If the house had been merely shabby I doubt whether I would have been
interested. Every residence section has its shabby houses, monuments to
departed aspirations, falling into slow decay in the midst of weedy
yards, sometimes uninhabited and sometimes sheltering one or two members
of the family who apparently have been left, like the ancient furniture,
to be forgotten. The paint cracks and peels, the windows fall into
impossible angles or are boarded up, the porches sag, the chimneys lose
a brick or two and come in time to look like stumps of teeth. By and by
the whole structure seems to sink into the grass under the burden of its
neglect, and only a faint tenacity, a melancholy inertia keeps it from
crumbling altogether. Then suddenly the inhabitants die, the neighbors
awake to a sudden sense of change, and that is all.
The Drainger house was such a house, but it was more. It was mysterious,
uncommunicative. In the midst of the commonplace residence block, with
its white cottages, its monotonous lawns and uninteresting gardens, the
contrast was startling, secretive, contemptuous. The tall grass waved
ironically at the neat grassplots which flanked it. The great untrimmed
elms sent branches to beat against the decaying shingles, or downward
into the faces of passers-by, with patrician indifference to the law.
They had, indeed, the air of ragged retainers, haughty and starving, and
yet crowding about the house as if to hide the poverty of their master
from the eyes of the vulgar. City ordinances required the laying of
cement walks; the rotting boardwalk in front of the Drainger mansion
was already treacherous, and no one complained.
The building itself was extraordinary. Built in the days when Crosby had
been a lumber town and building material had consequently been cheap,
its pretensions were immense. A tall, six-sided tower occupied
two-thirds of the front, an elaborate affair, crowned by rusty ironwork
in lieu of battlements. Windows were inserted at appropriate intervals,
suggesting a donjon keep or a page from Walter Scott. The heavy brown
shutters were never opened. There was a grim angularity to the deep
porch below, a military cut to the bare front door which added to the
forbidding character of the place. Behind this imposing front the rest
of the building lay like the parts of a castle, each portion a little
lower than the preceding. There were four of these sections, like four
platforms, their flat roofs crowned with further rusty ironwork. The
windows were infrequent and all barred, and a massive elm to the east of
the house threw over them a gloomy and impenetrable shade. Although the
whole building had been painted brown, time and the weather had combined
to make it almost black, the only patch of color being the rich green of
the mossy shingles on the roof of the porch.
I had first noticed the Drainger house because of its oddity. Then I was
impressed by its air of speechless and implacable resentment. So far as
I could observe it was empty; no foot disturbed the rank grass or
troubled the dismal porches. The windows were never thrown open to the
sunlight. The front door, in the month I had spent in Crosby, remained
locked. I had once observed a grocery wagon standing in front of the
house, but this, I assumed, was because the driver wished to leave his
horse in the shade.
Proceeding homeward one night to my cousin's, Mark Jedfrey, with whom I
was spending the summer, I was startled, when I came in front of the
Drainger place, to see a light in the front window of the tower on the
ground floor. It was moonlight, and the heavy shadows sculptured the old
mansion into fantastic shapes, revealing a barred window inscrutably
facing the moon, carving the top of the house into gargoyles of light
and throwing the porch into Egyptian darkness. The light through the
shutter of the window was therefore as unexpected as a stab. I paused
without knowing it. Apparently I was observed; there was a light sound
of footsteps from the invisible porch and the creaking, followed by the
shutting, of the front door. Immediately afterwards the light was
extinguished.
The person who had been on the porch had moved so quickly and so
quietly, and the street, drenched in the July moonlight, seemed so
still, that I wondered a moment later whether to credit my senses. At
any rate, it was not my business, I concluded, to stand staring at a
strange house at one o'clock in the morning, and I resumed my walk home.
A week later, a change in the routine of my daily life made me a regular
visitant in the neighborhood. Twice a day I passed the Drainger house.
In the morning it seemed to resist the genial sunlight, drawing its
hedge of shade trees closer about it and remaining impervious to all
suggestions of warmth. And on my return from the office in the evening
it was as sealed, as autumnal as ever. The pleasant sounds of human
intercourse, the chatting of women on the steps or the whirr of
lawn-mowers should, I fancied, at least unshutter a window or burst open
a frigid door. But the warm impulses of neighborhood life, like the
cries of the boys at their evening game of baseball, broke unheeded
against that clifflike impassivity. No one stirred within; no one, not
even the paper boy, dared to cut across the front yard; and a pile of
yellowing bills on the front steps testified to the unavailing temerity
of advertisers.
There was nothing to show I had not dreamed the episode of the light, as
I had begun to think of it. I could have made inquiries--Helen, Mark's
wife, knows everybody--but I did not. I could have consulted the
directory. But I preferred to keep the house to myself. I had a secret
sense of proprietorship (I am, I suppose, a romantic and imaginative
soul) and I preferred that the mystery should come to me. My alert
devotion must, I thought, have its reward. Indeed, my daily walks to
and from my work took on the character of a silent duel between the
expressionless walls and my expressionless face, and I was not going to
be beaten in taciturnity.
One Friday morning, well into August, I was surprised and curious to see
a woman standing under the elms in the front of the Drainger mansion.
The neighborhood was, for the moment, deserted. I concealed my eagerness
under a mask of impassivity. I thought myself masterly as, pretending an
interest in nothing, I yet watched the place out of the tail of my eye.
Imagine my increasing surprise to observe that as I approached, the
person in question came slowly down to the junction of her walk with the
sidewalk, so that, as I drew near we were face to face.
"You are Mr. Gillingham?" she asked.
I stopped mechanically and raised my hat. I visit Crosby regularly,
where I am well known, so that I was not surprised to be thus accosted
by one who was a stranger to me. She was about forty, obviously a
spinster, and clad in a costume not merely out-of-date, but so far
out-of-date as to possess a false air of theatricalism. I can best
describe her (I am not clever in matters of dress) by saying that, with
the exception that she was not wearing a hoopskirt, she appeared to have
stepped out of _Godey's Lady's Book_. A Paisley shawl was wrapped
tightly around her head, although the morning was warm, and its subdued
brilliance clashed oddly with the faded lemon of her dress. Her face was
small, the features regular, but her complexion was more than sallow, it
was yellow, the yellow of dying grass and sunless places. A spot of
rouge glared on either cheek, and, with her eyes, which were black and
brilliant, gave her face the look of fever. Her dark hair, just visible
under the shawl, deepened the hectic quality of her features, although,
as a matter of fact, she was not ill.
"You are a lawyer?" she continued, her brilliant eyes searching my face,
I thought with some boldness, and without waiting for an answer she
said, "Come," and walked abruptly toward the house.
I followed her. On the porch we paused; my companion turned and searched
the street, which was still empty, a fact which seemed to increase her
satisfaction, and without giving me a glance, unlocked the front door
with a key which she was carrying.