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Shapes that Haunt the Dusk

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Title: Shapes that Haunt the Dusk

Editor: William Dean Howells
        Henry Mills Alden


        
Release date: November 28, 2008 [eBook #27352]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/27352

Credits: Produced by David Edwards, S.D. and the Online Distributed
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SHAPES THAT HAUNT THE DUSK ***




Produced by David Edwards, S.D. and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was
produced from scanned images of public domain material
from the Google Print project.)









                     Shapes that
                    Haunt the Dusk

                 Harper's Novelettes

                      EDITED BY

                 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS

                         AND

                  HENRY MILLS ALDEN

           [Illustration: Publisher's Logo]

             Harper & Brothers Publishers
                  New York and London




  Copyright, 1891, 1893, 1894, 1895, 1896, 1897, 1898,
        1905, 1906, 1907, by HARPER & BROTHERS.

                         * * *

                 _All rights reserved._




                      GEORG SCHOCK
                  _THE CHRISTMAS CHILD_

                       RICHARD RICE
             _THE WHITE SLEEP OF AUBER HURN_

                       HOWARD PYLE
                      _IN TENEBRAS_

                   MADELENE YALE WYNNE
                    _THE LITTLE ROOM_

                  HARRIET LEWIS BRADLEY
                _THE BRINGING OF THE ROSE_

                   HILDEGARDE HAWTHORNE
                        _PERDITA_

                      M. E. M. DAVIS
                    _AT LA GLORIEUSE_

                       F. D. MILLET
                    _A FADED SCAPULAR_

                      E. LEVI BROWN
                    _AT THE HERMITAGE_

                      H. W. McVICKAR
                      _THE REPRISAL_




Introduction


The writers of American short stories, the best short stories in the
world, surpass in nothing so much as in their handling of those filmy
textures which clothe the vague shapes of the borderland between
experience and illusion. This is perhaps because our people, who seem to
live only in the most tangible things of material existence, really live
more in the spirit than any other. Their love of the supernatural is
their common inheritance from no particular ancestry, but is apparently
an effect from psychological influences in the past, widely separated in
time and place. It is as noticeable among our Southerners of French race
as among our New-Englanders deriving from Puritan zealots accustomed to
wonder-working providences, or among those descendants of the German
immigrants who brought with them to our Middle States the superstitions
of the Rhine valleys or the Hartz Mountains. It is something that has
tinged the nature of our whole life, whatever its varied sources, and
when its color seems gone out of us, or, going, it renews itself in all
the mystical lights and shadows so familiar to us that, till we read
some such tales as those grouped together here, we are scarcely aware
how largely they form the complexion of our thinking and feeling.

The opening story in this volume is from a hand quite new, and is, we
think, of an excellence quite absolute, so fresh is it in scene,
character, and incident, so delicately yet so strongly accented by a
talent trying itself in a region hardly yet visited by fiction. Its
perfect realism is consistent with the boldest appeal to those primitive
instincts furthest from every-day events, and its pathos is as poignant
as if it had happened within our own knowledge. In its way, it is as
finely imaginative as Mr. Pyle's wonderfully spiritualized and moralized
conception of the other world which he has realized on such terms as he
alone can command; or as Mrs. Wynne's symphony of thrills and shudders,
which will not have died out of the nerves of any one acquainted with it
before. Mr. Millet's sketch is of a quality akin to that of Mr.
McVickar's slighter but not less impressive fantasy: both are "in the
midst of men and day," and command such credence as we cannot withhold
from any well-confirmed report in the morning paper. Mr. Rice's story is
of like temperament, and so, somewhat, is Miss Hawthorne's, and Mr.
Brown's, and Miss Bradley's, while Miss Davis's romance is of another
atmosphere, but not less potent, because it comes from farther, and
wears a dreamier light.

Such as they severally and differently and collectively are, the pieces
are each a masterpiece and worthy the study of every reader who feels
that there are more things than we have dreamt of in our philosophy. The
collection is like a group of immortelles, gray in that twilight of the
reason which Americans are so fond of inviting, or, rather, they are
like a cluster of Indian pipe, those pale blossoms of the woods that
spring from the dark mould in the deepest shade, and are so entirely of
our own soil.

                                                    W. D. H.




The Christmas Child

BY GEORG SCHOCK


The moonlight was so bright across the clock that it showed the time,
and its tick was solemn, as though the minutes were marching slowly by.
There was no other sound in the room except the breathing of Conrad, who
lay in shadow, sleeping heavily, his head a black patch among the
pillows. Mary's hair looked like gold in the pale light which reflected
in her open eyes. She had been lying so, listening to the tick and
watching the hands, for hours.

When they marked eleven she began to stir; her feet made no more sound
than shadows; the cold air struck her body like a strange element.
Conrad did not move as she went into the kitchen and softly closed the
door. She groped her way to the chair where she had left her clothes and
put them on, wrapped herself in a shawl, and slipped out.

There was no snow, but a keen cold as befitted the night of the 24th of
December, and between two fields the ice on the Northkill glittered. The
air was so clear that far away appeared the great black barrier of the
mountains. Across the sky, as across deep water, was a radiance of
light, serene and chill,--of clouds like foam, of throbbing stars, of
the moon glorious in her aura. In the towns at that hour the people were
ready to begin the coming day with prayer and the sound of bells: here
sky and earth themselves honored the event with light and silence in a
majestic expectation.

As she made her way over the frozen grass she looked as detached from
the world's affairs as some shrouded lady at her nightly journey along a
haunted path. The great Swiss barn was dead silent; its red front,
painted with moons and stars, looked patriarchal; it had its own
pastoral and dignified associations. She hesitated at the middle door,
then she lifted the wooden bar and pushed it back cautiously. The
darkness seemed to come out to meet her, and when she had shut herself
in she was engulfed as though the ready earth had covered her a few
nights too soon.

The straw rustled when she stepped on it, and she was afraid to risk a
movement, so she crouched and made herself small. The air was thick and
pungent, freezing draughts played upon her through the cracks of the
door, and her foot tingled, but she did not move. After a while she saw
two luminous disks which halted, glared, and approached, and she patted
the furry body until it curled up on her skirt and lay there purring.
She felt it grow tense at a tiny squeak and scuttle, but she kept still.

More than half an hour had gone when something happened. A horse
stamped, a cock set up a sudden chatter, the cat leaped to a manger, and
a cow scrambled to her feet. The darkness was full of movement,--wings
fluttered, timbers shook under kicking hoofs and rubbing hides, tossed
heads jarred the rings that held them fast. Then from the corner in
which stood the splendid yoke of black oxen, the pride of the farm,
there came a long, deep sound, as of something primeval mourning.

Two minutes after, Conrad was roused by a noise in the kitchen. The
house door stood wide, showing a great rectangle of moonlight, there was
a rush of cold air, and his bare foot struck Mary, doubled up where she
had fallen. He shouted, and an old woman ran in with her gray hair
flying.

"Conrad!" she exclaimed, almost in a scream.

"I don't know," he answered. He had his wife in his arms and held her
out like a child showing a broken toy.

The old woman bethought herself first. "Take her in and lay her on the
bed," she ordered. While she worked he began to hurry on his clothes,
moving as though he were stupid; then he came up to the bed.

"Aunt Hannah, what has she?" he begged. She gave him a look, and he
suddenly burst into a great storm of tears.

"Hurry!" she said. "Take Dolly and a whip and go to Bernville first. If
the doctor isn't home, go along to Mount Pleasant; but bring a doctor.
Ach!" she seized his hand in her excitement.

Mary's eyes were opening--blue, wide, and terrified. "Don't take Dolly,"
she said, quite loud. "Dolly knows too much." Then her eyes closed
again.

Conrad went into the kitchen, still sobbing, and the old woman followed.

"I must take Dolly," he whispered. "Aunt Hannah, for God's sake, what
has she?"

"I don't know what she means about Dolly. Maybe I can find out till you
get back. She'll soon come to. You better be careful going out of the
barnyard. It might worry her if she hears the hoofs."

The young man checked his crying. "I take her through the fields," he
said, and went out softly.

In the light of the candle which contended with the moonbeams Hannah's
wrinkled face looked witchlike as she bent over the bed. Presently Mary
started and her eyes searched the room with a terrified stare; she
seemed to be all at once in the midst of some dreadful happening.

"Aunt Hannah," she exclaimed, "don't let them come for me!"

The old woman bent over her. "How do you feel?" she asked, in her soft
and friendly Dutch.

"Don't let them come!"

"Nobody comes, Mary. It is all right, only you are not so good. After
while somebody is coming. Then you are glad!"

"Keep them out! I don't want to go!"

"You don't go off; you stay right here with me and Conrad."

"They said--"

"Who?"

"The oxen."

Hannah's hand shook, but she still spoke reassuringly. "Were you in the
barn, Mary?"

"Yes. You know how it is said that on Christmas eve, twelve o'clock, the
animals talk. I thought so much about it, and I made up my mind to go
and hear what they had to say. I was in the middle stable that's empty,
and I waited, and all of a sudden--" She stopped, trembling.

"Just don't think about it," Hannah urged, but she went on:

"All of a sudden--Dolly stamped--and they all woke up--the cows and the
sheep, and the cat was scared and the big rooster cackled,--and then the
oxen--Ach, Aunt Hannah! One of them said, 'They will carry out the
mistress in the morning.'"

"You don't go, for all," the old woman soothed her. "Think of who is
coming, Mary. That's a better thing to think about. It's so lucky to
have it on Christmas day. She will have good fortune then, and see more
than others."

The pinched face grew bright. The trembling soul was not to go out
alone before, becoming a part of the great current of maternity, it had
had the best of what is here.

"I take such good care of her. I look after her all the time," said
Mary.

       *       *       *       *       *

The sun was gone, but the west was still as pink as coral and the
twilight gave a wonderful velvety look to the meadows. In the rye-fields
the stalks, heavy-headed already, dipped in the wind which blew the last
apple-blossoms about like snow. A row of sturdy trees grew along Conrad
Rhein's front fence, and there was a large orchard in the rear. The log
house was just the color of a nest among the pale foliage.

The place was so quiet that the irritable note of a couple of
chimney-swallows, swooping about in pursuit of an invisible purpose,
sounded loud. Hannah Rhein looked up from the small stocking she was
knitting to watch them. Her secular occupation was contradicted by her
black silk "Sunday dress," and there was a holiday appearance about the
little girl who sat very still, looking as though stillness were
habitual with her.

"You better run out to the gate. Maybe you can see them," Hannah said.
The child went, and stood looking down the road so long that she rolled
up her knitting and followed. "There they are!" she exclaimed. "Father
and Aunt Calista. Don't forget to give her a kiss when she gets out."

Conrad Rhein's austere face expressed no pleasure as he stepped from the
carriage and helped his companion, but she was not to be depressed by a
brother-in-law's gravity. Calista Yohe, moving lightly in her pink
delaine dress, resembled the prickly roses coming into bloom beside the
gate, which would flourish and fade imperturbably in accordance with
their own times and seasons. At present she looked as though the fading
were remote. She shook hands joyfully and seized the carpet-bag which
Hannah had taken.

"I guess I don't let you carry that," she said. "It's heavy."

The little girl put up her face, and Calista kissed her without speaking
to her, and went on talking:

"You are right, Dolly is hot. We drove good and hard. Conrad didn't want
to do it to give her the whip, but I don't like to ride slow. Let's sit
on the porch awhile."

The child placed her bench near the old woman's chair, but she watched
the young one admiringly. Calista did not notice her.

"How are the folks?" Hannah asked.

"They are good."

"Had they a big wedding?"

"I guess! It was teams on both sides of the road all the way down to
where you turn, and they had three tables. She wore such a nice dress,
too; such a silk it was, with little flowers in."

"How did it go while you were there?"

"Oh, all right; she's a nice girl and he and I could always get along;
but it wasn't like my home. If a man gets married once, he doesn't want
his sister afterwards," Calista said, cheerfully.

"Well, you stay here now. We are glad to have you. Conrad he is quiet
and I am getting along, so it's not such a lively place, but I guess you
can make out."

"Well, I think!" said Calista, "I like to work. Is Conrad always so
crabbed? He hardly talked anything all the way over."

"He hasn't much to say, but he is easy to get along with. He doesn't
look much to anything but the farm."

"Doesn't he go out in company?" Calista asked, eagerly.

"Once in a while, but not often. He doesn't look for that any more."
Hannah sighed and stroked the child's head, which rested against her
knee, and the movement caught Calista's eye.

"She favors Mary," she said. "All that light hair and her white skin.
That's a pretty dress she has on." She stooped and examined the blue
merino. "Did you work that sack?"

"No, I had it worked. I think she looks nice. Conrad bought her those
blue beads for a present. She was so glad."

"Does she always wear white stockings?"

"When she is dressed. Conrad he wants it all of the best."

"Does he think so much of her?"

"He doesn't make much with her; he is not one to show if he thinks much;
but would be strange if he didn't. And as well off as he is, and no one
to spend it on!"

Calista looked out through the orchard and across the fields of rye and
wheat over which the spring night was falling. "He has a fine place for
sure," she said. "He takes long in the barn."

"I guess he went off," said Hannah, peacefully.

"I didn't see him leave."

"It may be he went to Albrecht's."

"Who are they? Young people?"

"Yes. John Albrecht he is about Conrad's age, and his wife was such a
friend to Mary. They have two little ones come over sometimes to play
around."

"Is that all in the family?"

"His mother; she lives with her, a woman so crippled up she can't walk."

Calista looked as satisfied as a strategist who finds himself in control
of a desired situation: its difficulties made her spirits rise. Her eyes
wandered about and fixed upon the child again. "She gets sleepy early
for such a big girl," she said. "Wasn't she five on Christmas?"

"Yes. She wanted to see you, so I let her stay up to-night; and anyhow I
didn't want to be sitting up-stairs when you got here."

"Do you sit with her evenings?"

"Till she goes to sleep. If you leave her in the dark she is so scared I
pity her, and I don't want her to get excited. I have no trouble with
her other times. She listens to me, and she is real smart to help; she
can pick strawberries and pull weeds, and she always enjoys to go along
for eggs. She is like her father, she hasn't much to say. She will run
around in the orchard and play with her doll-baby the whole day, and
she is pretending all the time."

The little girl opened her eyes, very blue with sleep. With her rosy
color and the white and blue of her little garments she looked like a
cherub smiling out of the canvas of a German painter,--the soft
companion of an older and more pensive grace. Hannah watched her
tenderly.

"Now come, Mary, we go to bed," she said.

"I guess I'd make such a fuss with that child and sit with her nights!"
Calista thought, her prominent hazel eyes following in rather a catlike
fashion. They followed in the same way more than once during the next
few weeks. She would brush the little girl's hair when Hannah was busy,
or call her to a meal, but at other times she passed her by. At first
Mary was inclined to pursue the pretty stranger, and on the second
evening she ran up to her to show the results of the egg-hunting, but
she never did it again.

She was the only one whom Calista failed to please. The neighbors who
came to visit soon returned, and on Saturday night there were three
carriages at the gate and three young men in the parlor. Conrad did not
pay much attention to her, but one day he told her that one of her
admirers was "not such a man that you ought to go riding with," and she
said: "All right. It was two asked me to go to-night. I take the other
one." She went through the work singing, and Hannah sat on the porch
more than usual, and began to wonder how she had gotten on so long
alone.

Calista had been there only a few weeks when Hannah said at supper one
evening: "I guess I go to see your aunt Sarah, Conrad. It's six years
since I went. I couldn't leave the work before, but now Calista gets
along so good I can go a little."

"Just do it," said Calista, heartily. "Mary and I can keep house."

The child smiled and made a timid movement.

"All right," Conrad said. "I take you to the stage any time."

Mary cried when Hannah went, and the old woman was distressed. "I feel
bad to leave her," she said. "I would take her along if I had time to
get her ready."

"Ach, go on!" Calista said, laughing. "There is Conrad now with the
team. Mary will have good times. She can stem the cherries this
morning." She picked up the little girl and held her out to kiss her
aunt. "Don't you worry," she called, as the carriage started.

She came out on the back porch presently with a large basket of
ox-hearts.

"Now let's see how smart you can be," she said. "Sit down on the step
and I put the basket beside you. Pick them clean." Mary looked rather
frightened at the size of the task, but she set to work. She stemmed and
stemmed until her hands were sticky and her fingers ached. A thick
yellow sunbeam came crawling to her feet; the flies buzzed, diving
through the air as though it were heavy; the cat beside her slept and
woke. It seemed to the child that she had always been in that spot and
that there would never be anything but a hot morning and piles of
shining cherries. She was looking toward the orchard where her swing
hung empty when Calista hurried by the door. "Have you done them all?"
she called. "Not? Well, then you finish them quick."

The cherries lasted until dinner-time, and when that was over Mary
climbed on her father's bed and slept all afternoon. When she came out
the first thing she saw was the egg-basket piled full. "If you want to
go along for eggs you ought to be here when I am ready," said Calista.

The little creature made no noise, but her father looked at her hard as
he sat down to supper. "What's the matter?" he asked.

She did not answer, and Calista said, "Oh--!" with the peculiar German
inflection of contemptuous patience. Conrad said no more.

After supper Mary wandered out, and her aunt had to call her several
times. "Where were you?" she asked.

"Down there." The child pointed to the orchard. "A lady was there."

Calista went to the edge of the porch and shaded her eyes. "I don't see
her," she said. "Who was she?"

"I don't know."

"Did you never see her before?"

"No, ma'am."

"What did she look like?"

Mary thought hard, with the puzzled face of one who lacks words and
comparisons to convey an image that is clear enough. Calista walked a
little way into the orchard, then she looked up and down the road.

"Wasn't it Mrs. Albrecht?" she asked. "Well, I guess it makes nothing.
Come, you must go to bed. I stay with you." With a mocking expression
she held out her hand as to a very small child, and the little girl
walked into the house without a word, not noticing the hand.

When she was asleep Calista came back to the porch with some sewing.
Conrad appeared from the barn, stood about for a moment, and strolled
toward the orchard; then he walked in the garden for a while; finally he
sat on the step with his back to her, saying nothing and looking at the
sky. She preserved the silence of a bird-tamer.

"It's a nice evening," he said at last.

"Yes."

"Good weather for hay."

"Yes, fine."

"One field is about ready to cut. You better tell Aunt Hannah to come
home. It's too much work for you, with the men to cook for."

"Just you let her stay and enjoy herself. I get along all right."

After a pause she asked, "Did you see some one in the orchard just now?"

"No."

"Mary she ran down after supper, and she said a strange lady was there.
I wondered who it was."

"I didn't see her," he said, dully, as though he spoke from the midst
of some absorbing thought; then he got up and walked away. "You better
go in and light the lamp if you want to sew," he said, roughly.

Calista took her things and went at once, looking as though she were so
well satisfied that she could afford to be amused.

Though in the next two weeks she had plenty of company Conrad never
joined them: he spent the evenings with John Albrecht, drove to
Bernville, or went to bed early. He worked much harder than usual, and
his cheeks grew thin under his stubble of black beard. Calista did not
trouble him with conversation.

"Don't you feel good?" she once asked, and when he gave a surly answer
she said, carelessly, "You better get something from the doctor," and
began to sing immediately afterwards. But she knew how he looked even
when her back was turned, and she often stared at Mary in a meditative
way as though the child were the doubtful quantity in an important
calculation.

She was watching her so one day, when little John Albrecht and his
sister had come over and the three were very busy on the grass near the
kitchen window with two dolls and the old tiger-cat. In the afternoon
silence their little voices sounded clear and sweet. The cat escaped to
a cherry-tree and they chased him gayly, but he went to sleep in an
insulting way in spite of the lilac switch that John flourished.

"Look out!" Mary called.

John looked around and said, "For what?" and she went over to him.

There was a conversation which Calista could not hear; Mary pointed
several times to a spot in the sunny grass; then he went running down
the road and Katie followed, looking as though she would cry when she
had time, and leaving her doll behind her.

Calista went out. "What did you say to John to make them run off?" she
asked.

"I told him to look out, he would hit the lady with the switch."

"What lady?"

"She was there."

"Where is she now?"

"I don't know."

"Can't you see her?"

"No, ma'am."

Calista looked all about. Not a soul was in sight on the road; in the
orchard and the fields nothing moved but the wind; the yard was empty
except for the cat slipping round the corner with his mottled coat
shining. "Now listen," she said, not unkindly. "I saw you out of the
window, and there was no lady here. Why do you tell a story like that?"

The child looked at her in a preoccupied way and did not answer.

"I can't have you say things that are not so, Mary. If you do it again,
I have to whip you. Now pick up your doll-baby and come in."

She spoke of it to Conrad that evening, but he did not pay much
attention.

"I don't know if there is something wrong with Mary or, if she does see
some one, who it is," she said. "Do you know if there are gipsies
around?" He scarcely answered, and in a few minutes she heard him drive
down the road. She smiled to herself as she hurried through her work.
Then she put Mary to bed, though it was much earlier than usual, and
began to dress, while the little girl lay watching from among the
pillows.

Calista enjoyed the water like a sleek creature of two elements; her
white skirts crackled and flared; her hair hid her waist. When she had
finished her green dimity looked like foliage around a flower, and her
hazel eyes turned green to match it.

"I'm going on the front porch," she said. "You go to sleep like a good
girl."

She had sat with Mary in the evening as long as she could do so without
inconvenience. Now she saw no reason for continuing it. She had not
imagination enough to know what she was inflicting. Mary gazed after her
as a shipwrecked woman might watch a plank drifting out of reach, but
she said nothing; she shut her eyes and lay still for many minutes. She
was a timid child but not cowardly, and such tangible things as a cross
dog, a tramp, and a blacksnake in the orchard she had faced bravely, but
her terror of the dark was indefinite and unendurable. She opened her
eyes, shut them, and opened them again, looking for something dreadful.
The furniture was shapeless, the bedclothes dimly white, and each time
she looked it was darker. She did not know what she expected, and to see
nothing was almost worse. A carriage going down the road comforted her
as long as she could hear it, but it left a thicker silence. She pressed
her lids together, breathing quickly,--to move was like inviting
something to spring on her,--then she slid out of bed and ran down the
stairs, gave a frightened glance at the front door behind which sat her
aunt, who would send her up again, and slipped across the back porch
into the orchard.

Calista heard nothing. In the hot June evening she was fresh and cool
enough to be akin to the rejoicing fields, a nymph of beech or willow.
Now and then she looked down the road and saw no one, but she did not
seem disappointed. It was quite dark and the fireflies were trailing up
and down when wheels stopped at the gate, and she drew back behind a
lilac-bush that screened the porch, and sat still.

Conrad, striding up the path, started when he saw her. "Oh, it's you!"
he said, coldly. She gave a short answer, and he stood frowning at
nothing and looking very tall and black. "Want to take a little ride?"
he asked.

"No, I guess not."

"You stay at home too much," he said, presently. "You haven't been off
the place since Aunt Hannah left."

"I don't care to go. I can't leave Mary here all alone. It wouldn't be
safe."

She stayed silently in her corner as though waiting for him to leave--a
white shadow beside the black mass of the lilac-bush. Dolly at the gate
tossed her head until the reins scraped on the gate-post. Down in the
orchard a whippoorwill cried.

He was like a horse that takes the bit and the driver was his own
will--his own self. She made no resistance when he threw himself down
beside her: she was pliant, her cheek cool, she even looked at him
haughtily. He did not know that she slipped out of his arms just before
he would have released her, nor that she was all one flame of triumphant
happiness. She seemed as untouched as the starlight.

"Calista," he stammered, "I hope you overlook it."

"What about my sister Mary?" she asked, dryly. "I thought you didn't
look to any one else."

"I didn't. I tell you the truth. I was unwilling. I fought it off all I
could, but now I give in. I can do no more."

"So you think you like me as well as you like her?"

"Calista, I would ask you if Mary stood here and heard us."

The woman seemed to bloom like an opening rose. She looked at him, but
it was as though she saw some vision of success that she was just about
to grasp. "I am satisfied," she said.

There was a sound on the walk, and they lifted their heads; then they
were scarcely conscious of each other's presence. Up from the gate, her
nightdress hanging about her feet, her hair pale in the dim light, came
the little girl. She climbed the steps and passed fearlessly into the
dark house, smiling at the two with the radiant content of happy
childhood, soothed and petted,--her small right hand held up as if in
the clasp of another hand.

       *       *       *       *       *

Calista would have chosen to clean the whole house or do a harvest-time
baking rather than write one letter, so she asked most of the guests
verbally and put off the others as long as she could. Conrad had taken
Hannah to Bernville to have a new silk dress fitted and buy colored
sugar for the wedding-cakes when she began the invitations. By three
o'clock they were finished, and she counted them and laid them beside
the inkstand. Then she washed her hands, spread a sheet on the floor,
and got out a pile of soft white stuff, all puffs and lace and
ruffles--the work of weeks.

She sewed happily, looking out now and then at the trees, which tossed
like green waves under the roaring August rain. Sometimes a gust drove a
shower down the chimney and made the logs hiss. The room was warm and
still; in the interval of work it seemed to have paused and be
sleeping. The tiger-cat, with his paws folded under him, lay beside the
hearth, and Mary on her little bench nursed her doll peacefully. Calista
began to sing a German hymn; the words were awful, but their very
solemnity made her happier by contrast:

    "Wer weiss wie nahe mir mein Ende!
     Hin geht die Zeit, her kommt der Tod.

"Look here, Mary," she said. "Isn't this pretty?" The child came, and
Calista held up the soft stuff around her; it made the little face look
beautifully pink and white. She touched it lightly, smiling, then she
wandered over to the window with her doll and looked out into the rain.

    "Es kann vor Nacht leicht anders werden,
     Als es am frühen Morgen war,"

Calista sang.

Five minutes later she asked, good-naturedly, "What are you looking at?"
Mary did not answer. "Didn't you hear what I said? What's going on out
there?" Calista repeated.

"You said I shouldn't say it," the child whispered.

"Say what?"

"When I see the lady."

"Where do you see her?"

"Coming out of the orchard."

Certain old stories returning to Calista's mind made her look at Mary
for a minute as though the child had manifested strange powers. She went
to the window and her thimble clicked on the sill as she leaned forward;
then she touched her cheek. "Do you feel good?" she asked.

"Yes, ma'am."

She looked out again. "I want you to know for sure that no one is
there," she said, earnestly. "Now tell me: do you see a lady?"

"Yes, ma'am. She is coming up here."

Calista was very sober. "If your aunt Hannah doesn't teach you not to
tell stories, then I must," she said. "I can't have you like this. Soon
I can't believe you anything. Come here." Mary came as if pulled. "Now
mind, I do this so that you don't say what isn't so again." She gave the
child two good slaps on the mouth with her strong hand.

The inherited spirit of resistance to coercion, that had made pioneers
and martyrs of Mary Rhein's ancestors, was let loose too soon: it made
an imp of her. She darted silently like an insect from under Calista's
hand, seized the inkstand, and threw it with all her might at the
beautiful white gown. The ink poured out, dripping from fold to fold,
and the stand thudded on the sheet and scattered the last drops. Mary
gave one look and ran across the porch and out to the road in the rain.

Calista sat still for a moment, then she got up weakly. "Doesn't look
much like a wedding-dress now," she murmured. "It's no use doing
anything to it. It's done for." She wiped the inkstand on a stained
flounce before setting it on the table. "_Now_," she said, as though
some one were present who would disapprove, "I give it to her good. I
better fetch her in and have it done before they get back."

The sky was low but the rain was gentle when she started down the road,
and her shawl made a bright spot between the fields, green as chromos.
Mary had gone toward the creek, and she followed as far as the bridge;
then, as there was no one in sight, she turned up-stream. It was deep
just there and very full, carrying leaves and twigs so that it was like
a little flood, and the water caught the dipping branches of the willows
and swept them along. The shellbarks looked forlorn in the rain, and
the ground was so soft that it gave under her feet. Her skirts and shoes
were heavy with wet before she saw Mary.

The child looked as though she were being crowded out of life. She was
crying, with small weak sounds like a wretched little animal, her hair
was dark with water, and the rain drove across her face. At the sight of
Calista she began to run slowly with much stumbling; her crying mixed
with the sound of the stream. Calista followed as fast as she could.

A little way up the creek was a log bridge without a rail. Conrad had
put it up for his own convenience, and Calista never tried to cross it.

"Ach!" she thought, "I don't hope she runs out there!" Then she began to
call, but Mary did not look back. She fell over a root, picked herself
up, and went on, with her knees shaking.

Suddenly she began to cry very loud, as a child does when it sees
comfort, and went on much faster, making for the bridge. As she ran
along the log her arms were out to meet some one.

Calista stared for a couple of seconds, then she raced like a savage
down to the first bend, her red shawl flying behind her.

It lay in a pool on the kitchen floor when Conrad and Hannah came in; it
was the first thing they saw, and their voices stopped as though a hand
had been laid upon their mouths. Mary was lying on the settle and
Calista was doubled up against it with her face hidden.

"What's wrong?" Conrad asked. She said nothing, and when he tried to
lift her she writhed away from him. Hannah ran to Mary. The blankets
were warm, but the small creature was quite cold.

"Now it is time you say what has happened," she said, and Conrad stood
silently by.

Calista sat up, looking deadly sick. The story came out in fragments,
and at the end she bowed her head, shivering and staring at nothing.

"Did she say this before?" Hannah asked.

Calista told wearily, and the old woman listened, a spectator of strange
things to which she alone had the clue.

"Is that all?"

"Ach, yes! I can't remember any more. Now do what you want to do."

Hannah spoke like a judge sentencing a criminal: "So you thought she
told lies and you whipped her--that little thing! Now I tell you
something, Calista Yohe. That night she was born I said to Mary--your
sister Mary!--that once she came on Christmas she would be lucky and see
more than we see, and Mary was glad, and the last thing she said was: 'I
look after her. I take care of her.' And they say one that dies and
leaves something unfinished must come back to finish it up. I guess Mary
knew when to come.

"And you are glad. I don't say you just wished this to her, but you
thought would be fine not to have her around once you got married to
Conrad. She was lucky not to be here till you got a good hold of her.

"You might have thought whether I would let her with you that didn't
want her, to be in the way. But I am old. It is a good thing Mary
fetched her. Now I see to her myself. Don't you dare touch her."

Conrad had been perfectly still, with the face of a man in a nightmare,
but now he went to the shaking woman and lifted her in his arms. Hannah
looked at them for a moment. Then she set a great kettle of water to
heat, took up the child and went out, leaving them alone together, and
they heard her footsteps in the room above as she went back and forth,
getting what she needed.




The White Sleep of Auber Hurn

BY RICHARD RICE


The thing happened in America; that is one reason for believing it.
Another land would absorb it, or at least give a background to shadow
over its likelihood, the scenery and atmosphere to lend an evanescent
credibility, changing it in time to a mere legend, a tale told out of
the hazy distance. But in America it obtrudes; it stares eternally on in
all its stark unforgetfulness, absorbing its background, constantly
rescuing itself from legend by turning guesswork and theory into facts,
till it appears bare, irremediable, and complete,--witnessed at high
noon, and in New Jersey of all places, flat, unillusive, and American.

The thing was as clear a fact in its unsubtle, shadowless mystery as was
he--that is, as was the shell and husk of him lying there in the next
room after I had watched the life and the person drawn out, leaving only
mere barren lees to show what had gone. Hours it lay there to prove the
thing, to settle it in my mind, to let me believe eternally in it. Then
we buried it deep under the big pile of scree on my hill. As I write I
can see the white stones from the window.

It is not all guesswork to begin with; indeed it is not guesswork at any
moment if the end is always in view, and we had to begin with the end. I
tell you it was as plain as daylight. People saw him, heard him talk;
saw him get off the train at Newark to mail my letter--this
one--addressed to my engineers in Trenton; heard him say, "Promised
Crenshaw to post this before reaching the city; guess this is my last
chance to keep it." It is a little thing that counts; you can't get by
that; it alone is final; but there were a dozen more. Ezekiel saw him on
the platform hunting for the right box for west-bound mail, and saw him
post the letter after considerable trouble. When I heard that, I yielded
to the incredulous so far as to telephone to Trenton, asking if the firm
had received it. I did that, though I held the letter in my hand at the
time, and knew it had never left this house. Ezekiel was sure that he
mailed the letter, that it went from his hand into the box. He was
watching carefully because just then the train began to move; but
Auber, leisurely ignoring this, appeared to be comparing his watch with
the station clock, and finally looked up at the moving train as if in
disapproval. Ezekiel lost sight of him in the crowd, and then, at the
same moment, he was taking his seat opposite again.

Ezekiel said, "I thought you were going to miss the train,
characteristically, for the sake of setting your watch." And Auber
replied, rather queerly: "Great God! It's impossible now; I can see
that." Ezekiel did not know what he meant, but remembered it afterward
when we were talking the whole thing over in this room.

Besides Ezekiel, there were four men who saw him after the train left
Newark; and the porter remembered holding the vestibule door and
trap-platform open for some one as the train pulled out.

Then there is my coachman who drove him to the train, here in Barrelton,
who had his tip of a silver dollar from him. Put it in his pocket--and
then--lost it, of course. You see, there's the most conclusive link in
the chain. If William had produced his dollar, or my engineer had
received that letter, the whole thing would fall through--jugglery and
imposition, mere ordinary faking. The hypnotic theory might still hold,
but it must stretch fifty miles to an improbable source in a man who is,
at the time, dying strangely on my bed.

Of course, there is no use asking if any one on the train touched
him,--not only saw and heard him, but shook hands with him, let us say.
It is the same story as William's, or not so good. Ezekiel is sure that
he shook hands when Auber first boarded the train; Judson is sure that
he did so when he stepped across the aisle to ask about me. Yet, I tell
you that would have made no difference; let him have been as impalpable
as the very air of the car, those men would have felt the flesh, just as
William felt his silver dollar. "Fulfilment of sure expectation on the
ground of countless identical experiences," your psychologist would
explain. Illusion and fact were indistinguishable; and though I happened
to watch the facts, and the others the illusion, their testimony is as
good as mine.

There is the testimony of four men that, when the smash came, they saw
him thrown from his seat, head first, into the window-jamb, and lie for
a moment half through the shattered pane. Just before this, he had taken
out his watch. Its familiar picture-face, and also its enamelled hands
exactly together at twelve o'clock, had caught Ezekiel's eye. He said
that Auber looked at the watch, and then leaned forward as if to call
attention to the view from the window. It was then that the smash came.
When Ezekiel and some others, who were only thrown to the floor, looked
up again, Auber was gone.

You see, the time is identical; we calculated it exactly, for the train
left Newark on time and takes just six minutes to reach the bridge; that
is, at exactly noon. When I noticed the hour here, it was, perhaps, a
few minutes later, and that is not a difference in timepieces, for it
was by his own watch on the bedside table. No one saw him on the train
or on the bridge after that. It seems conclusive, just that alone. They
finally decided that he must have fallen from the window and somehow
rolled from the sleepers into the river.

Actually no one else in the Pullman was badly hurt. The men picked
themselves up and rushed to the doors of the car, or climbed out of the
windows. Ezekiel put his head through the shattered pane which Auber had
struck. Men were running toward the car ahead, from which screams came.
In the excitement of rescuing those from the telescoped coach, Auber was
forgotten; but when it was all over, Ezekiel and Judson looked
everywhere for him, till they assured themselves that he was not on the
bridge.

At all events, that is how he came to be reported among "The
Missing,--known by friends to have been on the train,--Auber Hurn, the
artist."

During that night, when Ezekiel and Judson had come down in response to
my telegrams, we sat here, talking endlessly, guessing, relating, slowly
developing the theory of the thing, delving into our minds for memories
of him, gradually getting below the facts, gradually working back to
them, examining the connections, completing the chain. The main fact,
the culmination, had to be the soulless shell of him, lying there in the
next room. Our theory began far away from that, in what he used to call
"white sleep," and more especially in a curious occasional association
between the dreams of this sleep and the landscape pictures that he
painted. What impressed you most as he recounted one of those
half-conscious dream concoctions, that he named "white-sleep fancies,"
was the remarkable scenery, the setting of the dream. This was in
character with his pictures, for about them both you felt that
peculiarly pervasive "sense of place," for which his landscape is of
course famous, and which in these dreams was emphasized through a subtle
ominousness of atmosphere. You perceived what the place stood for, its
sensational elements, and you began vaguely to imagine the kind of event
for which it would form a suitable background. In his pictures the
element was a sort of dream-infusion, as though in each scene the secret
goddess, the Naiad of the spot, must have stood close to him as he
painted, and thrilled him to understanding at her impalpable touch.
Whatever the exact nature of these creative intuitions, there was
between his art and his dreams a lurking connection, out of which, as we
believed, finally grew his strange faculty for seeing beyond the scene,
an intuition for certain events associated with what we called "an
ominous locality."

This faculty began to distinguish itself from mere psychical fancy
through a curious contact of one of Auber's dreams with his actual
experience.

The dream, which came at irregular intervals during a number of years,
began with a sense of color, a glare to dazzle the eyes, till, as Auber
insisted, he awaked and saw the sunset glow over a stretch of forest. He
was on a hillside field, spotted with daisies and clumps of tall grass.
On one side a stone wall, half hidden by the grass and by a sumac hedge
in full bloom, curved over the sky-line. All this was exactly
expressible by a gesture, and when he reached the bottom of the field he
looked back for a long time, and made the gesture appreciatively. It was
at this point that he always recognized the recurring dream; but he
could never remember how it was going to end. Then he entered the wood
on a grassy path, and for a long time the tall tasselled grasses brushed
through his fingers as he walked. Suddenly it grew dark, and feeling
that "it would be folly to continue," he tried hard to remember the
point of the dream. Just as he seemed to recollect it, the sound of
running water came to him, as from a ravine, and he knew that "he could
not escape." The low sound of running water,--the little lonely gurgle
of a deep-wood brook, all but lost in the loam and brush of the silent
forest,--why should he feel an incomprehensible distaste for the place?
He tried feverishly to recollect the outcome of the dream, but all
memory of it had fled. Nor could he bring himself to continue on the
path; when he tried to take another step his leg dangled uselessly in
front, his foot beating flimsily on the ground till he brought it back
beside the other. The longer he listened to the sound of the running
water, the stronger grew his aversion for the place. This continued
indefinitely, till he awoke.

You perceived the vague sense of "ominous locality" developed out of the
simplest details. There is a recognizable introduction, the field, the
stone wall, the grass striking his fingers; but there is no ending,
nothing happens; the dream-spell at last dissolves, and the sleeper
wakes. His aversion to the sound of the brook can, therefore, come from
no conscious knowledge of a portending catastrophe in the dream. It was
always Auber's fancy that the dream would really end in a catastrophe,
which, though the mind proper continue in ignorance, casts its ominous
shadow through the subconsciousness upon the surroundings of the event.

It was also a fanciful idea of his that dreams in general imply a
subconscious state coexisting constantly with the actual realm of
thought, but penetrated by our consciousness only when the will is
least active, or during sleep. With ordinary mortals sleep and
consciousness are so nearly incompatible that the notion of actual
mental achievement during sleep is unthought of. Dreams are allowed to
run an absurd riot through the brain, disturbing physical rest. The
remedy for this universal ailment and waste of time was to be found in
"white sleep," a bit of Indian mysticism, purporting to accomplish a
partial detachment of mind and body, so that the will, which is always
the expression of the link between these two, is, for the time,
dissolved. The body rests, but the unfettered mind enters upon a
"will-less state of pure seeing," where dreams no longer remain the
meaningless fantasies of blind sleep, but become luminous with idea and
sequence. With the body thus left behind, the intellect rises to the
zenith of perception, where the blue veil of earthly knowledge is
pierced and transcended.

How often had we heard Auber talk in his fantastically learned fashion,
with an amused seriousness lighting up his face. At what point he began
to see something more than amusement in his dreams and theories, I never
knew; but the serious beginning of the thing took shape in an incident
which not even the most fervent theorist could have created for the
sake of a theory.

It was up among the little knobby hills to the north of my farm. We were
as usual sketching, and Auber had been going on all the afternoon about
the mournful scenery, talking of nothing but browns, and grays, and
"mountain melancholy." He had a way of stringing out a ceaseless jargon
while he worked,--an irritating trick caught in the Paris studios. At
the end of the afternoon, he held up a remarkable sketch, suggesting the
color scheme for a picture in the atmosphere of oncoming dusk--a bit of
path over the hill toward the sun.

"You have struck it most certainly," I said. "Be wary of finishing that;
it is strangely suggestive as it is."

He nodded; and then, as we packed up, he said, "Do you know, I have felt
vaguely intimate with this spot, as if I had been here before, as if I
were painting a reminiscence." I remarked tritely on the commonness of
this feeling.

At the bottom of a hillside meadow I was hunting for the entrance of a
path into a patch of woods. Auber, instead of helping me, kept gazing
back at the fading light while he made random observations on the nature
of the sky-line,--one of his cant hobbies. "See how crudely the
character of everything is defined up there against the sky," I heard
him say, while I continued to search for the path. "Now even a sheep or
a cow, or an inanimate thing, like that stone wall, for instance,--see
how its character as a wall comes out as it sweeps over the top." At
this moment, a little drop of surprise in his voice made me look around.
He was walking backwards, one arm extended toward the hill in a
descriptive gesture. "Why, it is the dream!" he murmured in hushed
excitement. "Ah, of course! I might have known it. Now, I'll turn to
find the path."

"I wish you would," I said.

He started abruptly. Then he came slowly, and touched me in a queer
evasive way on my shoulder. Finally he drew a long breath, and gripped
me by the arm. "Don't you recognize it?" "It's the dream! See! The stone
wall--the field--the sumac! Now that's the first sumac--"

"Oh, come along!" I said; "there are twenty such fields. That is
curious, though: you made the gesture. Do you recognize it all exactly?"

"It's it! the whole thing--and now, you see, I'm turning to find the
path."

I admitted that it was curious, and said that it would be interesting to
see how it all turned out.

For a long time Auber followed in silence, which I tried to relieve by
bantering comments. I was some distance ahead, when I heard him say,
"The grass is brushing through my hands."

"Why not?" I laughed, but it rang false, for I recollected the detail.
It was childishly simple; perhaps that was why the thing bothered me. I
noticed that in the growing darkness the forest took on a peculiar look.
It had been partly burnt over, leaving the ground black, and some of the
trees gaunt, upbristling, and sentinel-like. The place, even in broad
daylight, would have had a night-struck appearance. At this hour, when
the sudden forest darkness had just fallen, there was a sense of unusual
gloom, easily connecting itself with strange forebodings.

Perhaps it had been five minutes, when Auber said, "I am conscious that
I cannot take my hands out of the grass."

As I said, it was a simple thing. With an odd impulse, I groped back
toward him till I found his wrists, and then shook them violently above
his head. We stood there for several moments performing this absurd
pantomime in the darkness. His arms, with the sleeves rolled up, felt
heavy with flesh in my grip. I seemed to be handling things of dead,
cold flesh.

Then Auber said, "I can still feel my hands down in the grass."

I drew back in a strange horror; but, at the same moment, we both stood
stock-still to listen: from some distance to the right came the
trickling sound of water. It was barely perceptible, and we listened
hard, indefinitely, while the silence congealed in our ears, and the
darkness condensed about our eyes, filling up space, and stopping
thought save just for the sound of the brook. It seemed a sort of
growing immobility, eternal, like after death.

At last Auber spoke, laying a hand on my shoulder: "It is over; let us
go ahead."

After a while we talked about it. There was little to "go" on. You see,
nothing happens, and, as Auber expressed it, "the psychological data are
ineffective for lack of an event." But though the whole thing remained
then a purely psychical experience, and did not "break through," yet it
had something of the fulness of fate. Auber, as usual, had a theory: in
the dream some manifestation was undoubtedly striving to break through,
but he had been unable to facilitate the process. The present
experience, he decided, was immature, a mere coincidence. The outcome
might yet, however, be foreseen through the dream, if the creative
perception of "white sleep" could be attained.

That is the affair which started the whole thing. Auber must have taken
the suggestion it contained much more seriously than any of us for
several years imagined; nor did we connect the long contemplativeness of
the man with any definite purpose. The thing was too vague and illusive
to become a purpose at all.

Before long there were half a dozen instances, some trivial, or
seemingly coincidental, but all forming our theory. There is one Ezekiel
recounted, as we sat here talking that night. It was just a matter of
old Horace MacNair's coming in on them once during a thunder-storm. The
family were sitting in the big hall; the ladies with their feet up on
chairs to insulate them from the lightning; young Vincent Ezekiel
teasing them by putting his on the mantelpiece. At one point in the
storm came a terrible crash, and Auber jumped up, starting toward the
door. Then he came back and sat down quietly. They laughed, and asked if
he had been struck.

"No," he said, quite seriously, "not by the lightning, but by a curious
idea that I saw Horace MacNair opening the door. I suppose I must have
dreamed it; I was nearly asleep."

The Ezekiels looked at one another in surprise, and Mrs. Ezekiel said:
"There is something curious in that, for the last time Horace was here,
just before he died, he came in the midst of a thunder-storm as we were
sitting here, much as we are now. And, why! I remember that he had come
over because he expected to see you, but you had not arrived."

"That's so," put in young Vincent, "because he said that if you had been
here, you wouldn't have been too afraid of the lightning to stand up and
shake hands. And by Jove! I had my feet on the mantelpiece! I remember
that, because when he saw me he laughed, and lined his up beside mine."

"He was wearing a gray rain-coat, and high overshoes that you made fun
of," added Auber, shortly, and then kept an embarrassed silence.

That was true, Ezekiel said; and Auber had not seen the man in five
years.

There were many cases which we strung that night on the threads of our
theory, all working toward its completion; and yet we neared the end
with misgiving and doubt, for we had the necessity of believing, if we
would keep ourselves still sane. All of us had noticed that so far as
there was an element of terror in the strange incidents, it lay in the
fact of a subtle undercurrent of connections, as if Fate were dimly
pointing all the while toward the invisible culmination. Suddenly there
would be a new manifestation of Auber's faculty, and a new instance
would be added, illusive, baffling, and yet forming each time new
threads in the vague warp and woof of something that we called our
theory. "There it is again," we would say to ourselves, as we sent the
ghostly shuttle flying in our psychological loom.

This undercurrent appeared to touch the incident of Horace MacNair, for
it seemed that the old artist had walked over to the Ezekiels that night
on purpose to talk with Auber about making a series of pictures of the
salt marshes along the Passaic River. Old Horace was dead of his heart
before Auber arrived, but the suggestion was repeated by Ezekiel; and
Auber, taking it as something like a dying request from his old master,
besides appreciating its value, set to work at once.

The long reaches of the Passaic tidal lagoon, with their mists and
blowing swamp-grass, are crossed by the trestles of all the railways
which enter New York from the south. It was old Horace MacNair's idea
that this place, more travelled, more unnoticed, and yet more
picturesque, perhaps, than any spot near the metropolis, might be the
making of Auber's reputation. The varied, moody tones of the marsh-land,
forever blending in a pervasive atmosphere of desolate beauty, suited
Auber's peculiar style. Here he would paint what passed in the popular
eye for the dullest commonplace, and would interpret, at the same time,
both this landscape and his little-understood art.

While he worked I frequently visited Auber on his yawl _Houri_, which
was canvassed over for an outdoor studio, and anchored at the point from
which he wished to paint. One day we were tied up to a pile by the
Central Railroad trestle. It was just the heat of the day, and Auber,
stretched out on a deck chair, was taking a sort of siesta. His eyes
were closed, and he had let his cigar go out. Whether it was due to the
light through the colored awning, I was not sure, but I was suddenly
attracted by a dull vacancy that seemed to be forming in his
countenance. It stole upon the features as if they were being slowly
sprinkled with fine dust, blotting their expression into a flat
lifelessness. Then the rush of a train passing over the bridge disturbed
him. With a fleeting look of pain he sat up, glanced first furtively at
me, and then stared hard around.

"Was there a train?" he asked, at length.

"Yes--an express."

"It did not stop here on the bridge for anything?"

"No, of course not."

"Of course not," he agreed, absently. "How long ago?"

"Perhaps two minutes," I said.

He examined his watch. After a while he got up, seeming to pull himself
together with an effort, and began scraping nervously on his picture. I
noticed that the palette-knife trembled in his hand.

"What is the matter?" I asked, finally.

"I feel very much upset," he replied, and sank weakly on the hatch. "I
was on that train and--"

I had to jump below to the ice-chest; Auber seemed to have fainted.
Jerry, the skipper, and I applied cold water for five minutes, and then
Auber revived and asked for whiskey.

"I was on the train," he began again, persistently. "Several people,
whom I knew, must have been in the chair-car with me, because I seemed
to be taking part in a conversation. Was there a Pullman on the train?"
he asked, abruptly.

"Yes," I said; "at the end."

The answer seemed to reassure him unhappily. "I was on the train," he
continued, "but I could not think where I had come from. There were
vague recollections of a walk, then of a long drive in the dark. Now I
was on the train, and yet I was somehow not there even now." I poured
out more whiskey, but he pushed it aside absently. "I was not there, nor
was I here; for when I moved, something seemed to be folded about me,
like bedclothes. It was all a kind of duplication, and I could be on the
train or in the other place at will. That is why it seemed confused and
unreal. We were talking about some matter of business. I held a list of
figures that I referred to now and then. Once I leaned forward to look
out of the window; it was just here. I was pointing, and saying to some
one, 'There is my last salt marsh!' when a great shock stopped the
words, and sent me against something in front. For a moment I was
conscious that you were leaning over me. Then I had a strange feeling of
becoming gradually detached, as if from my very self. A weight and a
feeling of bedclothes slipped from me; there was alternate glaring light
and enveloping darkness. Finally the light prevailed, and I found myself
looking up into this hideous awning."

"Well," I said, "that is a very queer dream!"

"Yes; it was white sleep," he replied, slowly; "but something was added
this time." He put his hand on my arm appealingly. "I knew it would
come; I have had the beginnings of that dream before." He spoke as if
from a tragic winding-sheet, a veil spun in the warp of his own fancy
and also in the very woof of Fate; and out of this veil, through which
none of us ever saw, he was stretching his hand to ask of me--what?

I did what I could. Auber consented to come at once to my farm till rest
should partly restore him. We reached here that night. It was just two
weeks ago; in thought, it is, for me, a lifetime. It was a time of
suspense and waiting when diversion seemed almost irreverent, but at
last it was forced upon us by that ever-moving providence which stood
back of the whole affair. My dam broke at the upper farm. Chance?
Nothing of the sort! I went up to see how it had happened, and found
some rotten joists and rust-eaten girders. They are in the course of
events. Auber went with me while I should see things set to rights.

It was a simple incident, but somehow I suspected it of finality even as
we started out of the yard on the long drive. I was suspicious of that
knobby hill region, which was connected with the incipient indications
of the whole affair. On arriving in the late afternoon, however, nothing
could be more natural than that Auber, having inspected the dam, should
stroll on to the pasture, where he once sketched the path that runs down
to his dream-meadow.

I went back to the farmhouse, and wrote to my engineers a detail of the
breach in the dam, then sat down on the porch to enjoy a smoke. The day
was warm and dreamy; the sun, filtering through the September haze,
rested on the eyelids like a caressing hand. I was soon half asleep,
peering lazily at the view which zigzags down between the knobby hills
to the more cultivated farm-lands that we had left hours behind us, when
the telephone rang. I got up and answered it:

"William?--at the farm? Oh yes--a message, a telegram--for Mr. Hurn, you
say? Is it important?--Well, go ahead--What! Must take 11.10
express--crisis on Wall Street?--meet on train--Who?--Ezekiel."

It had come, then! Chance? No. A railroad merger; stockholders
interested. At first I said: "I won't tell him." Then I thought: "After
this supposed Sentence is delayed and delayed till he no longer looks on
the world as his prison cell, and the whole matter evaporates in a
psychological mist, he will say: 'Our superstitions, my dear friend, and
your loving care, cost me just twenty thousand dollars that trip. My
picture of the twilight path, which you would have interrupted, won't
replace a hundredth part of that.'"

I wandered down to the broken dam; there beside the breach, with the
river sucking darkly through, Josiah Peacock stood, contemplating the
scene with his practical eye against to-morrow's labor. Suddenly I found
myself mentioning the telegram. He said, "Then you'll have to drive
back to-night." I felt alarmed; surely this was none of my doing.
Presently I was taking the short cut through the woods. The red glow of
sunset was fading behind me, and darkness already gathered among the
trees. Aware of a vague anxiety that impelled me forward, an odd notion
that I might be late for something, I began to hurry along, the gaunt
tree trunks watching like sentinels as I passed. Was I looking for Auber
Hurn? It was strangely reminiscent, not a real experience. "This is
absurd," I said to myself at length, and straightened my foot to stop.
Instead, I unexpectedly leaped over a fallen log, and continued with
nervous strides, while I flung back a sneaking glance of embarrassment.

On the turns of the path darkness closed in rapidly; the outlines of
objects loomed uncertainly distant through the forest. Gradually I
became aware that at the end of a dim vista down which I was hurrying,
something white had formed itself in the path. I stopped to look, but
could make out nothing clearly. It remained dimly ahead, and I
approached, a few steps at a time, peering through the obscure gray
shadows, striving to concentrate my vision. At last I recognized that
it was Auber Hurn in his shirt-sleeves, standing still in the middle of
the path. Apparently he, too, was trying to see who was coming.

"Auber!" I called. I was not sure that he replied.

When I was very close I began at once, as if involuntarily: "Auber, you
see, I came to meet you. There is a message from Ezekiel--a Wall Street
panic, or something. He wants you to meet him on the 11.10 to-mor--It
will be necess--Auber?" Had I been talking to the air? I looked about
me. "Auber!--Auber Hurn!" I called. There was no one there; but in the
hush of listening there came, as if wandering to me through the forest,
the little lost gurgle of a distant brook.

For a moment I stood fascinated by a reminiscence--and then, a sudden
fear swelling in my throat, I ran. Back on the path I fled, my legs
seeming to go of themselves, hurling my body violently along; my feet
pounding behind, as if in pursuit, whirling around the turns, then down
the last straight aisle, past the sentinel trees, out into the light.

When I reached the farmyard, a fresh team was being hitched to our
carriage.

"What! Has Mr. Hurn come back?" I asked, shakily.

"No," said Josiah, "but I thought maybe you'd want things ready. Didn't
you find him?"

"Why--no," I replied, and then repeated firmly, "No, I did not."

I sat down, exhausted, on the porch, and waited. At the end of ten
minutes Auber Hurn entered the gate, crossed to the buggy, and got in.
Josiah, from between the horses where he was buckling a knee-guard,
looked up in surprise. "You got that message, Mr. Hurn?"

"Yes," said Auber, speaking very distinctly. "Mr. Crenshaw just gave it
to me."

Josiah turned to me. "I thought you said--" he began.

"I was mistaken--I mean, I misunderstood you," I interposed.

Josiah stared, and then finished the harnessing. "Your coats are here
under the seat," he remarked. I took my place mechanically. Mrs. Josiah
came with some milk and sandwiches. I finished mine hurriedly, and took
the reins.

Auber sank back into his corner without a word, leaving me to feel only
a sense of desperate confused isolation, of lonely helplessness.

At length Auber said, in a voice that startled me, a low, contented
voice: "You were on the path? You went to find me yourself?"

"Yes," I answered; and then, after a long time, "And you were not
there--yourself?"

"No, I was not there." He leaned back against the cushions, and I
thought he smiled. "I was in that hill meadow. I went to sleep there for
a short time."

It was two o'clock when we drove into the yard. William was waiting to
take the horses.

As we went into the house, William asked if he should have the trap for
the 11.10 express. I could not answer, and Auber said, looking at me in
the light of the open door, "Yes, certainly."

I can see him now in the cheerless white hallway, his tall figure
exaggerated in a long driving-cloak, his high features sharpened in the
light of the lantern.

In taking off my coat I felt, in the pocket, the letter I had written to
my engineer in Trenton. I laid it on the hall table. "You might post
that to-morrow before you get to New York," I said, casually.

Then I lighted him to his room, and we said "good night."

Undressing mechanically, I went to bed, and after a long time I slept,
exhausted.

A rumbling noise; then, after it had ceased, the realization that a
carriage had driven out of the yard--that was what woke me up. The clock
on my bureau said half past ten. For a moment I forgot what that meant;
and then sliding out of bed, I tiptoed quickly down the hall. Putting my
ear to Auber's door, I listened--till I had made sure. From within came
the dull breathing of a sleeper. Throwing on a few clothes, I went
down-stairs. The waitress was dusting in the hall.

"Where has the carriage gone?" I asked her.

"Why, sir," she said, "William is taking Mr. Hurn to the station."

After a while I had the courage to say cautiously, "I thought Mr. Hurn
was still asleep; I did not hear him come down."

"He came down ten minutes ago," she replied, "and in a great hurry, with
no time for breakfast."

"You saw him?" I cross-examined.

"Yes. The carriage was waiting, and he seemed in a great hurry, though
he did run back to take a letter from the table there."

I was standing between the table and the maid.

"Well, of course you're right," I said, carelessly, and at that moment I
put my hand on the letter. I turned my back and put it in my pocket.

I went hurriedly to the barn. The runabout trap and the mare were out.
Then I finished dressing, and had breakfast. Soon after, William drove
into the yard, and I called from the library window--"Where have you
been?"

"Just to the station, sir."

"What for? Has my freight arrived?"

"Mr. Hurn, for the 11.10,"--he explained respectfully.

"Ah, yes!" I cried, in an overvoice; "I keep forgetting that I have just
waked up. You saw him off? Ah--did he leave any message for me? I
overslept, and did not see him this morning."

"No, sir; I had no message," he replied. "But he's a liberal man, Mr.
Hurn, sir." He grinned and slapped his pocket; then, with a look of
doubt, he straightened out one leg to allow his hand inside; the look
grew more doubting; he stood up and searched systematically, under the
seat, everywhere.

"Guess it rolled out," I said, very much interested. "What was it?"

"A silver dollar," he answered, mournfully.

"Oh, well, I'll make that up," I called, and shut the window.

I took out my watch and made a calculation; Auber's train was probably
at Newark. I could stand it no longer, and I went toward his room,
stamping on the bare floor, whistling nervously, and rattling the
rickety balustrade. I banged open the door and began to shout: "Auber!
you've missed your----"

He did not move. He was lying on his back, with his arms extended evenly
outside the bedclothes, which were tucked close around his breast. He
lay as if in state, with that dull dusty pallor on his face, and that
eyeless vacancy of an effigy on a marble tomb--a voidness of expression,
with masklike indications of duration and immobility. On the
reading-table, at his bedside, I noticed his watch lying face up. It was
two or three minutes of the noon hour.

Sitting down on the bed, I touched Auber on the shoulder. He did not
move. An intuition, growing till it all but became an idea, and then
remaining short of expressibility, unable to perceive even its own
indefiniteness--a film for impressions where there is no light--such
was the vagueness of my guess concerning the metamorphosis that was
taking place. Yet I began to understand that Auber Hurn, the real man,
was not there, not on the bed, not in my house at all. It was as if the
Person were being gradually deducted, leaving only the prime flesh to
vouch for the man's existence. Even as I sat in wonder, with my eyes
upon him, the life tinge faded utterly from his skin. There was a
fleeting shadow as if of pain. His breast sank in a long outbreathing,
and then, after seconds and minutes, it did not rise again. I listened.
The room seemed to be listening with me. The silence became stricken
with awe, with the interminable and unanswering awe--the muteness of
death.

We believed in the thing. Ezekiel and Judson came down in response to my
telegrams, and we sat here talking it all over, hours through the night.
It was inevitable to believe in it. We took his body up in the darkness,
and buried it in the scree on my hill; then we came back to Auber's
room, and faced each other by the empty bed.

"This is not for the practical world, or for the law," I said. "No
coroner on earth could return a verdict here."

"We could never see the thing clearly again if the practical world got
hold of it," said Judson. "Look; you have to believe so much!" He had
picked up Auber's purse from the table, where it had lain beside his
watch. He opened it over the bed. A roll of bills fell out--and one
silver dollar.

"That belongs to William, before the law," said Ezekiel.




In Tenebras

A Parable

BY HOWARD PYLE


_One morning, after I had dressed myself and had left my room, I came
upon an entry which I had never before noticed, even in this my own
house. At the further end a door stood ajar, and wondering what was in
the room beyond, I traversed the long passageway and looked within.
There I saw a man sitting, with an open book lying upon his knees, who,
as I laid one hand upon the door and opened it a little wider, beckoned
to me to come and read what was written therein._

_A secret fear stirred and rustled in my heart, but I did not dare to
disobey. So, coming forward (gathering away my clothes lest they should
touch his clothes), I leaned forward and read these words:_

"WHAT SHALL A MAN DO THAT HE MAY GAIN THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN?"

_I did not need a moment to seek for an answer to the question. "That,"
said I, "is not difficult to tell, for it has been answered again and
again. He who would gain the kingdom of heaven must resist and subdue
the lusts of his heart; he must do good works to his neighbors; he must
fear his God. What more is there that man can do?"_

_Then the leaf was turned, and I read the Parable._


I.

The town of East Haven is the full equation of the American ideal worked
out to a complete and finished result. Therein is to be found all that
is best of New England intellectuality--well taught, well trained; all
that is best of solidly established New England prosperity; all that is
best of New England progressive radicalism, tempered, toned, and
governed by all that is best of New England conservatism, warmed to life
by all that is best and broadest of New England Christian liberalism. It
is the sum total of nineteenth-century American _cultus_, and in it is
embodied all that for which we of these days of New World life are
striving so hard. Its municipal government is a perfect model of a
municipal government; its officials are elected from the most worthy of
its prosperous middle class by voters every one of whom can not only
read the Constitution, but could, if it were required, analyze its laws
and by-laws. Its taxes are fairly and justly assessed, and are spent
with a well-considered and munificent liberality. Its public works are
the very best that can be compassed, both from an artistic and practical
stand-point. It has a free library, not cumbersomely large, but almost
perfect of its kind; and, finally, it is the boast of the community that
there is not a single poor man living within its municipal limits.

Its leisure class is well read and widely speculative, and its busy
class, instead of being jealous of what the other has attained, receives
gladly all the good that it has to impart.

All this ripeness of prosperity is not a matter of quick growth of a
recent date; neither is its wealth inherited and held by a few lucky
families. It was fairly earned in the heyday of New England commercial
activity that obtained some twenty-five or thirty years ago, at which
time it was the boast of East Haven people that East Haven
sailing-vessels covered the seas from India to India. Now that busy
harvest-time is passed and gone, and East Haven rests with opulent ease,
subsisting upon the well-earned fruits of good work well done.

With all this fulness of completion one might think that East Haven had
attained the perfection of its ideal. But no. Still in one respect it is
like the rest of the world; still, like the rest of the world, it is
attainted by one great nameless sin, of which it, in part and parcel, is
somehow guilty, and from the contamination of which even it, with all
its perfection of law and government, is not free. Its boast that there
are no poor within its limits is true only in a certain particular
sense. There are, indeed, no poor resident, tax-paying, voting citizens,
but during certain seasons of the year there are, or were, plenty of
tramps, and they were not accounted when that boast was made.

East Haven has clad herself in comely enough fashion with all those fine
garments of enlightened self-government, but underneath those garments
are, or were, the same vermin that infested the garments of so many
communities less clean--parasites that suck existence from God's gifts
to decent people. Indeed, that human vermin at one time infested East
Haven even more than the other and neighboring towns; perhaps just
because its clothing of civilization was more soft and warm than theirs;
perhaps (and upon the face this latter is the more likely explanation of
the two) because, in a very exaltation of enlightenment, there were no
laws against vagrancy. Anyhow, however one might account for their
presence, there the tramps were. One saw the shabby, homeless waifs
everywhere--in the highways, in the byways. You saw them slouching past
the shady little common, with its smooth greensward, where well-dressed
young ladies and gentlemen played at lawn-tennis; you saw them standing
knocking at the doors of the fine old houses in Bay Street to beg for
food to eat; you saw them in the early morning on the steps of the old
North Church, combing their shaggy hair and beards with their fingers,
after their night's sleep on the old colonial gravestones under the
rustling elms; everywhere you saw them--heavy, sullen-browed, brutish--a
living reproach to the well-ordered, God-fearing community of something
cruelly wrong, something bitterly unjust, of which they, as well as the
rest of the world, were guilty, and of which God alone knew the remedy.

No town in the State suffered so much from their infestation, and it was
a common saying in the town of Norwark--a prosperous manufacturing
community adjoining East Haven--that Dives lived in East Haven, and that
Lazarus was his most frequent visitor.

The East Haven people always felt the sting of the suggested sneer; but
what could they do? The poor were at their doors; they knew no immediate
remedy for that poverty; and they were too compassionate and too
enlightened to send the tramps away hungry and forlorn.

So Lazarus continued to come, and Dives continued to feed him at the
gate, until, by-and-by, a strange and unexpected remedy for the trouble
was discovered, and East Haven at last overcame its dirty son of Anak.


II.

Perhaps if all the votes of those ultra-intelligent electors had been
polled as to which one man in all the town had done most to insure its
position in the van of American progress; as to who best represented
the community in the matter of liberal intelligence and ripe culture; as
to who was most to be honored for steadfast rectitude and immaculate
purity of life; as to who was its highest type of enlightened
Christianity--an overwhelming if not unanimous vote would have been cast
for Colonel Edward Singelsby.

He was born of one of the oldest and best New England families; he had
graduated with the highest honors from Harvard, and finished his
education at Göttingen. At the outbreak of the rebellion he had left a
lucrative law practice and a probable judgeship to fight at the head of
a volunteer regiment throughout the whole war, which he did with signal
credit to himself, the community, and the nation at large. He was a
broad and profound speculative thinker, and the papers which he
occasionally wrote, and which appeared now and then in the more
prominent magazines, never failed to attract general and wide-spread
attention. His intelligence, clear-cut and vividly operating, instead of
leading him into the quicksands of scepticism, had never left the hard
rock of earnest religious belief inherited from ten generations of
Puritan ancestors. Nevertheless, though his feet never strayed from that
rock, his was too active and living a soul to rest content with the
arid face of a by-gone orthodoxy; God's rain of truth had fallen upon
him and it, and he had hewn and delved until the face of his rock
blossomed a very Eden of exalted Christianity. To sum up briefly and in
full, he was a Christian gentleman of the highest and most perfect type.

Besides his close and profound studies in municipal government, from
which largely had sprung such a flawless and perfect type as that of
East Haven, he was also interested in public charities, and the
existence of many of the beneficial organizations throughout the State
had been largely due to his persistent and untiring efforts. The
municipal reforms, as has been suggested, worked beautifully, perfectly,
without the grating of a wheel or the creaking of a joint; but the
public charities--somehow they did not work so well; they never did just
what was intended, or achieved just what was expected; their mechanism
appeared to be perfect, but, as is so universally the case with public
charities, they somehow lacked a soul.

It was in connection with the matter of public charities that the tramp
question arose. Colonel Singelsby grappled with it, as he had grappled
with so many matters of the kind. The solution was the crowning work of
his life, and the result was in a way as successful as it was
paradoxical and unexpected.

Connected with the East Haven Public Library was the lecture-room, where
an association, calling itself the East Haven Lyceum, and comprising in
its number some of the most advanced thinkers of the town, met on
Thursdays from November to May to discuss and digest matters social and
intellectual. More than one good thing that had afterward taken definite
shape had originated in the discussions of the Lyceum, and one winter,
under Colonel Singelsby's lead, the tramp question was taken up and
dissected.

He had, Colonel Singelsby said, studied that complex question very
earnestly and for some time, and to his mind it had resolved itself to
this: not how to suppress vagrancy, but how to make of the vagrant an
honest and useful citizen. Repressive laws were easily passed, but it
appeared to him that the only result achieved by them was to drive the
tramp into other sections where no such laws existed, and which sections
they only infested to a greater degree and in larger numbers. Nor in
these days of light was it, in his opinion, a sufficient answer to that
objection that it was the fault of those other communities that they did
not also pass repressive laws. The fact remained that they had not
passed them, and that the tramps did infest their precincts, and such
being the case, it was as clear as day (for that which injures some,
injures all) that the wrong of vagrancy was not corrected by merely
driving tramps over the limits of one town into those of another.
Moreover, there was a deeper and more interior reason against the
passage of such repressive laws; to his thinking it behooved society, if
it would root out this evil, to seek first the radix from which it drew
existence; it behooved them first to very thoroughly diagnose the
disease before attempting a hasty cure. "So let us now," said he, "set
about searching for this radix, and then so drive the spade of reform as
to remove it forever."

The discussion that followed opened a wide field for investigation, and
the conclusion finally reached during the winter was not unlike that so
logically deduced by Mr. Henry George at a later date. The East Haven
Lyceum, however, either did not think of or did not care to advocate
such a radical remedy as Mr. George proposed. They saw clearly enough
that, apart from the unequal distribution of wealth, which may perhaps
have been the prime cause of the trouble, idleness and thriftlessness
are acquired habits, just as industry and thrift are acquired habits,
and it seemed to them better to cure the ill habit rather than to upset
society and then to rebuild it again for the sake of benefiting the
ill-conditioned few.

So the result of the winter's talk was the founding of the East Haven
Refuge, of which much has since been written and said.

Those interested in such matters may perhaps remember the article upon
the Refuge published in one of the prominent magazines. A full
description of it was given in that paper. The building stood upon Bay
Street overlooking the harbor; it was one of the most beautiful
situations in the town; without, the building was architecturally plain,
but in perfect taste; within, it was furnished with every comfort and
convenience--a dormitory immaculately clean; a dining-room, large and
airy, where plain substantial food, cooked in the best possible manner,
was served to the inmates. There were three bath-rooms supplied with hot
and cold water, and there was a reading and a smoking-room provided not
only with all the current periodicals, but with chess, checkers, and
backgammon-boards.

At the same time that the Refuge was being founded and built, certain
municipal laws were enacted, according to which a tramp appearing within
the town limits was conveyed (with as little appearance of constraint as
possible) to the Refuge. There for four weeks he was well fed, well
clothed, well cared for. In return he was expected to work for eight
hours every day upon some piece of public improvement: the repaving of
Main Street with asphaltum blocks was selected by the authorities as the
initial work. At the end of four weeks the tramp was dismissed from the
Refuge clad in a neat, substantial, well-made suit of clothes, and with
money in his pocket to convey him to some place where he might, if he
chose, procure permanent work.

The Refuge was finished by the last of March, and Colonel Singelsby was
unanimously chosen by the board as superintendent, a position he
accepted very reluctantly. He felt that in so accepting he shouldered
the whole responsibility of the experiment that was being undertaken,
yet he could not but acknowledge that it was right for him to shoulder
that burden, who had been foremost both in formulating and advocating
the scheme, as well as most instrumental in carrying it to a practical
conclusion. So, as was said, he accepted, though very reluctantly.

The world at large was much disposed to laugh at and to ridicule all the
preparation that Dives of East Haven made to entertain his Lazarus.
Nevertheless, there were a few who believed very sincerely in the
efficacy of the scheme. But both those who believed and those who
scoffed agreed in general upon one point--that it was altogether
probable that East Haven would soon be overrun with such a wilderness of
tramps that fifty Refuges would not be able to supply them with refuge.

But who shall undertake to solve that inscrutable paradox, human
life--its loves, its hates?

The Refuge was opened upon the 1st of April; by the 29th there were
thirty-two tramps lodged in its sheltering arms, all working their eight
hours a day upon the repaving of Main Street. That same day--the
29th--five were dismissed from within its walls. Colonel Singelsby, as
superintendent, had a little office on the ground-floor of the main
building, opening out upon the street. At one o'clock, and just after
the Refuge dinner had been served, he stood beside his table with five
sealed envelopes spread out side by side upon it. Presently the five
outgoing guests slouched one by one into the room. Each was shaven and
shorn; each wore clean linen; each was clad in a neat, plain, gray suit
of tweed; each bore stamped upon his face a dogged, obstinate, stolid,
low-browed shame. The colonel gave each the money enclosed in the
envelope, thanked each for his service, inquired with pleasant
friendliness as to his future movements and plans, invited each to come
again to the Refuge if he chanced to be in those parts, shook each by a
heavy, reluctant hand, and bade each a good-by. Then the five slouched
out and away, leaving the town by back streets and byways; each with his
hat pulled down over his brows; each ten thousand times more humiliated,
ten thousand times more debased in his cleanliness, in his good clothes,
and with money in his pocket, than he had been in his dirt, his tatters,
his poverty.

They never came back to East Haven again.

The capacity of the Refuge was 50. In May there were 47 inmates, and
Colonel Singelsby began to apprehend the predicted overflow. The
overflow never came. In June there were 45 inmates; in July there were
27; in August there were 28; in September, 10; in October, 2; in
November, 1; in December there were none. The fall was very cold and
wet, and maybe that had something to do with the sudden falling off of
guests, for the tramp is not fond of cold weather. But even granting
that bad weather had something to do with the matter, the Refuge was
nevertheless a phenomenal, an extraordinary success--but upon very
different lines than Colonel Singelsby had anticipated; for even in this
the first season of the institution the tramps began to shun East Haven
even more sedulously than they had before cultivated its hospitality.
Even West Hampstead, where vagrancy was punished only less severely than
petty larceny, was not so shunned as East Haven with the horrid comforts
of its Refuge.


III.

As was said, the records of the Refuge showed that one inmate still
lingered in the sheltering arms of that institution during a part of
the month of November. That one was Sandy Graff.

Sandy Graff did not strictly belong to the great peregrinating leisure
class for whose benefit the Refuge had been more especially founded and
built. Those were strangers to the town, and came and went apparently
without cause for coming and going. Little or nothing was known of
such--of their name, of their life, of whence they came or whither their
footsteps led. But with Sandy Graff it was different; he belonged
identically to the place, and all the town knew him, the sinister
tragedy of his history, and all the why and wherefore that led to his
becoming the poor miserable drunken outcast--the town "bummer"--that he
was.

There is something bitterly enough pathetic in the profound abasement of
the common tramp--frouzy, unkempt, dirty, forlorn; without ambition
further than to fill his belly with the cold leavings from decent folks'
tables; without other pride than to clothe his dirty body with the
cast-off rags and tatters of respectability; without further motive of
life than to roam hither and yon--idle, useless, homeless, aimless. In
all this there is indeed enough of the pathetic, but Sandy Graff in his
utter and complete abasement was even more deeply, tragically sunken
than they. For them there was still some sheltering ægis of secrecy to
conceal some substratum in the uttermost depths of personal depravity;
but for Sandy--all the world knew the story of his life, his struggle,
his fall; all the world could see upon his blotched and bloated face the
outer sign of his inner lusts; and what deeper humiliation can there be
than for all one's world to know how brutish and obscene one may be in
the bottom of one's heart? What deeper shame may any man suffer than to
have his neighbors read upon his blasted front the stamp and seal of
all, all his heart's lust, set there not only as a warning and a lesson,
not only a visible proof how deep below the level of savagery it is
possible for a God-enlightened man to sink, but also for
self-gratulation of those righteous ones that they are not fallen from
God's grace as that man has fallen?

One time East Haven had been Sandy Graff's home, and it was now the
centre of his wanderings, which never extended further than the
immediately neighboring towns. At times he would disappear from East
Haven for weeks, maybe months; then suddenly he would appear again,
pottering aimlessly, harmlessly, around the streets or byways;
wretched, foul, boozed, and sodden with vile rum, which he had procured
no one knew how or where. Maybe at such times of reappearance he would
be seen hanging around some store or street corner, maundering with some
one who had known him in the days of his prosperity, or maybe he would
be found loitering around the kitchen or out-house of some pitying
Bay-Streeter, who also had known him in the days of his dignity and
cleanliness, waiting with helpless patience for scraps of cold victuals
or the dregs of the coffee-pot, for no one drove him away or treated him
with unkindness.

Sandy Graff's father had been a cobbler in Upper Main Street, and he
himself had in time followed the same trade in the same little,
old-fashioned, dingy, shingled, hip-roofed house. In time he had married
a good, sound-hearted, respectable farmer's daughter from a neck of land
across the bay, known as Pig Island, and had settled down to what
promised to be a decent, prosperous life.

So far as any one could see, looking from the outside, his life offered
all that a reasonable man could ask for; but suddenly, within a year
after he was married, his feet slipped from the beaten level pathway of
respectability. He began taking to drink.

Why it was that the foul fiend should have leaped astride of his neck,
no man can exactly tell. More than likely it was inheritance, for his
grandfather, who had been a ship-captain--some said a slave-trader--had
died of _mania a potu_, and it is one of those inscrutable rulings of
Divine Providence that the innocent ones of the third and fourth
generation shall suffer because of the sins of their forebears, who have
raised more than one devil to grapple with them, their children, and
children's children. Anyhow, Sandy fell from grace, and within three
years' time had become a confirmed drunkard.

Fortunately no children were born to the couple. But it was one of the
most sad, pitiful sights in the world to see Sandy's patient, sad-eyed
wife leading him home from the tavern, tottering, reeling, helpless,
sodden. Pitiful indeed! Pitiful even from the outside; but if one could
only have looked through that outer husk of visible life, and have
beheld the inner workings of that lost soul--the struggles, the
wrestling with the foul grinning devil that sat astride of him--how much
more would that have been pitiful! And then, if one could have seen and
have realized as the roots from which arose those inner workings, the
hopes, the longings for a better life that filled his heart during the
intervals of sobriety, if one could have sensed but one pang of that
hell-thirst that foreran the mortal struggle that followed, as that
again foreran the inevitable fall into his kennel of lust, and then,
last and greatest, if those righteous neighbors of his who never sinned
and never fell could only have seen the wakening, the bitter agony of
remorse, the groaning horror of self-abasement that ended the
debauchery--Ah! that, indeed, was something to pity beyond man's power
of pitying.

If Sandy's wife had only berated and abused him, if she had even cried
or made a sign of her heart-break, maybe his pangs of remorse might not
have been so deadly bitter and cruel; but her steadfast and unrelaxing
patience--it was that that damned him more than all else to his hell of
remorse.

At last came the end. One day Sandy went to New Harbor City to buy
leather for cobbling, and there his devil, for no apparent reason at
all, leaped upon him and flung him. For a week he saw or knew nothing
but a whirling vision of the world seen through rum-crazy eyes; then at
last he awoke to find himself hatless, coatless, filthy, unshaved,
blear-eyed, palsied. Not a cent of money was left, and so that day and
night, in spite of the deadly nausea that beset him and the trembling
weakness that hung like a leaden weight upon every limb, he walked all
the thirty-eight miles home again to East Haven. He reached there about
five o'clock, and in the still gray of the early dawning. Only a few
people were stirring in the streets, and as he slunk along close to the
houses, those whom he met turned and looked after him. No one spoke to
him or stopped him, as might possibly have been done had he come home at
a later hour. Every shred and filament of his poor remorseful heart and
soul longed for home and the comfort that his wife alone could give him,
and yet at the last corner he stopped for a quaking moment or so in the
face of the terror of her unreproachful patience. Then he turned the
corner--

Not a sign of his house was to be seen--nothing but an empty, gaping
blackness where it had stood before. _It had been burned to the ground!_

Why is it that God's curse rests very often and most heavily upon the
misfortunate? Why is it that He should crush the reeds that are bruised
beneath His heel? Why is it that He should seem so often to choose the
broken heart to grind to powder?

Sandy's wife had been burned to death in the fire!

From that moment Sandy Graff was lost, utterly and entirely lost. God,
for His terrible purposes, had taken away the one last thread that bound
the drowning soul to anything of decency and cleanliness. Now his devil
and he no longer struggled together; they walked hand in hand. He was
without love, without hope, without one iota that might bring a flicker
of light into the midnight gloom of his despairing soul.

After the first dreadful blast of his sorrow and despair had burned
itself out, he disappeared, no one knew whither. A little over a month
passed, and then he suddenly appeared again, drunken, maudlin, tearful.
Again he disappeared, again he reappeared, a little deeper sunken, a
little more abased, and henceforth that was his life. He became a part
of the town, and everybody, from the oldest to the youngest, knew him
and his story. He injured no one, he offended no one, and he never
failed, somehow or somewhere, to find food to eat, lodging for his
head, and clothing to cover his nakedness. He had been among the very
first to enter the Refuge, and now, in November, he was the last one
left within its walls. He was the only one of the guests who returned,
and perhaps he would not have done so had not his aching restlessness
driven him back to suffer an echo of agony in the place where his
damnation had been inflicted upon him.

Between Colonel Singelsby upon the one side, the wise, the pure, the
honored servant of God, and Sandy Graff upon the other side, the vile,
the filthy, the ugly, the debased, there yawned a gulf as immeasurably
wide and deep as that which gaps between heaven and hell.


IV.

The winter of the year that saw the opening of the East Haven Refuge was
one of the most severe that New England had known for generations. It
was early in January that there came the great snowstorm that spread its
two or three feet of white covering all the way from Maine to Virginia,
and East Haven, looking directly in the teeth of the blast that came
swirling and raging across the open harbor, felt the full force of the
icy tempest. The streets of the town lay a silent desert of drifting
whiteness, for no one who could help it was abroad from home that bitter
morning.

The hail and snow spat venomously against the windows of Dr. Hunt's
office in one of those fine old houses on Bay Street overlooking the
harbor. The wind roared sonorously through the naked, tortured branches
of the great elm-trees, and the snow piled sharp and smooth in fence
corners and around north gables of the house.

Dr. Hunt shuddered as he looked out of the window, for while all his
neighbors sat snug and warm around their hearths, he had to face the
raging of the icy blast upon the dull routine of his business of
mercy--the dull routine of bread-getting by comforting the afflictions
of others. Then the sleigh drew up to the gate, the driver already
powdered with the gathering whiteness, and Dr. Hunt struggled into his
overcoat, tied the ribbons of his fur cap under his chin, and drew on
his beaver gloves. Then, with one final shudder, he opened his office
door, and stepped out into the drift upon the step.

Instantly he started back with a cry: he had trodden upon a man covered
and hidden by the snow.

It was Sandy Graff. How long he had been lying there, no one might tell;
a few moments more, and the last flicker of life would have twinkled
mercifully out. The doctor had him out of the snow in a moment, and in
the next had satisfied himself that Sandy was not dead.

Even as he leaned over the still white figure, feeling the slow faint
beating of the failing heart, the doctor was considering whether he
should take Sandy into the house or not. The decision was almost
instantaneous: it would be most inconvenient, and the Refuge was only a
stone's-throw away. So the doctor did not even disturb the household
with the news of what had happened. He and the driver wrapped the
unconscious figure in a buffalo-robe and laid it in the sleigh.

As the doctor was about to step into the sleigh, some one suddenly laid
a heavy hand upon his shoulder. He turned sharply, for he had not heard
the approaching footsteps, muffled by the thick snow, and he had been
too engrossed with attention to Sandy Graff to notice anything else.

It was young Harold Singelsby; his face was very white and drawn, and
in the absorption of his own suppressed agitation he did not even look
at Sandy. "Doctor," said he, in a hoarse, constrained voice, "for God's
sake, come home with me as quickly as you can: father's very sick!"

       *       *       *       *       *

_I had often wondered how it is with a man when he closes his life to
this world. Looking upon the struggling efforts of a dying man to retain
his hold upon his body, I had often wondered whether his sliding to
unconsciousness was like the dissolving of the mind to sleep in this
life._

_That death was not like sleep was at such times patent enough--it was
patent enough that it was the antithesis of sleep. Sleep is peaceful;
death is convulsed--sleep is rest; death is separation._

_That which I here following read in the book as it lay open upon the
man's knees seemed in a way dark, broken, indistinct with a certain grim
obscurity; yet if I read truly therein I distinguished this great
difference between death and sleep: Sleep is the cessation of
consciousness from an interior life to exterior thought; death is the
cessation of consciousness from the exterior mind to an interior life._

       *       *       *       *       *

When Sandy Graff opened his eyes once more, it was to find himself again
within the sheltering arms of the Refuge. That awakening was almost to a
full and clear consciousness. It was with no confusion of thought and
but little confusion of sight, except for a white mist that seemed to
blur the things he saw.

He knew, instantly and vividly, where he was. Instantly and vividly
everything found its fit place in his mind--the long rows of cots; the
bald, garishly white walls, cold and unbeautiful in their immaculate
cleanliness; the range of curtainless windows looking out upon the
chill, thin gray of the winter day. He was not surprised to find himself
in the Refuge; it did not seem strange to him, and he did not wonder. He
dimly remembered stumbling through the snow-drifts and then falling
asleep, overpowered by an irresistible and leaden drowsiness. But just
where it was he fell, he could not recall.

He saw with dim sight that three or four people were gathered about his
bed. Two of them were rubbing his legs and feet, but he could not feel
them. It was this senselessness of feeling that first brought the
jarring of the truth to him. The house-steward stood near by, and Sandy
turned his face weakly toward him. "Mr. Jackson," said he, faintly, "I
think I'm going to die."

       *       *       *       *       *

He turned his face again (now toward the opened window), and was staring
unwinkingly at a white square of light, and it seemed to him to grow
darker and darker. At first he thought that it was the gathering of
night, but faint and flickering as were his senses, there was something
beneath his outer self that dreaded it--that dreaded beyond measure the
coming of that darkness. After one or two efforts, in which his stiff
tongue refused to form the words he desired to speak, he said, at last,
"I can't see; it's--getting--dark."

       *       *       *       *       *

He was dimly, darkly conscious of hurry and bustle around him, of voices
calling to send for the doctor, of hurrying hither and thither, but it
all seemed faint and distant. Everything was now dark to his sight, and
it was as though all this concerned another; but as outer things slipped
further and further from him, the more that inner life struggled,
tenaciously, dumbly, hopelessly, to retain its grip upon the outer
world. Sometimes, now and then, to this inner consciousness, it seemed
almost as though it were rising again out of the gathering blackness.
But it was only the recurrent vibrations of ebbing powers, for still
again, and even before it knew it, that life found itself quickly deeper
and more hopelessly in the tremendous shadow into which it was being
inexorably engulfed.

He himself knew nothing now of those who stood about the bed, awe-struck
and silent, looking down upon him; he himself sensed nothing of the
harsh convulsive breathing, and of all the other grim outer signs of the
struggle. But still, deep within, that combat of resistance to death
waged as desperately, as vividly, as ever.

       *       *       *       *       *

A door opened, and at the sudden noise the dissolving life
recrystallized for one brief instant, and in that instant the dying man
knew that Dr. Hunt was standing beside his bed, and heard him say, in a
slow, solemn voice, sounding muffled and hollow, as though from far away
and through an empty space, "Colonel Singelsby has just died."

Then the cord, momentarily drawn tense, was relaxed with a snap, and
the last smoky spark was quenched in blackness.

Dr. Hunt's fingers were resting lightly upon the wrist. As the last deep
quivering breath expired with a quavering sigh, he laid the limp hand
back upon the bed, and then, before he arose, gently closed the stiff
eyelids over the staring glassy eyes, and set the gaping jaws back again
into a more seemly repose.


V.

_So all this first part of the Parable had, as I read it, a reflected
image of what was real and actual; of what belonged to the world of men
as I knew that world. The people of whom it spoke moved and lived, maybe
not altogether as real men of flesh and blood move and live, but
nevertheless with a certain life of their own--images of what was real.
All these things, I say (excepting perhaps the last), were clear and
plain enough after a certain fashion, but that which followed showed
those two of whom the story was written--the good man and the wicked
man--stripped of all their outer husk of fleshly reality, and walking
and talking not as men of flesh and blood, but as men in the spirit._

_So, though I knew that which I was reading might indeed be as true, and
perhaps truer, than that other which I had read, and though I knew that
to such a state I myself must come, and that as these two suffered, I
myself must some time suffer in the same kind, if not in the same
degree, nevertheless it was all strangely unreal, and being set apart
from that which I knew, was like life as seen in a dream._

_Yet let it not be thought that this Parable is all a vague dream, for
there are things which are more real than reality, and being so, must be
couched in different words from such as describe the things that one's
bodily eyes behold of the grim reality of this world. Such things, being
so told, may seem as strange and as unsubstantial as that which is
unreal, instead of like that which is real._

_So that which is now to be read must be read as the other has been
read--not as a likeness of life in its inner being, but as an image of
that life._

       *       *       *       *       *

Sandy Graff awoke, and opened his eyes. At first he thought that he was
still within the dormitory of the Refuge, for there before him he saw
cold, bare white walls immaculately clean. Upon either hand was the row
of beds, each with its spotless coverlet, and in front was the long line
of curtainless windows looking out upon the bright daylight.

But as his waking senses gathered to a more orderly clearness, he saw
very soon that the place in which he was was very different from the
Refuge. Even newly awakened, and with his brain clouded and obscured by
the fumes of sleep, he distinguished at once that the strange, clear,
lucid brilliancy of the light which came in through the row of windows
was very different from any light that his eyes had ever before seen.
Then, as his mind opened wider and fuller and clearer, and as one by one
the objects which surrounded him began to take their proper place in his
awakened life, he saw that there were many people around, and that most
of the beds were occupied, and in every case by a man. The room in which
he lay was somewhat longer than the dormitory of the Refuge, and was
connected at the further end with what appeared to be a sort of
waiting-room beyond. In and out of the connecting doorway people were
coming and going. Some of these seemed to be friends of those who were
lying in the beds, being in every case led to some particular bedside,
the occupant of which had newly awakened; others, who seemed to be
attendants of the place, moved constantly hither and thither, busying
themselves around other of the beds, where lay such as seemed to need
attention.

Sandy looked slowly around him from left to right. Some of the occupants
of the beds--and one of these lay in the cot next to him--were not yet
awake, and he saw, with a sort of awe, that each of these lay strangely
like a dead man--still, motionless, the face covered with a linen
napkin. Two of the attendants seemed to have these sleepers especially
in their charge, moving continually hither and thither, to the bedside
first of one and then another, evidently to see if there were yet any
signs of waking. As Sandy continued watching them, he saw them at last
softly and carefully lift a napkin from one of the faces, whereupon the
man immediately awoke and sat up.

This occurred in a bed not very far from where he himself lay, and he
watched all that passed with a keen and thrilling interest. The man had
hardly awakened when word was passed down the length of the room to the
antechamber beyond. Apparently some friends of the sleeper were waiting
for this word to be brought to them, for there entered directly two
women and a man from the further doorway. The three came straight to the
bed in which the man lay, and with great noise of rejoicing seemed to
welcome the new-comer. They helped him to arise, handed him his clothes
piece by piece from the chair at the bedside, and the man began dressing
himself.

It was not until then, and until his ear caught some stray words of
those that were spoken, that Sandy began to really realize where he was
and what had happened to him. Then suddenly a great and awful light
broke upon him--he had died and had come to life again--his living
senses had solved the greatest of all mysteries--the final mystery; the
mystery of eternity.

It happens nearly always, it is said, that the first awakening thought
of those who die is of the tremendous happening that has come upon them.
So it was with Sandy. For a while he lay quite still, with his hands
folded, and a strange awful brooding, almost as though of fear,
breathlessly wrapping his heart roundabout. But it was not for a long
time that he lay thus, for suddenly, like a second flash of lightning in
the gathering darkness of a cloud, the thought shot through him that no
friends had come to meet and to greet him as they had come to meet and
greet these others. Why had his wife not come to him? He turned his
head; the chair beside him was empty; he was without even clothes to
wear.

For a while he lay with closed eyes like one stunned. Then a sudden
voice broke upon his ear, and he opened his eyes again and looked up. A
tall man with calm face--almost a stern face--stood beside the bed
looking down at him.

Somehow Sandy knew that he had no business in the bed now that he was
awake, and, with a half-muttered apology, he made a motion as if to
arise, then, remembering that there were no clothes for him to wear, he
sank back again upon the pillow.

"Come," said the man, giving his cane a rap upon the floor, "you must
get up; you have already been here longer than the law allows."

Sandy had been too long accustomed to self-abasement in the world he had
left to question the authority of the man who spoke to him. "I can't
help lying here, sir," said he, helplessly. "I've no clothes to wear."
Then he added: "Maybe if you let my wife come to me, she'd bring me
something to wear. I hear say, sir, that I've died, and that this is
heaven. I don't know why she hasn't come to me. Everybody else here
seems to have somebody to meet him but me."

"This is not heaven," said the man.

A long silence followed. "It's not hell, is it?" said Sandy, at last.

The man apparently did not choose to answer the question. "Come," said
he, "you waste time in talk. Get up. Wrap the sheet around you, and come
with me."

"Where are you going to take me?" said Sandy.

"No matter," said the other. "Do as I tell you." His voice was calm,
dispassionate; there was nothing of anger in it, but there was that
which said he must be obeyed.

Sandy drew the sheet upon which he lay about him, and then shuddering,
half with nervous dread and half with cold, arose from the warm bed in
which he lay.

The other turned, and without saying a word led the way down the length
of the room, Sandy following close behind. The noise of talking ceased
as they passed by the various beds, and all turned and looked after the
two, some smiling, some laughing outright. Sandy, as he marched down the
length of the room, heard the rustling laugh and felt an echo of the
same dull humiliation he had felt when he had marched with the other
guests of the East Haven Refuge to their daily task of paving Main
Street. There as now the people laughed, and there in the same manner as
they did now; and as he had there slouched in the body, so now he
slouched heavily in the spirit after his conductor.

Opposite the end of the room where was the door through which the
friends and visitors came and went was another door, low and narrow.
Sandy's guide led the way directly to it, lifted the latch, and opened
it. It led to a long entry beyond, gloomy and dark. This passageway was
dully lighted by a small square window, glazed with clouded glass, at
the further end of the narrow hall, upon which fronted a row of closed
doors. The place was very damp and chill; a cold draught of air blew
through the length of it, and Sandy, as the other closed the door
through which they had just entered, and so shut out the noise beyond,
heard distinctly the sound of running water. Without turning to the left
or to the right, Sandy's guide led the way down the hall, stopping at
last when he had reached a door near the further end. He drew a bunch of
keys from his pocket, chose one from among them, fitted it into the
lock, and turned it.

"Go in there," said he, "and wash yourself clean, and then you shall
have clothes to wear."

Sandy entered, and the door was closed behind him. The place in which he
found himself was very cold, and the floor beneath his feet was wet and
slimy. His teeth chattered and his limbs shuddered as he stood looking
around him. The noise of flowing water sounded loud and clear through
the silence; it was running from a leaden pipe into a wooden tank,
mildewed and green with mould, that stood in the middle of the room. The
stone-walls around, once painted white, were now also stained and
splotched with great blotches of green and russet dampness. The only
light that lit the place came in through a small, narrow, slatted window
close to the ceiling, and opposite the doorway which he had entered. It
was all gloomy, ugly, repellent.

There were some letters painted in red at the head of the wooden tank.
He came forward and read them, not without some difficulty, for they
were nearly erased.

_This is the water of death!_

Sandy started back so suddenly that he nearly fell upon the slippery
floor. A keen pang of sudden terror shot through him; then a thought
that some grotesque mockery was being played upon him. A second thought
blew the first away like a breath of smoke, for it told him that there
could be no mockery in the place to which he had come. His waking and
all that had happened to him had much of nightmare grotesquery about it,
but there was no grotesquery or no appearance of jesting about that man
who had guided him to the place in which he now found himself. There was
a calm, impassive, unemotional sternness about all that he said and
did--official, automatonlike--that precluded the possibility of any jest
or meaningless form. This must indeed be the _water of death_, and his
soul told him that it was meant for him.

He turned dully, and walked with stumbling steps to the door. He felt
blindly for a moment for the latch, then his hand touched it, and he
raised it with a click. The sharp sound jarred through the silence, and
Sandy did not open the door. He stood for a little while staring
stupidly down upon the floor with his palm still upon the latch. Was the
man who had brought him there waiting outside? Behind him lay the _water
of death_, but he dared not open the door and chance the facing of that
man. The sheet had fallen away from him, and now he stood entirely
naked. He let the latch fall back to its place--carefully, lest it
should again make a noise, and that man should hear it. Then he gathered
the now damp and dirty sheet about him, and crouched down upon the cold
floor close to the crack of the door.

There he sat for a while, every now and then shuddering convulsively
with cold and terror, then by-and-by he began to cry.

There is something abjectly, almost brutally, pathetic in the ugly
squalor of a man's tears. Sandy Graff crying, and now and then wiping
his eyes with the damp and dirty sheet, was almost a more ugly sight
than he had been in the maudlin bathos of his former drunkenness.

So he sat for a long time, until finally his crying ended, only for a
sudden sob now and then, and he only crouched, wondering dully. At last
he slowly arose, gathering the sheet still closer around him, and
creeping step by step to the tank, looked down into its depth. The water
was as clear as crystal; he dipped his hand into it--it was as cold as
ice. Then he dropped aside the sheet, and stood as naked as the day he
was born. He stepped into the water.

       *       *       *       *       *

A deathly faintness fell upon him, and he clutched at the edge of the
tank; but even as he clutched his sight failed, and he felt himself
sinking down into the depths.

"Help!" he cried, hoarsely; and then the water closed blackly over his
head.

       *       *       *       *       *

He felt himself suddenly snatched out from the tank, warm towels were
wrapped about him, his limbs were rubbed with soft linen, and at last he
opened his eyes. He still heard the sound of running water, but now the
place in which he was was no longer dark and gloomy. Some one had flung
open the slatted window, and a great beam of warm, serene sunlight
streamed in, and lay in a dazzling white square upon the wet floor. Two
men were busied about him. They had wrapped his body in a soft warm
blanket, and were wiping dry his damp, chilled, benumbed hands and feet.

"What does this mean?" said Sandy, faintly. "Was I not then to die,
after all? Was not that the _water of death_?"

"_The water of death?_" said they. "You did not read the words aright;
that was _the water of life_." They helped him dress himself in his
clothes--clothes not unlike those which the East Haven Refuge had given
its outgoing guests, only, somehow, these did not make him feel
humiliated and abased as those had made him feel. Then they led him out
of that place. They traversed the same long passageway through which he
had come before, and so came to the bedroom which he had left. The
tenants were all gone now, and the attendants were busied spreading the
various beds with clean linen sheets and coverlets, as though for fresh
arrivals.

No one seemed to pay any attention to him. His conductors led the way to
the anteroom which Sandy had seen beyond.

A woman was sitting patiently looking out of the window. She turned her
head as they entered, and Sandy, when he saw her face, stood suddenly
still, as though turned to stone. _It was his wife!_


VI.

With Colonel Singelsby was no such nightmare awakening as with Sandy
Graff; with him, were no such ugly visions and experiences; with him was
no squalor and discomfort. Yet he also opened his eyes upon a room so
like that upon which they had closed that at first he thought that he
was still in the world. There was the same soft bed, the same warmth of
ease and comfort, the same style of old-fashioned furniture. There were
the curtained windows, the pictures upon the wall, the bright warm fire
burning in the grate.

At first he saw all these things drowsily, as one does upon newly
awakening. With him, as with Sandy, it was only when his conscious life
had opened wide and clear enough to observe and to recognize who they
were that were gathered around him that with a keen, almost agonizing
thrill he realized where he was and what had befallen him. Upon one side
of his bed stood his son Hubert; upon the other side stood his brother
James. The one had died ten, the other nineteen years before. Of all
those who had gone from the world which he himself had just left, these
stood the nearest to him, and now, in his resurrection, his opening eyes
first saw these two. They and other relatives and friends helped him to
arise and dress, as Sandy had seen the poor wretches in the place in
which he had awakened raised from their beds and dressed by their
friends.

       *       *       *       *       *

All Colonel Singelsby's teachings had told him that this was not so
different from the world he had left behind. Nevertheless, although he
was prepared somewhat for it, it was wonderful to him how alike the one
was to the other. The city, the streets, the people coming and going,
the stores, the parks, the great houses--all were just as they were in
the world of men. He had no difficulty in finding his way about the
streets. There, in comfortable houses of a better class, were many of
his friends; others were not to be found; some, he was told, had
ascended higher; others, he was also told, had descended lower.

Among other places, Colonel Singelsby found himself during the afternoon
in the house of one with whom he had been upon friendly, almost
intimate terms in times past in the world. Colonel Singelsby remembered
hearing that the good man had died a few months before he himself had
left the world. He wondered what had become of him, and then in a little
while he found himself in his old friend's house. It had been many years
since he had seen him. He remembered him as a benign, venerable old
gentleman, and he had been somewhat surprised to find that he was still
living in the town, instead of having ascended to a higher state.

The old gentleman still looked outwardly venerable, still outwardly
benign, but now there was under his outer seeming a somewhat of restless
querulousness, a something of uneasy discontent, that Colonel Singelsby
did not remember to have seen there before. They talked together about
many things, chiefly of those in the present state of existence in which
they found themselves. It was all very new and vivid upon Colonel
Singelsby's mind, but the reverend gentleman seemed constantly to forget
that he was in another world than that which he had left behind. It
seemed to be always with an effort that he brought himself to talk of
the world in which he lived as the world of spirits. The visit was
somehow unpleasant to Colonel Singelsby. He was impressed with a certain
air of intolerance exhibited by the other. His mind seemed to dwell more
upon the falsity of the old things than upon the truth of the new, and
he seemed to take a certain delight in showing how and in what everybody
but those of his own creed erred and fell short of the Divine intent,
and not the least disagreeable part of the talk to Colonel Singelsby was
that the other's words seemed to find a sort of echo in his own mind.

At last he proposed a walk, and the other, taking his hat and stick,
accompanied him for a little distance upon the way. The talk still clung
much to the same stem to which it had adhered all along.

"It is a very strange thing," said the reverend gentleman, "but a great
many people who have come to this town since I came hither have left it
again to ascend, as I have been told, to a higher state. I think there
must have been some mistake, for I cannot see how it is possible--and in
fact our teachings distinctly tell us that it is impossible--for one to
ascend to a higher state without having accepted the new truths of the
new order of things."

Colonel Singelsby did not make answer. He was not only growing tired of
the subject itself, but of his old friend as well.

They were at that moment crossing an angle of a small park shaded by
thin, spindly trees. As the Colonel looked up he saw three men and a
woman approaching along the same path and under the flickering shadows.
Two of the men walked a little in advance, the other walked with the
woman. There was something familiar about two of the group, and Colonel
Singelsby pointed at them with his finger.

"Who are they?" said he. "I am sure there is somebody I know."

The other adjusted his glasses and looked. "I do not know," said he,
"except that one of the men is a new-comer. We somehow grow to know who
are new-comers by the time we have lived here a little while."

"Dear me!" cried Colonel Singelsby, stopping abruptly, "I know that man.
I did not know that he had come here too. I wonder where they are
going?"

"I think," said the reverend gentleman, dryly--"I think that this is
one of those cases of which I just spoke to you. I judge from the
general appearance of the party that they are about to ascend, as they
call it here, to a higher state."

"That is impossible!" said Colonel Singelsby. "That man is a poor
wretched creature whom I have helped with charity again and again, it
cannot be that he is to go to a higher state, for he is not fit for it.
If he is to be taken anywhere, it must be to punishment."

The other shrugged his shoulders and said nothing, he had seen such
cases too often during his sojourn to be deceived.

The little party had now come close to the two, and Colonel Singelsby
stepped forward with all his old-time frank kindness of manner. "Why,
Sandy," said he, "I did not know that you also had come here."

"Yes, sir," said Sandy; "I died the same night you did."

"Dear me!" said the Colonel, "that is very singular, very singular
indeed! Where are you going now, Sandy?"

"I don't know," said Sandy; "these gentlemen here are taking me
somewhere, I don't know where. This is my wife," said he. "Don't you
remember her, sir?"

"Oh yes," said the Colonel, with his most pleasant air, "I remember her
very well, but of course I am not so much surprised to see her here as I
am to see you. But have you no idea where you are going?" he continued.

"No," said Sandy; "but perhaps these gentlemen can tell you." And he
looked inquiringly at his escort, who stood calmly listening to what was
said.

       *       *       *       *       *

_So far, the Parable, as I had read it, progressed onward with some
coherence and concatenation, a coherence and concatenation growing
perhaps more disjointed as it advanced. Now it began to be broken with
interjectory sentences, and just here was one, the tenor of which I
could not altogether understand, but have since comprehended more or
less clearly. I cannot give its exact words, but only its general form._

_"O wretched man," it said, "how pitiful are thy vain efforts and
strivings to keep back by thine own strength that fiery flood of hell
which grows and increases to overwhelm thy soul! If the inflowing of
good which Jehovah vouchsafes is infinite, only less infinite is the
outflowing of that which thou callest evil and wickedness. How, then,
canst thou hope to stand against it and to conquer? How canst thou hope
to keep back that raging torrent of fire and of flame with the crumbling
unbaked bricks of thine own soul's making? Poor fool! Thou mayst
endeavor, thou mayst strive, thou mayst build thy wall of defence higher
and higher, fearing God, and living a life of virtue, but by-and-by thou
wilt reach the end, and then wilt find thou canst build no higher! Then
how vain shall have been thy life of resistance! First that flood shall
trickle over the edge of thy defence; then it shall run a stream the
breadth of a man's hand; then it shall gush forth a torrent; then,
bursting over and through and around, it shall sweep away all that thou
hast so laboriously built up, and shall rush, howling, roaring, raging,
and burning through thy soul with ten thousand times the fury and
violence that it would have done if thou hadst not striven to keep it
back, if thou hadst not resisted and fought against it. For bear this in
mind: Christ said he came not to call the good to repentance, but the
evil, and if thou art full of thine own, how then canst thou hope to
receive of a God that asketh not for sacrifice, but for love?"_

_Hence again the story resumed._

       *       *       *       *       *

Colonel Singelsby had not before noticed the two men who were with
Sandy, now he observed them more closely. They were tall, middle-aged
men, with serious, placid, unemotional faces. Each carried a long white
staff, the end of which rested upon the ground. There was about them
something somehow different from anything Colonel Singelsby had ever
seen before. They were most quiet, courteous men, but there was that in
their personal appearance that was singularly unpleasant to Colonel
Singelsby. Why, he could not tell, for they were evidently gentlemen,
and, from their bearing, men of influence. He turned to Sandy again.

"How has it been with you since you have been here?" said he.

"It has been very hard with me," said Sandy, patiently; "very hard
indeed; but I hope and believe now that the worst is over, and that
by-and-by I shall be happy, and not have any more trouble."

"I trust so, indeed," said the Colonel; "but do not hope for too much,
Sandy. Even the best men coming to this world are not likely to be rid
of their troubles at once, and it is not to be hoped for that you, after
your ill-spent life, should find your lot easier than theirs."

"I know, sir," said Sandy, "and I am very sorry."

There was a meek acceptance of the Colonel's dictum that grated somehow
unpleasantly upon the Colonel's ears. He would rather that Sandy had
made some protest against that dictum. He approached half a step and
looked more keenly at the other, and then for the first time he saw that
some great, some radical, some tremendous change had happened. The man
before him was no doubt Sandy Graff, but all that was low-browed, evil,
foul, was gone, as though it had been washed away, and in its place was
a translucent, patient meekness, almost like--There was something so
terribly vital in that change that Colonel Singelsby shuddered before
it. He looked and looked, and then he passed the back of his hand across
his eyes. "All this is very unreal," said he, turning to his friend the
minister. "It is like a dream. I begin to feel as though nothing was
real. Surely it is not possible that magic changes can go on, and yet I
cannot understand all these things in the least."

For answer, the reverend gentleman shrugged his shoulders almost sourly.

"Gentlemen," said Colonel Singelsby, turning abruptly upon Sandy's
escort, "let me ask you is this a certain man whom I used to know as
Sandy Graff?"

One of the men nodded his head.

"And will you tell me," said he, "another thing? Will you kindly tell me
where you are taking him?"

"We are about to take him," said the man, looking steadily at the
Colonel as he answered--"we are about to take him to the outskirts of
the First Kingdom."

At the answer Colonel Singelsby actually fell back a pace in his
amazement. It was almost as though a blow had fallen upon him. "The
outskirts of the First Kingdom?" said he. "Did I understand you? The
outskirts of the First Kingdom? Surely there is some mistake here! It is
not possible that this man, who died only yesterday, filthy and polluted
with iniquity, stinking in the nostrils of God with ten thousand
indulged and gratified lusts--it is not possible that you intend taking
him to that land, passing by me, who all my life have lived to my best
endeavors in love to God and my neighbor?"

It was the voice of his minister that broke the answer. "Yes, they do,"
said he, sharply; "that is just what they do mean. They do mean to take
him, and they do mean to leave us, for such is the law in this dreadful
place. We, the children of light, are nothing, and they, the fuel of
hell, are everything. Have I not been telling you so?"

Colonel Singelsby had almost forgotten the presence of his acquaintance.
He felt very angry at his interference, and somehow he could no longer
govern his anger as he used to do. He turned upon him and fixed him with
a frown, and then he observed for the first time that a little crowd had
begun gathering, and now stood looking on, some curious and unsmiling,
some grinning. The Colonel drew himself to his height, and looked
haughtily about him. They who grinned began laughing. And now, at last,
it was come Colonel Singelsby's turn to feel as Sandy Graff had felt--as
though all that was happening to him was happening in some hideous
nightmare dream. As in a dream, the balancing weights of reasoning and
morality began to melt before the heat of that which burned within; as
in a dream, the uncurbed inner motives began to strive furiously. Then a
sudden fierce anger, quite like the savage irrational anger of an ugly
dream, flamed up quickly and fiercely. He opened his lips as though to
vent his rage, but for an instant his tottering reason regained a
momentary poise. Checking himself with an effort ten thousand times
greater than that he would have used in his former state and in the
world, he bowed his head upon his breast and stood for a little while
with fingers interlocked, clinching his trembling hands together. So he
stood for a while, brooding, until at last Sandy and his escort made a
motion as if to pass by. Then he spoke again.

"Stop a bit!" said he, looking up--"stop a bit!" His voice was hoarse
and constrained, and he looked neither to the right nor to the left, but
straight at that one of the men to whom he had spoken before. "Sir,"
said he, and then clearing his husky voice--"sir," again, "I have
learned a lesson--the greatest lesson of my life! I have looked into my
heart, and I have seen--I have seen myself--God help me,
gentlemen!--I--maybe I am no better than this man."

The crowd, which had been increasing, as crowds do, began to jeer at the
words, for, like most crowds, it was of a nether sort, and enjoyed the
unusual sight of the gentleman and the aristocrat abasing and
humiliating himself before the reformed drunkard.

At the sound of that ugly jeering laugh Colonel Singelsby quivered as
though under the cut of a lancet, but he never removed his eyes from the
man to whom he spoke. For a moment or two he bit his nether lip in his
effort for self-control, and then repeated, in a louder and perhaps
harsher voice, "I am no better than this man!" He paused for a moment,
and the crowd ceased its jeering to hear what he had to say. "I ask only
this," he said, "that you will take me where you are taking him, and
that I may enjoy such happiness as he is about to enjoy."

Instantly a great roar of laughter went up from the crowd, which had now
gathered to some twenty or thirty souls. The man to whom Colonel
Singelsby had spoken shook his head calmly and impassively.

"It cannot be," said he.

Colonel Singelsby turned white to the very lips, his eyes blazed, and
his breath came thick and heavily. His nostrils twitched spasmodically,
but still, with a supreme effort--a struggle so terrible that few men
happily may ever know it or experience it--he once more controlled the
words that sprang to his lips and struggled for utterance. He swallowed
and swallowed convulsively. "Sir," said he at last, in a voice so
hoarse, so horribly constrained, that it seemed almost to rend him as it
forced utterance--"sir, surely I am mistaken in what I understand; it is
little I ask you, and surely not unjust. Yesterday this man was a vile,
debauched drunkard; surely that does not make him fitter for heaven!
Yesterday I was a God-fearing, law-abiding man, surely that does not
make me unfit! I am not unfit, am I?"

"You are not yet fit for heaven," answered the man, with impassive
calmness. And again, for the third time, the crowd roared with evil
laughter.

Within Colonel Singelsby's soul that fiery flood was now lashing
dreadfully close to the summit of its barriers. His face was as livid as
death, and his hands were clinched till the nails cut into his palm.
"Let me understand for once and for all, for I confess I cannot
understand all this. You say he is to go, and that I am not to go! Is
it, then, God's will and God's justice that because this man for twenty
years has led a life of besotted sin and indulgence, and because I for
sixty years have feared God and loved my neighbor, that he is to be
chosen and I am to be left?"

The man did not reply in words, but in the steady look of his unwinking
eyes the other read his answer.

"Then," gasped Colonel Singelsby, and as he spoke he shook his clinched
and trembling fist against the still, blue sky overhead--"then, if that
be God's justice, may it be damned, for I want none of it."

Then came the end, swiftly, completely. For the fourth time the crowd
laughed, and at the sound those floodgates so laboriously built up
during a lifetime of abstinence were suddenly burst asunder and fell
crashing, and a burning flood of hell's own rage and madness rushed
roaring and thundering into his depicted, empty soul, flaming, blazing,
consuming like straws every precept of righteousness, every fear of God,
and Colonel Edward Singelsby, the one-time Christian gentleman, the
one-time upright son of grace, the one-time man of law and God, was
transformed instantly and terribly into--what? Was it a livid devil from
hell? He cursed the jeering crowd, and at the sound of his own curses a
blindness fell upon him, and he neither knew what he said nor what he
did. His good old friend, who had accompanied him so far and until now
had stood by him, suddenly turned, and maybe fearing lest some
thunderbolt of vengeance should fall upon them from heaven and consume
them all, he elbowed himself out of the crowd and hurried away. As for
the wretched madman, in his raging fury, it was not the men who had
forbidden him heaven whom he strove to rend and tear limb from limb, but
poor, innocent, harmless Sandy Graff. The crowd swayed and jostled this
way and that, and as madness begets madness, the curses that fell from
one pair of lips found an echo in curses that leaped from others. Sandy
shrunk back appalled before the hell-blast that breathed upon him, and
he felt his wife clutch him closer. Only two of those that were there
stood unmoved; they were the two men who acted as Sandy's escort. As the
tide of madness seemed to swell higher, they calmly stepped forward and
crossed their staves before their charge. There was something in their
action full of significance for those who knew. Instantly the crowd
melted away like snow under a blast of fire. Had there not been two men
present more merciful than the rest, it is hard to say what terrible
thing might not have happened to Colonel Edward Singelsby--deaf and dumb
and blind to everything but his own rage. These two clutched him by the
arms and dragged him back.

"God, man!" they cried, "what are you doing? Do you not see they are
angels?"

They dragged him back to a bench that stood near, and there held him,
whilst he still beat the air with his fist and cried out hoarse curses,
and even as they so held him, two other men came--two men dark, silent,
sinister--and led him away.

Then the other and his wife and his two escorts passed by and out of the
gate of the town, and away towards the mountain that stood still and
blue in the distance.

       *       *       *       *       *

_So far I read, and then I could bear to read no more, but placed my
hand upon the open page of the book. "What is this dreadful thing?" I
cried. "Is, then, a man punished for truth and justice and virtue and
righteousness? Is it, then, true that the evil are rewarded, and that
the good are punished so dreadfully?"_

_Then the man who held the book spoke again. "Take away thy hand and
read," said he._

_Then I took away my hand, and read as he bade me, and found these
words:_

_"How can God fill with His own that which is already filled by man?
First it must be emptied before it may be filled with the true good of
righteousness and truth, of humility and love, of peace and joy. O thou
foolish one who judgest but from the appearance of things, how long will
it be before thou canst understand that while some may be baptized with
water to cleanliness and repentance, others are baptized with living
fire to everlasting life, and that they alone are the children of God?"_

_Then again I read these words:_

_"Woe to thee, thou who deniest the laws of God and man! Woe to thee,
thou who walkest in the darkness of the shadow of sin and evil! But ten
thousand times woe to thee, thou who pilest Pelion of self-good upon
Ossa of self-truth, not that thou mayst scale therefrom the gate of
Heaven, but that thou mayst hide thyself beneath from the eye of the
Living God! By-and-by His Day shall come! His Terrible Lightning shall
flash from the East to the West! His Dreadful Flaming Thunder-bolt shall
fall, riving thy secret fastnesses to atoms, and leaving thee, poor
worm, writhing in the dazzling effulgence of His Light, and shrivelling
beneath the consuming flame of His Loving-kindness!"_

_Then the leaf was turned, and there before me lay the answer to that
first question, "What shall a man do that he may gain the kingdom of
Heaven?" There stood the words, plain and clear. But I did not dare to
read them, but turning, left that place, shutting the door to behind
me._

_Never have I found that door or entered that room again, but by-and-by
I know that I shall find them both once more, and shall then and there
read the answer that forever stands written in that book, for it still
lies open at the very page, and he upon whose knees it rests is
Israfeel, the Angel of Death._

       *       *       *       *       *

But what of the sequel? Is there a sequel? Are we, then, to suffer
ourselves to do evil for the sake of shunning pain in the other world? I
trow not! He who sets his foot to climb must never look backward and
downward. He who suffers most must reach the highest. There must be
another part of the story which lies darkly and dimly behind the letter.
One can see, faintly and dimly but nevertheless clearly, what the poor
man was to enjoy--the poor man who from without appeared to be so evil,
and yet within was not really evil. One can see a vision faint and dim
of a simple little house cooled by the dewy shade of green trees forever
in foliage; one can see pleasant meadows and gardens forever green,
stretching away to the banks of a smooth-flowing river in whose level
bosom rests a mirrored image of that which lies beyond its farther
bank--a great town with glistering walls and gleaming spires reaching
tower above tower and height above height into the blazing blue, the
awful serenity of a heavenly sky. One can know that toward that town the
poor man who had sinned and repented would in the evenings gaze and
wonder until his soul, now ploughed clean for new seed, might learn the
laws that would make it indeed an inhabitant of that place. It is a
serene and beautiful vision, but not different from that which all may
see, and enjoy even, in part, in this world.

But how was it with that other man--with that good man who had never
sinned until his earthly body was stripped away that he might sin and
fall in the spirit--sin and fall to a depth so profound that even one
furtive look into that awful abysm makes the minds of common men to reel
and stagger? When that God-sent blast of fire should have burned out the
selfhood that clung to the very vitals of his soul, what then? Who is
there that with unwinking eyes may gaze into the effulgent brilliancy of
the perfect angelhood? He who sweats drops of salt in his life's inner
struggles shall, maybe, eat good bread in the dew of it, but he who
sweats drops of blood in agony shall, when his labor is done, sit him,
maybe, at the King's table, and feast upon the Flesh of Life and the
very Wine of Truth.

Was it so with that man who never sinned until all his hell was let
loose at once upon him?




The Little Room

BY MADELENE YALE WYNNE


"How would it do for a smoking-room?"

"Just the very place; only, you know, Roger, you must not think of
smoking in the house. I am almost afraid having just a plain common man
around, let alone a smoking-man, will upset Aunt Hannah. She is New
England--Vermont New England boiled down."

"You leave Aunt Hannah to me; I shall find her tender side. I am going
to ask her about the old sea-captain and the yellow calico."

"Not yellow calico--blue chintz."

"Well, yellow _shell_, then."

"No, no! don't mix it up so; you won't know yourself what to expect, and
that's half the fun."

"Now you tell me again exactly what to expect; to tell the truth, I
didn't half hear about it the other day; I was woolgathering. It was
something queer that happened when you were a child, wasn't it?"

"Something that began to happen long before that, and kept happening,
and may happen again; but I hope not."

"What was it?"

"I wonder if the other people in the car can hear us?"

"I fancy not; we don't hear them--not consecutively, at least."

"Well, mother was born in Vermont, you know; she was the only child by a
second marriage. Aunt Hannah and Aunt Maria are only half-aunts to me,
you know."

"I hope they are half as nice as you are."

"Roger, be still; they certainly will hear us."

"Well, don't you want them to know we are married?"

"Yes, but not just married. There's all the difference in the world."

"You are afraid we look too happy!"

"No; only I want my happiness all to myself."

"Well, the little room?"

"My aunts brought mother up; they were nearly twenty years older than
she. I might say Hiram and they brought her up. You see, Hiram was
bound out to my grandfather when he was a boy, and when grandfather died
Hiram said he 's'posed he went with the farm, 'long o' the critters,'
and he has been there ever since. He was my mother's only refuge from
the decorum of my aunts. They are simply workers. They make me think of
the Maine woman who wanted her epitaph to be, 'She was a _hard_ working
woman.'"

"They must be almost beyond their working-days. How old are they?"

"Seventy, or thereabouts; but they will die standing; or, at least, on a
Saturday night, after all the house-work is done up. They were rather
strict with mother, and I think she had a lonely childhood. The house is
almost a mile away from any neighbors, and off on top of what they call
Stony Hill. It is bleak enough up there even in summer.

"When mamma was about ten years old they sent her to cousins in
Brooklyn, who had children of their own, and knew more about bringing
them up. She stayed there till she was married; she didn't go to Vermont
in all that time, and of course hadn't seen her sisters, for they never
would leave home for a day. They couldn't even be induced to go to
Brooklyn to her wedding, so she and father took their wedding-trip up
there."

"And that's why we are going up there on our own?"

"Don't, Roger; you have no idea how loud you speak."

"You never say so except when I am going to say that one little word."

"Well, don't say it, then, or say it very, very quietly."

"Well, what was the queer thing?"

"When they got to the house, mother wanted to take father right off into
the little room; she had been telling him about it, just as I am going
to tell you, and she had said that of all the rooms, that one was the
only one that seemed pleasant to her. She described the furniture and
the books and paper and everything, and said it was on the north side,
between the front and back room. Well, when they went to look for it,
there was no little room there; there was only a shallow china-closet.
She asked her sisters when the house had been altered and a closet made
of the room that used to be there. They both said the house was exactly
as it had been built--that they had never made any changes, except to
tear down the old wood-shed and build a smaller one.

"Father and mother laughed a good deal over it, and when anything was
lost they would always say it must be in the little room, and any
exaggerated statement was called 'little-roomy.' When I was a child I
thought that was a regular English phrase, I heard it so often.

"Well, they talked it over, and finally they concluded that my mother
had been a very imaginative sort of a child, and had read in some book
about such a little room, or perhaps even dreamed it, and then had 'made
believe,' as children do, till she herself had really thought the room
was there."

"Why, of course, that might easily happen."

"Yes, but you haven't heard the queer part yet; you wait and see if you
can explain the rest as easily.

"They stayed at the farm two weeks, and then went to New York to live.
When I was eight years old my father was killed in the war, and mother
was broken-hearted. She never was quite strong afterwards, and that
summer we decided to go up to the farm for three months.

"I was a restless sort of a child, and the journey seemed very long to
me; and finally, to pass the time, mamma told me the story of the
little room, and how it was all in her own imagination, and how there
really was only a china-closet there.

"She told it with all the particulars; and even to me, who knew
beforehand that the room wasn't there, it seemed just as real as could
be. She said it was on the north side, between the front and back rooms;
that it was very small, and they sometimes called it an entry. There was
a door also that opened out-of-doors, and that one was painted green,
and was cut in the middle like the old Dutch doors, so that it could be
used for a window by opening the top part only. Directly opposite the
door was a lounge or couch; it was covered with blue chintz--India
chintz--some that had been brought over by an old Salem sea-captain as a
'venture.' He had given it to Maria when she was a young girl. She was
sent to Salem for two years to school. Grandfather originally came from
Salem."

"I thought there wasn't any room or chintz."

"_That is just it._ They had decided that mother had imagined it all,
and yet you see how exactly everything was painted in her mind, for she
had even remembered that Hiram had told her that Maria could have
married the sea-captain if she had wanted to!

"The India cotton was the regular blue-stamped chintz, with the peacock
figure on it. The head and body of the bird were in profile, while the
tail was full front view behind it. It had seemed to take mamma's fancy,
and she drew it for me on a piece of paper as she talked. Doesn't it
seem strange to you that she could have made all that up, or even
dreamed it?

"At the foot of the lounge were some hanging-shelves with some old books
on them. All the books were leather-colored except one; that was bright
red, and was called the _Ladies' Album_. It made a bright break between
the other thicker books.

"On the lower shelf was a beautiful pink sea-shell, lying on a mat made
of balls of red-shaded worsted. This shell was greatly coveted by
mother, but she was only allowed to play with it when she had been
particularly good. Hiram had showed her how to hold it close to her ear
and hear the roar of the sea in it.

"I know you will like Hiram, Roger, he is quite a character in his way.

"Mamma said she remembered, or _thought_ she remembered, having been
sick once, and she had to lie quietly for some days on the lounge; then
was the time she had become so familiar with everything in the room, and
she had been allowed to have the shell to play with all the time. She
had had her toast brought to her in there, with make-believe tea. It was
one of her pleasant memories of her childhood; it was the first time she
had been of any importance to anybody, even herself.

"Right at the head of the lounge was a light-stand, as they called it,
and on it was a very brightly polished brass candlestick and a brass
tray, with snuffers. That is all I remember of her describing, except
that there was a braided rag rug on the floor, and on the wall was a
beautiful flowered paper--roses and morning-glories in a wreath on a
light-blue ground. The same paper was in the front room."

"And all this never existed except in her imagination?"

"She said that when she and father went up there, there wasn't any
little room at all like it anywhere in the house; there was a
china-closet where she had believed the room to be."

"And your aunts said there had never been any such room?"

"That is what they said."

"Wasn't there any blue chintz in the house with a peacock figure?"

"Not a scrap, and Aunt Hannah said there had never been any that she
could remember; and Maria just echoed her--she always does that. You
see, Aunt Hannah is an up-and-down New England woman. She looks just
like herself; I mean, just like her character. Her joints move up and
down or backward and forward in a plain square fashion. I don't believe
she ever leaned on anything in her life, or sat in an easy-chair. But
Maria is different; she is rounder and softer; she hasn't any ideas of
her own; she never had any. I don't believe she would think it right or
becoming to have one that differed from Aunt Hannah's, so what would be
the use of having any? She is an echo, that's all.

"When mamma and I got there, of course I was all excitement to see the
china-closet, and I had a sort of feeling that it would be the little
room after all. So I ran ahead and threw open the door, crying, 'Come
and see the little room.'

"And, Roger," said Mrs. Grant, laying her hand in his, "there really was
a little room there, exactly as mother had remembered it. There was the
lounge, the peacock chintz, the green door, the shell, the
morning-glory and rose paper, _everything exactly as she had described
it to me_."

"What in the world did the sisters say about it?"

"Wait a minute and I will tell you. My mother was in the front hall
still talking with Aunt Hannah. She didn't hear me at first, but I ran
out there and dragged her through the front room, saying, 'The room _is_
here--it is all right.'

"It seemed for a minute as if my mother would faint. She clung to me in
terror. I can remember now how strained her eyes looked and how pale she
was.

"I called out to Aunt Hannah and asked her when they had had the closet
taken away and the little room built; for in my excitement I thought
that that was what had been done.

"'That little room has always been there,' said Aunt Hannah, 'ever since
the house was built.'

"'But mamma said there wasn't any little room here, only a china-closet,
when she was here with papa,' said I.

"'No, there has never been any china-closet there; it has always been
just as it is now,' said Aunt Hannah.

"Then mother spoke; her voice sounded weak and far off. She said,
slowly, and with an effort, 'Maria, don't you remember that you told me
that there had _never been any little room here_? and Hannah said so
too, and then I said I must have dreamed it?'

"'No, I don't remember anything of the kind,' said Maria, without the
slightest emotion. 'I don't remember you ever said anything about any
china-closet. The house has never been altered; you used to play in this
room when you were a child, don't you remember?'

"'I know it,' said mother, in that queer slow voice that made me feel
frightened. 'Hannah, don't you remember my finding the china-closet
here, with the gilt-edge china on the shelves, and then _you_ said that
the _china-closet_ had always been here?'

"'No,' said Hannah, pleasantly but unemotionally--'no, I don't think you
ever asked me about any china-closet, and we haven't any gilt-edged
china that I know of.'

"And that was the strangest thing about it. We never could make them
remember that there had ever been any question about it. You would think
they could remember how surprised mother had been before, unless she had
imagined the whole thing. Oh, it was so queer! They were always
pleasant about it, but they didn't seem to feel any interest or
curiosity. It was always this answer: 'The house is just as it was
built; there have never been any changes, so far as we know.'

"And my mother was in an agony of perplexity. How cold their gray eyes
looked to me! There was no reading anything in them. It just seemed to
break my mother down, this queer thing. Many times that summer, in the
middle of the night, I have seen her get up and take a candle and creep
softly down-stairs. I could hear the steps creak under her weight. Then
she would go through the front room and peer into the darkness, holding
her thin hand between the candle and her eyes. She seemed to think the
little room might vanish. Then she would come back to bed and toss about
all night, or lie still and shiver; it used to frighten me.

"She grew pale and thin, and she had a little cough; then she did not
like to be left alone. Sometimes she would make errands in order to send
me to the little room for something--a book, or her fan, or her
handkerchief; but she would never sit there or let me stay in there
long, and sometimes she wouldn't let me go in there for days together.
Oh, it was pitiful!"

"Well, don't talk any more about it, Margaret, if it makes you feel so,"
said Mr. Grant.

"Oh yes, I want you to know all about it, and there isn't much more--no
more about the room.

"Mother never got well, and she died that autumn. She used often to
sigh, and say, with a wan little laugh, 'There is one thing I am glad
of, Margaret: your father knows now all about the little room.' I think
she was afraid I distrusted her. Of course, in a child's way, I thought
there was something queer about it, but I did not brood over it. I was
too young then, and took it as a part of her illness. But, Roger, do you
know, it really did affect me. I almost hate to go there after talking
about it; I somehow feel as if it might, you know, be a china-closet
again."

"That's an absurd idea."

"I know it; of course it can't be. I saw the room, and there isn't any
china-closet there, and no gilt-edged china in the house, either."

And then she whispered, "But, Roger, you may hold my hand as you do
now, if you will, when we go to look for the little room."

"And you won't mind Aunt Hannah's gray eyes?"

"I won't mind _anything_."

It was dusk when Mr. and Mrs. Grant went into the gate under the two old
Lombardy poplars and walked up the narrow path to the door, where they
were met by the two aunts.

Hannah gave Mrs. Grant a frigid but not unfriendly kiss; and Maria
seemed for a moment to tremble on the verge of an emotion, but she
glanced at Hannah, and then gave her greeting in exactly the same
repressed and non-committal way.

Supper was waiting for them. On the table was the _gilt-edged china_.
Mrs. Grant didn't notice it immediately, till she saw her husband
smiling at her over his teacup; then she felt fidgety, and couldn't eat.
She was nervous, and kept wondering what was behind her, whether it
would be a little room or a closet.

After supper she offered to help about the dishes, but, mercy! she might
as well have offered to help bring the seasons round; Maria and Hannah
couldn't be helped.

So she and her husband went to find the little room, or closet, or
whatever was to be there.

Aunt Maria followed them, carrying the lamp, which she set down, and
then went back to the dish-washing.

Margaret looked at her husband. He kissed her, for she seemed troubled;
and then, hand in hand, they opened the door. It opened into a
_china-closet_. The shelves were neatly draped with scalloped paper; on
them was the gilt-edged china, with the dishes missing that had been
used at the supper, and which at that moment were being carefully washed
and wiped by the two aunts.

Margaret's husband dropped her hand and looked at her. She was trembling
a little, and turned to him for help, for some explanation, but in an
instant she knew that something was wrong. A cloud had come between
them; he was hurt; he was antagonized.

He paused for an appreciable instant, and then said, kindly enough, but
in a voice that cut her deeply:

"I am glad this ridiculous thing is ended; don't let us speak of it
again."

"Ended!" said she. "How ended?" And somehow her voice sounded to her as
her mother's voice had when she stood there and questioned her sisters
about the little room. She seemed to have to drag her words out. She
spoke slowly: "It seems to me to have only just begun in my case. It was
just so with mother when she--"

"I really wish, Margaret, you would let it drop. I don't like to hear
you speak of your mother in connection with it. It--" He hesitated, for
was not this their wedding-day? "It doesn't seem quite the thing, quite
delicate, you know, to use her name in the matter."

She saw it all now: _he didn't believe her_. She felt a chill sense of
withering under his glance.

"Come," he added, "let us go out, or into the dining-room, somewhere,
anywhere, only drop this nonsense."

He went out; he did not take her hand now--he was vexed, baffled, hurt.
Had he not given her his sympathy, his attention, his belief--and his
hand?--and she was fooling him. What did it mean?--she so truthful, so
free from morbidness--a thing he hated. He walked up and down under the
poplars, trying to get into the mood to go and join her in the house.

Margaret heard him go out; then she turned and shook the shelves; she
reached her hand behind them and tried to push the boards away; she ran
out of the house on to the north side and tried to find in the darkness,
with her hands, a door, or some steps leading to one. She tore her dress
on the old rose-tree, she fell and rose and stumbled, then she sat down
on the ground and tried to think. What could she think--was she
dreaming?

She went into the house and out into the kitchen, and begged Aunt Maria
to tell her about the little room--what had become of it, when had they
built the closet, when had they bought the gilt-edged china?

They went on washing dishes and drying them on the spotless towels with
methodical exactness; and as they worked they said that there had never
been any little room, so far as they knew; the china-closet had always
been there, and the gilt-edged china had belonged to their mother, it
had always been in the house.

"No, I don't remember that your mother ever asked about any little
room," said Hannah. "She didn't seem very well that summer, but she
never asked about any changes in the house; there hadn't ever been any
changes."

There it was again: not sign of interest, curiosity, or annoyance, not
a spark of memory.

She went out to Hiram. He was telling Mr. Grant about the farm. She had
meant to ask him about the room, but her lips were sealed before her
husband.

Months afterwards, when time had lessened the sharpness of their
feelings, they learned to speculate reasonably about the phenomenon,
which Mr. Grant had accepted as something not to be scoffed away, not to
be treated as a poor joke, but to be put aside as something inexplicable
on any ordinary theory.

Margaret alone in her heart knew that her mother's words carried a
deeper significance than she had dreamed of at the time. "One thing I am
glad of, your father knows now," and she wondered if Roger or she would
ever know.

Five years later they were going to Europe. The packing was done; the
children were lying asleep, with their travelling things ready to be
slipped on for an early start.

Roger had a foreign appointment. They were not to be back in America for
some years. She had meant to go up to say good-by to her aunts; but a
mother of three children intends to do a great many things that never
get done. One thing she had done that very day, and as she paused for a
moment between the writing of two notes that must be posted before she
went to bed, she said:

"Roger, you remember Rita Lash? Well, she and Cousin Nan go up to the
Adirondacks every autumn. They are clever girls, and I have intrusted to
them something I want done very much."

"They are the girls to do it, then, every inch of them."

"I know it, and they are going to."

"Well?"

"Why, you see, Roger, that little room--"

"Oh--"

"Yes, I was a coward not to go myself, but I didn't find time, because I
hadn't the courage."

"Oh! _that_ was it, was it?"

"Yes, just that. They are going, and they will write us about it."

"Want to bet?"

"No; I only want to know."

       *       *       *       *       *

Rita Lash and Cousin Nan planned to go to Vermont on their way to the
Adirondacks. They found they would have three hours between trains,
which would give them time to drive up to the Keys farm, and they could
still get to the camp that night. But, at the last minute, Rita was
prevented from going. Nan had to go to meet the Adirondack party, and
she promised to telegraph her when she arrived at the camp. Imagine
Rita's amusement when she received this message: "Safely arrived; went
to the Keys farm; it is a little room."

Rita was amused, because she did not in the least think Nan had been
there. She thought it was a hoax; but it put it into her mind to carry
the joke further by really stopping herself when she went up, as she
meant to do the next week.

She did stop over. She introduced herself to the two maiden ladies, who
seemed familiar, as they had been described by Mrs. Grant.

They were, if not cordial, at least not disconcerted at her visit, and
willingly showed her over the house. As they did not speak of any other
stranger's having been to see them lately, she became confirmed in her
belief that Nan had not been there.

In the north room she saw the roses and morning-glory paper on the wall,
and also the door that should open into--what?

She asked if she might open it.

"Certainly," said Hannah; and Maria echoed, "Certainly."

She opened it, and found the china-closet. She experienced a certain
relief; she at least was not under any spell. Mrs. Grant left it a
china-closet; she found it the same. Good.

But she tried to induce the old sisters to remember that there had at
various times been certain questions relating to a confusion as to
whether the closet had always been a closet. It was no use; their stony
eyes gave no sign.

Then she thought of the story of the sea-captain, and said, "Miss Keys,
did you ever have a lounge covered with India chintz, with a figure of a
peacock on it, given to you in Salem by a sea-captain, who brought it
from India?"

"I dun'no' as I ever did," said Hannah. That was all. She thought
Maria's cheeks were a little flushed, but her eyes were like a
stone-wall.

She went on that night to the Adirondacks. When Nan and she were alone
in their room she said. "By-the-way, Nan, what did you see at the
farm-house? and how did you like Maria and Hannah?"

Nan didn't mistrust that Rita had been there, and she began excitedly to
tell her all about her visit. Rita could almost have believed Nan had
been there if she hadn't known it was not so. She let her go on for some
time, enjoying her enthusiasm, and the impressive way in which she
described her opening the door and finding the "little room." Then Rita
said: "Now, Nan, that is enough fibbing. I went to the farm myself on my
way up yesterday, and there is _no_ little room, and there _never_ has
been any; it is a china-closet, just as Mrs. Grant saw it last."

She was pretending to be busy unpacking her trunk, and did not look up
for a moment; but as Nan did not say anything, she glanced at her over
her shoulder. Nan was actually pale, and it was hard to say whether she
was most angry or frightened. There was something of both in her look.
And then Rita began to explain how her telegram had put her in the
spirit of going up there alone. She hadn't meant to cut Nan out. She
only thought--Then Nan broke in: "It isn't that; I am sure you can't
think it is that. But I went myself, and you did not go; you can't have
been there, for _it is a little room_."

Oh, what a night they had! They couldn't sleep. They talked and argued,
and then kept still for a while, only to break out again, it was so
absurd. They both maintained that they had been there, but both felt
sure the other one was either crazy or obstinate beyond reason. They
were wretched; it was perfectly ridiculous, two friends at odds over
such a thing; but there it was--"little room,"
"china-closet,"--"china-closet," "little room."

The next morning Nan was tacking up some tarlatan at a window to keep
the midges out. Rita offered to help her, as she had done for the past
ten years. Nan's "No, thanks," cut her to the heart.

"Nan," said she, "come right down from that stepladder and pack your
satchel. The stage leaves in just twenty minutes. We can catch the
afternoon express train, and we will go together to the farm. I am
either going there or going home. You better go with me."

Nan didn't say a word. She gathered up the hammer and tacks, and was
ready to start when the stage came round.

It meant for them thirty miles of staging and six hours of train,
besides crossing the lake; but what of that, compared with having a lie
lying round loose between them! Europe would have seemed easy to
accomplish, if it would settle the question.

At the little junction in Vermont they found a farmer with a wagon full
of meal-bags. They asked him if he could not take them up to the old
Keys farm and bring them back in time for the return train, due in two
hours.

They had planned to call it a sketching trip, so they said, "We have
been there before, we are artists, and we might find some views worth
taking, and we want also to make a short call upon the Misses Keys."

"Did ye calculate to paint the old _house_ in the picture?"

They said it was possible they might do so. They wanted to see it,
anyway.

"Waal, I guess you are too late. The _house_ burnt down last night, and
everything in it."




The Bringing of the Rose

BY HARRIET LEWIS BRADLEY


For certain subjects one of the most valuable works of reference in all
Berlin was Miss Olivia Valentine's "Adress-buch," the contents of which
were self-collected, self-tested, and abounded in extensive information
concerning hotels and pensions, apartments and restaurants, families
offering German home life with the language, instructors, and courses of
lectures, doctors, dentists, dressmakers, milliners, the most direct way
to Mendelssohn's grave in the Alte Dreifaltigkeits-Kirchhof, how to find
lodgings in Baireuth during the Wagner festival, where to stay in
Oberammergau, if it happened to be the year of the Passion Play, and so
on, indefinitely.

Miss Valentine herself was a kind-hearted, middle-aged woman, who, as
the result of much sojourning in foreign lands, possessed an intelligent
knowledge of subjects likely to be of use to other sojourners, and who
was cordially ready to share the same, according to the needs of the
season. If it were November, people came asking in what manner they
could take most profitable advantage of a Berlin winter; if it were
approaching spring, they wanted addresses for Paris or Switzerland or
Italy. It was March now and Sunday afternoon. Mr. Morris Davidson sat by
Miss Valentine's table, the famous "Adress-buch" in his hand. "I suppose
you don't undertake starting parties for heaven?" he said, opening the
book. "Ah! here it is--'Himmel und Hölle.' I might have known it, you
are so thorough."

"If you read a little further," remarked Miss Valentine, "you will see
that 'Himmel und Hölle' is a German game."

"Oh yes, I remember now; we play it at our pension. It's that game where
you say 'thou' to the you-people, and 'you' to the thou-people, and are
expected to address strange ladies whom you are meeting for the first
time as Klara and Charlotte and Wilhelmine, with most embarrassing
familiarity, and it is very stupid if the game happens to send you to
heaven. I wonder if there really is such a locality? I've been thinking
lately I should like to go there; things don't seem to agree with me
very well here. I've closed my books, walked the Thiergarten threadbare,
sleep twelve hours out of twenty-four, do everything I've been told to
do, with no result whatever except to grow duller." The young man yawned
as he spoke. "Do excuse me; I've come to such a pass that I'm not able
to look any one in the face without yawning. All things considered, I am
afraid I shouldn't be any better off in heaven. I'm afraid I couldn't
stand the people, there must be so many of them. I want to get away from
people."

"I know exactly where to send you," said Miss Valentine. "I was thinking
about it when you came in. It isn't heaven, but it is very near it, and
it also begins with H; and you are sure to like it--that is, unless you
object to the ghost."

"Oh, not in the least; only is the rest of it all right? Things are not,
generally; either the drainage is bad or there is a haunted room, and
every one who sleeps in it dies, and of course one cannot help sleeping
in it, just to see how it is going to work."

"Nothing of the kind," returned Miss Valentine; "the drainage is
excellent; and as for the haunted room, I once shared it half a summer
with a niece and namesake of mine, and we were never troubled by any
unusual occurrence, and we are both in excellent health and likely to
remain so. The ghost is reported to have a Mona Lisa face, to be dressed
in black, with something white and fluffy at the neck and sleeves, gold
bracelets, a necklace and ring of black pearls, and she carries a rose.
If her appearance means death or misfortune, the rose is white; if she
is only straying about in a friendly way, the rose is red.

"The place is called the Halden--the Hill-side. I have taken the
precaution to state vaguely that it is in the neighborhood of Zurich; I
want to do all in my power to keep the spot unspoiled. There is so
little left in Switzerland that is not tired of being looked at--the
trees are tired, and the grass, and the waterfalls; but here is a sweet
hidden-away nook, where everything is as fresh as before the days of
foreign travel. I am going to provide you with the directions for
finding it."

She sat down by the writing-desk, and presently gave a slip of paper to
Morris Davidson, who put it carefully in his pocket-book.

"The castle of the Halden," Miss Valentine continued, "belonged to a
certain countess, by name Maria Regina. There is a tradition that one
night a mist coming down from the mountain concealed the castle from the
village, and when it lifted, behold! the countess and her entire
household had vanished forever, and not a word was ever heard from them
again. The ghost-lady is supposed to be a sister of the Countess Maria
Regina, and in some way connected with the death of a young Austrian
officer who figures as a lover in the story; just whose lover no one
seems to know, but it is surmised of Maria Regina's daughter, said to be
a very aristocratic and haughty young person. The castle remained closed
after this mysterious occurrence for about two hundred years, and then
an enterprising Swiss-German had it put in order for a summer hotel.
What are you doing? I believe you are making extracts from my
'Adress-buch.' Now that is something I never allow. I like to give out
information discriminately, with personal explanations."

The young man showed what he had written. "Just a hint or two for
Italy," he said. "I may go down there next week. If I do, I shall
certainly turn aside and tarry a little at your Halden. I should like
to try whether your ghost-lady would lead me into any adventure."

Miss Valentine did not see Morris Davidson again, but a few weeks later
she received a letter bearing a Swiss postmark:

    "DEAR MISS VALENTINE,--I am here, and in order to give
    complete proof of it I sacrifice my prejudice and write on
    ruled paper, with purple ink and an unpleasant pen, that it
    may be all of the Halden. The place is exactly what I wanted
    and needed. I am so delighted to have it to myself. I am the
    only guest in the castle, the only stranger in the town. I
    came to stay a day; I intend now to stay a week. Yesterday,
    my first whole day, was perfect. I went by train to
    Mühlehorn, and walked from there to Wallenstadt, came back
    for dinner, and in the afternoon climbed the hill to Amden,
    where I found a hepatica in bloom, and had a beautiful view
    of the sunset. This morning there is a mist on the mountains,
    which is slowly rising, so I am using the time for
    letter-writing. Mountain-climbing is not yet inviting, owing
    to the snow; but, on the whole, the season of the year is not
    at all unfavorable. The loneliness is what I like best. The
    people do not interest me; I avoid them, and must appear in
    their eyes even more deluded than I am to come to this
    secluded spot at this unseasonable moment and be satisfied
    with my own society--no, not my own society, but that of
    these kind brotherly mountains. From a prosaic pedant I can
    almost feel myself becoming an ecstatical hermit, and my soul
    getting ready to

      'smooth itself out a long cramped scroll.
    Freshening and fluttering in the wind.'

    What a solid satisfaction it is to have a few days free from
    railroad travel! I have made a roundabout journey, coming
    here by way of Dresden, Leipsic, Cologne, Bonn, Frankfort,
    Heidelberg, Strasburg, Freiburg, Basel, and Zurich. It was
    all pleasant, but I am glad it is over. Please never
    advertise the Halden as a health-resort; let it remain a
    complete secret between us two, so that when we wish to leave
    everything and hermitize we may have the opportunity. If it
    were not for betraying this secret, I should like to
    recommend the castle for its generosity. At breakfast I have
    put beside my plate a five-pound loaf of bread, one slice of
    which is fifteen inches long by six wide, and thick _ad
    libitum_ dimensions, the delicacy of which even a Prussian
    soldier would call into question.

    "I haven't attempted to tell you what I think of your Halden.
    It is impossible. I simply give myself over to a few days of
    happiness and rest; all too soon I shall have to face the
    busy world again.

                                 "Most gratefully yours,

                                           "MORRIS DAVIDSON.

    "P.S.--I have not yet seen the ghost-lady. I thought I heard
    her footstep last night in the hall and a rustling at my
    door. I opened it, half expecting to find a rose upon the
    threshold. I found nothing, saw nothing."

The letter was dated March 13th, and contained a pressed hepatica. Some
two months later another letter came. It said:

    "I am still here. My Italian journey melted into a Swiss
    sojourn. If I stay much longer I shall not dare to go away, I
    feel so safe under the care of these wonderful mountains.
    What words has one to describe them, with their fulness of
    content, of majesty and mystery? I go daily up the time-worn
    steps behind the castle, throw myself on the grass, count the
    poplar-trees rising from the plain below, try to make out
    where earth ends and heaven begins as the white May clouds
    meet the snow-drifts on the mountain-tops. I am working a
    little again, but tramping a good deal more. I have not been
    so happy since I was a boy. In a certain sense I have died
    here, unaided by the apparition with the rose, unless,
    indeed, she has come in my sleep, and that of course would
    not count. I have died, because surely all that death can
    ever mean is the putting away of something no longer needed,
    and therefore we die daily--one day most of all. But although
    I have never seen the ghost-lady, I have every reason to have
    perfect faith in her existence. I was talking with our
    landlord's aged mother about it to-day. She carefully closed
    the door when the conversation turned in this direction,
    begging me never to mention the subject before the servants,
    and then in a half-whisper she gave me exactly the same
    description that you did in Berlin."

Early in June a third letter came:

    "Will you believe me when I say I have not only seen _Her_,
    but _Them_; that I have sat with Them, and talked with
    Them--the lost ladies of the Hill-side--with the Countess
    Maria Regina, the proud daughter, the mysterious sister? No,
    certainly you will not believe me.

    "I write nothing here of the physical results of my stay.
    Enough that I am ready for work; that I love my fellow-men;
    that I no longer dread to go to heaven for fear of their
    society; that I have formed an intimate friendship with the
    village weaver and priest and postmaster; that when we part,
    as we shall to-morrow, it will be affectionately and
    regretfully.

    "All this you know, or have guessed. What I am about to tell,
    you do not know, and can never guess.

    "It had been raining for a week. You remember what it is like
    here when it rains--how damp, sticky, discouraging; how cold
    the stone floor; how wet the fountain splashes when one goes
    through the court to dinner. I was driven to taking walks in
    the hall outside my room by way of exercise, and thus
    discovered in a certain dark corner a low door to which I
    eventually succeeded in finding a key. This door led me into
    an unused tower dimly lighted, hung with cobwebs, and filled
    with old red velvet furniture. I sat down on a sofa, and
    before long became conscious that I was being gazed upon by
    a haughty young woman, with an aristocratic nose, large dark
    eyes, hair caught back by tortoise-shell combs under a
    peculiar head-dress, having a gleam of gold directly on the
    top. Her gown was of dark green, with white puffs let into
    the sleeves below the elbows; around her tapering waist was a
    narrow belt of jewels; the front of her corsage was also
    trimmed with jewels. But the most distinctive feature of her
    costume consisted in a floating scarf of old-rose, worn like
    the frontispiece lady in some volume of 'Keepsake' or
    'Token.' Imagine meeting such a being as this unexpectedly in
    the long-closed tower-room of a castle after a week of Swiss
    rain! I forgot time, weather, locality, individuality; I
    began to think, in fact, that I myself might be the young
    Austrian officer who was murdered. Presently I noticed that
    my haughty young woman had a chaperon--a lady wearing a light
    green picturesquely shaped hood; a kerchief of the same shade
    bordered with golden tassels; a necklace of dark beads, from
    which hung a crucifix. She was not pretty, but had very plump
    red cheeks, and held a little dog. I learned, on nearer
    acquaintance, that this was the Countess Maria Regina, and
    as she then appeared so she had looked in the year 1695.

    "We sat for a while silently regarding each other, Maria
    Regina's cheek seeming all the time to grow deeper in color,
    the point in which the green hood terminated more and more
    distinct, the little dog making ready to bark, the daughter
    with the floating scarf prouder and prouder, and I, as the
    Austrian officer, hardly daring to move, lest the sister with
    the rose should join the group, and that perhaps be the end
    of me, when I had the happy thought of going in search of
    her, and thus breaking the spell, and preventing the mischief
    which might occur should she come uninvited. I left the sofa
    and peered about, and could scarcely believe my eyes as I
    came upon her standing by the tower window, pearls, black
    gown, lace frills, and rose in hand, all there, although very
    indistinct and shadowy, the Mona Lisa face looking discreetly
    towards the wall.

    "Now, my dear Miss Valentine, having related this remarkable
    adventure, I am about to relate one even more remarkable. It
    occurred this very evening, between seven and eight o'clock.
    I had been off for the day with the village goat-boy and his
    flock--the dear creatures, who have never had their bells
    removed to be painted over with Swiss landscapes and offered
    for sale as souvenir bric-à-brac. I had patted the goats
    good-night and good-by, and going up to my room, thrown
    myself into a reclining-chair, deliciously tired as one can
    only be after a long day of Swiss mountain life. The door was
    open, the room full of pleasant twilight, the three ladies
    safe in their tower close by. I was thinking and wondering
    about them, when I heard a rustling at the opposite end of
    the room. Now, as you know, the place being spacious as a
    banqueting-hall, objects at a distance, especially in the
    half-light, might easily deceive one. This was what I thought
    as I saw by the window a girlish form in black, with
    something white at the neck and sleeves. I rubbed my hands
    across my eyes, looked again, and, lo! my vision had vanished
    completely, noiselessly, without moving from the spot; for
    there had not been time to move. I sprang up and crossed the
    room. On the window-ledge was a rose, and the rose was red.

    "Another curious thing--the ghost-lady of the tower,
    according to her own authority, was forty-nine in the year
    1698. I don't know how ghosts manage about their age, but my
    ghost of this evening couldn't have been over nineteen.

    "Well, I have told my story. I wait for you to suggest the
    explanation of the second part; the first will explain itself
    when I bring to you, in a few days at most, and with the
    hearty consent and approval of the castle's present
    proprietor, the Countess Maria Regina, the haughty daughter,
    the ghost-lady herself, as found on the rainy day in the
    tower.

    "I am so well, so happy, so rich in life and thoughts and
    hopes! I owe it all to you, and I thank you again and still
    again, and sign my last letter from the Halden with the sweet
    salutation of the country, 'Grüss' Gott!'

                                        "Devotedly yours,

                                           "MORRIS DAVIDSON.

    "_Midnight, June the first._"

In the same mail Miss Valentine received a letter from her niece and
namesake, who was travelling with friends from Munich to Geneva.

    "MY DEAREST AUNT,--I can't possibly go to sleep without
    telling you about this beautiful day. Of course you knew we
    were going through Zurich, but you did not know we were
    going to give ourselves the joy of stopping for a little
    glimpse of the Halden country.

    "We took a very early train this morning, and without waiting
    at the village, went directly on that glorious ten-mile walk
    to Obstalden, and dined at the inn 'Zum Hirschen.'

    "You remember it--there where we tried to express ourselves
    once in verse:

    "The pasture-lands stretched far overhead,
     And blooming pathways heavenward led,
     As on the best of the land we fed
        At the pleasant inn 'Zum Hirschen.'

    "Above us, a sky of wondrous blue;
     Below, a lake of marvellous hue;
     And glad seemed life--the whole way through,
        That day as we dined 'Zum Hirschen.'

    "And that was how life seemed to-day, but we were wise enough
    not to attempt poetry. When we got back to the village at
    night, we climbed up to the castle for supper. I did so hope
    to see your Mr. Davidson; unfortunately he had gone off for a
    long tramp. You should hear die alte Grossmutter talk about
    him; she can't begin to say flattering things enough. And
    where do you think I went, Aunt Olivia? Into our old room, to
    be sure--your Mr. Davidson's room now--the door was open,
    and so I entered.

    "Oh, the view from that window!--the snow-tipped mountain
    over across the quiet lake, the little village, the castle
    garden, with its terraces and bowers! I wanted you so much!

    "Suddenly I had a feeling as if some one were coming, and
    very gently I pushed aside the panel door, closed it behind
    me, and descended in the dark--not a minute too soon, as it
    proved, because, firstly, when I looked back there was a
    light in the room above; and secondly, the rest of the party
    had gone to the station, expecting to find me there, and I
    arrived just in time to prevent us from missing the train.

    "And, oh, dear Aunt Olivia, your Mr. Davidson has made some
    wonderful discovery. Die alte Grossmutter couldn't resist
    telling me, although she wouldn't tell me what it was; she
    said he was intending to bring it, or them, to you as a
    present, and he might be wishing to make it a surprise, and
    it wasn't for her to go and spoil it all. Now what do you
    suppose it can be? I am consumed with curiosity, and could
    shed tears of envy. He doesn't know a word about the secret
    stairway. Die alte Grossmutter hadn't thought to mention it.
    Imagine that! So exactly like people who possess unusual
    things not to appreciate them. When you build your house do
    put in a secret stairway, they are so convenient. The castle
    garden to-day was a perfect wilderness of roses; we brought
    as many as we could back to Zurich, and one I left on the
    window-ledge of our old room--an unsigned offering from a
    past to a present occupant. It was a red rose too, and
    therefore of particularly good omen at the Halden. I wonder
    if your Mr. Davidson has found it yet, and is asking himself
    how it came?

    "And now, my dearest Aunt Olivia, I kiss you good-night, and
    end my letter with the sweet salutation which we have been
    hearing all day from peasant folk--'Grüss' Gott!'

                          "Lovingly, your namesake niece,

                                                    "OLIVIA.

    "_Midnight, June the first._"




Perdita

BY HILDEGARDE HAWTHORNE


I.--ALFALFA RANCH

Alfalfa Ranch, low, wide, with spreading verandas all overgrown by roses
and woodbine, and commanding on all sides a wide view of the rolling
alfalfa-fields, was a most bewitching place for a young couple to spend
the first few months of their married life. So Jack and I were naturally
much delighted when Aunt Agnes asked us to consider it our own for as
long as we chose. The ranch, in spite of its distance from the nearest
town, surrounded as it was by the prairies, and without a neighbor
within a three-mile radius, was yet luxuriously fitted with all the
modern conveniences. Aunt Agnes was a rich young widow, and had built
the place after her husband's death, intending to live there with her
child, to whom she transferred all the wealth of devotion she had
lavished on her husband. The child, however, had died when only three
years old, and Aunt Agnes, as soon as she recovered sufficient strength,
had left Alfalfa Ranch, intending never to visit the place again. All
this had happened nearly ten years ago, and the widow, relinquishing all
the advantages her youth and beauty, quite as much as her wealth, could
give her, had devoted herself to work amid the poor of New York.

At my wedding, which she heartily approved, and where to a greater
extent than ever before she cast off the almost morbid quietness which
had grown habitual with her, she seemed particularly anxious that Jack
and I should accept the loan of Alfalfa Ranch, apparently having an old
idea that the power of our happiness would somehow lift the cloud of
sorrow which, in her mind, brooded over the place. I had not been
strong, and Jack was overjoyed at such an opportunity of taking me into
the country. High as our expectations were, the beauty of the place far
exceeded them all. What color! What glorious sunsets! And the long rides
we took, seeming to be utterly tireless in that fresh sweet air!

One afternoon I sat on the veranda at the western wing of the house. The
veranda here was broader than elsewhere, and it was reached only by a
flight of steps leading up from the lawn on one side, and by a door
opposite these steps that opened into Jack's study. The rest of this
veranda was enclosed by a high railing, and by wire nettings so thickly
overgrown with vines that the place was always very shady. I sat near
the steps, where I could watch the sweep of the great shadows thrown by
the clouds that were sailing before the west wind. Jack was inside,
writing, and now and then he would say something to me through the open
window. As I sat, lost in delight at the beauty of the view and the
sweetness of the flower-scented air, I marvelled that Aunt Agnes could
ever have left so charming a spot. "She must still love it," I thought,
getting up to move my chair to where I might see still further over the
prairies, "and some time she will come back----" At this moment I
happened to glance to the further end of the veranda, and there I saw,
to my amazement, a little child seated on the floor, playing with the
shifting shadows of the tangled creepers. It was a little girl in a
daintily embroidered white dress, with golden curls around her baby
head. As I still gazed, she suddenly turned, with a roguish toss of the
yellow hair, and fixed her serious blue eyes on me.

"Baby!" I cried. "Where did you come from? Where's your mamma, darling?"
And I took a step towards her.

"What's that, Silvia?" called Jack from within. I turned my head and saw
him sitting at his desk.

"Come quick, Jack; there's the loveliest baby--" I turned back to the
child, looked, blinked, and at this moment Jack stepped out beside me.

"Baby?" he inquired. "What on earth are you talking about, Silvia
dearest?"

"Why, but--" I exclaimed. "There _was_ one! How did she get away? She
was sitting right there when I called."

"A _baby_!" repeated my husband. "My dear, babies don't appear and
disappear like East-Indian magicians. You have been napping, and are
trying to conceal the shameful fact."

"Jack," I said, decisively, "don't you suppose I know a baby when I see
one? She was sitting right there, playing with the shadows, and I--It's
certainly very queer!"

Jack grinned. "Go and put on your habit," he replied; "the horses will
be here in ten minutes. And remember that when you have accounted for
her disappearance, her presence still remains to be explained. Or
perhaps you think Wah Sing produced her from his sleeve?"

I laughed. Wah Sing was our Chinese cook, and more apt, I thought, to
put something up his sleeve than to take anything out.

"I suppose I _was_ dreaming," I said, "though I could almost as well
believe I had only dreamed our marriage."

"Or rather," observed Jack, "that our marriage had only dreamed us."


II.--SHADOWS

About a week later I received a letter from Aunt Agnes. Among other
things, chiefly relating to New York's slums, she said:

"I am in need of rest, and if you and Jack could put up with me for a
few days, I believe I should like to get back to the old place. As you
know, I have always dreaded a return there, but lately I seem somehow to
have lost that dread. I feel that the time has come for me to be there
again, and I am sure you will not mind me."

Most assuredly we would not mind her. We sat in the moonlight that night
on the veranda, Jack swinging my hammock slowly, and talked of Aunt
Agnes. The moon silvered the waving alfalfa, and sifted through the
twisted vines that fenced us in, throwing intricate and ever-changing
patterns on the smooth flooring. There was a hum of insects in the air,
and the soft wind ever and anon blew a fleecy cloud over the moon,
dimming for a moment her serene splendor.

"Who knows?" said Jack, lighting another cigar. "This may be a
turning-point in Aunt Agnes's life, and she may once more be something
like the sunny, happy girl your mother describes. She is beautiful, and
she is yet young. It may mean the beginning of a new life for her."

"Yes," I answered. "It isn't right that her life should always be
shadowed by that early sorrow. She is so lovely, and could be so happy.
Now that she has taken the first step, there is no reason why she
shouldn't go on."

"We'll do what we can to help her," responded my husband. "Let me fix
your cushions, darling; they have slipped." He rose to do so, and
suddenly stood still, facing the further end of the veranda. His
expression was so peculiar that I turned, following the direction of his
eyes, even before his smothered exclamation of "Silvia, look there!"
reached me.

Standing in the fluttering moonlight and shadows was the same little
girl I had seen already. She still wore white, and her tangled curls
floated shining around her head. She seemed to be smiling, and slightly
shook her head at us.

"What does it mean, Jack?" I whispered, slipping out of the hammock.

"How did she get there? Come!" said he, and we walked hastily towards
the little thing, who again shook her head. Just at this moment another
cloud obscured the moon for a few seconds, and though in the uncertain
twilight I fancied I still saw her, yet when the cloud passed she was
not to be found.


III.--PERDITA

Aunt Agnes certainly did look as though she needed rest. She seemed very
frail, and the color had entirely left her face. But her curling hair
was as golden as ever, and her figure as girlish and graceful. She
kissed me tenderly, and kept my hand in hers as she wandered over the
house and took long looks across the prairie.

"Isn't it beautiful?" she asked, softly. "Just the place to be happy
in! I've always had a strange fancy that I shou

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