The House of the Whispering Pines (2 page)

To steady my thoughts and bring my whirling brain again under control, I
fixed my eyes on her well-known form and features as upon a stranger's
whom I would understand and judge. I have called her a woman and
certainly I had loved her as such, but as, in this moment of strange
detachment, I watched her descend, swaying foot following swaying foot
falteringly down the stairs, I was able to see that only the emotions
which denaturalised her expression were a woman's; that her features, her
pose, and the peculiar childlike contour of the one cheek open to view
were those of one whose yesterday was in the playroom.

But beautiful! You do not often see such beauty. Under all the
disfigurement of an agitation so great as to daunt me and make me
question if I were its sole cause, her face shone with an individual
charm which marked her out as one of the few who are the making or
marring of men, sometimes of nations. This is the heritage she was born
to, this her lot, not to be shirked, not to be evaded even now at her
early age of seventeen. So much any one could see even in a momentary
scrutiny of her face and figure. But what was not so clear, not even to
myself with the consciousness of what had passed between us during the
last few hours, was why her heart should have so outrun her years, and
the emotion I beheld betray such shuddering depths. Some grisly fear,
some staring horror had met her in this strange retreat. Simple grief
speaks with a different language from that which I read in her distorted
features and tottering, slowly creeping form. What had happened above?
She had escaped me to run upon what? My lips refused to ask, my limbs
refused to move, and if I breathed at all, I did so with such fierceness
of restraint that her eyes never turned my way, not even when she had
reached the lowest step and paused for a moment there, oscillating in
pain or uncertainty. Her face was turned more fully towards me now, and I
had just begun to discern something in it besides its tragic beauty, when
she made a quick move and blew out the candle she held. One moment that
magical picture of superhuman loveliness, then darkness, I might say
silence, for I do not think either of us so much as stirred for several
instants. Then there came a crash, followed by the sound of flying feet.
She had flung the candlestick out of her hand and was hurriedly crossing
the hail. I thought she was coming my way, and instinctively drew back
against the wall. But she stopped far short of me, and I heard her
groping about, then give a sudden spring towards the front door. It
opened and the wind soughed in. I felt the chill of snow upon my face,
and realised the tempest. Then all was quiet and dark again. She had slid
quickly out and the door had swung to behind her. Another instant and I
heard the click of the key as it turned in the lock, heard it and made no
outcry, such the spell, such the bewilderment of my faculties! But once
the act was accomplished and egress made difficult, nay, for the moment,
impossible, I felt all lesser emotions give way to an anxiety which
demanded immediate action, for the girl had gone out without wraps or
covering for her head, and my experience of the evening had told me how
cold it was. I must follow and find her and rescue her if possible from
the snow. The distance was long to town, the cold would seize and perhaps
prostrate her, after which, the wind and snow would do the rest.

Throwing myself against the door, I shook it violently. It was immovable.
Then I flew to the windows. Their fastenings yielded readily enough, but
not the windows themselves; one had a broken cord, another seemed glued
to its frame, and I was still struggling with the latter when I heard a
sound which lifted the hair on my head and turned my whole attention back
to what lay behind and above me. There was still some one in the house. I
had forgotten everything in this apparition of the woman I have described
in a place so disassociated with any conception I could possibly have of
her whereabouts on this especial evening. But this noise, short, sharp,
but too distant to be altogether recognisable, roused doubts which once
awakened changed the whole tenor of my thoughts and would not let me rest
till I had probed the house from top to bottom. To find Carmel Cumberland
alone in this desolation was a mystifying discovery to which I had found
it hard enough to reconcile myself. But Carmel here in company with
another at the very moment when I had expected the fruition of my own
joy,—ah, that was to open hell's door in my breast; a possibility too
intolerable to remain unsettled for an instant. Though she had passed out
before my eyes in a drooping, almost agonised condition, not she, dear as
she was, and great as were my fears in her regard, was to be sought out
first, but the man! The man who was back of all this, possibly back of my
disappointment; the man whose work I may have witnessed, but at whose
identity I could not even guess.

Leaving the window, I groped my way along the wall until I reached the
rack where the man's coat and hat hung. Whether it was my intention to
carry them away and hide them, in my anxiety to secure this intruder and
hold him to a bitter account for the misery he was causing me, or whether
I only meant to satisfy myself that they were the habiliments of a
stranger and not those of some sneaking member of the club, is of little
importance in the light of the fact which presently burst upon me. The
hat and coat were gone. Nothing hung from the rack. The wall was free
from end to end. She had taken these articles of male apparel with her;
she had not gone forth into the driving snow, unprotected, but—

I did not know what to think. No acquaintanceship with her girlish
impulses, nothing that had occurred between us before or during this
night, had prepared me for a freak of this nature. I felt backward
along the wall; I felt forward; I even handled the pegs and counted
them as I passed to and fro, touching every one; but I could not alter
the fact. The groping she had done had been in this direction. She was
searching for this hat and coat (a man's hat,—a derby, as I had been
careful to assure myself at the first handling) and, in them, she had
gone home as she had probably come, and there was no man in the case,
or if there were—

The doubt drove me to the staircase. Making no further effort to unravel
the puzzle which only beclouded my faculties, I began my wary ascent. I
had not the slightest fear, I was too full of cold rage for that.

The arrangement of rooms on the second floor was well known to me. I
understood every nook and corner and could find my way about the whole
place without a light. I took but one precaution—that of slipping off
my shoes at the foot of the stairs. I wished to surprise the intruder. I
was willing to resort to any expedient to accomplish this. The matches I
carried in my pocket would make this possible if once I heard him
breathing. I held my own breath as I stole softly up, and waited for an
instant at the top of the stairs to listen. There was an awesome silence
everywhere, and I was hesitating whether to attack the front rooms first
or to follow up a certain narrow hall leading to a rear staircase, when
I remembered the thin line of smoke which, rising from one of the
chimneys, had first attracted my attention to the house. In that was my
clue. There was but one room on this floor where a fire could be lit.
It lay a few feet beyond me down the narrow hall I have just mentioned.
Why had I trusted everything to my ears when my nose would have been a
better guide? As I took the few steps necessary, a slight smell of smoke
became very perceptible, and no longer in doubt of my course, I pushed
boldly on and entering the half-open door, struck a match and peered
anxiously about.

Emptiness here just as everywhere else. A few chairs, a dresser,—it was
a ladies' dressing-room,—some smouldering ashes on the hearth, a lounge
piled up with cushions. But no person. The sound I had heard had not
issued from this room, yet something withheld me from seeking further.
Chilled to the bone, with teeth chattering in spite of myself, I paused
just inside the door, and when the match went out in my hand remained
shivering there in the darkness, a prey to sensations more nearly
approaching those of fear than any I had ever before experienced in my
whole life.

Look on death itself!—up, up, and see
The great doom's visage!

Macbeth
.

Why, I did not know. There seemed to be no reason for this excess of
feeling. I had no dread of attack; my apprehension was of another sort.
Besides, any attack here must come from the rear—from the open doorway
in which I stood—and my dread lay before me, in the room itself, which,
as I have already said, appeared to be totally empty. What could occasion
my doubts, and why did I not fly the place? There were passage-ways yet
to search, why linger here like a gaby in the dark when perhaps the man I
believed to be in hiding somewhere within these walls, was improving the
opportunity to escape?

If I asked myself this question, I did not answer it, but I doubt if I
asked it then. I had forgotten the intruder; the interest which had
carried me thus far had become lost in a fresher one of which the
beginning and ending lay hidden within the four walls I now stared upon,
unseeing. Not to see and yet to feel—did that make the horror? If so,
another lighted match must help me out. I struck one while the thought
was hot within me, and again took a look at the room.

I noted but one thing new, but that made me reel back till I was half way
into the hall. Then a certain dogged persistency I possess came to my
rescue, and I re-entered the room at a leap and stood before the lounge
and its pile of cushions. They were numerous,—all that the room
contained, and more! Chairs had been stripped, window-seats denuded, and
the whole collection disposed here in a set way which struck me as
unnatural. Was this the janitor's idea? I hardly thought so, and was
about to pluck one of these cushions off, when that most unreasonable
horror seized me again and I found myself looking back over my shoulder
at the fireplace from which rose a fading streak of smoke which some
passing gust, perhaps, had blown out into the room.

I felt sick. Was it the smell? It was not that of burning wood, hardly of
burning paper, I—but here my second match went out.

Thoroughly roused now (you will say, by what?) I felt my way out of the
room and to the head of the staircase. I remembered the candle and
candlestick I had heard thrown down on the lower floor by Carmel
Cumberland. I would secure them and come back and settle these uncanny
doubts. It might be the veriest fool business, but my mind was
disturbed and must be set at ease. Nothing else seemed so important,
yet I was not without anxiety for the lovely and delicate woman
wandering the snow-covered roads in the teeth of a furious gale, any
more than I was dead to the fact that I should never forgive myself if
I allowed the man to escape whom I believed to be hiding somewhere in
the rear of this house.

I had a hunt for the candlestick and a still longer one for the candle,
but finally I recovered both, and, lighting the latter, felt myself, for
the first time, more or less master of the situation.

Rapidly regaining the room in which my interest was now centred, I set
the candlestick down on the dresser, and approached the lounge. Hardly
knowing what I feared, or what I expected to find, I tore off one of the
cushions and flung it behind me. More cushions were revealed—but that
was not all.

Escaping from the edge of one of them I saw a shiny tress of woman's
hair. I gave a gasp and pulled off more cushions, then I fell on my
knees, struck down by the greatest horror which a man can feel. Death lay
before me—violent, uncalled-for death—and the victim was a woman. But
it was not that. Though the head was not yet revealed, I thought I knew
the woman and that she—Did seconds pass or many minutes before I lifted
that last cushion? I shall never know. It was an eternity to me and I am
not of a sentimental cast, but I have some sort of a conscience and
during that interval it awoke. It has never quite slept since.

The cushion had not concealed the hands, but I did not look at
them—I did not dare. I must first see the face. But I did not twitch
this pillow off; I drew it aside slowly, as though held by the
restraining clutch of some one behind me. And I was so held, but not
by what was visible—rather by the terrors which gather in the soul
at the summons of some dreadful doom. I could not meet the certainty
without some preparation. I released another strand of hair; then
the side of a cheek, half buried out of sight in the loosened locks
and bulging pillows; then, with prayers to God for mercy, an icy
brow; two staring eyes—which having seen I let the cushion drop,
for mercy was not to be mine.

It was
she
, she, indeed! and judgment was glassed in the look I
met—judgment and nothing more kindly, however I might appeal to
Heaven for mercy or whatever the need of my fiercely startled and
repentant soul.

Dead! Adelaide! the woman I had planned to wrong that very night, and who
had thus wronged me! For a moment I could take in nothing but this one
astounding fact, then the how and the why woke in maddening curiosity
within me, and seizing the cushion, I dragged it aside and stared down
into the pitiful and accusing features thus revealed, as though to tear
from them the story of the crime which had released me as I would not
have been released, no, not to have had my heart's desire in all the
fulness with which I had contemplated it a few short hours before.

But beyond the ever accusing, protuberant stare, those features told
nothing; and steeling myself to the situation, I made what observation I
could of her condition and the surrounding circumstances. For this was my
betrothed wife. Whatever my intentions, however far my love had strayed
under the spell cast over me by her sister,—the young girl who had just
passed out,—Adelaide and I had been engaged for many months; our wedding
day was even set.