life. She put out her hands and groped her way
through the darkness of the hall, and the fear lest she should touch
some one, some terrible thing, was as bad as the reality could have
been. She knew best where to find matches in the dining-room, so she
went through the hall, with a sort of mad rush in spite of her
blindness, and she gained the dining-room and felt along the shelf
for a little hammered-brass bowl where matches were usually kept. In
it she felt only two. The mantel-shelf was the old-fashioned marble
monstrosity, the perpetuation of a false taste in domestic
architecture, but it was excellent as to its facilities for
scratching matches. She rubbed one of the two matches under the shelf
on the rough surface, but it did not ignite. It evidently was a
half-burned match. She took the other. It seemed to her that if that
failed her, if she had to grope about the kitchen for more in this
thick blackness--for even the street-light did not reach this
room--she should die. She rubbed the last match against the marble,
and it blazed directly. She shielded it carefully with her hand from
the door draught, and succeeded in lighting a candle in one of a pair
of brass candlesticks which stood on the shelf. She then held the
flaring light aloft and looked fearfully around the room. Everything
was as usual, but, strangely enough, it did not reassure her. The
solitariness continued to hold terrible possibilities for her as well
as the darkness, and with the light also returned what had been for a
few minutes in abeyance before her purely selfish fear, the anxiety
over her father. She moved about the house with the candle, going
from room to room. It seemed to her that she could not remain one
minute if she did not do so. Every time before entering a room she
felt sure that it was occupied. Every time after leaving it she felt
sure that something unknown was left there. She went into the
kitchen, and saw her miserable little dinner drying up in the shelf
of the range, and then for the first time self-pity asserted itself.
She sat down and sobbed and sobbed.
"There, I got that nice dinner, that beautiful dinner," she said to
herself, quite aloud in a pitiful wail like a baby's, "and perhaps
poor papa will never even taste it. Oh dear! Oh dear!"
She rocked herself back and forth in the kitchen-chair, weeping. She
had set the candle on the table, and a draught of wind from some
unknown quarter struck it and the strangest lights and shadows flared
and flickered over the room and ceiling. Presently, Charlotte,
looking at them, became diverted again from her grief. She looked
about fearfully. Then she made a tremendous effort, rose, and lighted
a lamp. With that the room was not so frightful, yet it was still not
normal. The familiar homely articles of furniture assumed strange
appearances. She saw something on the range, a little object which
filled her with such unreasoning horror that it was almost sheer
insanity. It was simply because she could not for the moment imagine
what the little object, which had nothing in the least frightful
about it, could be. Finally she rose and looked, and it was only a
little iron spoon which she must have dropped there. She removed it,
but still the horror was over her. She lifted the cover from the dish
of meat, and again the tears came.
"Poor papa! poor papa!" she said.
Then she carried the lamp into the dining-room, and went into the
parlor. She had made herself quite satisfied that there was in
reality nothing menacing in the house except her own fears. She would
sit beside one of the front windows in the parlor, in the dark, in
order that she might not be seen, and she would watch for her father,
and she would also watch for any one who might approach the house
with any harmful intent.
Charlotte curled herself up in a large chair beside the window which
commanded the best view of the grounds and the drive. With the light
of the young moon there was really no possibility that anything could
approach unseen by her, unless by way of the fields from the back.
But that she did not think of. Her mind became again concentrated
upon her father and the possibility of either his return on the next
train or a telegram explaining his absence. She knew that the next
train from New York was due in Banbridge at a few minutes after
eight. She had no time-table, but she remembered Major Arms arriving
once, and she was quite certain that the train was due at
eight-seventeen. It might, of course, be late. She reflected, with a
sense of solid comfort, that the trains were rather more apt to be
late than not. She need not give up hope of her father's arriving on
this train until even nine o'clock, for besides the possibility of
the lateness there was also that of his walking rather than taking a
carriage from the station. In fact, he would probably walk, since he
was still in Samson Rawdy's debt. She might allow at least twenty
minutes for the walk from the station. She might allow more even than
that. She sat at the window, and waited, peering out. There was a
singular half-dusk rather than half-light from the new moon. The moon
itself was not visible from where she sat, for the window faced
north, but she could see over everything the sweet influence of it.
There was no snow on the lawn, which was a dry crisp of frost-killed
grass, as flat as if swept by a broom, and here and there were the
faintest patches and mottles of silver from this moon, aside from a
broad gleam of the garish light from the street-lamp. The bushes and
trees showed lines of silver. The moon was so young that the stars
were quite brilliant. Taking all the lights together--the electric
light in the street, the new moon, and the stars--the lawn was quite
visible, and even, because the leaves were now all gone from the
trees, the road for quite a distance beyond. Charlotte had a
considerable vista in which to watch for her father. The time passed
incredibly in this watching. She had upon her such a fear and even
premonition that he might not come, that the minutes passed with the
horrible swiftness that they pass for a criminal awaiting execution.
The first time she slipped out in the dining-room--with a last look
at the lawn and road, to be sure that he would not be there in the
mean time--to see what time it was by the clock on the shelf, she was
amazed. It was already eight o'clock. She had not dreamed it was more
than half-past seven. She crept back to her place by the parlor
window, with the feeling that much of her time of reprieve had
passed, and that she was so much the nearer the certainty of
tribulation. Instead of impatience she had rather the desire to defer
approaching disaster. While she watched, she had less and less hope
that her father would come on that train, and yet she kept her heart
alive by picturing her rapture when she should see his tall, dark
figure enter the lawn path, when she should run and unlock and unbar
the door and throw her arms around his neck. She made up her mind
that she should not confess to him what a panic she had been in
because of his non-arrival. She planned how she would run and set the
dinner, in which she still believed, on the table, and how hungry he
would be for it. She was quite sure that her poor father did not in
these days provide himself with sumptuous lunches in the city. But
all the time she reared these air-castles, she saw for a certainty
the dark sky of her trouble through them. For some premonition, or a
much modified form of prophecy, the rudimentary expression of a
divine sense in reality exists. It existed in Charlotte watching for
her father at the window, and yet so bound up was she in the
probabilities and present sequences of things that she still watched.
Now and then she made sure that she saw her father turn from the road
into the lawn, but the figure, to her horror, would remain standing
still in one place. It was simply a slender spruce which had seemed
to start out of a corner of the night with a semblance of life. Now
and then she actually did see a figure coming up the road,
approaching the entrance to the lawn, and her heart leaped up with
joy. She watched for it to enter, but that was the end. Whoever it
was, it had passed the house and gone farther up the road. Those were
the cruellest moments of any--the momentary revival of hope and then
the dashing it to the ground. By-and-by her eyes, strained with such
watching, began to actually deceive her. She saw, as she thought,
shadows, approach and enter the house. Several times she ran to the
door and opened it, and no one was there.
After she had gone out in the dining-room and seen that it was
eight-seventeen, the time when the train was due in Banbridge, she
watched for the train. She knew that she could hear the rush of the
train after it left the station; she could even catch a glimpse of
the rosy fire of the locomotive through the trees, since the track
was elevated. She therefore watched for that, but it was very late.
That was unmistakably a great solace for her. She actually had a
prayerful mood of thankfulness for the lateness of the train. It was
that much longer that she need not give up hope. There was a few
minutes that she felt quite easy. Suddenly she remembered how foolish
she had been to watch for her father, anyway, before she heard the
arrival of the train. She realized that her head was overstrained,
her reason failing her. "How could papa come before the train?" she
asked herself. But after a few minutes her fears reasserted
themselves. She watched for something inimical to appear crossing the
lawn instead of her father. And then she heard a train, and she felt
faint, but in a second she became aware that it was a long freight.
No passenger-train ever moved thus with the veritable chu-chu of the
children, the heavy panting of two engines. Then after that she
started again, for she heard a train, but it was as if she had been
let fall by some wanton hand from a cruel height, for that train was
clearly a fast express which did not stop at Banbridge. Then she
heard a faint rumble of another freight on the Lehigh Valley road.
Then at last came the train for which she had been looking, the train
on which her father might come, the train on which he surely would
come unless some terrible thing had happened. She heard distinctly,
with her sharpened ears, the stop of the train at the station, the
letting off of steam. She heard the engine-bell. She heard it resume
its advance with slowly gathering motion. She saw a rosy flash of
fire in the distance from the engine. Then she waited for
carriage-wheels, or for the sight of her father coming up the road.
It was quite soon that she heard carriage-wheels on the frozen
ground, and she ran to the door and opened it, but the carriage
passed. Samson Rawdy was taking home the next neighbor. "It will take
papa considerably longer if he walks," she told herself, and she
locked the door and returned to her station at the window. She saw
again a dark figure approaching on the road outside, and she thought
with a great throb of joy that he had surely come, but the figure did
not enter the grounds. She allowed twenty-five minutes for him to
walk from the station. She said to herself if, when twenty-five
minutes had elapsed, he had not come, she should certainly know that
he had not come on that train. She did not dare look at the clock,
but after a while, when she did so, she found it was twenty-seven
minutes after eight. Still that clock often gained. She ran out in
the kitchen and looked at the clock there, but that had stopped at
half-past seven. It was very seldom that anybody remembered to wind
up the kitchen-clock since Marie went. Her own little watch was at
the jeweller's in New Sanderson for repairs. She had nothing to
depend on except the dining-room clock, which, to her great comfort,
so often gained. She decided that she might wait until ten minutes of
nine by that clock before she gave up hope, but the next time she
went trembling out to look at it it was only three minutes before
nine. Then it occurred to her that her father might easily have had
an errand at one of the stores before coming home. The post-office
would be closed; she had no hope for that, but he might have had some
business. She thought that she might allow until half-past nine
before she entirely gave up her father having come on the
eight-seventeen train. It was then that she began running out on the
lawn to the entrance of the drive to watch for him. She put a Roman
blanket, which was kept on the divan in the den, over her head, and
she continually ran out across the lawn, and stood close to a tree,
staring down the road for some sign of her father. Curiously enough,
she was not nearly so terrified out-of-doors as in the house. The
strain of returning to that vacant house was much worse for her than
going across the lawn in the lonely night. She watched and watched,
and at last when she returned to the house and looked at the
dining-room clock, it was half-past nine, and she completely gave up
all hope of her father having come on that train.
A species of stupor, of terror and anxiety, seemed to overcome her.
She sat by the parlor window, still staring out from mere force of
habit. She knew that the next and last train that night was not due
until one-thirty, presumably nearly two o'clock. She knew that there
was not the slightest chance of her father's coming until then, but
her mind now centred on the telegram. It did seem as if there must be
a telegram, at least. All at once a figure appeared in the road and
swiftly turned into the drive. She thought at once that the boy in
the drug-store was bringing the telegram; still, she resolved not to
open the door until she was sure who it was. She peered closely from
the window, and it was unmistakably the drug-store boy who emerged
from the tree shadows and came up on the stoop. She ran to the door
and unfastened it, not waiting for him to ring. She held out her
trembling little hand for the telegram, but he kept his at his side.
He looked at her, grinning half-sympathetically, half-sheepishly. He
was an overgrown boy, perhaps three years younger than she, whom a
pretty girl overwhelmed with an enormous self-consciousness and
admiration.
"Where is it?" asked Charlotte, impatiently.
"I 'ain't got nothing'," said the boy.
"Then why--"
"I was going home from the store, and I thought I'd jest stop an' let
you know there wa'n't no telegrams yet. It wa'n't much out of my way."
Charlotte gasped.
"I thought it might be a relief to your mind to know," said the boy.
"I thought you might be watchin'. I saw your father didn't come on
that other train. I was up at the station on an errand."
"Thank you," said Charlotte, feebly.
The boy lingered a second with bashful eyes on her face, then he said
again that he thought he would just stop in and let her know. He was
going down the path, and she was just closing the door, when he
called back that she might have a telegram if her father sent it by
the postal-telegraph system.
"You won't get none from our place after now," he said, "for Mr.
Drake won't bring up none so late; but if your father sends that way,
you could get one, mebbe."
"Thank you," replied Charlotte, and the boy went away.
When Charlotte re-entered the house and locked the door, a loneliness
which was like a positive chill struck over her. It was much worse
now since she had been in communication with another human being.
"If he had only been a girl I would have gone down on my knees to him
to stay all night with me," she thought.
She tried to think if there was anybody in Banbridge whom she could
ask to stay with her, but she could think of none. She thought of
Marie, but she did not even know where she was. There was no woman
whom she could call upon. She resumed her seat beside the window. She
did not dream of going to bed. She had now to watch for the possible
postal telegram; it would not be time for the last train for hours
yet. She had the telegraph-messenger and some possible marauder to
watch for. She kept her eyes glued to the expanse of the lawn and
small stretch of road visible between the leafless trees. Now and
then a carriage passed; very seldom a walking shadow. She always
started at the sight of these, thinking the telegram might be about
to arrive. If the telegram should arrive she expected fully that it
would be of some terrible import. A thought struck her, something
that she might do. If her father was injured, if she were to be sent
for from the City, she resolved that she would have everything in
readiness for instant departure. There was a train which Banbridge
flagged after the arrival of the last train from New York. She lit a
lamp, went up-stairs, and packed a little travelling-bag with
necessaries, and made some changes in her dress, and felt a certain
relief in so doing. She had very little money, and a book with two or
three railroad tickets. She felt that she could start at a moment's
notice should the telegram arrive. All the time she was packing she
was listening for the door-bell. It became quite firmly fixed in her
mind what the telegram would be: that her father was terribly injured
and had been carried to a hospital, that she should at once go to the
hospital. It sometimes occurred to her that he might be even dead,
but that idea did not so take hold on her fancy as the other.
She left the lamp burning up-stairs, thinking suddenly that it would
be well to have the house present the appearance of being well
inhabited. She took her hat and coat and her little travelling-bag,
and she went back to the place by the parlor window and stared out at
the lawn again. It was growing very late. Soon it would be time for
her to watch for the last train. It really seemed to the girl an
incredible supposition of disaster that that train could pass by and
her father not appear, and that in the face of her morbid and
pessimistic conclusions. She was a mass of inconsistencies, of
incoherencies. She at once despaired and hoped with a hope that was
conviction. At last, when she saw by the clock that it only wanted a
few minutes before the time when the last train was due, her spirits
arose as if winged. She even went out in the kitchen and examined the
wretched dinner to make sure it was still hot. She put more coal on
the range. The house was growing very cold, and she knew that the
furnace fire needed attention, but she absolutely dared not go down
cellar alone at that time. They had very little coal, also, and had
been in the habit of letting the furnace fire die down at night. She
put on her coat when she returned from the kitchen, and sat again by
the window. She felt now an absolute certainty that her father would
arrive on this train. She felt that it was monstrous to assume that
her father would not come home all night and leave her alone with no
message. She felt even quite radiantly happy sitting there. She said
to herself what a little goose she had been. Even a noise made by
some coal falling in the kitchen-range failed to startle her. She now
hoped that the train would not be late, and it was, in fact, very
nearly on time. Then she watched for her father with not the
slightest doubt that he would come. It had come to that pass that her
credulity as to disaster had failed her. It was simply out of her
power to credit the possibility of his not coming on this train when
he had sent no telegram. She knew that there would be no carriage at
the station at that hour, unless he had telegraphed for one from New
York, and she questioned, in the state of their finances, if he would
do that. She was therefore sure of seeing his figure appear, coming,
with the stately stride which she knew so well, into view on the road
below the lawn.
She allowed twenty-five minutes for his appearance after she had seen
the train pass. She knew nothing could detain him in the village at
that time of night, and she was sure he would come within that time.
She looked at the dining-room clock and found that she had, if she
allowed that twenty-five minutes, just fifteen minutes to wait. She
sat shrugged up in her little fur-trimmed coat, for the house was
growing very cold, and stared intently at the pale glimmer of the
road. After the twenty-five minutes had passed, she went out in the
dining-room and looked at the clock. The time was more than passed;
there was no doubt. Her father had not come. The panic seized her.
She was now dashed from the heights of hope, and the shock was
double. She realized that her father had not come, would not come
that night; that she would probably have no telegram. She realized
that she was all alone in the house. Now again unreasoning fear as
well as the anxiety for her father seized her. Again the conviction
of the awful population of the empty rooms was upon her. She sat down
again by the window, and she tried to make her reasoning powers
reassert themselves.
"If anything comes this way, I shall see it in time, and I can run
out the back door and across to the neighbors," she told herself. "If
anything comes in the back way, I shall hear and have time to run out
the front door; and I know there is nothing in the house." But she
could not reassure herself, since what terrified her, and even
temporarily unbalanced her, was fear itself.
Fear multiplied, growing upon itself, spreading out new tentacles
with every throb of her imagination, filling the whole house. All her
life she had thought what a frightful thing it would be if ever she
were left alone by herself in a house, all night; and now worse than
that had come to pass, for she was not alone; the house was peopled
by fear and the creatures of fear. She heard noises constantly that
she could not account for, and she also saw things which she could
not account for. Again the small and trivial, acutely stinging horror
of some ordinary object in a new and awful guise possessed her. She
was almost paralyzed at the sudden glimpse of something on the divan
across the room. It was a long time before she could possibly totter
to investigate, and ascertain it was one of her own gloves. But it
did not strike her as at all funny. There was still something
frightful to her about the glove. She went back to the window, and
soon she distinctly heard a noise up-stairs, and then a shadow
crossed the ceiling. A new horror seized her--a horror of herself.
She felt that in another moment she might herself become a very part
and substance of the fear that was oppressing her. She had an
imagination of jumping up, of running about and screaming, of
breaking something. Then with that clutch at life and reason which is
life itself, which all dying and despairing things have at the last,
she thought again that there must be somebody, somebody in the whole
place to whom she could turn, somebody who would help her, who would
pity her. She had heretofore only thought of the possibility of
somebody who would come and stay with her; it now occurred to her
that she herself might be the one to go, and that she might escape
from this house of fear. It was suddenly to her as to a prisoner who
realizes that all the time his prison doors have been unbarred.
"What am I staying here for in this awful house by myself?" she
suddenly thought. When that idea came to her, the idea of escape, the
action of her mind became involuntary. There was only one to whom she
could run for aid. She remembered so vividly that the experience
seemed to repeat itself, her terror of the tramp in the woods, and
how she had seen Anderson. She sprang up. It became sure to her that
she must get away from that house, that she must not remain. The
imaginative girl, whom anxiety and want of food had weakened, as well
as fear, was fairly at the point of madness, or that hysteria which
is the border-land of it. She distinctly heard herself laugh as she
ran out of the room and out of the house. Her head was bare, but she
did not think of that. She had on her coat which she had worn because
of the coldness of the house. She fled across the lawn to the street.
Once on the road, she was saner, she felt only the natural impulse of
flight of any hunted thing. She fled down the road past the quiet
village houses, in which the people slept in their beds. The electric
lights were out, the moon was low. It was quite dark. Nobody except
herself was abroad in the night. A great pity for herself, a pity
that she might have felt for a little lonely child out by herself at
night, when everybody else was safe in their homes, came over her.
She sobbed as she ran; she even sobbed quite loudly. She did not feel
so afraid, as wild for somebody to take her in and comfort her. She
ran down the main street and turned up the one on which the Andersons
lived. When she reached the house it was quite dark, except for a
very faint glimmer in one of the upper front rooms. It was from the
little night-lamp which Mrs. Anderson always kept burning. The sight
of that light seemed to give Charlotte strength to get up the steps.
She had run so weakly that all the way she had a thought of the
terraces of steps leading to the Anderson house, if she could climb
them. She went up the steps, and then she pressed hard the electric
button on the door; she also raised the superfluous old brass knocker
which Mrs. Anderson cherished because it was a relic from her
husband's time; then she clanged that. Then she sank down on the step
in front of the door.