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The Lock and Key Library: The most interesting stories of all nations: American

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Title: The Lock and Key Library: The most interesting stories of all nations: American

Editor: Julian Hawthorne

Contributor: Ambrose Bierce
        Charles Brockden Brown
        F. Marion Crawford
        Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman
        Nathaniel Hawthorne
        Washington Irving
        Fitz James O'Brien
        Edgar Allan Poe
        Melville Davisson Post


        
Release date: January 1, 2000 [eBook #2043]
                Most recently updated: October 14, 2023

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2043


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LOCK AND KEY LIBRARY: THE MOST INTERESTING STORIES OF ALL NATIONS: AMERICAN ***




THE LOCK AND KEY LIBRARY

THE MOST INTERESTING STORIES OF ALL NATIONS


Edited by Julian Hawthorne


AMERICAN




Table of Contents


INTRODUCTION BY JULIAN HAWTHORNE

“Riddle Stories”


F. MARION CRAWFORD (1854–)
By the Waters of Paradise


MARY E. WILKINS FREEMAN (1862–)
The Shadows on the Wall


MELVILLE D. POST (1871–)
The Corpus Delicti


AMBROSE BIERCE (1842–)
An Heiress from Redhorse
The Man and the Snake


EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809–49)
The Oblong Box
The Gold-Bug


WASHINGTON IRVING (1783–1859)
Wolfert Webber, or Golden Dreams
Adventure of the Black Fisherman


CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN (1771–1810)
Wieland’s Madness


FITZJAMES O’BRIEN (1828–1862)
The Golden Ingot
My Wife’s Tempter


NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE (1804–1864)
The Minister’s Black Veil


ANONYMOUS
Horror: A True Tale




“Riddle Stories”

Introduction by Julian Hawthorne


When Poe wrote his immortal Dupin tales, the name “Detective”
stories had not been invented; the detective of fiction not having
been as yet discovered.  And the title is still something of a
misnomer, for many narratives involving a puzzle of some sort,
though belonging to the category which I wish to discuss, are
handled by the writer without expert detective aid.  Sometimes the
puzzle solves itself through operation of circumstance; sometimes
somebody who professes no special detective skill happens upon the
secret of its mystery; once in a while some venturesome genius has
the courage to leave his enigma unexplained.  But ever since
Gaboriau created his Lecoq, the transcendent detective has been in
favor; and Conan Doyle’s famous gentleman analyst has given him a
fresh lease of life, and reanimated the stage by reverting to the
method of Poe.  Sherlock Holmes is Dupin redivivus, and mutatus
mutandis; personally he is a more stirring and engaging companion,
but so far as kinship to probabilities or even possibilities is
concerned, perhaps the older version of him is the more
presentable.  But in this age of marvels we seem less difficult to
suit in this respect than our forefathers were.

The fact is, meanwhile, that, in the riddle story, the detective
was an afterthought, or, more accurately, a deus ex machina to make
the story go.  The riddle had to be unriddled; and who could do it
so naturally and readily as a detective?  The detective, as Poe saw
him, was a means to this end; and it was only afterwards that
writers perceived his availability as a character.  Lecoq
accordingly becomes a figure in fiction, and Sherlock, while he was
as yet a novelty, was nearly as attractive as the complications in
which he involved himself.  Riddle-story writers in general,
however, encounter the obvious embarrassment that their detective
is obliged to lavish so much attention on the professional services
which the exigencies of the tale demand of him, that he has very
little leisure to expound his own personal equation—the rather
since the attitude of peering into a millstone is not, of itself,
conducive to elucidations of oneself; the professional endowment
obscures all the others.  We ordinarily find, therefore, our author
dismissing the individuality of his detective with a few strong
black-chalk outlines, and devoting his main labor upon what he
feels the reader will chiefly occupy his own ingenuity with,—
namely, the elaboration of the riddle itself.  Reader and writer
sit down to a game, as it were, with the odds, of course,
altogether on the latter’s side,—apart from the fact that a writer
sometimes permits himself a little cheating.  It more often happens
that the detective appears to be in the writer’s pay, and aids the
deception by leading the reader off on false scents.  Be that as it
may, the professional sleuth is in nine cases out of ten a dummy by
malice prepense; and it might be plausibly argued that, in the
interests of pure art, that is what he ought to be.  But genius
always finds a way that is better than the rules, and I think it
will be found that the very best riddle stories contrive to drive
character and riddle side by side, and to make each somehow enhance
the effect of the other.—The intention of the above paragraph will
be more precisely conveyed if I include under the name of detective
not only the man from the central office, but also anybody whom the
writer may, for ends of his own, consider better qualified for that
function.  The latter is a professional detective so far as the
exigencies of the tale are concerned, and what becomes of him after
that nobody need care,—there is no longer anything to prevent his
becoming, in his own right, the most fascinating of mankind.

But in addition to the dummyship of the detective, or to the cases
in which the mere slip of circumstance takes his place, there is
another reason against narrowing our conception of the riddle story
to the degree which the alternative appellation would imply.  And
that is, that it would exclude not a few of the most captivating
riddle stories in existence; for in De Quincey’s “Avenger,” for
example, the interest is not in the unraveling of the web, but in
the weaving of it.  The same remark applies to Bulwer’s “Strange
Story”; it is the strangeness that is the thing.  There is, in
short, an inalienable charm in the mere contemplation of mystery
and the hazard of fortunes; and it would be a pity to shut them out
from our consideration only because there is no second-sighted
conjurer on hand to turn them into plain matter of fact.

Yet we must not be too liberal; and a ghost story can be brought
into our charmed and charming circle only if we have made up our
minds to believe in the ghosts; otherwise their introduction would
not be a square deal.  It would not be fair, in other words, to
propose a conundrum on a basis of ostensible materialism, and then,
when no other key would fit, to palm off a disembodied spirit on
us.  Tell me beforehand that your scenario is to include both
worlds, and I have no objection to make; I simply attune my mind to
the more extensive scope.  But I rebel at an unheralded ghostland,
and declare frankly that your tale is incredible.  And I must
confess that I would as lief have ghosts kept out altogether; their
stories make a very good library in themselves, and have no need to
tag themselves on to what is really another department of fiction.
Nevertheless, when a ghost story is told with the consummate art of
a Miss Wilkins, and of one or two others on our list, consistency
in this regard ceases to be a jewel; art proves irresistible.  As
for adventure stories, there is a fringe of them that comes under
the riddle-story head; but for the most part the riddle story
begins after the adventures have finished.  We are to contemplate a
condition, not to watch the events that ultimate in it.  Our
detective, or anyone else, may of course meet with haps and mishaps
on his way to the solution of his puzzle; but an astute writer will
not color such incidents too vividly, lest he risk forfeiting our
preoccupation with the problem that we came forth for to study.  In
a word, One thing at a time!

The foregoing disquisition may seem uncalled for by such rigid
moralists as have made up their minds not to regard detective, or
riddle stories, as any part of respectable literature at all.  With
that sect, I announce at the outset that I am entirely out of
sympathy.  It is not needed to compare “The Gold Bug” with
“Paradise Lost”; nobody denies the superior literary stature of the
latter, although, as the Oxford Senior Wrangler objected, “What
does it prove?”  But I appeal to Emerson, who, in his poem of “The
Mountain and the Squirrel,” states the nub of the argument, with
incomparable felicity, as follows:—you will recall that the two
protagonists had a difference, originating in the fact that the
former called the latter “Little Prig.”  Bun made a very sprightly
retort, summing up to this effect:—


     “Talents differ; all is well and wisely put;
      If I cannot carry forests on my back,
      Neither can you crack a nut.”


Andes and Paradises Lost are expedient and perhaps necessary in
their proper atmosphere and function; but Squirrels and Gold Bugs
are indispensable in our daily walk.  There is as fine and as true
literature in Poe’s Tales as in Milton’s epics; only the elevation
and dimensions differ.  But I would rather live in a world that
possessed only literature of the Poe caliber, than shiver in one
echoing solely the strains of the Miltonian muse.  Mere human
beings are not constructed to stand all day a-tiptoe on the misty
mountain tops; they like to walk the streets most of the time and
sit in easy chairs.  And writings that picture the human mind and
nature, in true colors and in artistic proportions, are literature,
and nobody has any business to pooh-pooh them.  In fact, I feel as
if I were knocking down a man of straw.  I look in vain for any
genuine resistance.  Of course “The Gold Bug” is literature; of
course any other story of mystery and puzzle is also literature,
provided it is as good as “The Gold Bug,”—or I will say, since
that standard has never since been quite attained, provided it is a
half or a tenth as good.  It is goldsmith’s work; it is Chinese
carving; it is Daedalian; it is fine.  It is the product of the
ingenuity lobe of the human brain working and expatiating in
freedom.  It is art; not spiritual or transcendental art, but solid
art, to be felt and experienced.  You may examine it at your
leisure, it will be always ready for you; you need not fast or
watch your arms overnight in order to understand it.  Look at the
nice setting of the mortises; mark how the cover fits; how smooth
is the working of that spring drawer.  Observe that this bit of
carving, which seemed mere ornament, is really a vital part of the
mechanism.  Note, moreover, how balanced and symmetrical the whole
design is, with what economy and foresight every part is fashioned.
It is not only an ingenious structure, it is a handsome bit of
furniture, and will materially improve the looks of the empty
chambers, or disorderly or ungainly chambers that you carry under
your crown.  Or if it happen that these apartments are noble in
decoration and proportions, then this captivating little object
will find a suitable place in some spare nook or other, and will
rest or entertain eyes too long focused on the severely sublime and
beautiful.  I need not, however, rely upon abstract argument to
support my contention.  Many of the best writers of all time have
used their skill in the inverted form of story telling, as a glance
at our table of contents will show; and many of their tales depend
for their effect as much on character and atmosphere as on the play
and complication of events.

The statement that a good detective or riddle story is good in art
is supported by the fact that the supply of really good ones is
relatively small, while the number of writers who would write good
ones if they could, and who have tried and failed to write them, is
past computation.  And one reason probably is that such stories,
for their success, must depend primarily upon structure—a sound
and perfect plot—which is one of the rare things in our
contemporary fiction.  Our writers get hold of an incident, or a
sentiment, or a character, or a moral principle, or a hit of
technical knowledge, or a splotch of local color, or even of a new
version of dialect, and they will do something in two to ten
thousand words out of that and call it a short story.  Magazines
may be found to print it—for there are all manner of magazines;
but nothing of that sort will serve for a riddle story.  You cannot
make a riddle story by beginning it and then trusting to luck to
bring it to an end.  You must know all about the end and the middle
before thinking, even, of the beginning; the beginning of a riddle
story, unlike those of other stories and of other enterprises, is
not half the battle; it is next to being quite unimportant, and,
moreover, it is always easy.  The unexplained corpse lies weltering
in its gore in the first paragraph; the inexplicable cipher
presents its enigma at the turning of the opening page.  The writer
who is secure in the knowledge that he has got a good thing coming,
and has arranged the manner and details of its coming, cannot go
far wrong with his exordium; he wants to get into action at once,
and that is his best assurance that he will do it in the right way.
But O! what a labor and sweat it is; what a planning and trimming;
what a remodeling, curtailing, interlining; what despairs succeeded
by new lights, what heroic expedients tried at the last moment, and
dismissed the moment after; what wastepaper baskets full of
futilities, and what gallant commencements all over again!  Did the
reader know, or remotely suspect, what terrific struggles the
writer of a really good detective story had sustained, he would
regard the final product with a new wonder and respect, and read it
all over once more to find out how the troubles occurred.  But he
will search in vain; there are no signs of them left; no, not so
much as a scar.  The tale moves along as smoothly and inevitably as
oiled machinery; obviously, it could not have been arranged
otherwise than it is; and the wise reader is convinced that he
could have done the thing himself without half trying.  At that,
the weary writer smiles a bitter smile; but it is one of the spurns
that patient merit of the unworthy takes.  Nobody, except him who
has tried it, will ever know how hard it is to write a really good
detective story.  The man or woman who can do it can also write a
good play (according to modern ideas of plays), and possesses force
of character, individuality, and mental ability.  He or she must
combine the intuition of the artist with the talent of the master
mechanic, but will seldom be a poet, and will generally care more
for things and events than for fellow creatures.  For, although the
story is often concerned with righting some wrong, or avenging some
murder, yet it must be confessed that the author commonly succeeds
better in the measure of his ruthlessness in devising crimes and
giving his portraits of devils an extra touch of black.  Mercy is
not his strong point, however he may abound in justice; and he will
not stickle at piling up the agony, if thereby he provides
opportunity for enhancing the picturesqueness and completeness of
the evil doer’s due.

But this leads me to the admission that one charge, at least, does
lie against the door of the riddle-story writer; and that is, that
he is not sincere; he makes his mysteries backward, and knows the
answer to his riddle before he states its terms.  He deliberately
supplies his reader, also, with all manner of false scents, well
knowing them to be such; and concocts various seeming artless and
innocent remarks and allusions, which in reality are diabolically
artful, and would deceive the very elect.  All this, I say, must be
conceded; but it is not unfair; the very object, ostensibly, of the
riddle story is to prompt you to sharpen your wits; and as you are
yourself the real detective in the case, so you must regard your
author as the real criminal whom you are to detect.  Credit no
statement of his save as supported by the clearest evidence; be
continually repeating to yourself, “Timeo Danaos et dona
ferentes,”—nay, never so much as then.  But, as I said before,
when the game is well set, you have no chance whatever against the
dealer; and for my own part, I never try to be clever when I go up
against these thimble-riggers; I believe all they tell me, and
accept the most insolent gold bricks; and in that way I
occasionally catch some of the very ablest of them napping; for
they are so subtle that they will sometimes tell you the truth
because they think you will suppose it to be a lie.  I do not wish
to catch them napping, however; I cling to the wisdom of ignorance,
and childishly enjoy the way in which things work themselves out—
the cul-de-sac resolving itself at the very last moment into a
promising corridor toward the outer air.  At every rebuff it is my
happiness to be hopelessly bewildered; and I gape with admiration
when the Gordian knot is untied.  If the author be old-fashioned
enough to apostrophize the Gentle Reader, I know he must mean me,
and docilely give ear, and presently tumble head-foremost into the
treacherous pit he has digged for me.  In brief, I am there to be
sold, and I get my money’s worth.  No one can thoroughly enjoy
riddle stories unless he is old enough, or young enough, or, at any
rate, wise enough to appreciate the value of the faculty of being
surprised.  Those sardonic and omniscient persons who know
everything beforehand, and smile compassionately or scornfully at
the artless outcries of astonishment of those who are uninformed,
may get an ill-natured satisfaction out of the persuasion that they
are superior beings; but there is very little meat in that sort of
happiness, and the uninformed have the better lot after all.

I need hardly point out that there is a distinction and a
difference between short riddle stories and long ones—novels.  The
former require far more technical art for their proper development;
the enigma cannot be posed in so many ways, but must be stated once
for all; there cannot be false scents, or but a few of them; there
can be small opportunity for character drawing, and all kinds of
ornament and comment must be reduced to their very lowest terms.
Here, indeed, as everywhere, genius will have its way; and while a
merely talented writer would deem it impossible to tell the story
of “The Gold Bug” in less than a volume, Poe could do it in a few
thousand words, and yet appear to have said everything worth
saying.  In the case of the Sherlock Holmes tales, they form a
series, and our previous knowledge of the hero enables the writer
to dispense with much description and accompaniment that would be
necessary had that eminent personage been presented in only a
single complication of events.  Each special episode of the great
analyst’s career can therefore be handled with the utmost economy,
and yet fill all the requirements of intelligent interest and
comprehension.  But, as a rule, the riddle novel approaches its
theme in a spirit essentially other than that which inspires the
short tale.  We are given, as it were, a wide landscape instead of
a detailed genre picture.  The number of the dramatis personae is
much larger, and the parts given to many of them may be very small,
though each should have his or her necessary function in the
general plan.  It is much easier to create perplexity on these
terms; but on the other hand, the riddle novel demands a power of
vivid character portrayal and of telling description which are not
indispensable in the briefer narrative.  A famous tale, published
perhaps forty years ago, but which cannot be included in our
series, tells the story of a murder the secret of which is
admirably concealed till the last; and much of the fascination of
the book is due to the ability with which the leading character,
and some of the subordinate ones, are drawn.  The author was a
woman, and I have often marveled that women so seldom attempt this
form of literature; many of them possess a good constructive
faculty, and their love of detail and of mystery is notorious.
Perhaps they are too fond of sentiment; and sentiment must be
handled with caution in riddle stories.  The fault of all riddle
novels is that they inevitably involve two kinds of interest, and
can seldom balance these so perfectly that one or the other of them
shall not suffer.  The mind of the reader becomes weary in its
frequent journeys between human characters on one side the
mysterious events on the other, and would prefer the more single-
eyed treatment of the short tale.  Wonder, too, is a very tender
and short-lived emotion, and sometimes perishes after a few pages.
Curiosity is tougher; but that too may be baffled too long, and end
by tiring of the pursuit while it is yet in its early stages.  Many
excellent plots, admirable from the constructive point of view,
have been wasted by stringing them out too far; the reader
recognizes their merit, but loses his enthusiasm on account of a
sort of monotony of strain; he wickedly turns to the concluding
chapter, and the game is up.  “The Woman in White,” by Wilkie
Collins, was published about 1860, I think, in weekly installments,
and certainly they were devoured with insatiable appetite by many
thousands of readers.  But I doubt whether a book of similar merit
could command such a following to-day; and I will even confess that
I have myself never read the concluding parts, and do not know to
this day who the woman was or what were the wrongs from which she
so poignantly suffered.

The tales contained in the volumes herewith offered are the best
riddle or detective stories in the world, according to the best
judgment of the editors.  They are the product of writers of all
nations; and translation, in this case, is less apt to be
misleading than with most other forms of literature, for a mystery
or a riddle is equally captivating in all languages.  Many of the
good ones—perhaps some of the best ones—have been left out,
either because we missed them in our search, or because we had to
choose between them and others seemingly of equal excellence, and
were obliged to consider space limitations which, however
generously laid out, must have some end at last.  Be that as it
may, we believe that there are enough good stories here to satisfy
the most Gargantuan hunger, and we feel sure that our volumes will
never be crowded off the shelf which has once made room for them.
If we have, now and then, a little transcended the strict
definition of the class of fiction which our title would promise,
we shall nevertheless not anticipate any serious quarrel with our
readers; if there be room to question the right of any given story
to appear in this company, there will be all the more reason for
accepting it on its own merits; for it had to be very good indeed
in order to overcome its technical disqualification.  And if it did
not rightfully belong here, there would probably be objections as
strong to admitting it in any other collection.  Between two or
more stools, it would be a pity to let it fall to the ground; so
let it be forgiven, and please us with whatever gift it has.

In many cases where copyrights were still unexpired, we have to
express our acknowledgments to writers and publishers who have
accorded us the courtesy of their leave to reproduce what their
genius or enterprise has created and put forth.  To our readers we
take pleasure in presenting what we know cannot fail to give them
pleasure—a collection of the fruits of the finest literary
ingenuity and nicest art accessible to the human mind.  Gaudeat,
non caveat emptor!

JULIAN HAWTHORNE.




American Mystery Stories




F. Marion Crawford




By the Waters of Paradise


I


I remember my childhood very distinctly.  I do not think that the
fact argues a good memory, for I have never been clever at learning
words by heart, in prose or rhyme; so that I believe my remembrance
of events depends much more upon the events themselves than upon my
possessing any special facility for recalling them.  Perhaps I am
too imaginative, and the earliest impressions I received were of a
kind to stimulate the imagination abnormally.  A long series of
little misfortunes, so connected with each other as to suggest a
sort of weird fatality, so worked upon my melancholy temperament
when I was a boy that, before I was of age, I sincerely believed
myself to be under a curse, and not only myself, but my whole
family and every individual who bore my name.

I was born in the old place where my father, and his father, and
all his predecessors had been born, beyond the memory of man.  It
is a very old house, and the greater part of it was originally a
castle, strongly fortified, and surrounded by a deep moat supplied
with abundant water from the hills by a hidden aqueduct.  Many of
the fortifications have been destroyed, and the moat has been
filled up.  The water from the aqueduct supplies great fountains,
and runs down into huge oblong basins in the terraced gardens, one
below the other, each surrounded by a broad pavement of marble
between the water and the flower-beds.  The waste surplus finally
escapes through an artificial grotto, some thirty yards long, into
a stream, flowing down through the park to the meadows beyond, and
thence to the distant river.  The buildings were extended a little
and greatly altered more than two hundred years ago, in the time of
Charles II., but since then little has been done to improve them,
though they have been kept in fairly good repair, according to our
fortunes.

In the gardens there are terraces and huge hedges of box and
evergreen, some of which used to be clipped into shapes of animals,
in the Italian style.  I can remember when I was a lad how I used
to try to make out what the trees were cut to represent, and how I
used to appeal for explanations to Judith, my Welsh nurse.  She
dealt in a strange mythology of her own, and peopled the gardens
with griffins, dragons, good genii and bad, and filled my mind with
them at the same time.  My nursery window afforded a view of the
great fountains at the head of the upper basin, and on moonlight
nights the Welshwoman would hold me up to the glass and bid me look
at the mist and spray rising into mysterious shapes, moving
mystically in the white light like living things.

“It’s the Woman of the Water,” she used to say; and sometimes she
would threaten that if I did not go to sleep the Woman of the Water
would steal up to the high window and carry me away in her wet
arms.

The place was gloomy.  The broad basins of water and the tall
evergreen hedges gave it a funereal look, and the damp-stained
marble causeways by the pools might have been made of tombstones.
The gray and weather-beaten walls and towers without, the dark and
massively furnished rooms within, the deep, mysterious recesses and
the heavy curtains, all affected my spirits.  I was silent and sad
from my childhood.  There was a great clock tower above, from which
the hours rang dismally during the day, and tolled like a knell in
the dead of night.  There was no light nor life in the house, for
my mother was a helpless invalid, and my father had grown
melancholy in his long task of caring for her.  He was a thin, dark
man, with sad eyes; kind, I think, but silent and unhappy.  Next to
my mother, I believe he loved me better than anything on earth, for
he took immense pains and trouble in teaching me, and what he
taught me I have never forgotten.  Perhaps it was his only
amusement, and that may be the reason why I had no nursery
governess or teacher of any kind while he lived.

I used to be taken to see my mother every day, and sometimes twice
a day, for an hour at a time.  Then I sat upon a little stool near
her feet, and she would ask me what I had been doing, and what I
wanted to do.  I dare say she saw already the seeds of a profound
melancholy in my nature, for she looked at me always with a sad
smile, and kissed me with a sigh when I was taken away.

One night, when I was just six years old, I lay awake in the
nursery.  The door was not quite shut, and the Welsh nurse was
sitting sewing in the next room.  Suddenly I heard her groan, and
say in a strange voice, “One—two—one—two!”  I was frightened,
and I jumped up and ran to the door, barefooted as I was.

“What is it, Judith?” I cried, clinging to her skirts.  I can
remember the look in her strange dark eyes as she answered:

“One—two leaden coffins, fallen from the ceiling!” she crooned,
working herself in her chair.  “One—two—a light coffin and a
heavy coffin, falling to the floor!”

Then she seemed to notice me, and she took me back to bed and sang
me to sleep with a queer old Welsh song.

I do not know how it was, but the impression got hold of me that
she had meant that my father and mother were going to die very
soon.  They died in the very room where she had been sitting that
night.  It was a great room, my day nursery, full of sun when there
was any; and when the days were dark it was the most cheerful place
in the house.  My mother grew rapidly worse, and I was transferred
to another part of the building to make place for her.  They
thought my nursery was gayer for her, I suppose; but she could not
live.  She was beautiful when she was dead, and I cried bitterly.

“The light one, the light one—the heavy one to come,” crooned the
Welshwoman.  And she was right.  My father took the room after my
mother was gone, and day by day he grew thinner and paler and
sadder.

“The heavy one, the heavy one—all of lead,” moaned my nurse, one
night in December, standing still, just as she was going to take
away the light after putting me to bed.  Then she took me up again
and wrapped me in a little gown, and led me away to my father’s
room.  She knocked, but no one answered.  She opened the door, and
we found him in his easy chair before the fire, very white, quite
dead.

So I was alone with the Welshwoman till strange people came, and
relations whom I had never seen; and then I heard them saying that
I must be taken away to some more cheerful place.  They were kind
people, and I will not believe that they were kind only because I
was to be very rich when I grew to be a man.  The world never
seemed to be a very bad place to me, nor all the people to be
miserable sinners, even when I was most melancholy.  I do not
remember that anyone ever did me any great injustice, nor that I
was ever oppressed or ill treated in any way, even by the boys at
school.  I was sad, I suppose, because my childhood was so gloomy,
and, later, because I was unlucky in everything I undertook, till I
finally believed I was pursued by fate, and I used to dream that
the old Welsh nurse and the Woman of the Water between them had
vowed to pursue me to my end.  But my natural disposition should
have been cheerful, as I have often thought.

Among the lads of my age I was never last, or even among the last,
in anything; but I was never first.  If I trained for a race, I was
sure to sprain my ankle on the day when I was to run.  If I pulled
an oar with others, my oar was sure to break.  If I competed for a
prize, some unforeseen accident prevented my winning it at the last
moment.  Nothing to which I put my hand succeeded, and I got the
reputation of being unlucky, until my companions felt it was always
safe to bet against me, no matter what the appearances might be.  I
became discouraged and listless in everything.  I gave up the idea
of competing for any distinction at the University, comforting
myself with the thought that I could not fail in the examination
for the ordinary degree.  The day before the examination began I
fell ill; and when at last I recovered, after a narrow escape from
death, I turned my back upon Oxford, and went down alone to visit
the old place where I had been born, feeble in health and
profoundly disgusted and discouraged.  I was twenty-one years of
age, master of myself and of my fortune; but so deeply had the long
chain of small unlucky circumstances affected me that I thought
seriously of shutting myself up from the world to live the life of
a hermit and to die as soon as possible.  Death seemed the only
cheerful possibility in my existence, and my thoughts soon dwelt
upon it altogether.

I had never shown any wish to return to my own home since I had
been taken away as a little boy, and no one had ever pressed me to
do so.  The place had been kept in order after a fashion, and did
not seem to have suffered during the fifteen years or more of my
absence.  Nothing earthly could affect those old gray walls that
had fought the elements for so many centuries.  The garden was more
wild than I remembered it; the marble causeways about the pools
looked more yellow and damp than of old, and the whole place at
first looked smaller.  It was not until I had wandered about the
house and grounds for many hours that I realized the huge size of
the home where I was to live in solitude.  Then I began to delight
in it, and my resolution to live alone grew stronger.

The people had turned out to welcome me, of course, and I tried to
recognize the changed faces of the old gardener and the old
housekeeper, and to call them by name.  My old nurse I knew at
once.  She had grown very gray since she heard the coffins fall in
the nursery fifteen years before, but her strange eyes were the
same, and the look in them woke all my old memories.  She went over
the house with me.

“And how is the Woman of the Water?” I asked, trying to laugh a
little.  “Does she still play in the moonlight?”

“She is hungry,” answered the Welshwoman, in a low voice.

“Hungry?  Then we will feed her.”  I laughed.  But old Judith
turned very pale, and looked at me strangely.

“Feed her?  Aye—you will feed her well,” she muttered, glancing
behind her at the ancient housekeeper, who tottered after us with
feeble steps through the halls and passages.

I did not think much of her words.  She had always talked oddly, as
Welshwomen will, and though I was very melancholy I am sure I was
not superstitious, and I was certainly not timid.  Only, as in a
far-off dream, I seemed to see her standing with the light in her
hand and muttering, “The heavy one—all of lead,” and then leading
a little boy through the long corridors to see his father lying
dead in a great easy chair before a smoldering fire.  So we went
over the house, and I chose the rooms where I would live; and the
servants I had brought with me ordered and arranged everything, and
I had no more trouble.  I did not care what they did provided I was
left in peace and was not expected to give directions; for I was
more listless than ever, owing to the effects of my illness at
college.

I dined in solitary state, and the melancholy grandeur of the vast
old dining-room pleased me.  Then I went to the room I had selected
for my study, and sat down in a deep chair, under a bright light,
to think, or to let my thoughts meander through labyrinths of their
own choosing, utterly indifferent to the course they might take.

The tall windows of the room opened to the level of the ground upon
the terrace at the head of the garden.  It was in the end of July,
and everything was open, for the weather was warm.  As I sat alone
I heard the unceasing splash of the great fountains, and I fell to
thinking of the Woman of the Water.  I rose and went out into the
still night, and sat down upon a seat on the terrace, between two
gigantic Italian flower pots.  The air was deliciously soft and
sweet with the smell of the flowers, and the garden was more
congenial to me than the house.  Sad people always like running
water and the sound of it at night, though I cannot tell why.  I
sat and listened in the gloom, for it was dark below, and the pale
moon had not yet climbed over the hills in front of me, though all
the air above was light with her rising beams.  Slowly the white
halo in the eastern sky ascended in an arch above the wooded
crests, making the outlines of the mountains more intensely black
by contrast, as though the head of some great white saint were
rising from behind a screen in a vast cathedral, throwing misty
glories from below.  I longed to see the moon herself, and I tried
to reckon the seconds before she must appear.  Then she sprang up
quickly, and in a moment more hung round and perfect in the sky.  I
gazed at her, and then at the floating spray of the tall fountains,
and down at the pools, where the water lilies were rocking softly
in their sleep on the velvet surface of the moonlit water.  Just
then a great swan floated out silently into the midst of the basin,
and wreathed his long neck, catching the water in his broad bill,
and scattering showers of diamonds around him.

Suddenly, as I gazed, something came between me and the light.  I
looked up instantly.  Between me and the round disk of the moon
rose a luminous face of a woman, with great strange eyes, and a
woman’s mouth, full and soft, but not smiling, hooded in black,
staring at me as I sat still upon my bench.  She was close to me—
so close that I could have touched her with my hand.  But I was
transfixed and helpless.  She stood still for a moment, but her
expression did not change.  Then she passed swiftly away, and my
hair stood up on my head, while the cold breeze from her white
dress was wafted to my temples as she moved.  The moonlight,
shining through the tossing spray of the fountain, made traceries
of shadow on the gleaming folds of her garments.  In an instant she
was gone and I was alone.

I was strangely shaken by the vision, and some time passed before I
could rise to my feet, for I was still weak from my illness, and
the sight I had seen would have startled anyone.  I did not reason
with myself, for I was certain that I had looked on the unearthly,
and no argument could have destroyed that belief.  At last I got up
and stood unsteadily, gazing in the direction in which I thought
the face had gone; but there was nothing to be seen—nothing but
the broad paths, the tall, dark evergreen hedges, the tossing water
of the fountains and the smooth pool below.  I fell back upon the
seat and recalled the face I had seen.  Strange to say, now that
the first impression had passed, there was nothing startling in the
recollection; on the contrary, I felt that I was fascinated by the
face, and would give anything to see it again.  I could retrace the
beautiful straight features, the long dark eyes, and the wonderful
mouth most exactly in my mind, and when I had reconstructed every
detail from memory I knew that the whole was beautiful, and that I
should love a woman with such a face.

“I wonder whether she is the Woman of the Water!” I said to myself.
Then rising once more, I wandered down the garden, descending one
short flight of steps after another from terrace to terrace by the
edge of the marble basins, through the shadow and through the
moonlight; and I crossed the water by the rustic bridge above the
artificial grotto, and climbed slowly up again to the highest
terrace by the other side.  The air seemed sweeter, and I was very
calm, so that I think I smiled to myself as I walked, as though a
new happiness had come to me.  The woman’s face seemed always
before me, and the thought of it gave me an unwonted thrill of
pleasure, unlike anything I had ever felt before.

I turned as I reached the house, and looked back upon the scene.
It had certainly changed in the short hour since I had come out,
and my mood had changed with it.  Just like my luck, I thought, to
fall in love with a ghost!  But in old times I would have sighed,
and gone to bed more sad than ever, at such a melancholy
conclusion.  To-night I felt happy, almost for the first time in my
life.  The gloomy old study seemed cheerful when I went in.  The
old pictures on the walls smiled at me, and I sat down in my deep
chair with a new and delightful sensation that I was not alone.
The idea of having seen a ghost, and of feeling much the better for
it, was so absurd that I laughed softly, as I took up one of the
books I had brought with me and began to read.

That impression did not wear off.  I slept peacefully, and in the
morning I threw open my windows to the summer air and looked down
at the garden, at the stretches of green and at the colored flower-
beds, at the circling swallows and at the bright water.

“A man might make a paradise of this place,” I exclaimed.  “A man
and a woman together!”

From that day the old Castle no longer seemed gloomy, and I think I
ceased to be sad; for some time, too, I began to take an interest
in the place, and to try and make it more alive.  I avoided my old
Welsh nurse, lest she should damp my humor with some dismal
prophecy, and recall my old self by bringing back memories of my
dismal childhood.  But what I thought of most was the ghostly
figure I had seen in the garden that first night after my arrival.
I went out every evening and wandered through the walks and paths;
but, try as I might, I did not see my vision again.  At last, after
many days, the memory grew more faint, and my old moody nature
gradually overcame the temporary sense of lightness I had
experienced.  The summer turned to autumn, and I grew restless.  It
began to rain.  The dampness pervaded the gardens, and the outer
halls smelled musty, like tombs; the gray sky oppressed me
intolerably.  I left the place as it was and went abroad,
determined to try anything which might possibly make a second break
in the monotonous melancholy from which I suffered.


II


Most people would be struck by the utter insignificance of the
small events which, after the death of my parents, influenced my
life and made me unhappy.  The grewsome forebodings of a Welsh
nurse, which chanced to be realized by an odd coincidence of
events, should not seem enough to change the nature of a child and
to direct the bent of his character in after years.  The little
disappointments of schoolboy life, and the somewhat less childish
ones of an uneventful and undistinguished academic career, should
not have sufficed to turn me out at one-and-twenty years of age a
melancholic, listless idler.  Some weakness of my own character may
have contributed to the result, but in a greater degree it was due
to my having a reputation for bad luck.  However, I will not try to
analyze the causes of my state, for I should satisfy nobody, least
of all myself.  Still less will I attempt to explain why I felt a
temporary revival of my spirits after my adventure in the garden.
It is certain that I was in love with the face I had seen, and that
I longed to see it again; that I gave up all hope of a second
visitation, grew more sad than ever, packed up my traps, and
finally went abroad.  But in my dreams I went back to my home, and
it always appeared to me sunny and bright, as it had looked on that
summer’s morning after I had seen the woman by the fountain.

I went to Paris.  I went farther, and wandered about Germany.  I
tried to amuse myself, and I failed miserably.  With the aimless
whims of an idle and useless man come all sorts of suggestions for
good resolutions.  One day I made up my mind that I would go and
bury myself in a German university for a time, and live simply like
a poor student.  I started with the intention of going to Leipzig,
determined to stay there until some event should direct my life or
change my humor, or make an end of me altogether.  The express
train stopped at some station of which I did not know the name.  It
was dusk on a winter’s afternoon, and I peered through the thick
glass from my seat.  Suddenly another train came gliding in from
the opposite direction, and stopped alongside of ours.  I looked at
the carriage which chanced to be abreast of mine, and idly read the
black letters painted on a white board swinging from the brass
handrail: BERLIN—COLOGNE—PARIS.  Then I looked up at the window
above.  I started violently, and the cold perspiration broke out
upon my forehead.  In the dim light, not six feet from where I sat,
I saw the face of a woman, the face I loved, the straight, fine
features, the strange eyes, the wonderful mouth, the pale skin.
Her head-dress was a dark veil which seemed to be tied about her
head and passed over the shoulders under her chin.  As I threw down
the window and knelt on the cushioned seat, leaning far out to get
a better view, a long whistle screamed through the station,
followed by a quick series of dull, clanking sounds; then there was
a slight jerk, and my train moved on.  Luckily the window was
narrow, being the one over the seat, beside the door, or I believe
I would have jumped out of it then and there.  In an instant the
speed increased, and I was being carried swiftly away in the
opposite direction from the thing I loved.

For a quarter of an hour I lay back in my place, stunned by the
suddenness of the apparition.  At last one of the two other
passengers, a large and gorgeous captain of the White Konigsberg
Cuirassiers, civilly but firmly suggested that I might shut my
window, as the evening was cold.  I did so, with an apology, and
relapsed into silence.  The train ran swiftly on for a long time,
and it was already beginning to slacken speed before entering
another station, when I roused myself and made a sudden resolution.
As the carriage stopped before the brilliantly lighted platform, I
seized my belongings, saluted my fellow-passengers, and got out,
determined to take the first express back to Paris.

This time the circumstances of the vision had been so natural that
it did not strike me that there was anything unreal about the face,
or about the woman to whom it belonged.  I did not try to explain
to myself how the face, and the woman, could be traveling by a fast
train from Berlin to Paris on a winter’s afternoon, when both were
in my mind indelibly associated with the moonlight and the
fountains in my own English home.  I certainly would not have
admitted that I had been mistaken in the dusk, attributing to what
I had seen a resemblance to my former vision which did not really
exist.  There was not the slightest doubt in my mind, and I was
positively sure that I had again seen the face I loved.  I did not
hesitate, and in a few hours I was on my way back to Paris.  I
could not help reflecting on my ill luck.  Wandering as I had been
for many months, it might as easily have chanced that I should be
traveling in the same train with that woman, instead of going the
other way.  But my luck was destined to turn for a time.

I searched Paris for several days.  I dined at the principal
hotels; I went to the theaters; I rode in the Bois de Boulogne in
the morning, and picked up an acquaintance, whom I forced to drive
with me in the afternoon.  I went to mass at the Madeleine, and I
attended the services at the English Church.  I hung about the
Louvre and Notre Dame.  I went to Versailles.  I spent hours in
parading the Rue de Rivoli, in the neighborhood of Meurice’s
corner, where foreigners pass and repass from morning till night.
At last I received an invitation to a reception at the English
Embassy.  I went, and I found what I had sought so long.

There she was, sitting by an old lady in gray satin and diamonds,
who had a wrinkled but kindly face and keen gray eyes that seemed
to take in everything they saw, with very little inclination to
give much in return.  But I did not notice the chaperon.  I saw
only the face that had haunted me for months, and in the excitement
of the moment I walked quickly toward the pair, forgetting such a
trifle as the necessity for an introduction.

She was far more beautiful than I had thought, but I never doubted
that it was she herself and no other.  Vision or no vision before,
this was the reality, and I knew it.  Twice her hair had been
covered, now at last I saw it, and the added beauty of its
magnificence glorified the whole woman.  It was rich hair, fine and
abundant, golden, with deep ruddy tints in it like red bronze spun
fine.  There was no ornament in it, not a rose, not a thread of
gold, and I felt that it needed nothing to enhance its splendor;
nothing but her pale face, her dark strange eyes, and her heavy
eyebrows.  I could see that she was slender too, but strong withal,
as she sat there quietly gazing at the moving scene in the midst of
the brilliant lights and the hum of perpetual conversation.

I recollected the detail of introduction in time, and turned aside
to look for my host.  I found him at last.  I begged him to present
me to the two ladies, pointing them out to him at the same time.

“Yes—uh—by all means—uh,” replied his Excellency with a pleasant
smile.  He evidently had no idea of my name, which was not to be
wondered at.

“I am Lord Cairngorm,” I observed.

“Oh—by all means,” answered the Ambassador with the same
hospitable smile.  “Yes—uh—the fact is, I must try and find out
who they are; such lots of people, you know.”

“Oh, if you will present me, I will try and find out for you,” said
I, laughing.

“Ah, yes—so kind of you—come along,” said my host.  We threaded
the crowd, and in a few minutes we stood before the two ladies.

“’Lowmintrduce L’d Cairngorm,” he said; then, adding quickly to me,
“Come and dine to-morrow, won’t you?” he glided away with his
pleasant smile and disappeared in the crowd.

I sat down beside the beautiful girl, conscious that the eyes of
the duenna were upon me.

“I think we have been very near meeting before,” I remarked, by way
of opening the conversation.

My companion turned her eyes full upon me with an air of inquiry.
She evidently did not recall my face, if she had ever seen me.

“Really—I cannot remember,” she observed, in a low and musical
voice.  “When?”

“In the first place, you came down from Berlin by the express ten
days ago.  I was going the other way, and our carriages stopped
opposite each other.  I saw you at the window.”

“Yes—we came that way, but I do not remember—”  She hesitated.

“Secondly,” I continued, “I was sitting alone in my garden last
summer—near the end of July—do you remember?  You must have
wandered in there through the park; you came up to the house and
looked at me—”

“Was that you?” she asked, in evident surprise.  Then she broke
into a laugh.  “I told everybody I had seen a ghost; there had
never been any Cairngorms in the place since the memory of man.  We
left the next day, and never heard that you had come there; indeed,
I did not know the castle belonged to you.”

“Where were you staying?” I asked.

“Where?  Why, with my aunt, where I always stay.  She is your
neighbor, since it IS you.”

“I—beg your pardon—but then—is your aunt Lady Bluebell?  I did
not quite catch—”

“Don’t be afraid.  She is amazingly deaf.  Yes.  She is the relict
of my beloved uncle, the sixteenth or seventeenth Baron Bluebell—I
forget exactly how many of them there have been.  And I—do you
know who I am?”  She laughed, well knowing that I did not.

“No,” I answered frankly.  “I have not the least idea.  I asked to
be introduced because I recognized you.  Perhaps—perhaps you are a
Miss Bluebell?”

“Considering that you are a neighbor, I will tell you who I am,”
she answered.  “No; I am of the tribe of Bluebells, but my name is
Lammas, and I have been given to understand that I was christened
Margaret.  Being a floral family, they call me Daisy.  A dreadful
American man once told me that my aunt was a Bluebell and that I
was a Harebell—with two l’s and an e—because my hair is so thick.
I warn you, so that you may avoid making such a bad pun.”

“Do I look like a man who makes puns?” I asked, being very
conscious of my melancholy face and sad looks.

Miss Lammas eyed me critically.

“No; you have a mournful temperament.  I think I can trust you,”
she answered.  “Do you think you could communicate to my aunt the
fact that you are a Cairngorm and a neighbor?  I am sure she would
like to know.”

I leaned toward the old lady, inflating my lungs for a yell.  But
Miss Lammas stopped me.

“That is not of the slightest use,” she remarked.  “You can write
it on a bit of paper.  She is utterly deaf.”

“I have a pencil,” I answered; “but I have no paper.  Would my cuff
do, do you think?”

“Oh, yes!” replied Miss Lammas, with alacrity; “men often do that.”

I wrote on my cuff: “Miss Lammas wishes me to explain that I am
your neighbor, Cairngorm.”  Then I held out my arm before the old
lady’s nose.  She seemed perfectly accustomed to the proceeding,
put up her glasses, read the words, smiled, nodded, and addressed
me in the unearthly voice peculiar to people who hear nothing.

“I knew your grandfather very well,” she said.  Then she smiled and
nodded to me again, and to her niece, and relapsed into silence.

“It is all right,” remarked Miss Lammas.  “Aunt Bluebell knows she
is deaf, and does not say much, like the parrot.  You see, she knew
your grandfather.  How odd that we should be neighbors!  Why have
we never met before?”

“If you had told me you knew my grandfather when you appeared in
the garden, I should not have been in the least surprised,” I
answered rather irrelevantly.  “I really thought you were the ghost
of the old fountain.  How in the world did you come there at that
hour?”

“We were a large party and we went out for a walk.  Then we thought
we should like to see what your park was like in the moonlight, and
so we trespassed.  I got separated from the rest, and came upon you
by accident, just as I was admiring the extremely ghostly look of
your house, and wondering whether anybody would ever come and live
there again.  It looks like the castle of Macbeth, or a scene from
the opera.  Do you know anybody here?”

“Hardly a soul!  Do you?”

“No.  Aunt Bluebell said it was our duty to come.  It is easy for
her to go out; she does not bear the burden of the conversation.”

“I am sorry you find it a burden,” said I.  “Shall I go away?”

Miss Lammas looked at me with a sudden gravity in her beautiful
eyes, and there was a sort of hesitation about the lines of her
full, soft mouth.

“No,” she said at last, quite simply, “don’t go away.  We may like
each other, if you stay a little longer—and we ought to, because
we are neighbors in the country.”

I suppose I ought to have thought Miss Lammas a very odd girl.
There is, indeed, a sort of freemasonry between people who discover
that they live near each other and that they ought to have known
each other before.  But there was a sort of unexpected frankness
and simplicity in the girl’s amusing manner which would have struck
anyone else as being singular, to say the least of it.  To me,
however, it all seemed natural enough.  I had dreamed of her face
too long not to be utterly happy when I met her at last and could
talk to her as much as I pleased.  To me, the man of ill luck in
everything, the whole meeting seemed too good to be true.  I felt
again that strange sensation of lightness which I had experienced
after I had seen her face in the garden.  The great rooms seemed
brighter, life seemed worth living; my sluggish, melancholy blood
ran faster, and filled me with a new sense of strength.  I said to
myself that without this woman I was but an imperfect being, but
that with her I could accomplish everything to which I should set
my hand.  Like the great Doctor, when he thought he had cheated
Mephistopheles at last, I could have cried aloud to the fleeting
moment, Verweile doch, du bist so schon!

“Are you always gay?” I asked, suddenly.  “How happy you must be!”

“The days would sometimes seem very long if I were gloomy,” she
answered, thoughtfully.  “Yes, I think I find life very pleasant,
and I tell it so.”

“How can you ‘tell life’ anything?” I inquired.  “If I could catch
my life and talk to it, I would abuse it prodigiously, I assure
you.”

“I dare say.  You have a melancholy temper.  You ought to live out-
of-doors, dig potatoes, make hay, shoot, hunt, tumble into ditches,
and come home muddy and hungry for dinner.  It would be much better
for you than moping in your rook tower and hating everything.”

“It is rather lonely down there,” I murmured, apologetically,
feeling that Miss Lammas was quite right.

“Then marry, and quarrel with your wife,” she laughed.  “Anything
is better than being alone.”

“I am a very peaceable person.  I never quarrel with anybody.  You
can try it.  You will find it quite impossible.”

“Will you let me try?” she asked, still smiling.

“By all means—especially if it is to be only a preliminary
canter,” I answered, rashly.

“What do you mean?” she inquired, turning quickly upon me.

“Oh—nothing.  You might try my paces with a view to quarreling in
the future.  I cannot imagine how you are going to do it.  You will
have to resort to immediate and direct abuse.”

“No.  I will only say that if you do not like your life, it is your
own fault.  How can a man of your age talk of being melancholy, or
of the hollowness of existence?  Are you consumptive?  Are you
subject to hereditary insanity?  Are you deaf, like Aunt Bluebell?
Are you poor, like—lots of people?  Have you been crossed in love?
Have you lost the world for a woman, or any particular woman for
the sake of the world?  Are you feeble-minded, a cripple, an
outcast?  Are you—repulsively ugly?”  She laughed again.  “Is
there any reason in the world why you should not enjoy all you have
got in life?”

“No.  There is no reason whatever, except that I am dreadfully
unlucky, especially in small things.”

“Then try big things, just for a change,” suggested Miss Lammas.
“Try and get married, for instance, and see how it turns out.”

“If it turned out badly it would be rather serious.”

“Not half so serious as it is to abuse everything unreasonably.  If
abuse is your particular talent, abuse something that ought to be
abused.  Abuse the Conservatives—or the Liberals—it does not
matter which, since they are always abusing each other.  Make
yourself felt by other people.  You will like it, if they don’t.
It will make a man of you.  Fill your mouth with pebbles, and howl
at the sea, if you cannot do anything else.  It did Demosthenes no
end of good, you know.  You will have the satisfaction of imitating
a great man.”

“Really, Miss Lammas, I think the list of innocent exercises you
propose—”

“Very well—if you don’t care for that sort of thing, care for some
other sort of thing.  Care for something, or hate something.  Don’t
be idle.  Life is short, and though art may be long, plenty of
noise answers nearly as well.”

“I do care for something—I mean, somebody,” I said.

“A woman?  Then marry her.  Don’t hesitate.”

“I do not know whether she would marry me,” I replied.  “I have
never asked her.”

“Then ask her at once,” answered Miss Lammas.  “I shall die happy
if I feel I have persuaded a melancholy fellow creature to rouse
himself to action.  Ask her, by all means, and see what she says.
If she does not accept you at once, she may take you the next time.
Meanwhile, you will have entered for the race.  If you lose, there
are the ‘All-aged Trial Stakes,’ and the ‘Consolation Race.’”

“And plenty of selling races into the bargain.  Shall I take you at
your word, Miss Lammas?”

“I hope you will,” she answered.

“Since you yourself advise me, I will.  Miss Lammas, will you do me
the honor to marry me?”

For the first time in my life the blood rushed to my head and my
sight swam.  I cannot tell why I said it.  It would be useless to
try to explain the extraordinary fascination the girl exercised
over me, or the still more extraordinary feeling of intimacy with
her which had grown in me during that half hour.  Lonely, sad,
unlucky as I had been all my life, I was certainly not timid, nor
even shy.  But to propose to marry a woman after half an hour’s
acquaintance was a piece of madness of which I never believed
myself capable, and of which I should never be capable again, could
I be placed in the same situation.  It was as though my whole being
had been changed in a moment by magic—by the white magic of her
nature brought into contact with mine.  The blood sank back to my
heart, and a moment later I found myself staring at her with
anxious eyes.  To my amazement she was as calm as ever, but her
beautiful mouth smiled, and there was a mischievous light in her
dark-brown eyes.

“Fairly caught,” she answered.  “For an individual who pretends to
be listless and sad you are not lacking in humor.  I had really not
the least idea what you were going to say.  Wouldn’t it be
singularly awkward for you if I had said ‘Yes’?  I never saw
anybody begin to practice so sharply what was preached to him—with
so very little loss of time!”

“You probably never met a man who had dreamed of you for seven
months before being introduced.”

“No, I never did,” she answered gayly.  “It smacks of the romantic.
Perhaps you are a romantic character, after all.  I should think
you were if I believed you.  Very well; you have taken my advice,
entered for a Stranger’s Race and lost it.  Try the All-aged Trial
Stakes.  You have another cuff, and a pencil.  Propose to Aunt
Bluebell; she would dance with astonishment, and she might recover
her hearing.”


III


That was how I first asked Margaret Lammas to be my wife, and I
will agree with anyone who says I behaved very foolishly.  But I
have not repented of it, and I never shall.  I have long ago
understood that I was out of my mind that evening, but I think my
temporary insanity on that occasion has had the effect of making me
a saner man ever since.  Her manner turned my head, for it was so
different from what I had expected.  To hear this lovely creature,
who, in my imagination, was a heroine of romance, if not of
tragedy, talking familiarly and laughing readily was more than my
equanimity could bear, and I lost my head as well as my heart.  But
when I went back to England in the spring, I went to make certain
arrangements at the Castle—certain changes and improvements which
would be absolutely necessary.  I had won the race for which I had
entered myself so rashly, and we were to be married in June.

Whether the change was due to the orders I had left with the
gardener and the rest of the servants, or to my own state of mind,
I cannot tell.  At all events, the old place did not look the same
to me when I opened my window on the morning after my arrival.
There were the gray walls below me and the gray turrets flanking
the huge building; there were the fountains, the marble causeways,
the smooth basins, the tall box hedges, the water lilies and the
swans, just as of old.  But there was something else there, too—
something in the air, in the water, and in the greenness that I did
not recognize—a light over everything by which everything was
transfigured.  The clock in the tower struck seven, and the strokes
of the ancient bell sounded like a wedding chime.  The air sang
with the thrilling treble of the song-birds, with the silvery music
of the plashing water and the softer harmony of the leaves stirred
by the fresh morning wind.  There was a smell of new-mown hay from
the distant meadows, and of blooming roses from the beds below,
wafted up together to my window.  I stood in the pure sunshine and
drank the air and all the sounds and the odors that were in it; and
I looked down at my garden and said: “It is Paradise, after all.”
I think the men of old were right when they called heaven a garden,
and Eden a garden inhabited by one man and one woman, the Earthly
Paradise.

I turned away, wondering what had become of the gloomy memories I
had always associated with my home.  I tried to recall the
impression of my nurse’s horrible prophecy before the death of my
parents—an impression which hitherto had been vivid enough.  I
tried to remember my old self, my dejection, my listlessness, my
bad luck, my petty disappointments.  I endeavored to force myself
to think as I used to think, if only to satisfy myself that I had
not lost my individuality.  But I succeeded in none of these
efforts.  I was a different man, a changed being, incapable of
sorrow, of ill luck, or of sadness.  My life had been a dream, not
evil, but infinitely gloomy and hopeless.  It was now a reality,
full of hope, gladness, and all manner of good.  My home had been
like a tomb; to-day it was Paradise.  My heart had been as though
it had not existed; to-day it beat with strength and youth and the
certainty of realized happiness.  I reveled in the beauty of the
world, and called loveliness out of the future to enjoy it before
time should bring it to me, as a traveler in the plains looks up to
the mountains, and already tastes the cool air through the dust of
the road.

Here, I thought, we will live and live for years.  There we will
sit by the fountain toward evening and in the deep moonlight.  Down
those paths we will wander together.  On those benches we will rest
and talk.  Among those eastern hills we will ride through the soft
twilight, and in the old house we will tell tales on winter nights,
when the logs burn high, and the holly berries are red, and the old
clock tolls out the dying year.  On these old steps, in these dark
passages and stately rooms, there will one day be the sound of
little pattering feet, and laughing child voices will ring up to
the vaults of the ancient hall.  Those tiny footsteps shall not be
slow and sad as mine were, nor shall the childish words be spoken
in an awed whisper.  No gloomy Welshwoman shall people the dusky
corners with weird horrors, nor utter horrid prophecies of death
and ghastly things.  All shall be young, and fresh, and joyful, and
happy, and we will turn the old luck again, and forget that there
was ever any sadness.

So I thought, as I looked out of my window that morning and for
many mornings after that, and every day it all seemed more real
than ever before, and much nearer.  But the old nurse looked at me
askance, and muttered odd sayings about the Woman of the Water.  I
cared little what she said, for I was far too happy.

At last the time came near for the wedding.  Lady Bluebell and all
the tribe of Bluebells, as Margaret called them, were at Bluebell
Grange, for we had determined to be married in the country, and to
come straight to the Castle afterwards.  We cared little for
traveling, and not at all for a crowded ceremony at St. George’s in
Hanover Square, with all the tiresome formalities afterwards.  I
used to ride over to the Grange every day, and very often Margaret
would come with her aunt and some of her cousins to the Castle.  I
was suspicious of my own taste, and was only too glad to let her
have her way about the alterations and improvements in our home.

We were to be married on the thirtieth of July, and on the evening
of the twenty-eighth Margaret drove over with some of the Bluebell
party.  In the long summer twilight we all went out into the
garden.  Naturally enough, Margaret and I were left to ourselves,
and we wandered down by the marble basins.

“It is an odd coincidence,” I said; “it was on this very night last
year that I first saw you.”

“Considering that it is the month of July,” answered Margaret with
a laugh, “and that we have been here almost every day, I don’t
think the coincidence is so extraordinary, after all.”

“No, dear,” said I, “I suppose not.  I don’t know why it struck me.
We shall very likely be here a year from today, and a year from
that.  The odd thing, when I think of it, is that you should be
here at all.  But my luck has turned.  I ought not to think
anything odd that happens now that I have you.  It is all sure to
be good.”

“A slight change in your ideas since that remarkable performance of
yours in Paris,” said Margaret.  “Do you know, I thought you were
the most extraordinary man I had ever met.”

“I thought you were the most charming woman I had ever seen.  I
naturally did not want to lose any time in frivolities.  I took you
at your word, I followed your advice, I asked you to marry me, and
this is the delightful result—what’s the matter?”

Margaret had started suddenly, and her hand tightened on my arm.
An old woman was coming up the path, and was close to us before we
saw her, for the moon had risen, and was shining full in our faces.
The woman turned out to be my old nurse.

“It’s only Judith, dear—don’t be frightened,” I said.  Then I
spoke to the Welshwoman: “What are you about, Judith?  Have you
been feeding the Woman of the Water?”

“Aye—when the clock strikes, Willie—my Lord, I mean,” muttered
the old creature, drawing aside to let us pass, and fixing her
strange eyes on Margaret’s face.

“What does she mean?” asked Margaret, when we had gone by.

“Nothing, darling.  The old thing is mildly crazy, but she is a
good soul.”

We went on in silence for a few moments, and came to the rustic
bridge just above the artificial grotto through which the water ran
out into the park, dark and swift in its narrow channel.  We
stopped, and leaned on the wooden rail.  The moon was now behind
us, and shone full upon the long vista of basins and on the huge
walls and towers of the Castle above.

“How proud you ought to be of such a grand old place!” said
Margaret, softly.

“It is yours now, darling,” I answered.  “You have as good a right
to love it as I—but I only love it because you are to live in it,
dear.”

Her hand stole out and lay on mine, and we were both silent.  Just
then the clock began to strike far off in the tower.  I counted—
eight—nine—ten—eleven—I looked at my watch—twelve—thirteen—I
laughed.  The bell went on striking.

“The old clock has gone crazy, like Judith,” I exclaimed.  Still it
went on, note after note ringing out monotonously through the still
air.  We leaned over the rail, instinctively looking in the
direction whence the sound came.  On and on it went.  I counted
nearly a hundred, out of sheer curiosity, for I understood that
something had broken and that the thing was running itself down.

Suddenly there was a crack as of breaking wood, a cry and a heavy
splash, and I was alone, clinging to the broken end of the rail of
the rustic bridge.

I do not think I hesitated while my pulse beat twice.  I sprang
clear of the bridge into the black rushing water, dived to the
bottom, came up again with empty hands, turned and swam downward
through the grotto in the thick darkness, plunging and diving at
every stroke, striking my head and hands against jagged stones and
sharp corners, clutching at last something in my fingers and
dragging it up with all my might.  I spoke, I cried aloud, but
there was no answer.  I was alone in the pitchy darkness with my
burden, and the house was five hundred yards away.  Struggling
still, I felt the ground beneath my feet, I saw a ray of
moonlight—the grotto widened, and the deep water became a broad
and shallow brook as I stumbled over the stones and at last laid
Margaret’s body on the bank in the park beyond.

“Aye, Willie, as the clock struck!” said the voice of Judith, the
Welsh nurse, as she bent down and looked at the white face.  The
old woman must have turned back and followed us, seen the accident,
and slipped out by the lower gate of the garden.  “Aye,” she
groaned, “you have fed the Woman of the Water this night, Willie,
while the clock was striking.”

I scarcely heard her as I knelt beside the lifeless body of the
woman I loved, chafing the wet white temples and gazing wildly into
the wide-staring eyes.  I remember only the first returning look of
consciousness, the first heaving breath, the first movement of
those dear hands stretching out toward me.


That is not much of a story, you say.  It is the story of my life.
That is all.  It does not pretend to be anything else.  Old Judith
says my luck turned on that summer’s night when I was struggling in
the water to save all that was worth living for.  A month later
there was a stone bridge above the grotto, and Margaret and I stood
on it and looked up at the moonlit Castle, as we had done once
before, and as we have done many times since.  For all those things
happened ten years ago last summer, and this is the tenth Christmas
Eve we have spent together by the roaring logs in the old hall,
talking of old times; and every year there are more old times to
talk of.  There are curly-headed boys, too, with red-gold hair and
dark-brown eyes like their mother’s, and a little Margaret, with
solemn black eyes like mine.  Why could not she look like her
mother, too, as well as the rest of them?

The world is very bright at this glorious Christmas time, and
perhaps there is little use in calling up the sadness of long ago,
unless it be to make the jolly firelight seem more cheerful, the
good wife’s face look gladder, and to give the children’s laughter
a merrier ring, by contrast with all that is gone.  Perhaps, too,
some sad-faced, listless, melancholy youth, who feels that the
world is very hollow, and that life is like a perpetual funeral
service, just as I used to feel myself, may take courage from my
example, and having found the woman of his heart, ask her to marry
him after half an hour’s acquaintance.  But, on the whole, I would
not advise any man to marry, for the simple reason that no man will
ever find a wife like mine, and being obliged to go farther, he
will necessarily fare worse.  My wife has done miracles, but I will
not assert that any other woman is able to follow her example.

Margaret always said that the old place was beautiful, and that I
ought to be proud of it.  I dare say she is right.  She has even
more imagination than I.  But I have a good answer and a plain one,
which is this,—that all the beauty of the Castle comes from her.
She has breathed upon it all, as the children blow upon the cold
glass window panes in winter; and as their warm breath crystallizes
into landscapes from fairyland, full of exquisite shapes and
traceries upon the blank surface, so her spirit has transformed
every gray stone of the old towers, every ancient tree and hedge in
the gardens, every thought in my once melancholy self.  All that
was old is young, and all that was sad is glad, and I am the
gladdest of all.  Whatever heaven may be, there is no earthly
paradise without woman, nor is there anywhere a place so desolate,
so dreary, so unutterably miserable that a woman cannot make it
seem heaven to the man she loves and who loves her.

I hear certain cynics laugh, and cry that all that has been said
before.  Do not laugh, my good cynic.  You are too small a man to
laugh at such a great thing as love.  Prayers have been said before
now by many, and perhaps you say yours, too.  I do not think they
lose anything by being repeated, nor you by repeating them.  You
say that the world is bitter, and full of the Waters of Bitterness.
Love, and so live that you may be loved—the world will turn sweet
for you, and you shall rest like me by the Waters of Paradise.


From “The Play-Actress and the Upper Berth,” by F. Marion Crawford.
Copyright, 1896, by G. P. Putnam’s Sons.




Mary E. Wilkins Freeman




The Shadows on the Wall


“Henry had words with Edward in the study the night before Edward
died,” said Caroline Glynn.

She was elderly, tall, and harshly thin, with a hard colourlessness
of face.  She spoke not with acrimony, but with grave severity.
Rebecca Ann Glynn, younger, stouter and rosy of face between her
crinkling puffs of gray hair, gasped, by way of assent.  She sat in
a wide flounce of black silk in the corner of the sofa, and rolled
terrified eyes from her sister Caroline to her sister Mrs. Stephen
Brigham, who had been Emma Glynn, the one beauty of the family. She
was beautiful still, with a large, splendid, full-blown beauty; she
filled a great rocking-chair with her superb bulk of femininity,
and swayed gently back and forth, her black silks whispering and
her black frills fluttering.  Even the shock of death (for her
brother Edward lay dead in the house,) could not disturb her
outward serenity of demeanor.  She was grieved over the loss of her
brother: he had been the youngest, and she had been fond of him,
but never had Emma Brigham lost sight of her own importance amidst
the waters of tribulation.  She was always awake to the
consciousness of her own stability in the midst of vicissitudes and
the splendor of her permanent bearing.

But even her expression of masterly placidity changed before her
sister Caroline’s announcement and her sister Rebecca Ann’s gasp of
terror and distress in response.

“I think Henry might have controlled his temper, when poor Edward
was so near his end,” said she with an asperity which disturbed
slightly the roseate curves of her beautiful mouth.

“Of course he did not KNOW,” murmured Rebecca Ann in a faint tone
strangely out of keeping with her appearance.

One involuntarily looked again to be sure that such a feeble pipe
came from that full-swelling chest.

“Of course he did not know it,” said Caroline quickly.  She turned
on her sister with a strange sharp look of suspicion.  “How could
he have known it?” said she.  Then she shrank as if from the
other’s possible answer.  “Of course you and I both know he could
not,” said she conclusively, but her pale face was paler than it
had been before.

Rebecca gasped again.  The married sister, Mrs. Emma Brigham, was
now sitting up straight in her chair; she had ceased rocking, and
was eyeing them both intently with a sudden accentuation of family
likeness in her face.  Given one common intensity of emotion and
similar lines showed forth, and the three sisters of one race were
evident.

“What do you mean?” said she impartially to them both.  Then she,
too, seemed to shrink before a possible answer.  She even laughed
an evasive sort of laugh.  “I guess you don’t mean anything,” said
she, but her face wore still the expression of shrinking horror.

“Nobody means anything,” said Caroline firmly.  She rose and
crossed the room toward the door with grim decisiveness.

“Where are you going?” asked Mrs. Brigham.

“I have something to see to,” replied Caroline, and the others at
once knew by her tone that she had some solemn and sad duty to
perform in the chamber of death.

“Oh,” said Mrs. Brigham.

After the door had closed behind Caroline, she turned to Rebecca.

“Did Henry have many words with him?” she asked.

“They were talking very loud,” replied Rebecca evasively, yet with
an answering gleam of ready response to the other’s curiosity in
the quick lift of her soft blue eyes.

Mrs. Brigham looked at her.  She had not resumed rocking.  She
still sat up straight with a slight knitting of intensity on her
fair forehead, between the pretty rippling curves of her auburn
hair.

“Did you—hear anything?” she asked in a low voice with a glance
toward the door.

“I was just across the hall in the south parlor, and that door was
open and this door ajar,” replied Rebecca with a slight flush.

“Then you must have—”

“I couldn’t help it.”

“Everything?”

“Most of it.”

“What was it?”

“The old story.”

“I suppose Henry was mad, as he always was, because Edward was
living on here for nothing, when he had wasted all the money father
left him.”

Rebecca nodded with a fearful glance at the door.

When Emma spoke again her voice was still more hushed.  “I know how
he felt,” said she.  “He had always been so prudent himself, and
worked hard at his profession, and there Edward had never done
anything but spend, and it must have looked to him as if Edward was
living at his expense, but he wasn’t.”

“No, he wasn’t.”

“It was the way father left the property—that all the children
should have a home here—and he left money enough to buy the food
and all if we had all come home.”

“Yes.”

“And Edward had a right here according to the terms of father’s
will, and Henry ought to have remembered it.”

“Yes, he ought.”

“Did he say hard things?”

“Pretty hard from what I heard.”

“What?”

“I heard him tell Edward that he had no business here at all, and
he thought he had better go away.”

“What did Edward say?”

“That he would stay here as long as he lived and afterward, too, if
he was a mind to, and he would like to see Henry get him out; and
then—”

“What?”

“Then he laughed.”

“What did Henry say.”

“I didn’t hear him say anything, but—”

“But what?”

“I saw him when he came out of this room.”

“He looked mad?”

“You’ve seen him when he looked so.”

Emma nodded; the expression of horror on her face had deepened.

“Do you remember that time he killed the cat because she had
scratched him?”

“Yes.  Don’t!”

Then Caroline reentered the room.  She went up to the stove in
which a wood fire was burning—it was a cold, gloomy day of fall—
and she warmed her hands, which were reddened from recent washing
in cold water.

Mrs. Brigham looked at her and hesitated.  She glanced at the door,
which was still ajar, as it did not easily shut, being still
swollen with the damp weather of the summer.  She rose and pushed
it together with a sharp thud which jarred the house.  Rebecca
started painfully with a half exclamation.  Caroline looked at her
disapprovingly.

“It is time you controlled your nerves, Rebecca,” said she.

“I can’t help it,” replied Rebecca with almost a wail.  “I am
nervous.  There’s enough to make me so, the Lord knows.”

“What do you mean by that?” asked Caroline with her old air of
sharp suspicion, and something between challenge and dread of its
being met.

Rebecca shrank.

“Nothing,” said she.

“Then I wouldn’t keep speaking in such a fashion.”

Emma, returning from the closed door, said imperiously that it
ought to be fixed, it shut so hard.

“It will shrink enough after we have had the fire a few days,”
replied Caroline.  “If anything is done to it it will be too small;
there will be a crack at the sill.”

“I think Henry ought to be ashamed of himself for talking as he did
to Edward,” said Mrs. Brigham abruptly, but in an almost inaudible
voice.

“Hush!” said Caroline, with a glance of actual fear at the closed
door.

“Nobody can hear with the door shut.”

“He must have heard it shut, and—”

“Well, I can say what I want to before he comes down, and I am not
afraid of him.”

“I don’t know who is afraid of him!  What reason is there for
anybody to be afraid of Henry?” demanded Caroline.

Mrs. Brigham trembled before her sister’s look.  Rebecca gasped
again.  “There isn’t any reason, of course.  Why should there be?”

“I wouldn’t speak so, then.  Somebody might overhear you and think
it was queer.  Miranda Joy is in the south parlor sewing, you
know.”

“I thought she went upstairs to stitch on the machine.”

“She did, but she has come down again.”

“Well, she can’t hear.”

“I say again I think Henry ought to be ashamed of himself.  I
shouldn’t think he’d ever get over it, having words with poor
Edward the very night before he died.  Edward was enough sight
better disposition than Henry, with all his faults.  I always
thought a great deal of poor Edward, myself.”

Mrs. Brigham passed a large fluff of handkerchief across her eyes;
Rebecca sobbed outright.

“Rebecca,” said Caroline admonishingly, keeping her mouth stiff and
swallowing determinately.

“I never heard him speak a cross word, unless he spoke cross to
Henry that last night.  I don’t know, but he did from what Rebecca
overheard,” said Emma.

“Not so much cross as sort of soft, and sweet, and aggravating,”
sniffled Rebecca.

“He never raised his voice,” said Caroline; “but he had his way.”

“He had a right to in this case.”

“Yes, he did.”

“He had as much of a right here as Henry,” sobbed Rebecca, “and now
he’s gone, and he will never be in this home that poor father left
him and the rest of us again.”

“What do you really think ailed Edward?” asked Emma in hardly more
than a whisper.  She did not look at her sister.

Caroline sat down in a nearby armchair, and clutched the arms
convulsively until her thin knuckles whitened.

“I told you,” said she.

Rebecca held her handkerchief over her mouth, and looked at them
above it with terrified, streaming eyes.

“I know you said that he had terrible pains in his stomach, and had
spasms, but what do you think made him have them?”

“Henry called it gastric trouble.  You know Edward has always had
dyspepsia.”

Mrs. Brigham hesitated a moment.  “Was there any talk of an—
examination?” said she.

Then Caroline turned on her fiercely.

“No,” said she in a terrible voice.  “No.”

The three sisters’ souls seemed to meet on one common ground of
terrified understanding through their eyes.  The old-fashioned
latch of the door was heard to rattle, and a push from without made
the door shake ineffectually.  “It’s Henry,” Rebecca sighed rather
than whispered.  Mrs. Brigham settled herself after a noiseless
rush across the floor into her rocking-chair again, and was swaying
back and forth with her head comfortably leaning back, when the
door at last yielded and Henry Glynn entered.  He cast a covertly
sharp, comprehensive glance at Mrs. Brigham with her elaborate
calm; at Rebecca quietly huddled in the corner of the sofa with her
handkerchief to her face and only one small reddened ear as
attentive as a dog’s uncovered and revealing her alertness for his
presence; at Caroline sitting with a strained composure in her
armchair by the stove.  She met his eyes quite firmly with a look
of inscrutable fear, and defiance of the fear and of him.

Henry Glynn looked more like this sister than the others.  Both had
the same hard delicacy of form and feature, both were tall and
almost emaciated, both had a sparse growth of gray blond hair far
back from high intellectual foreheads, both had an almost noble
aquilinity of feature.  They confronted each other with the
pitiless immovability of two statues in whose marble lineaments
emotions were fixed for all eternity.

Then Henry Glynn smiled and the smile transformed his face.  He
looked suddenly years younger, and an almost boyish recklessness
and irresolution appeared in his face.  He flung himself into a
chair with a gesture which was bewildering from its incongruity
with his general appearance.  He leaned his head back, flung one
leg over the other, and looked laughingly at Mrs. Brigham.

“I declare, Emma, you grow younger every year,” he said.

She flushed a little, and her placid mouth widened at the corners.
She was susceptible to praise.

“Our thoughts to-day ought to belong to the one of us who will
NEVER grow older,” said Caroline in a hard voice.

Henry looked at her, still smiling.  “Of course, we none of us
forget that,” said he, in a deep, gentle voice, “but we have to
speak to the living, Caroline, and I have not seen Emma for a long
time, and the living are as dear as the dead.”

“Not to me,” said Caroline.

She rose, and went abruptly out of the room again.  Rebecca also
rose and hurried after her, sobbing loudly.

Henry looked slowly after them.

“Caroline is completely unstrung,” said he.  Mrs. Brigham rocked. A
confidence in him inspired by his manner was stealing over her. Out
of that confidence she spoke quite easily and naturally.

“His death was very sudden,” said she.

Henry’s eyelids quivered slightly but his gaze was unswerving.

“Yes,” said he; “it was very sudden.  He was sick only a few
hours.”

“What did you call it?”

“Gastric.”

“You did not think of an examination?”

“There was no need.  I am perfectly certain as to the cause of his
death.”

Suddenly Mrs. Brigham felt a creep as of some live horror over her
very soul.  Her flesh prickled with cold, before an inflection of
his voice.  She rose, tottering on weak knees.

“Where are you going?” asked Henry in a strange, breathless voice.

Mrs. Brigham said something incoherent about some sewing which she
had to do, some black for the funeral, and was out of the room. She
went up to the front chamber which she occupied.  Caroline was
there.  She went close to her and took her hands, and the two
sisters looked at each other.

“Don’t speak, don’t, I won’t have it!” said Caroline finally in an
awful whisper.

“I won’t,” replied Emma.

That afternoon the three sisters were in the study, the large front
room on the ground floor across the hall from the south parlor,
when the dusk deepened.

Mrs. Brigham was hemming some black material.  She sat close to the
west window for the waning light.  At last she laid her work on her
lap.

“It’s no use, I cannot see to sew another stitch until we have a
light,” said she.

Caroline, who was writing some letters at the table, turned to
Rebecca, in her usual place on the sofa.

“Rebecca, you had better get a lamp,” she said.

Rebecca started up; even in the dusk her face showed her agitation.

“It doesn’t seem to me that we need a lamp quite yet,” she said in
a piteous, pleading voice like a child’s.

“Yes, we do,” returned Mrs. Brigham peremptorily.  “We must have a
light.  I must finish this to-night or I can’t go to the funeral,
and I can’t see to sew another stitch.”

“Caroline can see to write letters, and she is farther from the
window than you are,” said Rebecca.

“Are you trying to save kerosene or are you lazy, Rebecca Glynn?”
cried Mrs. Brigham.  “I can go and get the light myself, but I have
this work all in my lap.”

Caroline’s pen stopped scratching.

“Rebecca, we must have the light,” said she.

“Had we better have it in here?” asked Rebecca weakly.

“Of course!  Why not?” cried Caroline sternly.

“I am sure I don’t want to take my sewing into the other room, when
it is all cleaned up for to-morrow,” said Mrs. Brigham.

“Why, I never heard such a to-do about lighting a lamp.”

Rebecca rose and left the room.  Presently she entered with a lamp—
a large one with a white porcelain shade.  She set it on a table,
an old-fashioned card-table which was placed against the opposite
wall from the window.  That wall was clear of bookcases and books,
which were only on three sides of the room.  That opposite wall was
taken up with three doors, the one small space being occupied by
the table.  Above the table on the old-fashioned paper, of a white
satin gloss, traversed by an indeterminate green scroll, hung quite
high a small gilt and black-framed ivory miniature taken in her
girlhood of the mother of the family.  When the lamp was set on the
table beneath it, the tiny pretty face painted on the ivory seemed
to gleam out with a look of intelligence.

“What have you put that lamp over there for?” asked Mrs. Brigham,
with more of impatience than her voice usually revealed.  “Why
didn’t you set it in the hall and have done with it.  Neither
Caroline nor I can see if it is on that table.”

“I thought perhaps you would move,” replied Rebecca hoarsely.

“If I do move, we can’t both sit at that table.  Caroline has her
paper all spread around.  Why don’t you set the lamp on the study
table in the middle of the room, then we can both see?”

Rebecca hesitated.  Her face was very pale.  She looked with an
appeal that was fairly agonizing at her sister Caroline.

“Why don’t you put the lamp on this table, as she says?” asked
Caroline, almost fiercely.  “Why do you act so, Rebecca?”

“I should think you WOULD ask her that,” said Mrs. Brigham.  “She
doesn’t act like herself at all.”

Rebecca took the lamp and set it on the table in the middle of the
room without another word.  Then she turned her back upon it
quickly and seated herself on the sofa, and placed a hand over her
eyes as if to shade them, and remained so.

“Does the light hurt your eyes, and is that the reason why you
didn’t want the lamp?” asked Mrs. Brigham kindly.

“I always like to sit in the dark,” replied Rebecca chokingly. Then
she snatched her handkerchief hastily from her pocket and began to
weep.  Caroline continued to write, Mrs. Brigham to sew.

Suddenly Mrs. Brigham as she sewed glanced at the opposite wall.
The glance became a steady stare.  She looked intently, her work
suspended in her hands.  Then she looked away again and took a few
more stitches, then she looked again, and again turned to her task.
At last she laid her work in her lap and stared concentratedly. She
looked from the wall around the room, taking note of the various
objects; she looked at the wall long and intently.  Then she turned
to her sisters.

“What IS that?” said she.

“What?” asked Caroline harshly; her pen scratched loudly across the
paper.

Rebecca gave one of her convulsive gasps.

“That strange shadow on the wall,” replied Mrs. Brigham.

Rebecca sat with her face hidden: Caroline dipped her pen in the
inkstand.

“Why don’t you turn around and look?” asked Mrs. Brigham in a
wondering and somewhat aggrieved way.

“I am in a hurry to finish this letter, if Mrs. Wilson Ebbit is
going to get word in time to come to the funeral,” replied Caroline
shortly.

Mrs. Brigham rose, her work slipping to the floor, and she began
walking around the room, moving various articles of furniture, with
her eyes on the shadow.

Then suddenly she shrieked out:

“Look at this awful shadow!  What is it?  Caroline, look, look!
Rebecca, look!  WHAT IS IT?”

All Mrs. Brigham’s triumphant placidity was gone.  Her handsome
face was livid with horror.  She stood stiffly pointing at the
shadow.

“Look!” said she, pointing her finger at it.  “Look!  What is it?”

Then Rebecca burst out in a wild wail after a shuddering glance at
the wall:

“Oh, Caroline, there it is again!  There it is again!”

“Caroline Glynn, you look!” said Mrs. Brigham.  “Look!  What is
that dreadful shadow?”

Caroline rose, turned, and stood confronting the wall.

“How should I know?” she said.

“It has been there every night since he died,” cried Rebecca.

“Every night?”

“Yes.  He died Thursday and this is Saturday; that makes three
nights,” said Caroline rigidly.  She stood as if holding herself
calm with a vise of concentrated will.

“It—it looks like—like—” stammered Mrs. Brigham in a tone of
intense horror.

“I know what it looks like well enough,” said Caroline.  “I’ve got
eyes in my head.”

“It looks like Edward,” burst out Rebecca in a sort of frenzy of
fear.  “Only—”

“Yes, it does,” assented Mrs. Brigham, whose horror-stricken tone
matched her sister’s, “only—  Oh, it is awful!  What is it,
Caroline?”

“I ask you again, how should I know?” replied Caroline.  “I see it
there like you.  How should I know any more than you?”

“It MUST be something in the room,” said Mrs. Brigham, staring
wildly around.

“We moved everything in the room the first night it came,” said
Rebecca; “it is not anything in the room.”

Caroline turned upon her with a sort of fury.  “Of course it is
something in the room,” said she.  “How you act!  What do you mean
by talking so?  Of course it is something in the room.”

“Of course, it is,” agreed Mrs. Brigham, looking at Caroline
suspiciously.  “Of course it must be.  It is only a coincidence. It
just happens so.  Perhaps it is that fold of the window curtain
that makes it.  It must be something in the room.”

“It is not anything in the room,” repeated Rebecca with obstinate
horror.

The door opened suddenly and Henry Glynn entered.  He began to
speak, then his eyes followed the direction of the others’.  He
stood stock still staring at the shadow on the wall.  It was life
size and stretched across the white parallelogram of a door, half
across the wall space on which the picture hung.

“What is that?” he demanded in a strange voice.

“It must be due to something in the room, Mrs. Brigham said
faintly.

“It is not due to anything in the room,” said Rebecca again with
the shrill insistency of terror.

“How you act, Rebecca Glynn,” said Caroline.

Henry Glynn stood and stared a moment longer.  His face showed a
gamut of emotions—horror, conviction, then furious incredulity.
Suddenly he began hastening hither and thither about the room.  He
moved the furniture with fierce jerks, turning ever to see the
effect upon the shadow on the wall.  Not a line of its terrible
outlines wavered.

“It must be something in the room!” he declared in a voice which
seemed to snap like a lash.

His face changed.  The inmost secrecy of his nature seemed evident
until one almost lost sight of his lineaments.  Rebecca stood close
to her sofa, regarding him with woeful, fascinated eyes.  Mrs.
Brigham clutched Caroline’s hand.  They both stood in a corner out
of his way.  For a few moments he raged about the room like a caged
wild animal.  He moved every piece of furniture; when the moving of
a piece did not affect the shadow, he flung it to the floor, his
sisters watching.

Then suddenly he desisted.  He laughed and began straightening the
furniture which he had flung down.

“What an absurdity,” he said easily.  “Such a to-do about a
shadow.”

“That’s so,” assented Mrs. Brigham, in a scared voice which she
tried to make natural.  As she spoke she lifted a chair near her.

“I think you have broken the chair that Edward was so fond of,”
said Caroline.

Terror and wrath were struggling for expression on her face.  Her
mouth was set, her eyes shrinking.  Henry lifted the chair with a
show of anxiety.

“Just as good as ever,” he said pleasantly.  He laughed again,
looking at his sisters.  “Did I scare you?” he said.  “I should
think you might be used to me by this time.  You know my way of
wanting to leap to the bottom of a mystery, and that shadow does
look—queer, like—and I thought if there was any way of accounting
for it I would like to without any delay.”

“You don’t seem to have succeeded,” remarked Caroline dryly, with a
slight glance at the wall.

Henry’s eyes followed hers and he quivered perceptibly.

“Oh, there is no accounting for shadows,” he said, and he laughed
again.  “A man is a fool to try to account for shadows.”

Then the supper bell rang, and they all left the room, but Henry
kept his back to the wall, as did, indeed, the others.

Mrs. Brigham pressed close to Caroline as she crossed the hall. “He
looked like a demon!” she breathed in her ear.

Henry led the way with an alert motion like a boy; Rebecca brought
up the rear; she could scarcely walk, her knees trembled so.

“I can’t sit in that room again this evening,” she whispered to
Caroline after supper.

“Very well, we will sit in the south room,” replied Caroline.  “I
think we will sit in the south parlor,” she said aloud; “it isn’t
as damp as the study, and I have a cold.”

So they all sat in the south room with their sewing.  Henry read
the newspaper, his chair drawn close to the lamp on the table.
About nine o’clock he rose abruptly and crossed the hall to the
study.  The three sisters looked at one another.  Mrs. Brigham
rose, folded her rustling skirts compactly around her, and began
tiptoeing toward the door.

“What are you going to do?” inquired Rebecca agitatedly.

“I am going to see what he is about,” replied Mrs. Brigham
cautiously.

She pointed as she spoke to the study door across the hall; it was
ajar.  Henry had striven to pull it together behind him, but it had
somehow swollen beyond the limit with curious speed.  It was still
ajar and a streak of light showed from top to bottom.  The hall
lamp was not lit.

“You had better stay where you are,” said Caroline with guarded
sharpness.

“I am going to see,” repeated Mrs. Brigham firmly.

Then she folded her skirts so tightly that her bulk with its
swelling curves was revealed in a black silk sheath, and she went
with a slow toddle across the hall to the study door.  She stood
there, her eye at the crack.

In the south room Rebecca stopped sewing and sat watching with
dilated eyes.  Caroline sewed steadily.  What Mrs. Brigham,
standing at the crack in the study door, saw was this:

Henry Glynn, evidently reasoning that the source of the strange
shadow must be between the table on which the lamp stood and the
wall, was making systematic passes and thrusts all over and through
the intervening space with an old sword which had belonged to his
father.  Not an inch was left unpierced.  He seemed to have divided
the space into mathematical sections.  He brandished the sword with
a sort of cold fury and calculation; the blade gave out flashes of
light, the shadow remained unmoved.  Mrs. Brigham, watching, felt
herself cold with horror.

Finally Henry ceased and stood with the sword in hand and raised as
if to strike, surveying the shadow on the wall threateningly.  Mrs.
Brigham toddled back across the hall and shut the south room door
behind her before she related what she had seen.

“He looked like a demon!” she said again.  “Have you got any of
that old wine in the house, Caroline?  I don’t feel as if I could
stand much more.”

Indeed, she looked overcome.  Her handsome placid face was worn and
strained and pale.

“Yes, there’s plenty,” said Caroline; “you can have some when you
go to bed.”

“I think we had all better take some,” said Mrs. Brigham.  “Oh, my
God, Caroline, what—”

“Don’t ask and don’t speak,” said Caroline.

“No, I am not going to,” replied Mrs. Brigham; “but—”

Rebecca moaned aloud.

“What are you doing that for?” asked Caroline harshly.

“Poor Edward,” returned Rebecca.

“That is all you have to groan for,” said Caroline.  “There is
nothing else.”

“I am going to bed,” said Mrs. Brigham.  “I sha’n’t be able to be
at the funeral if I don’t.”

Soon the three sisters went to their chambers and the south parlor
was deserted.  Caroline called to Henry in the study to put out the
light before he came upstairs.  They had been gone about an hour
when he came into the room bringing the lamp which had stood in the
study.  He set it on the table and waited a few minutes, pacing up
and down.  His face was terrible, his fair complexion showed livid;
his blue eyes seemed dark blanks of awful reflections.

Then he took the lamp up and returned to the library.  He set the
lamp on the centre table, and the shadow sprang out on the wall.
Again he studied the furniture and moved it about, but
deliberately, with none of his former frenzy.  Nothing affected the
shadow.  Then he returned to the south room with the lamp and again
waited.  Again he returned to the study and placed the lamp on the
table, and the shadow sprang out upon the wall.  It was midnight
before he went upstairs.  Mrs. Brigham and the other sisters, who
could not sleep, heard him.

The next day was the funeral.  That evening the family sat in the
south room.  Some relatives were with them.  Nobody entered the
study until Henry carried a lamp in there after the others had
retired for the night.  He saw again the shadow on the wall leap to
an awful life before the light.

The next morning at breakfast Henry Glynn announced that he had to
go to the city for three days.  The sisters looked at him with
surprise.  He very seldom left home, and just now his practice had
been neglected on account of Edward’s death.  He was a physician.

“How can you leave your patients now?” asked Mrs. Brigham
wonderingly.

“I don’t know how to, but there is no other way,” replied Henry
easily.  “I have had a telegram from Doctor Mitford.”

“Consultation?” inquired Mrs. Brigham.

“I have business,” replied Henry.

Doctor Mitford was an old classmate of his who lived in a
neighboring city and who occasionally called upon him in the case
of a consultation.

After he had gone Mrs. Brigham said to Caroline that after all
Henry had not said that he was going to consult with Doctor
Mitford, and she thought it very strange.

“Everything is very strange,” said Rebecca with a shudder.

“What do you mean?” inquired Caroline sharply.

“Nothing,” replied Rebecca.

Nobody entered the library that day, nor the next, nor the next.
The third day Henry was expected home, but he did not arrive and
the last train from the city had come.

“I call it pretty queer work,” said Mrs. Brigham.  “The idea of a
doctor leaving his patients for three days anyhow, at such a time
as this, and I know he has some very sick ones; he said so.  And
the idea of a consultation lasting three days!  There is no sense
in it, and NOW he has not come.  I don’t understand it, for my
part.”

“I don’t either,” said Rebecca.

They were all in the south parlor.  There was no light in the study
opposite, and the door was ajar.

Presently Mrs. Brigham rose—she could not have told why; something
seemed to impel her, some will outside her own.  She went out of
the room, again wrapping her rustling skirts around that she might
pass noiselessly, and began pushing at the swollen door of the
study.

“She has not got any lamp,” said Rebecca in a shaking voice.

Caroline, who was writing letters, rose again, took a lamp (there
were two in the room) and followed her sister.  Rebecca had risen,
but she stood trembling, not venturing to follow.

The doorbell rang, but the others did not hear it; it was on the
south door on the other side of the house from the study.  Rebecca,
after hesitating until the bell rang the second time, went to the
door; she remembered that the servant was out.

Caroline and her sister Emma entered the study.  Caroline set the
lamp on the table.  They looked at the wall.  “Oh, my God,” gasped
Mrs. Brigham, “there are—there are TWO—shadows.”  The sisters
stood clutching each other, staring at the awful things on the
wall.  Then Rebecca came in, staggering, with a telegram in her
hand.  “Here is—a telegram,” she gasped.  “Henry is—dead.”


From “The Wind in the Rosebush,” by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman.
Copyright, 1903, by Doubleday, Page & Company.




Melville Davisson Post




Introduction to The Corpus Delicti


The high ground of the field of crime has not been explored; it has
not even been entered.  The book stalls have been filled to
weariness with tales based upon plans whereby the DETECTIVE, or
FERRETING power of the State might be baffled.  But, prodigious
marvel! no writer has attempted to construct tales based upon plans
whereby the PUNISHING power of the State might be baffled.

The distinction, if one pauses for a moment to consider it, is
striking.  It is possible, even easy, deliberately to plan crimes
so that the criminal agent and the criminal agency cannot be
detected.  Is it possible to plan and execute wrongs in such a
manner that they will have all the effect and all the resulting
profit of desperate crimes and yet not be crimes before the law?

We are prone to forget that the law is no perfect structure, that
it is simply the result of human labor and human genius, and that
whatever laws human ingenuity can create for the protection of men,
those same laws human ingenuity can evade.  The Spirit of Evil is
no dwarf; he has developed equally with the Spirit of Good.

All wrongs are not crimes.  Indeed only those wrongs are crimes in
which certain technical elements are present.  The law provides a
Procrustean standard for all crimes.  Thus a wrong, to become
criminal, must fit exactly into the measure laid down by the law,
else it is no crime; if it varies never so little from the legal
measure, the law must, and will, refuse to regard it as criminal,
no matter how injurious a wrong it may be.  There is no measure of
morality, or equity, or common right that can be applied to the
individual case.  The gauge of the law is iron-bound.  The wrong
measured by this gauge is either a crime or it is not.  There is no
middle ground.

Hence is it, that if one knows well the technicalities of the law,
one may commit horrible wrongs that will yield all the gain and all
the resulting effect of the highest crimes, and yet the wrongs
perpetrated will constitute no one of the crimes described by the
law.  Thus the highest crimes, even murder, may be committed in
such manner that although the criminal is known and the law holds
him in custody, yet it cannot punish him.  So it happens that in
this year of our Lord of the nineteenth century, the skillful
attorney marvels at the stupidity of the rogue who, committing
crimes by the ordinary methods, subjects himself to unnecessary
peril, when the result which he seeks can easily be attained by
other methods, equally expeditious and without danger of liability
in any criminal tribunal.  This is the field into which the author
has ventured, and he believes it to be new and full of interest.

It may be objected that the writer has prepared here a text-book
for the shrewd knave.  To this it is answered that, if he instructs
the enemies, he also warns the friends of law and order; and that
Evil has never yet been stronger because the sun shone on it.


[See Lord Hale’s Rule, Russell on Crimes.  For the law in New York
see 18th N. Y. Reports, 179; also N. Y. Reports, 49, page 137.  The
doctrine there laid down obtains in almost every State, with the
possible exception of a few Western States, where the decisions are
muddy.]




The Corpus Delicti


I


“That man Mason,” said Samuel Walcott, “is the mysterious member of
this club.  He is more than that; he is the mysterious man of New
York.”

“I was much surprised to see him,” answered his companion, Marshall
St. Clair, of the great law firm of Seward, St. Clair & De Muth.
“I had lost track of him since he went to Paris as counsel for the
American stockholders of the Canal Company.  When did he come back
to the States?”

“He turned up suddenly in his ancient haunts about four months
ago,” said Walcott, “as grand, gloomy, and peculiar as Napoleon
ever was in his palmiest days.  The younger members of the club
call him ‘Zanona Redivivus.’  He wanders through the house usually
late at night, apparently without noticing anything or anybody.
His mind seems to be deeply and busily at work, leaving his bodily
self to wander as it may happen.  Naturally, strange stories are
told of him; indeed, his individuality and his habit of doing some
unexpected thing, and doing it in such a marvelously original
manner that men who are experts at it look on in wonder, cannot
fail to make him an object of interest.

“He has never been known to play at any game whatever, and yet one
night he sat down to the chess table with old Admiral Du Brey.  You
know the Admiral is the great champion since he beat the French and
English officers in the tournament last winter.  Well, you also
know that the conventional openings at chess are scientifically and
accurately determined.  To the utter disgust of Du Brey, Mason
opened the game with an unheard-of attack from the extremes of the
board.  The old Admiral stopped and, in a kindly patronizing way,
pointed out the weak and absurd folly of his move and asked him to
begin again with some one of the safe openings.  Mason smiled and
answered that if one had a head that he could trust he should use
it; if not, then it was the part of wisdom to follow blindly the
dead forms of some man who had a head.  Du Brey was naturally angry
and set himself to demolish Mason as quickly as possible.  The game
was rapid for a few moments.  Mason lost piece after piece.  His
opening was broken and destroyed and its utter folly apparent to
the lookers-on.  The Admiral smiled and the game seemed all one-
sided, when, suddenly, to his utter horror, Du Brey found that his
king was in a trap.  The foolish opening had been only a piece of
shrewd strategy.  The old Admiral fought and cursed and sacrificed
his pieces, but it was of no use.  He was gone.  Mason checkmated
him in two moves and arose wearily.

“‘Where in Heaven’s name, man,’ said the old Admiral,
thunderstruck, ‘did you learn that masterpiece?’

“‘Just here,’ replied Mason.  ‘To play chess, one should know his
opponent.  How could the dead masters lay down rules by which you
could be beaten, sir?  They had never seen you’; and thereupon he
turned and left the room.  Of course, St. Clair, such a strange man
would soon become an object of all kinds of mysterious rumors.
Some are true and some are not.  At any rate, I know that Mason is
an unusual man with a gigantic intellect.  Of late he seems to have
taken a strange fancy to me.  In fact, I seem to be the only member
of the club that he will talk with, and I confess that he startles
and fascinates me.  He is an original genius, St. Clair, of an
unusual order.”

“I recall vividly,” said the younger man, “that before Mason went
to Paris he was considered one of the greatest lawyers of this city
and he was feared and hated by the bar at large.  He came here, I
believe, from Virginia and began with the high-grade criminal
practice.  He soon became famous for his powerful and ingenious
defenses.  He found holes in the law through which his clients
escaped, holes that by the profession at large were not suspected
to exist, and that frequently astonished the judges.  His ability
caught the attention of the great corporations.  They tested him
and found in him learning and unlimited resources.  He pointed out
methods by which they could evade obnoxious statutes, by which they
could comply with the apparent letter of the law and yet violate
its spirit, and advised them well in that most important of all
things, just how far they could bend the law without breaking it.
At the time he left for Paris he had a vast clientage and was in
the midst of a brilliant career.  The day he took passage from New
York, the bar lost sight of him.  No matter how great a man may be,
the wave soon closes over him in a city like this.  In a few years
Mason was forgotten.  Now only the older practitioners would recall
him, and they would do so with hatred and bitterness.  He was a
tireless, savage, uncompromising fighter, always a recluse.”

“Well,” said Walcott, “he reminds me of a great world-weary cynic,
transplanted from some ancient mysterious empire.  When I come into
the man’s presence I feel instinctively the grip of his intellect.
I tell you, St. Clair, Randolph Mason is the mysterious man of New
York.”

At this moment a messenger boy came into the room and handed Mr.
Walcott a telegram.  “St. Clair,” said that gentleman, rising, “the
directors of the Elevated are in session, and we must hurry.”  The
two men put on their coats and left the house.

Samuel Walcott was not a club man after the manner of the Smart
Set, and yet he was in fact a club man.  He was a bachelor in the
latter thirties, and resided in a great silent house on the avenue.
On the street he was a man of substance, shrewd and progressive,
backed by great wealth.  He had various corporate interests in the
larger syndicates, but the basis and foundation of his fortune was
real estate.  His houses on the avenue were the best possible
property, and his elevator row in the importers’ quarter was indeed
a literal gold mine.  It was known that, many years before, his
grandfather had died and left him the property, which, at that
time, was of no great value.  Young Walcott had gone out into the
gold-fields and had been lost sight of and forgotten.  Ten years
afterwards he had turned up suddenly in New York and taken
possession of his property, then vastly increased in value.  His
speculations were almost phenomenally successful, and, backed by
the now enormous value of his real property, he was soon on a level
with the merchant princes.  His judgment was considered sound, and
he had the full confidence of his business associates for safety
and caution.  Fortune heaped up riches around him with a lavish
hand.  He was unmarried and the halo of his wealth caught the keen
eye of the matron with marriageable daughters.  He was invited out,
caught by the whirl of society, and tossed into its maelstrom.  In
a measure he reciprocated.  He kept horses and a yacht.  His
dinners at Delmonico’s and the club were above reproach.  But with
all he was a silent man with a shadow deep in his eyes, and seemed
to court the society of his fellows, not because he loved them, but
because he either hated or feared solitude.  For years the strategy
of the match-maker had gone gracefully afield, but Fate is
relentless.  If she shields the victim from the traps of men, it is
not because she wishes him to escape, but because she is pleased to
reserve him for her own trap.  So it happened that, when Virginia
St. Clair assisted Mrs. Miriam Steuvisant at her midwinter
reception, this same Samuel Walcott fell deeply and hopelessly and
utterly in love, and it was so apparent to the beaten generals
present, that Mrs. Miriam Steuvisant applauded herself, so to
speak, with encore after encore.  It was good to see this
courteous, silent man literally at the feet of the young debutante.
He was there of right.  Even the mothers of marriageable daughters
admitted that.  The young girl was brown-haired, brown-eyed, and
tall enough, said the experts, and of the blue blood royal, with
all the grace, courtesy, and inbred genius of such princely
heritage.

Perhaps it was objected by the censors of the Smart Set that Miss
St. Clair’s frankness and honesty were a trifle old-fashioned, and
that she was a shadowy bit of a Puritan; and perhaps it was of
these same qualities that Samuel Walcott received his hurt.  At any
rate the hurt was there and deep, and the new actor stepped up into
the old time-worn, semi-tragic drama, and began his role with a
tireless, utter sincerity that was deadly dangerous if he lost.


II


Perhaps a week after the conversation between St. Clair and
Walcott, Randolph Mason stood in the private waiting-room of the
club with his hands behind his back.

He was a man apparently in the middle forties; tall and reasonably
broad across the shoulders; muscular without being either stout or
lean.  His hair was thin and of a brown color, with erratic streaks
of gray.  His forehead was broad and high and of a faint reddish
color.  His eyes were restless inky black, and not over-large.  The
nose was big and muscular and bowed.  The eyebrows were black and
heavy, almost bushy.  There were heavy furrows, running from the
nose downward and outward to the corners of the mouth.  The mouth
was straight and the jaw was heavy, and square.

Looking at the face of Randolph Mason from above, the expression in
repose was crafty and cynical; viewed from below upward, it was
savage and vindictive, almost brutal; while from the front, if
looked squarely in the face, the stranger was fascinated by the
animation of the man and at once concluded that his expression was
fearless and sneering.  He was evidently of Southern extraction and
a man of unusual power.

A fire smoldered on the hearth.  It was a crisp evening in the
early fall, and with that far-off touch of melancholy which ever
heralds the coming winter, even in the midst of a city.  The man’s
face looked tired and ugly.  His long white hands were clasped
tight together.  His entire figure and face wore every mark of
weakness and physical exhaustion; but his eyes contradicted.  They
were red and restless.

In the private dining-room the dinner party was in the best of
spirits.  Samuel Walcott was happy.  Across the table from him was
Miss Virginia St. Clair, radiant, a tinge of color in her cheeks.
On either side, Mrs. Miriam Steuvisant and Marshall St. Clair were
brilliant and lighthearted.  Walcott looked at the young girl and
the measure of his worship was full.  He wondered for the
thousandth time how she could possibly love him and by what earthly
miracle she had come to accept him, and how it would be always to
have her across the table from him, his own table in his own house.

They were about to rise from the table when one of the waiters
entered the room and handed Walcott an envelope.  He thrust it
quickly into his pocket.  In the confusion of rising the others did
not notice him, but his face was ash white and his hands trembled
violently as he placed the wraps around the bewitching shoulders of
Miss St. Clair.

“Marshall,” he said, and despite the powerful effort his voice was
hollow, “you will see the ladies safely cared for, I am called to
attend a grave matter.”

“All right, Walcott,” answered the young man, with cheery good
nature, “you are too serious, old man, trot along.”

“The poor dear,” murmured Mrs. Steuvisant, after Walcott had helped
them to the carriage and turned to go up the steps of the club,—
“The poor dear is hard hit, and men are such funny creatures when
they are hard hit.”

Samuel Walcott, as his fate would, went direct to the private
writing-room and opened the door.  The lights were not turned on
and in the dark he did not see Mason motionless by the mantel-
shelf.  He went quickly across the room to the writing-table,
turned on one of the lights, and, taking the envelope from his
pocket, tore it open.  Then he bent down by the light to read the
contents.  As his eyes ran over the paper, his jaw fell.  The skin
drew away from his cheekbones and his face seemed literally to sink
in.  His knees gave way under him and he would have gone down in a
heap had it not been for Mason’s long arms that closed around him
and held him up.  The human economy is ever mysterious.  The moment
the new danger threatened, the latent power of the man as an
animal, hidden away in the centers of intelligence, asserted
itself.  His hand clutched the paper and, with a half slide, he
turned in Mason’s arms.  For a moment he stared up at the ugly man
whose thin arms felt like wire ropes.

“You are under the dead-fall, aye,” said Mason.  “The cunning of my
enemy is sublime.”

“Your enemy?” gasped Walcott.  “When did you come into it?  How in
God’s name did you know it?  How your enemy?”

Mason looked down at the wide bulging eyes of the man.

“Who should know better than I?” he said.  “Haven’t I broken
through all the traps and plots that she could set?”

“She?  She trap you?”  The man’s voice was full of horror.

“The old schemer,” muttered Mason.  “The cowardly old schemer, to
strike in the back; but we can beat her.  She did not count on my
helping you—I, who know her so well.”

Mason’s face was red, and his eyes burned.  In the midst of it all
he dropped his hands and went over to the fire.  Samuel Walcott
arose, panting, and stood looking at Mason, with his hands behind
him on the table.  The naturally strong nature and the rigid school
in which the man had been trained presently began to tell.  His
composure in part returned and he thought rapidly.  What did this
strange man know?  Was he simply making shrewd guesses, or had he
some mysterious knowledge of this matter?  Walcott could not know
that Mason meant only Fate, that he believed her to be his great
enemy.  Walcott had never before doubted his own ability to meet
any emergency.  This mighty jerk had carried him off his feet.  He
was unstrung and panic-stricken.  At any rate this man had promised
help.  He would take it.  He put the paper and envelope carefully
into his pocket, smoothed out his rumpled coat, and going over to
Mason touched him on the shoulder.

“Come,” he said, “if you are to help me we must go.”

The man turned and followed him without a word.  In the hall Mason
put on his hat and overcoat, and the two went out into the street.
Walcott hailed a cab, and the two were driven to his house on the
avenue.  Walcott took out his latchkey, opened the door, and led
the way into the library.  He turned on the light and motioned
Mason to seat himself at the table.  Then he went into another room
and presently returned with a bundle of papers and a decanter of
brandy.  He poured out a glass of the liquor and offered it to
Mason.  The man shook his head.  Walcott poured the contents of the
glass down his own throat.  Then he set the decanter down and drew
up a chair on the side of the table opposite Mason.

“Sir,” said Walcott, in a voice deliberate, indeed, but as hollow
as a sepulcher, “I am done for.  God has finally gathered up the
ends of the net, and it is knotted tight.”

“Am I not here to help you?” said Mason, turning savagely.  “I can
beat Fate.  Give me the details of her trap.”

He bent forward and rested his arms on the table.  His streaked
gray hair was rumpled and on end, and his face was ugly.  For a
moment Walcott did not answer.  He moved a little into the shadow;
then he spread the bundle of old yellow papers out before him.

“To begin with,” he said, “I am a living lie, a gilded crime-made
sham, every bit of me.  There is not an honest piece anywhere.  It
is all lie.  I am a liar and a thief before men.  The property
which I possess is not mine, but stolen from a dead man.  The very
name which I bear is not my own, but is the bastard child of a
crime.  I am more than all that—I am a murderer; a murderer before
the law; a murderer before God; and worse than a murderer before
the pure woman whom I love more than anything that God could make.”

He paused for a moment and wiped the perspiration from his face.

“Sir,” said Mason, “this is all drivel, infantile drivel.  What you
are is of no importance.  How to get out is the problem, how to get
out.”

Samuel Walcott leaned forward, poured out a glass of brandy and
swallowed it.

“Well,” he said, speaking slowly, “my right name is Richard Warren.
In the spring of 1879 I came to New York and fell in with the real
Samuel Walcott, a young man with a little money and some property
which his grandfather had left him.  We became friends, and
concluded to go to the far west together.  Accordingly we scraped
together what money we could lay our hands on, and landed in the
gold-mining regions of California.  We were young and
inexperienced, and our money went rapidly.  One April morning we
drifted into a little shack camp, away up in the Sierra Nevadas,
called Hell’s Elbow.  Here we struggled and starved for perhaps a
year.  Finally, in utter desperation, Walcott married the daughter
of a Mexican gambler, who ran an eating house and a poker joint.
With them we lived from hand to mouth in a wild God-forsaken way
for several years.  After a time the woman began to take a strange
fancy to me.  Walcott finally noticed it, and grew jealous.

“One night, in a drunken brawl, we quarreled, and I killed him.  It
was late at night, and, beside the woman, there were four of us in
the poker room,—the Mexican gambler, a half-breed devil called
Cherubim Pete, Walcott, and myself.  When Walcott fell, the half-
breed whipped out his weapon, and fired at me across the table; but
the woman, Nina San Croix, struck his arm, and, instead of killing
me, as he intended, the bullet mortally wounded her father, the
Mexican gambler.  I shot the half-breed through the forehead, and
turned round, expecting the woman to attack me.  On the contrary,
she pointed to the window, and bade me wait for her on the cross
trail below.

“It was fully three hours later before the woman joined me at the
place indicated.  She had a bag of gold dust, a few jewels that
belonged to her father, and a package of papers.  I asked her why
she had stayed behind so long, and she replied that the men were
not killed outright, and that she had brought a priest to them and
waited until they had died.  This was the truth, but not all the
truth.  Moved by superstition or foresight, the woman had induced
the priest to take down the sworn statements of the two dying men,
seal it, and give it to her.  This paper she brought with her.  All
this I learned afterwards.  At the time I knew nothing of this
damning evidence.

“We struck out together for the Pacific coast.  The country was
lawless.  The privations we endured were almost past belief.  At
times the woman exhibited cunning and ability that were almost
genius; and through it all, often in the very fingers of death, her
devotion to me never wavered.  It was doglike, and seemed to be her
only object on earth.  When we reached San Francisco, the woman put
these papers into my hands.”  Walcott took up the yellow package,
and pushed it across the table to Mason.

“She proposed that I assume Walcott’s name, and that we come boldly
to New York and claim the property.  I examined the papers, found a
copy of the will by which Walcott inherited the property, a bundle
of correspondence, and sufficient documentary evidence to establish
his identity beyond the shadow of a doubt.  Desperate gambler as I
now was, I quailed before the daring plan of Nina San Croix.  I
urged that I, Richard Warren, would be known, that the attempted
fraud would be detected and would result in investigation, and
perhaps unearth the whole horrible matter.

“The woman pointed out how much I resembled Walcott, what vast
changes ten years of such life as we had led would naturally be
expected to make in men, how utterly impossible it would be to
trace back the fraud to Walcott’s murder at Hell’s Elbow, in the
wild passes of the Sierra Nevadas.  She bade me remember that we
were both outcasts, both crime-branded, both enemies of man’s law
and God’s; that we had nothing to lose; we were both sunk to the
bottom.  Then she laughed, and said that she had not found me a
coward until now, but that if I had turned chicken-hearted, that
was the end of it, of course.  The result was, we sold the gold
dust and jewels in San Francisco, took on such evidences of
civilization as possible, and purchased passage to New York on the
best steamer we could find.

“I was growing to depend on the bold gambler spirit of this woman,
Nina San Croix; I felt the need of her strong, profligate nature.
She was of a queer breed and a queerer school.  Her mother was the
daughter of a Spanish engineer, and had been stolen by the Mexican,
her father.  She herself had been raised and educated as best might
be in one of the monasteries along the Rio Grande, and had there
grown to womanhood before her father, fleeing into the mountains of
California, carried her with him.

“When we landed in New York I offered to announce her as my wife,
but she refused, saying that her presence would excite comment and
perhaps attract the attention of Walcott’s relatives.  We therefore
arranged that I should go alone into the city, claim the property,
and announce myself as Samuel Walcott, and that she should remain
under cover until such time as we would feel the ground safe under
us.

“Every detail of the plan was fatally successful.  I established my
identity without difficulty and secured the property.  It had
increased vastly in value, and I, as Samuel Walcott, soon found
myself a rich man.  I went to Nina San Croix in hiding and gave her
a large sum of money, with which she purchased a residence in a
retired part of the city, far up in the northern suburb.  Here she
lived secluded and unknown while I remained in the city, living
here as a wealthy bachelor.

“I did not attempt to abandon the woman, but went to her from time
to time in disguise and under cover of the greatest secrecy.  For a
time everything ran smooth, the woman was still devoted to me above
everything else, and thought always of my welfare first and seemed
content to wait so long as I thought best.  My business expanded.
I was sought after and consulted and drawn into the higher life of
New York, and more and more felt that the woman was an albatross on
my neck.  I put her off with one excuse after another.  Finally she
began to suspect me and demanded that I should recognize her as my
wife.  I attempted to point out the difficulties.  She met them all
by saying that we should both go to Spain, there I could marry her
and we could return to America and drop into my place in society
without causing more than a passing comment.

“I concluded to meet the matter squarely once for all.  I said that
I would convert half of the property into money and give it to her,
but that I would not marry her.  She did not fly into a storming
rage as I had expected, but went quietly out of the room and
presently returned with two papers, which she read.  One was the
certificate of her marriage to Walcott duly authenticated; the
other was the dying statement of her father, the Mexican gambler,
and of Samuel Walcott, charging me with murder.  It was in proper
form and certified by the Jesuit priest.

“‘Now,’ she said, sweetly, when she had finished, ‘which do you
prefer, to recognize your wife, or to turn all the property over to
Samuel Walcott’s widow and hang for his murder?’

“I was dumfounded and horrified.  I saw the trap that I was in and
I consented to do anything she should say if she would only destroy
the papers.  This she refused to do.  I pleaded with her and
implored her to destroy them.  Finally she gave them to me with a
great show of returning confidence, and I tore them into bits and
threw them into the fire.

“That was three months ago.  We arranged to go to Spain and do as
she said.  She was to sail this morning and I was to follow.  Of
course I never intended to go.  I congratulated myself on the fact
that all trace of evidence against me was destroyed and that her
grip was now broken.  My plan was to induce her to sail, believing
that I would follow.  When she was gone I would marry Miss St.
Clair, and if Nina San Croix should return I would defy her and
lock her up as a lunatic.  But I was reckoning like an infernal
ass, to imagine for a moment that I could thus hoodwink such a
woman as Nina San Croix.

“To-night I received this.”  Walcott took the envelope from his
pocket and gave it to Mason.  “You saw the effect of it; read it
and you will understand why.  I felt the death hand when I saw her
writing on the envelope.”

Mason took the paper from the envelope.  It was written in Spanish,
and ran:


“Greeting to RICHARD WARREN.

“The great Senor does his little Nina injustice to think she would
go away to Spain and leave him to the beautiful American.  She is
not so thoughtless.  Before she goes, she shall be, Oh so very
rich! and the dear Senor shall be, Oh so very safe!  The Archbishop
and the kind Church hate murderers.

“NINA SAN CROIX.

“Of course, fool, the papers you destroyed were copies.

“N. SAN C.”


To this was pinned a line in a delicate aristocratic hand saying
that the Archbishop would willingly listen to Madam San Croix’s
statement if she would come to him on Friday morning at eleven.

“You see,” said Walcott, desperately, “there is no possible way
out.  I know the woman—when she decides to do a thing that is the
end of it.  She has decided to do this.”

Mason turned around from the table, stretched out his long legs,
and thrust his hands deep into his pockets.  Walcott sat with his
head down, watching Mason hopelessly, almost indifferently, his
face blank and sunken.  The ticking of the bronze clock on the
mantel shelf was loud, painfully loud.  Suddenly Mason drew his
knees in and bent over, put both his bony hands on the table, and
looked at Walcott.

“Sir,” he said, “this matter is in such shape that there is only
one thing to do.  This growth must be cut out at the roots, and cut
out quickly.  This is the first fact to be determined, and a fool
would know it.  The second fact is that you must do it yourself.
Hired killers are like the grave and the daughters of the horse
leech,—they cry always, ‘Give, Give.’  They are only palliatives,
not cures.  By using them you swap perils.  You simply take a stay
of execution at best.  The common criminal would know this.  These
are the facts of your problem.  The master plotters of crime would
see here but two difficulties to meet:

“A practical method for accomplishing the body of the crime.

“A cover for the criminal agent.

“They would see no farther, and attempt to guard no farther.  After
they had provided a plan for the killing, and a means by which the
killer could cover his trail and escape from the theater of the
homicide, they would believe all the requirements of the problems
met, and would stop.  The greatest, the very giants among them,
have stopped here and have been in great error.

“In every crime, especially in the great ones, there exists a third
element, preeminently vital.  This third element the master
plotters have either overlooked or else have not had the genius to
construct.  They plan with rare cunning to baffle the victim.  They
plan with vast wisdom, almost genius, to baffle the trailer.  But
they fail utterly to provide any plan for baffling the punisher.
Ergo, their plots are fatally defective and often result in ruin.
Hence the vital necessity for providing the third element—the
escape ipso jure.”

Mason arose, walked around the table, and put his hand firmly on
Samuel Walcott’s shoulder.  “This must be done to-morrow night,” he
continued; “you must arrange your business matters to-morrow and
announce that you are going on a yacht cruise, by order of your
physician, and may not return for some weeks.  You must prepare
your yacht for a voyage, instruct your men to touch at a certain
point on Staten Island, and wait until six o’clock day after
tomorrow morning.  If you do not come aboard by that time, they are
to go to one of the South American ports and remain until further
orders.  By this means your absence for an indefinite period will
be explained.  You will go to Nina San Croix in the disguise which
you have always used, and from her to the yacht, and by this means
step out of your real status and back into it without leaving
traces.  I will come here to-morrow evening and furnish you with
everything that you shall need and give you full and exact
instructions in every particular.  These details you must execute
with the greatest care, as they will be vitally essential to the
success of my plan.”

Through it all Walcott had been silent and motionless.  Now he
arose, and in his face there must have been some premonition of
protest, for Mason stepped back and put out his hand.  “Sir,” he
said, with brutal emphasis, “not a word.  Remember that you are
only the hand, and the hand does not think.”  Then he turned around
abruptly and went out of the house.


III


The place which Samuel Walcott had selected for the residence of
Nina San Croix was far up in the northern suburb of New York.  The
place was very old.  The lawn was large and ill kept; the house, a
square old-fashioned brick, was set far back from the street, and
partly hidden by trees.  Around it all was a rusty iron fence.  The
place had the air of genteel ruin, such as one finds in the
Virginias.

On a Thursday of November, about three o’clock in the afternoon, a
little man, driving a dray, stopped in the alley at the rear of the
house.  As he opened the back gate an old negro woman came down the
steps from the kitchen and demanded to know what he wanted.  The
drayman asked if the lady of the house was in.  The old negro
answered that she was asleep at this hour and could not be seen.

“That is good,” said the little man, “now there won’t be any row.
I brought up some cases of wine which she ordered from our house
last week and which the Boss told me to deliver at once, but I
forgot it until to-day.  Just let me put it in the cellar now,
Auntie, and don’t say a word to the lady about it and she won’t
ever know that it was not brought up on time.”

The drayman stopped, fished a silver dollar out of his pocket, and
gave it to the old negro.  “There now, Auntie,” he said, “my job
depends upon the lady not knowing about this wine; keep it mum.”

“Dat’s all right, honey,” said the old servant, beaming like a May
morning.  “De cellar door is open, carry it all in and put it in de
back part and nobody ain’t never going to know how long it has been
in dar.”

The old negro went back into the kitchen and the little man began
to unload the dray.  He carried in five wine cases and stowed them
away in the back part of the cellar as the old woman had directed.
Then, after having satisfied himself that no one was watching, he
took from the dray two heavy paper sacks, presumably filled with
flour, and a little bundle wrapped in an old newspaper; these he
carefully hid behind the wine cases in the cellar.  After awhile he
closed the door, climbed on his dray, and drove off down the alley.

About eight o’clock in the evening of the same day, a Mexican
sailor dodged in the front gate and slipped down to the side of the
house.  He stopped by the window and tapped on it with his finger.
In a moment a woman opened the door.  She was tall, lithe, and
splendidly proportioned, with a dark Spanish face and straight
hair.  The man stepped inside.  The woman bolted the door and
turned round.

“Ah,” she said, smiling, “it is you, Senor?  How good of you!”

The man started.  “Whom else did you expect?” he said quickly.

“Oh!” laughed the woman, “perhaps the Archbishop.”

“Nina!” said the man, in a broken voice that expressed love,
humility, and reproach.  His face was white under the black
sunburn.

For a moment the woman wavered.  A shadow flitted over her eyes,
then she stepped back.  “No,” she said, “not yet.”

The man walked across to the fire, sank down in a chair, and
covered his face with his hands.  The woman stepped up noiselessly
behind him and leaned over the chair.  The man was either in great
agony or else he was a superb actor, for the muscles of his neck
twitched violently and his shoulders trembled.

“Oh,” he muttered, as though echoing his thoughts, “I can’t do it,
I can’t!”

The woman caught the words and leaped up as though some one had
struck her in the face.  She threw back her head.  Her nostrils
dilated and her eyes flashed.

“You can’t do it!” she cried.  “Then you do love her!  You shall do
it!  Do you hear me?  You shall do it!  You killed him!  You got
rid of him! but you shall not get rid of me.  I have the evidence,
all of it.  The Archbishop will have it to-morrow.  They shall hang
you!  Do you hear me?  They shall hang you!”

The woman’s voice rose, it was loud and shrill.  The man turned
slowly round without looking up, and stretched out his arms toward
the woman.  She stopped and looked down at him.  The fire glittered
for a moment and then died out of her eyes, her bosom heaved and
her lips began to tremble.  With a cry she flung herself into his
arms, caught him around the neck, and pressed his face up close
against her cheek.

“Oh! Dick, Dick,” she sobbed, “I do love you so!  I can’t live
without you!  Not another hour, Dick!  I do want you so much, so
much, Dick!”

The man shifted his right arm quickly, slipped a great Mexican
knife out of his sleeve, and passed his fingers slowly up the
woman’s side until he felt the heart beat under his hand, then he
raised the knife, gripped the handle tight, and drove the keen
blade into the woman’s bosom.  The hot blood gushed out over his
arm, and down on his leg.  The body, warm and limp, slipped down in
his arms.  The man got up, pulled out the knife, and thrust it into
a sheath at his belt, unbuttoned the dress, and slipped it off of
the body.  As he did this a bundle of papers dropped upon the
floor; these he glanced at hastily and put into his pocket.  Then
he took the dead woman up in his arms, went out into the hall, and
started to go up the stairway.  The body was relaxed and heavy, and
for that reason difficult to carry.  He doubled it up into an awful
heap, with the knees against the chin, and walked slowly and
heavily up the stairs and out into the bathroom.  There he laid the
corpse down on the tiled floor.  Then he opened the window, closed
the shutters, and lighted the gas.  The bathroom was small and
contained an ordinary steel tub, porcelain lined, standing near the
window and raised about six inches above the floor.  The sailor
went over to the tub, pried up the metal rim of the outlet with his
knife, removed it, and fitted into its place a porcelain disk which
he took from his pocket; to this disk was attached a long platinum
wire, the end of which he fastened on the outside of the tub.
After he had done this he went back to the body, stripped off its
clothing, put it down in the tub and began to dismember it with the
great Mexican knife.  The blade was strong and sharp as a razor.
The man worked rapidly and with the greatest care.

When he had finally cut the body into as small pieces as possible,
he replaced the knife in its sheath, washed his hands, and went out
of the bathroom and downstairs to the lower hall.  The sailor
seemed perfectly familiar with the house.  By a side door he passed
into the cellar.  There he lighted the gas, opened one of the wine
cases, and, taking up all the bottles that he could conveniently
carry, returned to the bathroom.  There he poured the contents into
the tub on the dismembered body, and then returned to the cellar
with the empty bottles, which he replaced in the wine cases.  This
he continued to do until all the cases but one were emptied and the
bath tub was more than half full of liquid.  This liquid was
sulphuric acid.

When the sailor returned to the cellar with the last empty wine
bottles, he opened the fifth case, which really contained wine,
took some of it out, and poured a little into each of the empty
bottles in order to remove any possible odor of the sulphuric acid.
Then he turned out the gas and brought up to the bathroom with him
the two paper flour sacks and the little heavy bundle.  These sacks
were filled with nitrate of soda.  He set them down by the door,
opened the little bundle, and took out two long rubber tubes, each
attached to a heavy gas burner, not unlike the ordinary burners of
a small gas stove.  He fastened the tubes to two of the gas jets,
put the burners under the tub, turned the gas on full, and lighted
it.  Then he threw into the tub the woman’s clothing and the papers
which he had found on her body, after which he took up the two
heavy sacks of nitrate of soda and dropped them carefully into the
sulphuric acid.  When he had done this he went quickly out of the
bathroom and closed the door.

The deadly acids at once attacked the body and began to destroy it;
as the heat increased, the acids boiled and the destructive process
was rapid and awful.  From time to time the sailor opened the door
of the bathroom cautiously, and, holding a wet towel over his mouth
and nose, looked in at his horrible work.  At the end of a few
hours there was only a swimming mass in the tub.  When the man
looked at four o’clock, it was all a thick murky liquid.  He turned
off the gas quickly and stepped back out of the room.  For perhaps
half an hour he waited in the hall; finally, when the acids had
cooled so that they no longer gave off fumes, he opened the door
and went in, took hold of the platinum wire and, pulling the
porcelain disk from the stopcock, allowed the awful contents of the
tub to run out.  Then he turned on the hot water, rinsed the tub
clean, and replaced the metal outlet.  Removing the rubber tubes,
he cut them into pieces, broke the porcelain disk, and, rolling up
the platinum wire, washed it all down the sewer pipe.

The fumes had escaped through the open window; this he now closed
and set himself to putting the bathroom in order, and effectually
removing every trace of his night’s work.  The sailor moved around
with the very greatest degree of care.  Finally, when he had
arranged everything to his complete satisfaction, he picked up the
two burners, turned out the gas, and left the bathroom, closing the
door after him.  From the bathroom he went directly to the attic,
concealed the two rusty burners under a heap of rubbish, and then
walked carefully and noiselessly down the stairs and through the
lower hall.  As he opened the door and stepped into the room where
he had killed the woman, two police officers sprang out and seized
him.  The man screamed like a wild beast taken in a trap and sank
down.

“Oh! oh!” he cried, “it was no use! it was no use to do it!”  Then
he recovered himself in a manner and was silent.  The officers
handcuffed him, summoned the patrol, and took him at once to the
station house.  There he said he was a Mexican sailor and that his
name was Victor Ancona; but he would say nothing further.  The
following morning he sent for Randolph Mason and the two were long
together.


IV


The obscure defendant charged with murder has little reason to
complain of the law’s delays.  The morning following the arrest of
Victor Ancona, the newspapers published long sensational articles,
denounced him as a fiend, and convicted him.  The grand jury, as it
happened, was in session.  The preliminaries were soon arranged and
the case was railroaded into trial.  The indictment contained a
great many counts, and charged the prisoner with the murder of Nina
San Croix by striking, stabbing, choking, poisoning, and so forth.

The trial had continued for three days and had appeared so
overwhelmingly one-sided that the spectators who were crowded in
the court room had grown to be violent and bitter partisans, to
such an extent that the police watched them closely.  The attorneys
for the People were dramatic and denunciatory, and forced their
case with arrogant confidence.  Mason, as counsel for the prisoner,
was indifferent and listless.  Throughout the entire trial he had
sat almost motionless at the table, his gaunt form bent over, his
long legs drawn up under his chair, and his weary, heavy-muscled
face, with its restless eyes, fixed and staring out over the heads
of the jury, was like a tragic mask.  The bar, and even the judge,
believed that the prisoner’s counsel had abandoned his case.

The evidence was all in and the People rested.  It had been shown
that Nina San Croix had resided for many years in the house in
which the prisoner was arrested; that she had lived by herself,
with no other companion than an old negro servant; that her past
was unknown, and that she received no visitors, save the Mexican
sailor, who came to her house at long intervals.  Nothing whatever
was shown tending to explain who the prisoner was or whence he had
come.  It was shown that on Tuesday preceding the killing the
Archbishop had received a communication from Nina San Croix, in
which she said she desired to make a statement of the greatest
import, and asking for an audience.  To this the Archbishop replied
that he would willingly grant her a hearing if she would come to
him at eleven o’clock on Friday morning.  Two policemen testified
that about eight o’clock on the night of Thursday they had noticed
the prisoner slip into the gate of Nina San Croix’s residence and
go down to the side of the house, where he was admitted; that his
appearance and seeming haste had attracted their attention; that
they had concluded that it was some clandestine amour, and out of
curiosity had both slipped down to the house and endeavored to find
a position from which they could see into the room, but were unable
to do so, and were about to go back to the street when they heard a
woman’s voice cry out in, great anger: “I know that you love her
and that you want to get rid of me, but you shall not do it!  You
murdered him, but you shall not murder me!  I have all the evidence
to convict you of murdering him!  The Archbishop will have it to-
morrow!  They shall hang you!  Do you hear me?  They shall hang you
for this murder!” that thereupon one of the policemen proposed that
they should break into the house and see what was wrong, but the
other had urged that it was only the usual lovers’ quarrel and if
they should interfere they would find nothing upon which a charge
could be based and would only be laughed at by the chief; that they
had waited and listened for a time, but hearing nothing further had
gone back to the street and contented themselves with keeping a
strict watch on the house.

The People proved further, that on Thursday evening Nina San Croix
had given the old negro domestic a sum of money and dismissed her,
with the instruction that she was not to return until sent for.
The old woman testified that she had gone directly to the house of
her son, and later had discovered that she had forgotten some
articles of clothing which she needed; that thereupon she had
returned to the house and had gone up the back way to her room,—
this was about eight o’clock; that while there she had heard Nina
San Croix’s voice in great passion and remembered that she had used
the words stated by the policemen; that these sudden, violent cries
had frightened her greatly and she had bolted the door and been
afraid to leave the room; shortly thereafter, she had heard heavy
footsteps ascending the stairs, slowly and with great difficulty,
as though some one were carrying a heavy burden; that therefore her
fear had increased and that she had put out the light and hidden
under the bed.  She remembered hearing the footsteps moving about
upstairs for many hours, how long she could not tell.  Finally,
about half-past four in the morning, she crept out, opened the
door, slipped downstairs, and ran out into the street.  There she
had found the policemen and requested them to search the house.

The two officers had gone to the house with the woman.  She had
opened the door and they had had just time to step back into the
shadow when the prisoner entered.  When arrested, Victor Ancona had
screamed with terror, and cried out, “It was no use! it was no use
to do it!”

The Chief of Police had come to the house and instituted a careful
search.  In the room below, from which the cries had come, he found
a dress which was identified as belonging to Nina San Croix and
which she was wearing when last seen by the domestic, about six
o’clock that evening.  This dress was covered with blood, and had a
slit about two inches long in the left side of the bosom, into
which the Mexican knife, found on the prisoner, fitted perfectly.
These articles were introduced in evidence, and it was shown that
the slit would be exactly over the heart of the wearer, and that
such a wound would certainly result in death.  There was much blood
on one of the chairs and on the floor.  There was also blood on the
prisoner’s coat and the leg of his trousers, and the heavy Mexican
knife was also bloody.  The blood was shown by the experts to be
human blood.

The body of the woman was not found, and the most rigid and
tireless search failed to develop the slightest trace of the
corpse, or the manner of its disposal.  The body of the woman had
disappeared as completely as though it had vanished into the air.

When counsel announced that he had closed for the People, the judge
turned and looked gravely down at Mason.  “Sir,” he said, “the
evidence for the defense may now be introduced.”

Randolph Mason arose slowly and faced the judge.

“If your Honor please,” he said, speaking slowly and distinctly,
“the defendant has no evidence to offer.”  He paused while a murmur
of astonishment ran over the court room.  “But, if your Honor
please,” he continued, “I move that the jury be directed to find
the prisoner not guilty.”

The crowd stirred.  The counsel for the People smiled.  The judge
looked sharply at the speaker over his glasses.  “On what ground?”
he said curtly.

“On the ground,” replied Mason, “that the corpus delicti has not
been proven.”

“Ah!” said the judge, for once losing his judicial gravity.  Mason
sat down abruptly.  The senior counsel for the prosecution was on
his feet in a moment.

“What!” he said, “the gentleman bases his motion on a failure to
establish the corpus delicti?  Does he jest, or has he forgotten
the evidence?  The term ‘corpus delicti’ is technical, and means
the body of the crime, or the substantial fact that a crime has
been committed.  Does anyone doubt it in this case?  It is true
that no one actually saw the prisoner kill the decedent, and that
he has so successfully hidden the body that it has not been found,
but the powerful chain of circumstances, clear and close-linked,
proving motive, the criminal agency, and the criminal act, is
overwhelming.

“The victim in this case is on the eve of making a statement that
would prove fatal to the prisoner.  The night before the statement
is to be made he goes to her residence.  They quarrel.  Her voice
is heard, raised high in the greatest passion, denouncing him, and
charging that he is a murderer, that she has the evidence and will
reveal it, that he shall be hanged, and that he shall not be rid of
her.  Here is the motive for the crime, clear as light.  Are not
the bloody knife, the bloody dress, the bloody clothes of the
prisoner, unimpeachable witnesses to the criminal act?  The
criminal agency of the prisoner has not the shadow of a possibility
to obscure it.  His motive is gigantic.  The blood on him, and his
despair when arrested, cry ‘Murder! murder!’ with a thousand
tongues.

“Men may lie, but circumstances cannot.  The thousand hopes and
fears and passions of men may delude, or bias the witness.  Yet it
is beyond the human mind to conceive that a clear, complete chain
of concatenated circumstances can be in error.  Hence it is that
the greatest jurists have declared that such evidence, being rarely
liable to delusion or fraud, is safest and most powerful.  The
machinery of human justice cannot guard against the remote and
improbable doubt.  The inference is persistent in the affairs of
men.  It is the only means by which the human mind reaches the
truth.  If you forbid the jury to exercise it, you bid them work
after first striking off their hands.  Rule out the irresistible
inference, and the end of justice is come in this land; and you may
as well leave the spider to weave his web through the abandoned
court room.”

The attorney stopped, looked down at Mason with a pompous sneer,
and retired to his place at the table.  The judge sat thoughtful
and motionless.  The jurymen leaned forward in their seats.

“If your Honor please,” said Mason, rising, “this is a matter of
law, plain, clear, and so well settled in the State of New York
that even counsel for the People should know it.  The question
before your Honor is simple.  If the corpus delicti, the body of
the crime, has been proven, as required by the laws of the
commonwealth, then this case should go to the jury.  If not, then
it is the duty of this Court to direct the jury to find the
prisoner not guilty.  There is here no room for judicial
discretion.  Your Honor has but to recall and apply the rigid rule
announced by our courts prescribing distinctly how the corpus
delicti in murder must be proven.

“The prisoner here stands charged with the highest crime.  The law
demands, first, that the crime, as a fact, be established.  The
fact that the victim is indeed dead must first be made certain
before anyone can be convicted for her killing, because, so long as
there remains the remotest doubt as to the death, there can be no
certainty as to the criminal agent, although the circumstantial
evidence indicating the guilt of the accused may be positive,
complete, and utterly irresistible.  In murder, the corpus delicti,
or body of the crime, is composed of two elements:

“Death, as a result.

“The criminal agency of another as the means.

“It is the fixed and immutable law of this State, laid down in the
leading case of Ruloff v. The People, and binding upon this Court,
that both components of the corpus delicti shall not be established
by circumstantial evidence.  There must be direct proof of one or
the other of these two component elements of the corpus delicti.
If one is proven by direct evidence, the other may be presumed; but
both shall not be presumed from circumstances, no matter how
powerful, how cogent, or how completely overwhelming the
circumstances may be.  In other words, no man can be convicted of
murder in the State of New York, unless the body of the victim be
found and identified, or there be direct proof that the prisoner
did some act adequate to produce death, and did it in such a manner
as to account for the disappearance of the body.”

The face of the judge cleared and grew hard.  The members of the
bar were attentive and alert; they were beginning to see the legal
escape open up.  The audience were puzzled; they did not yet
understand.  Mason turned to the counsel for the People.  His ugly
face was bitter with contempt.

“For three days,” he said, “I have been tortured by this useless
and expensive farce.  If counsel for the People had been other than
play-actors, they would have known in the beginning that Victor
Ancona could not be convicted for murder, unless he were confronted
in this court room with a living witness, who had looked into the
dead face of Nina San Croix; or, if not that, a living witness who
had seen him drive the dagger into her bosom.

“I care not if the circumstantial evidence in this case were so
strong and irresistible as to be overpowering; if the judge on the
bench, if the jury, if every man within sound of my voice, were
convinced of the guilt of the prisoner to the degree of certainty
that is absolute; if the circumstantial evidence left in the mind
no shadow of the remotest improbable doubt; yet, in the absence of
the eyewitness, this prisoner cannot be punished, and this Court
must compel the jury to acquit him.”

The audience now understood, and they were dumfounded.  Surely this
was not the law.  They had been taught that the law was common
sense, and this,—this was anything else.

Mason saw it all, and grinned.  “In its tenderness,” he sneered,
“the law shields the innocent.  The good law of New York reaches
out its hand and lifts the prisoner out of the clutches of the
fierce jury that would hang him.”

Mason sat down.  The room was silent.  The jurymen looked at each
other in amazement.  The counsel for the People arose.  His face
was white with anger, and incredulous.

“Your Honor,” he said, “this doctrine is monstrous.  Can it be said
that, in order to evade punishment, the murderer has only to hide
or destroy the body of the victim, or sink it into the sea?  Then,
if he is not seen to kill, the law is powerless and the murderer
can snap his finger in the face of retributive justice.  If this is
the law, then the law for the highest crime is a dead letter.  The
great commonwealth winks at murder and invites every man to kill
his enemy, provided he kill him in secret and hide him.  I repeat,
your Honor,”—the man’s voice was now loud and angry and rang
through the court room—“that this doctrine is monstrous!”

“So said Best, and Story, and many another,” muttered Mason, “and
the law remained.”

“The Court,” said the judge, abruptly, “desires no further
argument.”

The counsel for the People resumed his seat.  His face lighted up
with triumph.  The Court was going to sustain him.

The judge turned and looked down at the jury.  He was grave, and
spoke with deliberate emphasis.

“Gentlemen of the jury,” he said, “the rule of Lord Hale obtains in
this State and is binding upon me.  It is the law as stated by
counsel for the prisoner: that to warrant conviction of murder
there must be direct proof either of the death, as of the finding
and identification of the corpse, or of criminal violence adequate
to produce death, and exerted in such a manner as to account for
the disappearance of the body; and it is only when there is direct
proof of the one that the other can be established by
circumstantial evidence.  This is the law, and cannot now be
departed from.  I do not presume to explain its wisdom.  Chief-
Justice Johnson has observed, in the leading case, that it may have
its probable foundation in the idea that where direct proof is
absent as to both the fact of the death and of criminal violence
capable of producing death, no evidence can rise to the degree of
moral certainty that the individual is dead by criminal
intervention, or even lead by direct inference to this result; and
that, where the fact of death is not certainly ascertained, all
inculpatory circumstantial evidence wants the key necessary for its
satisfactory interpretation, and cannot be depended on to furnish
more than probable results.  It may be, also, that such a rule has
some reference to the dangerous possibility that a general
preconception of guilt, or a general excitement of popular feeling,
may creep in to supply the place of evidence, if, upon other than
direct proof of death or a cause of death, a jury are permitted to
pronounce a prisoner guilty.

“In this case the body has not been found and there is no direct
proof of criminal agency on the part of the prisoner, although the
chain of circumstantial evidence is complete and irresistible in
the highest degree.  Nevertheless, it is all circumstantial
evidence, and under the laws of New York the prisoner cannot be
punished.  I have no right of discretion.  The law does not permit
a conviction in this case, although every one of us may be morally
certain of the prisoner’s guilt.  I am, therefore, gentlemen of the
jury, compelled to direct you to find the prisoner not guilty.”

“Judge,” interrupted the foreman, jumping up in the box, “we cannot
find that verdict under our oath; we know that this man is guilty.”

“Sir,” said the judge, “this is a matter of law in which the wishes
of the jury cannot be considered.  The clerk will write a verdict
of not guilty, which you, as foreman, will sign.”

The spectators broke out into a threatening murmur that began to
grow and gather volume.  The judge rapped on his desk and ordered
the bailiffs promptly to suppress any demonstration on the part of
the audience.  Then he directed the foreman to sign the verdict
prepared by the clerk.  When this was done he turned to Victor
Ancona; his face was hard and there was a cold glitter in his eyes.

“Prisoner at the bar,” he said, “you have been put to trial before
this tribunal on a charge of cold-blooded and atrocious murder.
The evidence produced against you was of such powerful and
overwhelming character that it seems to have left no doubt in the
minds of the jury, nor indeed in the mind of any person present in
this court room.

“Had the question of your guilt been submitted to these twelve
arbiters, a conviction would certainly have resulted and the death
penalty would have been imposed.  But the law, rigid, passionless,
even-eyed, has thrust in between you and the wrath of your fellows
and saved you from it.  I do not cry out against the impotency of
the law; it is perhaps as wise as imperfect humanity could make it.
I deplore, rather, the genius of evil men who, by cunning design,
are enabled to slip through the fingers of this law.  I have no
word of censure or admonition for you, Victor Ancona.  The law of
New York compels me to acquit you.  I am only its mouthpiece, with
my individual wishes throttled.  I speak only those things which
the law directs I shall speak.

“You are now at liberty to leave this court room, not guiltless of
the crime of murder, perhaps, but at least rid of its punishment.
The eyes of men may see Cain’s mark on your brow, but the eyes of
the Law are blind to it.”

When the audience fully realized what the judge had said they were
amazed and silent.  They knew as well as men could know, that
Victor Ancona was guilty of murder, and yet he was now going out of
the court room free.  Could it happen that the law protected only
against the blundering rogue?  They had heard always of the boasted
completeness of the law which magistrates from time immemorial had
labored to perfect, and now when the skillful villain sought to
evade it, they saw how weak a thing it was.


V


The wedding march of Lohengrin floated out from the Episcopal
Church of St. Mark, clear and sweet, and perhaps heavy with its
paradox of warning.  The theater of this coming contract before
high heaven was a wilderness of roses worth the taxes of a county.
The high caste of Manhattan, by the grace of the check book, were
present, clothed in Parisian purple and fine linen, cunningly and
marvelously wrought.

Over in her private pew, ablaze with jewels, and decked with
fabrics from the deft hand of many a weaver, sat Mrs. Miriam
Steuvisant as imperious and self-complacent as a queen.  To her it
was all a kind of triumphal procession, proclaiming her ability as
a general.  With her were a choice few of the genus homo, which
obtains at the five-o’clock teas, instituted, say the sages, for
the purpose of sprinkling the holy water of Lethe.

“Czarina,” whispered Reggie Du Puyster, leaning forward, “I salute
you.  The ceremony sub jugum is superb.”

“Walcott is an excellent fellow,” answered Mrs. Steuvisant; “not a
vice, you know, Reggie.”

“Aye, Empress,” put in the others, “a purist taken in the net.  The
clean-skirted one has come to the altar.  Vive la vertu!”

Samuel Walcott, still sunburned from his cruise, stood before the
chancel with the only daughter of the blue blooded St. Clairs.  His
face was clear and honest and his voice firm.  This was life and
not romance.  The lid of the sepulcher had closed and he had
slipped from under it.  And now, and ever after, the hand red with
murder was clean as any.

The minister raised his voice, proclaiming the holy union before
God, and this twain, half pure, half foul, now by divine ordinance
one flesh, bowed down before it.  No blood cried from the ground.
The sunlight of high noon streamed down through the window panes
like a benediction.

Back in the pew of Mrs. Miriam Steuvisant, Reggie Du Puyster turned
down his thumb.  “Habet!” he said.


From “The Strange Schemes of Randolph Mason,” by Melville Davisson
Post.  Copyright, 1896, by G. P. Putnam’s Sons.




Ambrose Bierce




An Heiress from Redhorse


CORONADO, June 20th.

I find myself more and more interested in him.  It is not, I am
sure, his—do you know any noun corresponding to the adjective
“handsome”?  One does not like to say “beauty” when speaking of a
man.  He is handsome enough, heaven knows; I should not even care
to trust you with him—faithful of all possible wives that you are—
when he looks his best, as he always does.  Nor do I think the
fascination of his manner has much to do with it.  You recollect
that the charm of art inheres in that which is undefinable, and to
you and me, my dear Irene, I fancy there is rather less of that in
the branch of art under consideration than to girls in their first
season.  I fancy I know how my fine gentleman produces many of his
effects, and could, perhaps, give him a pointer on heightening
them.  Nevertheless, his manner is something truly delightful.  I
suppose what interests me chiefly is the man’s brains.  His
conversation is the best I have ever heard, and altogether unlike
anyone’s else.  He seems to know everything, as, indeed, he ought,
for he has been everywhere, read everything, seen all there is to
see—sometimes I think rather more than is good for him—and had
acquaintance with the QUEEREST people.  And then his voice—Irene,
when I hear it I actually feel as if I ought to have PAID AT THE
DOOR, though, of course, it is my own door.


July 3d.

I fear my remarks about Dr. Barritz must have been, being
thoughtless, very silly, or you would not have written of him with
such levity, not to say disrespect.  Believe me, dearest, he has
more dignity and seriousness (of the kind, I mean, which is not
inconsistent with a manner sometimes playful and always charming)
than any of the men that you and I ever met.  And young Raynor—you
knew Raynor at Monterey—tells me that the men all like him, and
that he is treated with something like deference everywhere.  There
is a mystery, too—something about his connection with the
Blavatsky people in Northern India.  Raynor either would not or
could not tell me the particulars.  I infer that Dr. Barritz is
thought—don’t you dare to laugh at me—a magician!  Could anything
be finer than that?  An ordinary mystery is not, of course, as good
as a scandal, but when it relates to dark and dreadful practices—
to the exercise of unearthly powers—could anything be more
piquant?  It explains, too, the singular influence the man has upon
me.  It is the undefinable in his art—black art.  Seriously, dear,
I quite tremble when he looks me full in the eyes with those
unfathomable orbs of his, which I have already vainly attempted to
describe to you.  How dreadful if we have the power to make one
fall in love!  Do you know if the Blavatsky crowd have that power—
outside of Sepoy?


July 1

The strangest thing!  Last evening while Auntie was attending one
of the hotel hops (I hate them) Dr. Barritz called.  It was
scandalously late—I actually believe he had talked with Auntie in
the ballroom, and learned from her that I was alone.  I had been
all the evening contriving how to worm out of him the truth about
his connection with the Thugs in Sepoy, and all of that black
business, but the moment he fixed his eyes on me (for I admitted
him, I’m ashamed to say) I was helpless, I trembled, I blushed, I—
O Irene, Irene, I love the man beyond expression, and you know how
it is yourself!

Fancy!  I, an ugly duckling from Redhorse—daughter (they say) of
old Calamity Jim—certainly his heiress, with no living relation
but an absurd old aunt, who spoils me a thousand and fifty ways—
absolutely destitute of everything but a million dollars and a hope
in Paris—I daring to love a god like him!  My dear, if I had you
here, I could tear your hair out with mortification.

I am convinced that he is aware of my feeling, for he stayed but a
few moments, said nothing but what another man might have said half
as well, and pretending that he had an engagement went away.  I
learned to-day (a little bird told me—the bell bird) that he went
straight to bed.  How does that strike you as evidence of exemplary
habits?


July 17th.

That little wretch, Raynor, called yesterday, and his babble set me
almost wild.  He never runs down—that is to say, when he
exterminates a score of reputations, more or less, he does not
pause between one reputation and the next.  (By the way, he
inquired about you, and his manifestations of interest in you had,
I confess, a good deal of vraisemblance.)

Mr. Raynor observes no game laws; like Death (which he would
inflict if slander were fatal) he has all seasons for his own.  But
I like him, for we knew one another at Redhorse when we were young
and true-hearted and barefooted.  He was known in those far fair
days as “Giggles,” and I—O Irene, can you ever forgive me?—I was
called “Gunny.”  God knows why; perhaps in allusion to the material
of my pinafores; perhaps because the name is in alliteration with
“Giggles,” for Gig and I were inseparable playmates, and the miners
may have thought it a delicate compliment to recognize some kind of
relationship between us.

Later, we took in a third—another of Adversity’s brood, who, like
Garrick between Tragedy and Comedy, had a chronic inability to
adjudicate the rival claims (to himself) of Frost and Famine.
Between him and the grave there was seldom anything more than a
single suspender and the hope of a meal which would at the same
time support life and make it insupportable.  He literally picked
up a precarious living for himself and an aged mother by
“chloriding the dumps,” that is to say, the miners permitted him to
search the heaps of waste rock for such pieces of “pay ore” as had
been overlooked; and these he sacked up and sold at the Syndicate
Mill.  He became a member of our firm—“Gunny, Giggles, and Dumps,”
thenceforth—through my favor; for I could not then, nor can I now,
be indifferent to his courage and prowess in defending against
Giggles the immemorial right of his sex to insult a strange and
unprotected female—myself.  After old Jim struck it in the
Calamity, and I began to wear shoes and go to school, and in
emulation Giggles took to washing his face, and became Jack Raynor,
of Wells, Fargo & Co., and old Mrs. Barts was herself chlorided to
her fathers, Dumps drifted over to San Juan Smith and turned stage
driver, and was killed by road agents, and so forth.

Why do I tell you all this, dear?  Because it is heavy on my heart.
Because I walk the Valley of Humility.  Because I am subduing
myself to permanent consciousness of my unworthiness to unloose the
latchet of Dr. Barritz’s shoe.  Because-oh, dear, oh, dear—there’s
a cousin of Dumps at this hotel!  I haven’t spoken to him.  I never
had any acquaintance with him, but—do you suppose he has
recognized me?  Do, please, give me in your next your candid, sure-
enough opinion about it, and say you don’t think so.  Do you think
He knows about me already and that is why He left me last evening
when He saw that I blushed and trembled like a fool under His eyes?
You know I can’t bribe ALL the newspapers, and I can’t go back on
anybody who was good to Gunny at Redhorse—not if I’m pitched out
of society into the sea.  So the skeleton sometimes rattles behind
the door.  I never cared much before, as you know, but now—NOW it
is not the same.  Jack Raynor I am sure of—he will not tell him.
He seems, indeed, to hold him in such respect as hardly to dare
speak to him at all, and I’m a good deal that way myself.  Dear,
dear!  I wish I had something besides a million dollars!  If Jack
were three inches taller I’d marry him alive and go back to
Redhorse and wear sackcloth again to the end of my miserable days.


July 25th.

We had a perfectly splendid sunset last evening, and I must tell
you all about it.  I ran away from Auntie and everybody, and was
walking alone on the beach.  I expect you to believe, you infidel!
that I had not looked out of my window on the seaward side of the
hotel and seen him walking alone on the beach.  If you are not lost
to every feeling of womanly delicacy you will accept my statement
without question.  I soon established myself under my sunshade and
had for some time been gazing out dreamily over the sea, when he
approached, walking close to the edge of the water—it was ebb
tide.  I assure you the wet sand actually brightened about his
feet!  As he approached me, he lifted his hat, saying: “Miss
Dement, may I sit with you?—or will you walk with me?”

The possibility that neither might be agreeable seems not to have
occurred to him.  Did you ever know such assurance?  Assurance?  My
dear, it was gall, downright GALL!  Well, I didn’t find it
wormwood, and replied, with my untutored Redhorse heart in my
throat: “I—I shall be pleased to do ANYTHING.”  Could words have
been more stupid?  There are depths of fatuity in me, friend o’ my
soul, which are simply bottomless!

He extended his hand, smiling, and I delivered mine into it without
a moment’s hesitation, and when his fingers closed about it to
assist me to my feet, the consciousness that it trembled made me
blush worse than the red west.  I got up, however, and after a
while, observing that he had not let go my hand, I pulled on it a
little, but unsuccessfully.  He simply held on, saying nothing, but
looking down into my face with some kind of a smile—I didn’t know—
how could I?—whether it was affectionate, derisive, or what, for
I did not look at him.  How beautiful he was!—with the red fires
of the sunset burning in the depths of his eyes.  Do you know,
dear, if the Thugs and Experts of the Blavatsky region have any
special kind of eyes?  Ah, you should have seen his superb
attitude, the godlike inclination of his head as he stood over me
after I had got upon my feet!  It was a noble picture, but I soon
destroyed it, for I began at once to sink again to the earth.
There was only one thing for him to do, and he did it; he supported
me with an arm about my waist.

“Miss Dement, are you ill?” he said.

It was not an exclamation; there was neither alarm nor solicitude
in it.  If he had added: “I suppose that is about what I am
expected to say,” he would hardly have expressed his sense of the
situation more clearly.  His manner filled me with shame and
indignation, for I was suffering acutely.  I wrenched my hand out
of his, grasped the arm supporting me, and, pushing myself free,
fell plump into the sand and sat helpless.  My hat had fallen off
in the struggle, and my hair tumbled about my face and shoulders in
the most mortifying way.

“Go away from me,” I cried, half choking.  “Oh, PLEASE go away,
you—you Thug!  How dare you think THAT when my leg is asleep?”

I actually said those identical words!  And then I broke down and
sobbed.  Irene, I BLUBBERED!

“His manner altered in an instant—I could see that much through my
fingers and hair.  He dropped on one knee beside me, parted the
tangle of hair, and said, in the tenderest way: My poor girl, God
knows I have not intended to pain you.  How should I?—I who love
you—I who have loved you for—for years and years!”

He had pulled my wet hands away from my face and was covering them
with kisses.  My cheeks were like two coals, my whole face was
flaming and, I think, steaming.  What could I do?  I hid it on his
shoulder—there was no other place.  And, oh, my dear friend, how
my leg tingled and thrilled, and how I wanted to kick!

We sat so for a long time.  He had released one of my hands to pass
his arm about me again, and I possessed myself of my handkerchief
and was drying my eyes and my nose.  I would not look up until that
was done; he tried in vain to push me a little away and gaze into
my eyes.  Presently, when it was all right, and it had grown a bit
dark, I lifted my head, looked him straight in the eyes, and smiled
my best—my level best, dear.

“What do you mean,” I said, “by ‘years and years’?”

“Dearest,” he replied, very gravely, very earnestly, “in the
absence of the sunken cheeks, the hollow eyes, the lank hair, the
slouching gait, the rags, dirt, and youth, can you not—will you
not understand?  Gunny, I’m Dumps!”

In a moment I was upon my feet and he upon his.  I seized him by
the lapels of his coat and peered into his handsome face in the
deepening darkness.  I was breathless with excitement.

“And you are not dead?” I asked, hardly knowing what I said.

“Only dead in love, dear.  I recovered from the road agent’s
bullet, but this, I fear, is fatal.”

“But about Jack—Mr. Raynor?  Don’t you know—”

“I am ashamed to say, darling, that it was through that unworthy
person’s invitation that I came here from Vienna.”

Irene, they have played it upon your affectionate friend,

MARY JANE DEMENT.


P.S.—The worst of it is that there is no mystery.  That was an
invention of Jack to arouse my curiosity and interest.  James is
not a Thug.  He solemnly assures me that in all his wanderings he
has never set foot in Sepoy.




The Man and the Snake


I


It is of veritabyll report, and attested of so many that there be
nowe of wyse and learned none to gaynsaye it, that ye serpente hys
eye hath a magnetick propertie that whosoe falleth into its svasion
is drawn forwards in despyte of his wille, and perisheth miserabyll
by ye creature hys byte.


Stretched at ease upon a sofa, in gown and slippers, Harker Brayton
smiled as he read the foregoing sentence in old Morryster’s
“Marvells of Science.”  “The only marvel in the matter,” he said to
himself, “is that the wise and learned in Morryster’s day should
have believed such nonsense as is rejected by most of even the
ignorant in ours.”

A train of reflections followed—for Brayton was a man of thought—
and he unconsciously lowered his book without altering the
direction of his eyes.  As soon as the volume had gone below the
line of sight, something in an obscure corner of the room recalled
his attention to his surroundings.  What he saw, in the shadow
under his bed, were two small points of light, apparently about an
inch apart.  They might have been reflections of the gas jet above
him, in metal nail heads; he gave them but little thought and
resumed his reading.  A moment later something—some impulse which
it did not occur to him to analyze—impelled him to lower the book
again and seek for what he saw before.  The points of light were
still there.  They seemed to have become brighter than before,
shining with a greenish luster which he had not at first observed.
He thought, too, that they might have moved a trifle—were somewhat
nearer.  They were still too much in the shadow, however, to reveal
their nature and origin to an indolent attention, and he resumed
his reading.  Suddenly something in the text suggested a thought
which made him start and drop the book for the third time to the
side of the sofa, whence, escaping from his hand, it fell sprawling
to the floor, back upward.  Brayton, half-risen, was staring
intently into the obscurity beneath the bed, where the points of
light shone with, it seemed to him, an added fire.  His attention
was now fully aroused, his gaze eager and imperative.  It
disclosed, almost directly beneath the foot rail of the bed, the
coils of a large serpent—the points of light were its eyes!  Its
horrible head, thrust flatly forth from the innermost coil and
resting upon the outermost, was directed straight toward him, the
definition of the wide, brutal jaw and the idiotlike forehead
serving to show the direction of its malevolent gaze.  The eyes
were no longer merely luminous points; they looked into his own
with a meaning, a malign significance.


II


A snake in a bedroom of a modern city dwelling of the better sort
is, happily, not so common a phenomenon as to make explanation
altogether needless.  Harker Brayton, a bachelor of thirty-five, a
scholar, idler, and something of an athlete, rich, popular, and of
sound health, had returned to San Francisco from all manner of
remote and unfamiliar countries.  His tastes, always a trifle
luxurious, had taken on an added exuberance from long privation;
and the resources of even the Castle Hotel being inadequate for
their perfect gratification, he had gladly accepted the hospitality
of his friend, Dr. Druring, the distinguished scientist.  Dr.
Druring’s house, a large, old-fashioned one in what was now an
obscure quarter of the city, had an outer and visible aspect of
reserve.  It plainly would not associate with the contiguous
elements of its altered environment, and appeared to have developed
some of the eccentricities which come of isolation.  One of these
was a “wing,” conspicuously irrelevant in point of architecture,
and no less rebellious in the matter of purpose; for it was a
combination of laboratory, menagerie, and museum.  It was here that
the doctor indulged the scientific side of his nature in the study
of such forms of animal life as engaged his interest and comforted
his taste—which, it must be confessed, ran rather to the lower
forms.  For one of the higher types nimbly and sweetly to recommend
itself unto his gentle senses, it had at least to retain certain
rudimentary characteristics allying it to such “dragons of the
prime” as toads and snakes.  His scientific sympathies were
distinctly reptilian; he loved nature’s vulgarians and described
himself as the Zola of zoology.  His wife and daughters, not having
the advantage to share his enlightened curiosity regarding the
works and ways of our ill-starred fellow-creatures, were, with
needless austerity, excluded from what he called the Snakery, and
doomed to companionship with their own kind; though, to soften the
rigors of their lot, he had permitted them, out of his great
wealth, to outdo the reptiles in the gorgeousness of their
surroundings and to shine with a superior splendor.

Architecturally, and in point of “furnishing,” the Snakery had a
severe simplicity befitting the humble circumstances of its
occupants, many of whom, indeed, could not safely have been
intrusted with the liberty which is necessary to the full enjoyment
of luxury, for they had the troublesome peculiarity of being alive.
In their own apartments, however, they were under as little
personal restraint as was compatible with their protection from the
baneful habit of swallowing one another; and, as Brayton had
thoughtfully been apprised, it was more than a tradition that some
of them had at divers times been found in parts of the premises
where it would have embarrassed them to explain their presence.
Despite the Snakery and its uncanny associations—to which, indeed,
he gave little attention—Brayton found life at the Druring mansion
very much to his mind.


III


Beyond a smart shock of surprise and a shudder of mere loathing,
Mr. Brayton was not greatly affected.  His first thought was to
ring the call bell and bring a servant; but, although the bell cord
dangled within easy reach, he made no movement toward it; it had
occurred to his mind that the act might subject him to the
suspicion of fear, which he certainly did not feel.  He was more
keenly conscious of the incongruous nature of the situation than
affected by its perils; it was revolting, but absurd.

The reptile was of a species with which Brayton was unfamiliar.
Its length he could only conjecture; the body at the largest
visible part seemed about as thick as his forearm.  In what way was
it dangerous, if in any way?  Was it venomous?  Was it a
constrictor?  His knowledge of nature’s danger signals did not
enable him to say; he had never deciphered the code.

If not dangerous, the creature was at least offensive.  It was de
trop—“matter out of place”—an impertinence.  The gem was unworthy
of the setting.  Even the barbarous taste of our time and country,
which had loaded the walls of the room with pictures, the floor
with furniture, and the furniture with bric-a-brac, had not quite
fitted the place for this bit of the savage life of the jungle.
Besides—insupportable thought!—the exhalations of its breath
mingled with the atmosphere which he himself was breathing!

These thoughts shaped themselves with greater or less definition in
Brayton’s mind, and begot action.  The process is what we call
consideration and decision.  It is thus that we are wise and
unwise.  It is thus that the withered leaf in an autumn breeze
shows greater or less intelligence than its fellows, falling upon
the land or upon the lake.  The secret of human action is an open
one—something contracts our muscles.  Does it matter if we give to
the preparatory molecular changes the name of will?

Brayton rose to his feet and prepared to back softly away from the
snake, without disturbing it, if possible, and through the door.
People retire so from the presence of the great, for greatness is
power, and power is a menace.  He knew that he could walk backward
without obstruction, and find the door without error.  Should the
monster follow, the taste which had plastered the walls with
paintings had consistently supplied a rack of murderous Oriental
weapons from which he could snatch one to suit the occasion.  In
the meantime the snake’s eyes burned with a more pitiless
malevolence than ever.

Brayton lifted his right foot free of the floor to step backward.
That moment he felt a strong aversion to doing so.

“I am accounted brave,” he murmured; “is bravery, then, no more
than pride?  Because there are none to witness the shame shall I
retreat?”

He was steadying himself with his right hand upon the back of a
chair, his foot suspended.

“Nonsense!” he said aloud; “I am not so great a coward as to fear
to seem to myself afraid.”

He lifted the foot a little higher by slightly bending the knee,
and thrust it sharply to the floor—an inch in front of the other!
He could not think how that occurred.  A trial with the left foot
had the same result; it was again in advance of the right.  The
hand upon the chair back was grasping it; the arm was straight,
reaching somewhat backward.  One might have seen that he was
reluctant to lose his hold.  The snake’s malignant head was still
thrust forth from the inner coil as before, the neck level.  It had
not moved, but its eyes were now electric sparks, radiating an
infinity of luminous needles.

The man had an ashy pallor.  Again he took a step forward, and
another, partly dragging the chair, which, when finally released,
fell upon the floor with a crash.  The man groaned; the snake made
neither sound nor motion, but its eyes were two dazzling suns.  The
reptile itself was wholly concealed by them.  They gave off
enlarging rings of rich and vivid colors, which at their greatest
expansion successively vanished like soap bubbles; they seemed to
approach his very face, and anon were an immeasurable distance
away.  He heard, somewhere, the continual throbbing of a great
drum, with desultory bursts of far music, inconceivably sweet, like
the tones of an aeolian harp.  He knew it for the sunrise melody of
Memnon’s statue, and thought he stood in the Nileside reeds,
hearing, with exalted sense, that immortal anthem through the
silence of the centuries.

The music ceased; rather, it became by insensible degrees the
distant roll of a retreating thunderstorm.  A landscape, glittering
with sun and rain, stretched before him, arched with a vivid
rainbow, framing in its giant curve a hundred visible cities.  In
the middle distance a vast serpent, wearing a crown, reared its
head out of its voluminous convolutions and looked at him with his
dead mother’s eyes.  Suddenly this enchanting landscape seemed to
rise swiftly upward, like the drop scene at a theater, and vanished
in a blank.  Something struck him a hard blow upon the face and
breast.  He had fallen to the floor; the blood ran from his broken
nose and his bruised lips.  For a moment he was dazed and stunned,
and lay with closed eyes, his face against the door.  In a few
moments he had recovered, and then realized that his fall, by
withdrawing his eyes, had broken the spell which held him.  He felt
that now, by keeping his gaze averted, he would be able to retreat.
But the thought of the serpent within a few feet of his head, yet
unseen—perhaps in the very act of springing upon him and throwing
its coils about his throat—was too horrible.  He lifted his head,
stared again into those baleful eyes, and was again in bondage.

The snake had not moved, and appeared somewhat to have lost its
power upon the imagination; the gorgeous illusions of a few moments
before were not repeated.  Beneath that flat and brainless brow its
black, beady eyes simply glittered, as at first, with an expression
unspeakably malignant.  It was as if the creature, knowing its
triumph assured, had determined to practice no more alluring wiles.

Now ensued a fearful scene.  The man, prone upon the floor, within
a yard of his enemy, raised the upper part of his body upon his
elbows, his head thrown back, his legs extended to their full
length.  His face was white between its gouts of blood; his eyes
were strained open to their uttermost expansion.  There was froth
upon his lips; it dropped off in flakes.  Strong convulsions ran
through his body, making almost serpentine undulations.  He bent
himself at the waist, shifting his legs from side to side.  And
every movement left him a little nearer to the snake.  He thrust
his hands forward to brace himself back, yet constantly advanced
upon his elbows.


IV


Dr. Druring and his wife sat in the library.  The scientist was in
rare good humor.

“I have just obtained, by exchange with another collector,” he
said, “a splendid specimen of the Ophiophagus.”

“And what may that be?” the lady inquired with a somewhat languid
interest.

“Why, bless my soul, what profound ignorance!  My dear, a man who
ascertains after marriage that his wife does not know Greek, is
entitled to a divorce.  The Ophiophagus is a snake which eats other
snakes.”

“I hope it will eat all yours,” she said, absently shifting the
lamp.  “But how does it get the other snakes?  By charming them, I
suppose.”

“That is just like you, dear,” said the doctor, with an affectation
of petulance.  “You know how irritating to me is any allusion to
that vulgar superstition about the snake’s power of fascination.”

The conversation was interrupted by a mighty cry which rang through
the silent house like the voice of a demon shouting in a tomb.
Again and yet again it sounded, with terrible distinctness.  They
sprang to their feet, the man confused, the lady pale and
speechless with fright.  Almost before the echoes of the last cry
had died away the doctor was out of the room, springing up the
staircase two steps at a time.  In the corridor, in front of
Brayton’s chamber, he met some servants who had come from the upper
floor.  Together they rushed at the door without knocking.  It was
unfastened, and gave way.  Brayton lay upon his stomach on the
floor, dead.  His head and arms were partly concealed under the
foot rail of the bed.  They pulled the body away, turning it upon
the back.  The face was daubed with blood and froth, the eyes were
wide open, staring—a dreadful sight!

“Died in a fit,” said the scientist, bending his knee and placing
his hand upon the heart.  While in that position he happened to
glance under the bed.  “Good God!” he added; “how did this thing
get in here?”

He reached under the bed, pulled out the snake, and flung it, still
coiled, to the center of the room, whence, with a harsh, shuffling
sound, it slid across the polished floor till stopped by the wall,
where it lay without motion.  It was a stuffed snake; its eyes were
two shoe buttons.


From “Tales of Soldiers and Civilians,” by Ambrose Bierce.
Copyright, 1891, by E. L. G. Steele.




Edgar Allan Poe




The Oblong Box


Some years ago, I engaged passage from Charleston, S. C, to the
city of New York, in the fine packet-ship “Independence,” Captain
Hardy.  We were to sail on the fifteenth of the month (June),
weather permitting; and on the fourteenth, I went on board to
arrange some matters in my stateroom.

I found that we were to have a great many passengers, including a
more than usual number of ladies.  On the list were several of my
acquaintances, and among other names, I was rejoiced to see that of
Mr. Cornelius Wyatt, a young artist, for whom I entertained
feelings of warm friendship.  He had been with me a fellow-student
at C—— University, where we were very much together.  He had the
ordinary temperament of genius, and was a compound of misanthropy,
sensibility, and enthusiasm.  To these qualities he united the
warmest and truest heart which ever beat in a human bosom.

I observed that his name was carded upon THREE state-rooms; and,
upon again referring to the list of passengers, I found that he had
engaged passage for himself, wife, and two sisters—his own.  The
state-rooms were sufficiently roomy, and each had two berths, one
above the other.  These berths, to be sure, were so exceedingly
narrow as to be insufficient for more than one person; still, I
could not comprehend why there were THREE staterooms for these four
persons.  I was, just at that epoch, in one of those moody frames
of mind which make a man abnormally inquisitive about trifles: and
I confess, with shame, that I busied myself in a variety of ill-
bred and preposterous conjectures about this matter of the
supernumerary stateroom.  It was no business of mine, to be sure,
but with none the less pertinacity did I occupy myself in attempts
to resolve the enigma.  At last I reached a conclusion which
wrought in me great wonder why I had not arrived at it before.  “It
is a servant of course,” I said; “what a fool I am, not sooner to
have thought of so obvious a solution!”  And then I again repaired
to the list—but here I saw distinctly that NO servant was to come
with the party, although, in fact, it had been the original design
to bring one—for the words “and servant” had been first written
and then over-scored.  “Oh, extra baggage, to be sure,” I now said
to myself—“something he wishes not to be put in the hold—
something to be kept under his own eye—ah, I have it—a painting
or so—and this is what he has been bargaining about with Nicolino,
the Italian Jew.”  This idea satisfied me, and I dismissed my
curiosity for the nonce.

Wyatt’s two sisters I knew very well, and most amiable and clever
girls they were.  His wife he had newly married, and I had never
yet seen her.  He had often talked about her in my presence,
however, and in his usual style of enthusiasm.  He described her as
of surpassing beauty, wit, and accomplishment.  I was, therefore,
quite anxious to make her acquaintance.

On the day in which I visi

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