Sinister house

Front matter

ELAND HALL

¥ : tail

2 Park Srreet, Boston

Chapter I

WE hit upon the same thought at precisely the same instant, my wife and I, as we started home from Julia’s. Coming out from the gloomy driveway and turning to the right along the main road, the night a bit wild with wind and the moonlight hitting the earth hard through rifts in the racing cloud, my . wife spoke the words with me: “‘How gay she was after all!”

Such little happenings are not always so mysterious as they seem. In this case there was cause enough for us to hit upon the same thought at the same moment. A mournful spirit always walked in the driveway to the house in which Julia and Eric lived, and that night Eric was away and Julia was alone in the place. Many a time before, having left them together in the dark house behind, my wife and I half sighed with relief as we came up from the blackness under the hemlocks that roofed the driveway and gained the flat highroad, bare of trees and blessedly free under sun, stars, or cloud from lugubrious shadows. We had often spoken of the melancholy that breathed round the house and grounds, puzzled to explain it, since Eric was warm-hearted and cordial and Julia had a way with her that put guests at their ease, and they adored each other.

Perhaps he loved her too intensely. I have since thought of that. His very ardor of attention, maybe, put it into our subconsciousness ~ that he was protecting her against — well, anything. You see, it was easy enough to fill the black shadows under those old hemlocks with menaces to the welfare of Eric and Julia. And since many others felt as we felt about the place, though not so keenly, I suppose the stimulus to the imagination must have been something that was evident to all the friends who visited the house. Nothing therein was ‘so evident as Eric’s restless and forever protecting love of his wife. After spending an evening with him and her, one might well shiver with fear lest something harm her and hence drive him mad. The black shadows under those trees could easily secrete wickedness. ;

To those who knew Eric and Julia less intimately than we, I am aware that this will appear a little far-fetched. There was a very noticeable element of tenderness in him which might belie what, for the sake of my argument, I must call his alertness as against an inexorable hostility. Then, too, wives who attract a jealous watchfulness from their husbands usually suggest the possibility of evasion, a fling over the traces. But Julia loved Eric with a love that would, and did, go through hell-fire unchanged. He was wholly sure of her love. Weall were. I think no one lost sight of that, even when to some it could not but seem that his presence was to her a source of —

Well, let that go for the present. It was natural enough for my wife and me to ejaculate at the same moment the surprising fact that Julia, alone in the gloomy house save for a grouchy servant, and with Eric gone from her for the first time since they had been married, had seemed unusually gay. Perhaps I should say gay as she used to be in the first days when we knew her.

We had feared that she might be sadly depressed by his absence. As we drove home that night, we recalled to each other, in phrases snatched from our lips by the gale, Eric’s sorrow at being forced to leave her even for the brief space of two weeks. Lately she had not been well. Her delicately colored face had slowly been losing its color, and its delicate lines were being drawn, especially about the eyes, in which both Annette and I had observed from time to time a look of apprehension. Sleeplessness might have made her look so. Just before Eric went away she had come to walk with a certain weariness; and Annette, naturally a keener observer than I, had declared to me that Julia struck her as a woman beset by nervousness at night and exhausted by day.

While all this was slighter than my words about it, it was real enough for Eric to feel that Julia should not accompany him on a tiresome business trip; and though Julia dreaded being separated from him, she evidently recognized the wisdom of her staying quietly at home while he was gone.

“T cannot bear the thought of his leaving me, and I want most dreadfully to go with him,” she told Annette. “But — Well, I am a little run down and we both think I had better not try it. After all,” she went on with a half-sad smile, ““we simply are two persons and we can’t always be with each other.”

And then she added with a surprisingly different tone, which Annette could neither describe nor reproduce. ““We must be sensible. Yes; sensible — reasonable.”

When we got home that night, when I had filled my pipe, and Annette, plumper than the berry since the baby was born, had kicked off her slippers, and we sat down for a little chat together before going upstairs to bed, it was the very reasonableness of Eric and Julia that we agreed upon.

“Though,” I remarked judicially, “I should think Eric would have sent her to pass the time of his absence in some more cheerful place. That would have been the wholly sensible thing to do.”

**What more have you ever learned of that house, Pierre?’’ my wife asked me by way of rejoinder.

She had set me once to find out something. We felt the place had almost a personality, not, as you will have gleaned, one wholly pleasant to us. But that may not have been entirely because of its spookiness. I am an > American; and I am chauvinist enough (is that the word?) to be prejudiced in favor of a new concrete house. As for Annette, with two children to safeguard, she’s all for the up-to-date in ventilation, plumbing, and orientation. Forsby, where we lived, was being built of houses of the kind that are put up quickly and that last — theoretically should last — long. Most of them had not been built long enough as yet to test the boast of architects and promoters that they’d call for next to no repairs. While they were cheap, they were good; and they were blessedly clean and full of sun and air. Forsby was a settlement of commuters, most of them well enough off to own an automobile, few of them rich | enough to hire a chauffeur. There were perhaps twenty young married couples bringing up their infants there. We had n’t yet much of a community spirit; but such a thing was beginning to crystallize round the general need (we all had babies growing rapidly in the way of nature) for schools.

You see, there had never been a village of Forsby. The Common Sense Realty Company — specially incorporated under the laws of New York — had bought up some ten square miles of land on the high plateau above the river, had drained the swampy places, laid out a few rods, cut down the moth-eaten trees, and marked off the terrain into generous house lots. The name Forsby had come from the maternal grandfather of the up-and-coming young man whose brain had engendered the Common Sense Realty Company. He was Bob Planter.

We had him to dinner once, Annette and I, and took to him whole-heartedly. Like all young American business men, he had an eye out for the money in the scheme; but equally like them — let me say like us — he had a sort of glorious inspiration and dreamed of the ““Future”’ of the place and loved planning for it — saw it all in the rosy light of enthusiastic yet common-sense youth.

After all, the United States of America were born in a clearing, and they ’ve cleared the way before them as they ’ve grown. If tome there’s romance about a brand-new cement house in a bare, flat plot of land, it’s because I’ve inherited the forward-looking temperament from my grandfathers.

I write this by way of gentle protest, because I remember that Annette’s second cousin, Giles Farrow, a gifted but temperamental artist, was staying with us the night young Planter came to dinner, and that he called Forsby hopeless, naked, new, and American. Why, of course American; but that was the very reason it was n't hopeless.

Nothing could down Planter’s enthusiasm ; but on the other hand, nothing could soften my wife’s cousin’s resentment. Meadow grasses were beautiful; find a way to kill off mosquitoes, but keep your meadows. You can restore moth-eaten trees and protect them from pests in the future. (But drain your © meadows and cut down all your trees, you. take all natural charm and individuality from the place.

“Well,” replied Planter with unperturbed good-humor, “the sun still sets in the west, over the river; and we have grand sunsets, my friend.”

Giles paid no more attention to him than if he had not spoken. “Take that old place behind the hemlocks, back in on the river three miles or so up,” he went on. “That has charm, softness, atmosphere.”

Atmosphere! I shudder now when I think of that place. But I remember that then Planter laughed heartily at picking as a model for the Common Sense Realty Company such a broken-down old wooden house, all squat and dark, on the edge of a precipice down to the river one way, and shut off from the sun and the rest of the world by a bunch of damp and half-rotten old evergreens the other.

It was that same night I learned my first about the house. I myself had never laid eyes on it; but my wife’s cousin, walking in a fever of wounded susceptibilities and dragging my wife along with him, had made a bee-line out of the squarely planned and flat Forsby, on across the fields towards a clump of trees on a distant headland that jutted out into the river. Having reached these, they pushed their way through and came upon the wooden house.

It was, as Planter said, built on the very edge of the cliff. On all but the river side it was surrounded by a thicket of hemlocks, which had been set out not more than fifty feet from the house itself. Planter had penetrated the thicket in the early days of the Forsby survey, and had found the narrow bit of land between the house and the trees overgrown with tall grass, weeds, and thistles. He had found the house broken down: sashes without glass, shutters dangling from one hinge, sections of the gutters fallen askew, and the paint peeled off. ©: | But my wife and her cousin had found a smooth lawn, a house which seemed to be in good repair, and a charming lady and a lanky, low-voiced gentleman, evidently living there, tying up foxgloves in bloom along the southern wall. : | Since the afternoon of that chance encounter, both my wife and I had become intimate with Eric and Julia Grier and had grown really to love them; but to both of us the house had remained rather antipathetic. Grier himself, in answer to my direct inquiries, had told me that Julia and he had stumbled on it during their honeymoon, and Julia had fallen in love:

with it — “had felt drawn to it at once; which was singular enough, since, as perhaps you know, the old house was all a ruin, and to me, at least, depressing.”

Julia in her own sweet way, so bright and vivacious in the early days of our acquaintance, told several of us one night at. dinner _ there, some time before midsummer, that when ' she first laid eyes on the house, she had a queer feeling that all the doors and windows opened to her and that something really called to her from within to come and live and be happy there. “Yes,” she went on, her bright eyes glowing, “be happy there. Why, it sang to me, really sang as I went towards it; like a —”

I forget her word, but I remember the radiance in her eyes as she looked towards her husband, and how his eyes gave back her look.

Later on, when once more— not wholly casually —I asked him about the house, I remember he said: ‘*To tell the truth, I did n’t feel — feel drawn to it, as Julia felt. But to be able to give my wife the one thing she desired above all others— it really took hold of her, and to be able to give it to her and please her— My God, Pierre, the joy of doing that —I say the strange, strange joy!”

There you have it. Why strange? I don’t mean anything about the old house; but that intensity in his love for Julia which, I say again, stimulated in the subconsciousness of their friends the apprehension of menaces to their happiness in those black shadows under the hemlocks.

I never bought but one house, and that we bought on paper. If, however, in the flush of our honeymoon Annette and I had stumbled on one already made and the doors and windows had flown open to her and sweet spirits had, as it were, sung her in — well, I suppose I should never have lost faith in my bride’s reason. One can hardly imagine anything more dreadful than that for a hon- | eymoon experience. But I’d have got her damned quick out of the sight of such a lunatic place, and I might have set fire to it into the bargain.

Chapter II

*““No, dear,” I said to Annette that night we came from dining with a surprisingly happy bachelor Julia, “I’ve feund out nothing more about the house.”

Some time before, I may add here, we had gleaned from an old storekeeper in Stanton, within the bounds of which it stood, that it had been built for a summer house by an eccentric old man, very religious, Morgan Snart by name. We thought the name had an evil sound, but the old fellow had been apparently more than respectable, and he had not been near the place for many years before he died, not, at any rate, since his daughter Huldah had married. Huldah was dead, too, had died “‘just on top of her father.”’ According to the old storekeeper, she had taken to religion even more entirely than her father had, and he guessed from what he had heard the village people say, she had seen the light powerful strong. Though the memory of them was rather drab, they were holy enough. As Annette said, they were too good to be denied heaven, and must have been wholly folded up in bliss: a conclusion disappointing to us who were given to thinking that the errant, damned soul of at least a murderer must be haunting the place.

I was rather puzzled to have my wife bring up the subject of the house again. We had come to accept the fact that Julia and Eric loved it, even though we did n’t; and thinking of this, I asked Annette abruptly whatever had set her to suspecting the house again.

“Oh, nothing,” she replied thoughtfully. “I was n’t suspecting. Julia’s being so attached to it, and what you said about Eric’s leaving her in such a gloomy place, I suppose. I wonder, Pierre, if you and I are— You remember Cousin Giles thought it was a charming old place. Perhaps we’re not educated to see in those old places what other people see. Let’s get some books on architecture and read it up, and then our eyes will be opened. Of course, I should n’t think for a moment of bringing up my children in such an unsanitary old shanty. I can’t help it. I think it’s damp and horrid and gloomy. There, now!”’

‘“Heavens, Annette,” I cried, turning to face her, “‘what’s the matter?”’

I knew that she was quite stirred up about something. Usually she was gracious enough to refer to Nettie and little Bobbie as our children.

“Oh, nothing,” she said again, with the airy inflection women use when they think it hardly necessary to take their husbands into their confidence.

““Nonsense,”’ I replied firmly but kindly; *“something’s made you mad.”

She turned surprised round eyes at me.

“Tt has, too,” I went on.

“Why, Pierre,” she said, innocent as a lamb, “‘just because I suggest that we improve our minds!”’

“But what,” I asked, surer than ever, **made you think of such a thing?”

“Well, it could be done, could n’t it? Do you think, dear, that I am not naturally ambitious?”’ (This with supreme pity.) “Do you think that I do not want the best for my children and myself — and you, dear? If there’s something in architecture more than we think, we ought to get busy and learn about it. Cousin Giles tells me that my sense of beauty is undeveloped. Heaven knows what he’d say about yours, dear. But he’s in the family, and I don’t mind him.”

“Now we'll get to the heart of this,”’ I said, smiling.

“It’s nothing to get to the heart of,” Annette went on serenely. “It’s simply that old house. I told Julia I thought it a horrid old place.”

** Annette!”

“Well, not baldly like that, of course. It was when we came. I — well —I invited Julia to come and stay with us while Eric’s away. ‘You know,’ I said, ‘we have a nice, sunny spare room, and I think it would do you much more good than to stay shut up in a gloomy old house like this.’”

“Well, that was going somes And then?”

**She was very toplofty —

“No,” I interrupted; ‘“‘not toplofty, not Julia.”

“Yes, Pierre. Will you let me finish? I tell you she was very toplofty. ‘Oh,’ she said, just like that, ‘so you find this house a gloomy, shut-up old place?’ And since I’d gone that far, I was n’t going to take anything back, and I came out flat and told her I thought it was horrid. Then she said, ‘But J love it. Thank you a thousand times for asking me to stay with you while Eric’s gone. You must n’t think, though, that this house is — lonesome. She gave quite a queer little laugh, and then she told me that it was a sweet old place: ‘and,’ she said, ‘you don’t think, after all that _ Eric and I have done with it, that I want to leave it for a single night, do you? I know some of the rooms are shady; but you would n’t have me driven from our nest by a shadow, would you?’ She got quite excited, so I said’I only thought our house would be more cheerful for her in Eric’s absence, and I admitted that I did n’t see in her old place what she saw in it. And she just turned her back on me and said, ‘I suppose not.’”’

“Not like that!’’ I cried, for Annette had given the little remark a most disagreeable, almost an insolent, ring.

“Yes, Pierre,” Annette replied, with something like indignation. “She was very sharp and rather snobbish. I know Julia’s artistic and all that, but goodness knows, though I may be only a plain, practical woman, I’m not a country know-nothing, and she has no right to put on airs with me just because I don’t happen to see in her old house what she sees in it.”

I say frankly that little else could have made me sorrier than to have my wife fall out with Julia Grier. I have never met two persons to whom I have been so drawn as to Eric and Julia Grier, and I have heard Annette say the same thing for her part. They were so good-looking and so generous, and they had such warm voices. While I felt much the same as Annette about their house, I could not help confessing that compared with them Annette and I were — well, not ordinary, but not extraordinary either. It is, of course, only fair to Annette to remind you that the distinguished artist, Giles Farrow, was her cousin, not mine. For my part, I could name perhaps half a dozen colors, and could recognize the names of twice as many more. But tones, shades, and tints! Not that Julia and Eric ever talked of such details with me; but Giles used to talk such stuff with them and they used to be very much interested in it.

So I told Annette that Julia had meant nothing, that the tone might easily be misunderstood while the words in themselves were entirely innocent. After all, no one but Julia could be expected to see in that house just what Julia saw.

Annette let me rave on awhile about beauty, and then she asked me if I, too, found beauty in that old house.

“Yes,” I said valiantly; “‘a certain beauty. Wes; Ido.” ..

But I blushed as I said it; and it was so wholly sham — so wholly manly, Annette said, that we both burst out laughing.

Suddenly, Annette stopped, poised a second, and then fled upstairs in her stocking feet, shouting down at me:

“It’s raining great guns and all the windows are ne: Go out and bring in a baby carriage.”

It was raining hard and the wind was blowing a gale. I got pretty wet hauling the baby carriage backwards to the front porch; but once there with it, I was sheltered, and I stood there a few moments, facing north.

The night was absolutely black, for we had as yet no street lights in the outer parts of Forsby. The light from the bulb on the porch behind me, however, lit up the heavy drops of rain that fell from the coping, and down the granolithic path a ways I saw long streaks of rain reflect it back now and then like steel.

Through all the noise of rain and wind I just barely heard the whistle of the last train from the city. The tracks were a couple of miles away.

Half-past twelve!

I went in and locked up the house for the night.

Oh, serenity of the sound, new house. At every stage of my toilet I thought of it: our neat, square bedroom, with its window east and its two windows south; and all Julia’s rooms were queer-shaped; our tiled bathroom, with its white enamel, its shining nickel, its _ open plumbing, and I don’t believe Eric had a bit of shining nickel or open plumbing in his whole place; our electric light beside the beds and over the mirror and everywhere one might want it, and their dingy gas and flickering candles.

My thoughts went on as I brushed my teeth over the bright nickel toothbrush basin. The sanitary equipment of our house was up to date and complete, as it always should be in a house that shelters young children. If the Griers had children, now, it would n’t be so lonesome over there; but they’d have to clear the place up more: cut down those rotten old trees and let the sun in all day all round.

Funny: Julia was as merry as a lark this eve-

ning, and looked as she looked the first day I saw her, before the summer had — well, pulled her down, I guess. And she was as fresh and sparkling as the sun on a brook.

‘Are n’t you ever coming to bed?” Annette called to me.

I snapped off the light and went into the bedroom.

As I opened the window the wind roared in, flapped my pyjamas about my legs, and hurled the rain half way across the floor.

“Say, Annette, I don’t know about opening this window.”

“Come along; the other’ll be just as bad, and we’ll mop up the floor in the morning. Roll the rug back, dear, and come to bed.”

That for good tight floors.

S34 SINISTER HOUSE

I got into bed, and then snapped out the little table lamp (with rose-colored shade) right beside me. The room was instantly in darkness, but I was safe in bed.

“Better than dingy gas and flaring candles, eh, old girl?”

I reached out my hand from the bed for hers, that, sleepy as she might be or dark the room, never failed to find mine and bridge | the little space between our beds in a good-night clasp.

“Just the same,” she murmured sleepily, “I’m going to study architecture till I see in that house what Julia sees.”

I chuckled and pressed her hand.

“That you'll never do, my love. Good-night.”

I’ll never forget how Annette pulled on my hand when, at that very moment, abangingon — the front door resounded through the house. —

Chapter III

As I have told you, our house has every modern convenience. We have electric doorbells at every door; but whoever gave those resounding thwacks — they seemed resounding, I assure you, at that weird hour of the night and in that storm — was probably unable in the dark to find the button. So my mind reasoned inasecond or two. You know, pounding on a door is a very threatening noise, and I confess I was startled.

Annette was really alarmed. For a long while she would not loose my hand, but kept dragging at me; and I was very awkward trying to find the button of the lamp to my left.

Once a little light in the room, however, she became cautious and alert. She would not let me leave my bed. Both of us sat up, and, very strained, we listened for the blows to come again.

It seemed a long time that we waited. It was probably not more than a couple of minutes. At any rate, no sound but the roaring of the wind, the driving of the rain, and the flapping of the curtain by the open window assailed our ears.

Suddenly I jumped out of bed and, determined to find who had roused us so, made my way without slippers or gown into the northeast room, from the window of which I could lean out and spy. I did n’t switch on any light because, as Annette said, that would have made me too good a target for any one below.

As I stumbled along, I heard my little son begin to cry, an unusual sound in our house and disconcerting at that hour.

From the north window I could see nothing in the blackness of the night. I opened it cautiously, without making a sound, and leaned out. The very wall of the house beneath me was invisible. I might have been leaning over an unfathomable abyss. But through the noise of rain and wind my ear caught the sound of | footsteps, heavy and slow, on the granolithic walk.

*“Who’s there?” I challenged loudly.

To my utter amazement, the voice which answered me, hushed but audible, from out the storm, was familiar.

“Ah, Pierre, I got you up. I’m sorry. I watched your light from half a mile down the road, hoping it would not go out. I was just going on.”

**For the love of Heaven, Eric!”’ I shouted back. “I’ll be down in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”

Darting back to my room for my slippers, I switched on the living-room lights from up- _ stairs, and then I rushed down to let him in.

He stepped over the threshold, dripping wet. I saw in a glance that his clothes were soaked through. They hung down heavily from his shoulders. I caught a glimpse, too, of a heavy dress-suit case he left outside on the porch.

“What’s the matter, Eric?”’ I asked him, more than ever surprised to see standing before me a man I had thought was a thousand miles away.

“Nothing’s the matter,” he replied in his melodious and somewhat sad voice.

He took off his hat with an apologetic, sidelong smile, The rain ran in streams from it.

“TI didn’t mean to rout you out, but — Somehow, it’s such a devilish night, and I wanted to get home quickly —”’

“'There’s nothing the matter with Julia, is there?”’ I asked suddenly and without thinking.

“With Julia!” he cried, his look transfixing me and his deep-set brown eyes terribly anxious and searching.

“Tam an idiot. Of course not. We left her not two hours ago. Never saw her looking so well; never saw her livelier.”’

That relieved him. He undid a button or two of his coat (I always noticed how lean and sensitive his hands were) and reached in for a handkerchief to mop his face. ;

What an expressive wet face it was! He cleared his throat, putting his fingers to his mouth as he did so in a gesture characteristically apologetic. He was a tall, wiry, gaunt fellow, whose face fairly burned with eagerness at times, though he was a man of few words, rather mute. I suppose he was self-effacing and extremely considerate of others rather than apologetic. Certainly there was no suggestion of weakness about him. He wasn’t assertive or aggressive, but he had unusual power of endurance, both physical and, I found out later, mental.

Weeks afterwards Giles said of him that he was tempered in a white-hot resentment. But Giles was an incorrigible phrase-maker. Eric seemed to me just an attractive, magnetic, dark-eyed fellow, taller and thinner than the average and a good deal more what the women call sympathetic. Resentment was the last thing in the world I should have associated with Eric Grier.