Book: The House of Mystery

W >> William Henry Irwin >> The House of Mystery




In the mind, too--though no one perceived that, he least of all--had
come a change. Here and there, a cell had disintegrated and collapsed.
They were not the cells which vitalized his business sense. They lay
deeper down; it was as though their very disuse for thirty years had
weakened them. In such a cell his consciousness dwelt while he gazed on
Trinity Churchyard, and especially upon that modest shaft of granite,
three graves from the south entrance. And the watch on his desk clicked
off the valuable seconds, and the electric clock on the wall jumped to
mark the passing minutes. "Click-click" from the desk--seventy-eight
cents--"Click-click"--one dollar and fifty-seven cents--"Clack" from
the wall--forty-seven dollars.

Presently, when watch and clock had chronicled four hundred and seventy
dollars of wasted time, he leaned back, looked for a moment on the
brazen September heavens above, and sighed. He might then have turned
back to his desk and the table of gross earnings, but for his
secretary.

"Mr. Bulger outside, sir," said the secretary.

"All right!" responded Mr. Norcross. In him, those two words spoke
enthusiasm; usually, a gesture or a nod was enough to bar or admit a
visitor to the royal presence. Hard behind the secretary, entered with
a bound and a breeze, Mr. Arthur Bulger. He was a tall man about
forty-five if you studied him carefully, no more than thirty-five if
you studied him casually. Not only his strong shoulders, his firm set
on his feet, his well-conditioned skin, showed the ex-athlete who has
kept up his athletics into middle age, but also that very breeze and
bound of a man whose blood runs quick and orderly through its channels.
His face, a little pudgy, took illumination from a pair of lively eyes.
He was the jester in the court of King Norcross; one of the half-dozen
men whom the bachelor lord of railroads admitted to intimacy. A
measured intimacy it was; and it never trenched on business. Bulger,
like all the rest, owed half of his position to the fact that he never
asked by so much as a hint for tips, never seemed curious about the
operations of Norcross. There was the time on Wall Street when
Norcross, by a lift of his finger, a deflection of his eye, might have
put his cousin and only known relative on the right side of the market.
He withheld the sign, and his cousin lost. The survivors in Norcross's
circle of friends understood this perfectly; it was why they survived.
If they got any financial advantage from the friendship, it was through
the advertising it gave. For example, Bulger, a broker of only moderate
importance, owed something to the general understanding that he was
"thick with the Old Man."

Norcross looked up; his mustache lifted a little, and his eyes lit.

"Drink?" he said. His allowance was two drinks a day; one just before
he left the office, the other before dinner.

"Much obliged," responded Bulger, "but you know where I was last night.
If I took a drink now, I would emit a pale, blue flame."

Norcross laughed a purring laugh, and touched a bell. The secretary
stood in the door; Norcross indicated, by an out-turned hand, the top
of his desk. The secretary had hardly disappeared before the office-boy
entered with a tray and glasses. Simultaneously a clerk, entering from
another door as though by accident, swept up the balance sheets of the
L.D. and M. and bore them away. Bulger's glance followed the papers
hungrily for a second; then turned back on Norcross, carefully mixing a
Scotch highball.

As Norcross finished with the siphon, his eyes wandered downward again.

"Ever been about much down there?" he asked suddenly. Bulger crossed
the room and looked down over his shoulder.

"Where?" he asked, "The Street or--"

"Trinity Churchyard."

"Once I sang my little love lays there in the noon hour," answered
Bulger. "I was a gallant clerk and hers the fairest fingers that ever
caressed a typewriter--" The intent attitude of Norcross, the fact that
he neither turned nor smiled, checked Bulger. With the instinct of the
courtier, he perceived that the wind lay in another tack. He racked the
unused half of his mind for appropriate sentiments.

"Bully old graveyard," he brought out; "lot's of good people buried
there."

"Know any of the graves?"

"Only Alexander Hamilton's. Everyone knows that."

"That one--see--that marble shaft--not one of the old ones."

"If you're curious to know," answered Bulger easily, "I'll find out on
my way down to-morrow. I suppose if you were to go and look, and the
reporters were to see you meditating among the tombs, we'd have a scare
head to-morrow and a drop of ten points in the market." Bulger's shift
to a slight levity was premeditated; he was taking guard against
overplaying his part.

"No, never mind," said Norcross, "it just recalls something." He paused
the fraction of a second, and his eye grew dull. "Wonder if
they're--anywhere--those people down under the tombstones?"

"I suppose we all believe in immortality."

"Seeing and hearing is believing. I believe what I see. Born that way."
Norcross was speaking with a slight, agitated jerk in his voice. He
rose now, and paced the floor, throwing out his feet in quick thrusts.
"I'm getting along, Bulger, and I'd like to know." More pacing. Coming
to the end of his route, he peered shrewdly into the face of the
younger man. "Have you read the Psychical Society's report on Mrs.
Fife?"

Bulger's mind said, "Good God no!" His lips said, "Only some newspaper
stuff about them. Seemed rather remarkable if true. Something in that
stuff, I suppose."

"I've read them," resumed Norcross. "Got the full set. We ought to
inform ourselves on such things, Bulger. Especially when we get older.
That gravestone now. There's one like it--that I know about." Norcross,
with another jerky motion, which seemed to propel him against his will,
crossed to his desk and touched a bell, bringing his secretary
instantly.

"Left hand side of the vault, box marked 'Private 3,'" he said. Then he
resumed:

"If they could come back they would come, Bulger. Especially those we
loved. Not to let us see them, you understand, but to assure us it is
all right--that we'll live again. That's what I want--proof--I can't
take it on faith." His voice lowered. "Thirty years!" he whispered.
"What's thirty years?"

The secretary knocked, entered, set a small, steel box on the glass top
of the desk. Norcross dismissed him with a gesture, drew out his keys,
opened the box. It distilled a faint scent of old roses and old papers.
Norcross looked within for a moment, as though turning the scent into
memories, before he took out a locket. He opened it, hesitated, and
then extended it to Bulger. It enclosed an exquisite miniature--a young
woman, blonde, pretty in a blue-eyed, innocent way, but characterless,
too--a face upon which life had left nothing, so that even the great
painter who made the miniature from a photograph had illuminated it
only with technical skill.

"Don't tell me what you think of her," Norcross said quietly; "I prefer
to keep my own ideas. It was when I was a young freight clerk. She
taught school up there. We were--well, the ring's in the box, too. They
took it off her finger when they buried her. That's why--" to put the
brake on his rapidly running sentiment, he ventured one of his rare
pleasantries at this point--"that's why I'm still a stock newspaper
feature as one of the great matches for ambitious society girls."

Bulger, listening, was observing also. Within the front cover of the
case were two sets of initials in old English letters--"R.H.N." and
"H.W." His mind, a little confused by its wanderings in strange fields,
tried idly to match "H.W." with names. Suddenly he felt the necessity
of expressing sympathy.

"Poor--" he began, but Norcross, by a swift outward gesture of the
hand, stopped and saved him.

[Illustration: "IT WASN'T THE MONEY; IT WAS THE GAME--"]

"Well, I got in after that," Norcross went on, "and I drove 'em! It
wasn't the money; it was the game. She'd have had the spending of
_that_. And it isn't just to see her--it's to know if she is still
waiting--and if we'll make up for thirty years--out there."

As Bulger handed back the locket, the secretary knocked again. Norcross
started; something seemed to snap into place; he was again the silent,
guarded baron of the railroads. He dropped the locket into the box,
closed it. "The automobile," said his secretary. Norcross nodded, and
indicated the box. The secretary bore it away.

"Come up to dinner Tuesday," said Norcross in his normal tone. But his
voice quavered a little for a moment as he added:

"You're good at forgetting?"

"Possessor of the best forgettery you ever saw," responded Bulger.
Forthwith, they turned to speech of the railroad rate bill.

* * * * *

When, after a mufti dinner at the club, Bulger reached his bachelor
apartments, he found a telegram. The envelope bore his office address;
by that sign he knew, even before he unfolded the yellow paper, that it
was the important telegram from his partner, the crucial telegram, for
which he had been waiting these two days. It must have come to the
office after he left. He got out the code book from his desk, laid it
open beside the sheet, and began to decipher, his face whitening as he
went on:

BUTTE, MONT.

Reports of expert phony. Think Oppendike salted it on him. They
will finish this vein in a month. Then the show will bust.
Federated Copper Company will not bite and too late now to unload
on public. Something must be done. Can't you use your drag with
Norcross somehow?

WATSON.

Bulger, twisting the piece of yellow paper, stared out into the street.
His "drag with Norcross!" What had that ever brought, what could it
ever bring, except advertising and vague standing? Yet Norcross by a
word, a wink, could give him information which, rightly used, would
cancel all the losses of this unfortunate plunge in the Mongolia Mine.
But Norcross would never give that word, that wink; and to fish for it
were folly. Norcross never broke the rules of the lone game which he
played.

As Bulger stood there, immovable except for the nervous hands which
still twisted and worried the telegram, he saw a sign on the building
opposite. The first line, bearing the name, doubtless, was illegible;
the second, fully legible, lingered for a long time merely in his
perceptions before it reached and touched his consciousness.

"CLAIRVOYANT," it read.

He started, leaned on a table as though from weakness, and continued to
stare at the sign.

"Who is the cleverest fakir in that business?" he said at length to
himself.

And then, after a few intent minutes:

"When he was a freight clerk--thirty years ago--that was at Farnham
Mills--'H.W.'--granite shaft--sure it can be done!"




III

THE LIGHT


As Dr. Blake tucked his racket under his arm and came down to the net,
the breeze caught a corner of her veil and let the sunlight run clear
across her face. He realized, in that moment, how the burning interest
as a man, which he had developed in these three weeks for Annette
Markham, had quite submerged his interest as a physician. For health,
this was a different creature from the one whom he had studied in the
parlor-car. Her color ran high; the greatest alarmist in the profession
would have wasted no thought on her heart valves; the look as of one
"called" had passed. Though she still appeared a little grave, it was a
healthy, attractive gravity; and take it all in all she had smiled much
during three weeks of daily walks and rides and tennis. Indeed, now
that he remembered it, her tennis measured the gradual change. She
would never be good at tennis; she had no inner strength and no "game
sense." But at first she had played in a kind of stupor; again and
again she would stand at the backline in a brown study until the
passage of the ball woke her with an apologetic start. Now, she
frolicked through the game with all vigor, zest and attention, going
after every shot, smiling and sparkling over her good plays, prettily
put out at her bad ones.

While he helped her on with her sweater--lingering too long over that
little service of courtesy--he expressed this.

"Do you know that for physical condition you're no more the same girl
whom I first met than--than I am!"

She laughed a little at the comparison. "And you are no more the same
man whom I first met--than I am!"

He laughed too at this tribute to his summer coating of bronze over
red. "I feel pretty fit," he admitted.

"My summer always has that effect," she went on. "Do you know that for
all I've been so much out of the active world"--a shadow fell on her
eyes,--"I long for country and farms? How I wish I could live always
out-of-doors! The day might come--" the shadow lifted a little--"when
I'd retire to a farm for good."

"You've one of those constitutions which require air and light and
sunshine," he answered.

"You're quite right. I actually bleach in the shadow--like lettuce.
That's why Aunt Paula always sends me away for a month every now and
then to the quietest place proper for a well-brought-up young person."

His eyes shadowed as though they had caught that blasting shade in
hers. From gossip about the Mountain House, later from her own
admission, he knew who "Aunt Paula" was--"a spirit medium, or
something," said the gossip; "a great teacher of a new philosophy,"
said Annette Markham.

Dr. Blake, partly because adventure had kept him over-young, held still
his basic, youthful ideas about the proper environment for woman.
Whenever the name "Aunt Paula," softened with the accents of affection,
proceeded from that low, contralto voice, it hurt the new thing,
greater than any conventional idea, which was growing up in him. He
even suspected, at such times, what might be the "something nobler than
nursing."

A big apple tree shaded the sidelines of the Mountain House tennis
court. A bench fringed its trunk. Annette threw herself down, back
against the bark. It was late afternoon. The other house-guests droned
over bridge on the piazzas or walked in the far woods; they were alone
out-of-doors. And Annette, always, until now, so chary of confidences,
developed the true patient's weakness and began to talk symptoms.

"It is curious the state I'm in before Aunt Paula sends me away," she
said; "I was a nervous child, and though I've outgrown it, I still have
attacks of nerve fag or something like it. I can feel them coming on
and so can she. You know we've been together so much that it's
like--like two bees in adjoining cells. The cell-wall has worn thin; we
can almost touch. She knows it often before I do. She makes me go to
bed early; often she puts me to sleep holding my hand, as she used to
do when I was a little girl. But even sleep doesn't much help. I come
out of it with a kind of fright and heaviness. I have little memories
of curious dreams and a queer sense, too, that I mustn't remember what
I've dreamed. I grow tired and heavy--I can always see it in my face.
Then Aunt Paula sends me away, and I become all right again--as I am
now."

Blake did not express the impatient thought of his mind. He only said:

"A little sluggishness of the blood and a little congestion of the
brain. I had such sleep once after I'd done too much work and fought
too much heat in the Cavite Hospital. Only with me it took the form of
nightmare--mostly, I was in process of being boloed."

"Yes, perhaps it was that"--her eyes deepened to their most faraway
blue--"and perhaps it is something else. I think it may be. Aunt Paula
thinks so, too, though she never says it."

What was the something? Did she stand again on the edge of revelation?
Events had gone past the time when he could wait patiently for her
confidence, could approach it through tact. It was the moment not for
snipping but for bold charging. And his blood ran hot.

"This something--won't you tell me what it is? Why are you always so
mysterious with me? Why--when I want to know everything about you?"
After he had said this, he knew that there was no going backward.
Doubts, fears, terrors of conventionalities, awe of his conservative,
blood-proud mother in Paris--all flew to the winds.

Perhaps she caught something of this in his face, for she drew away a
trifle and said:

"I might have told you long ago, but I wasn't sure of your sympathy."

"I want you to be sure of my sympathy in all things."

"Ah, but your mind is between!" That phrase brought a shock to Dr.
Blake. At the only spiritualistic seance he had ever attended, a greasy
affair in a hall bedroom, he had heard that very phrase. A picture of
this woman, so clean and windblown of mind and soul, caught like a
trapped fly in the web of the unclean and corrupt--it was that which
quite whirled him off his feet.

"Between our hearts then, between our hearts!" he cried. "Oh, Annette,
I love you!" His voice came out of him low and distinct, but all the
power in the world vibrated behind it. "I have loved you always. You've
been with me everywhere I went, because I was looking for you. I've
seen a part of you in the best of every woman"--he pulled himself up,
for neither by look nor gesture did she respond--"I've no right to be
saying this--"

"If you have not," she answered, and a delicate blush ran over her
skin, "no other man has!" She said it simply, but with a curious kind
of pride.

He would have taken her hand on this, but the grave, direct gaze of her
sapphirine eyes restrained him. It was not the look of a woman who
gives herself, but rather that of a woman who grieves for the
ungivable.

"Ah," she said, "if anyone's to blame, it is I. I've brought it on
myself! I've been weak--weak!"

"No," he said, "I brought it on--God brought it on--but what does that
matter?

"It's _here_. I can no more fight it than I can fight the sea."

Now her head dropped forward and her hands, with that gracefully
uncertain motion which was like flower-stalks swayed by a breeze, had
covered her face.

"I can't speak if I look at you," she said, "and I must before you go
further--I must tell you all about myself so that you will understand."

The confidence, long sought, was coming, he thought; and he thought
also how little he cared for it now that he was pursuing a greater
thing.

"You know so little about me that I must begin far back--you don't even
know about my aunt--"

"I know something--what you've said, what Mrs. Cole at the Mountain
House told me. She's Mrs. Paula Markham--" his mind went on, "the great
fakir of the spook doctors," but his lips stifled the phrase and said
after a pause, "the great medium."

"I don't like to hear her called that," said Annette. "In spite of what
I'm going to tell you, I never saw but once the thing they call a
medium. That was years ago--but the horrible sacrilege of it has never
left me. She had a part of truth, and she was desecrating it by guesses
and catch words--selling it for money! Aunt Paula is broader than I.
'It's part of the truth,' she said, 'that woman is desecrating the
work, but she's serving in her way.' I suppose so--but since then I've
never liked to hear Aunt Paula called a medium."

She paused a second on this.

"If I were only sure of your sympathy!" A note of pleading fluttered in
her voice.

"No thought of yours, however I regard it, but is sure of my
sympathy--because it's yours," he answered.

As though she had not heard, she went on.

"I was an orphan. I never knew my father and mother. The first things I
remember are of the country--perhaps that is why I love the
out-of-doors--the sky through my window, filled with huge, puffy,
ice-cream clouds, a little new-born pig that somebody put in my bed one
morning--daisy-fields like snow--and the darling peep-peep-peep of
little bunches of yellow down that I was always trying to catch and
never succeeding. I couldn't say _chicken_. I always said _shicken_"
She paused. With that tenderness which every woman entertains for her
own little girlhood, she smiled.

"I've told you of the five white birches. I was looking at them and
naming them on my fingers the day that Aunt Paula came. My childhood
ended there. I seemed to grow up all at once."

Blake muttered something inarticulate. But at her look of inquiry, he
merely said. "Go on!"

"She isn't really my aunt by blood,--Aunt Paula isn't. You
understand--my father and her husband were brothers. They all
died--everybody died but just Aunt Paula and me. So she took me away
with her. And after that it was always the dreadful noise and confusion
of New York, with only my one doll--black Dinah--a rag-baby. I
thought," she interrupted herself wistfully, "I'd send Dinah to you
when I got back to New York. Would you like her?"

"Like her--like her! My--my--" But he swallowed his words. "Go on!" He
commanded again.

"Afterwards came London and then India. Such education as I had, I got
from governesses. I didn't have very much as girls go in my--in my
class. I didn't understand that then, any more than I understand why I
wasn't allowed to go to school or to play with other girls. There was a
time when I rebelled frightfully at that. I can tell definitely just
when it began. We were passing a convent in the Bronx, and it was
recess time. The sisters in their starched caps were sewing over by the
fence, and the girls were playing--a ring game, 'Go in and out the
window'--I can hear it now. I crowded my little face against the
pickets to watch, and two little girls who weren't in the game passed
close to me. The nearest one--I 'm sure I'd know her now if I saw her
grown up. She was of about my own age, very dark, with the silkiest
black hair and the longest black eyelashes that I ever saw. She had a
dimple at one corner of her mouth. She wore on her arm a little
bracelet with a gold heart dangling from it. I wasn't allowed any
jewelry; and it came into my mind that I'd like a gold bracelet like
that, before it came that I'd like such a friend for my very ownest and
dearest. The other girl, a red-haired minx who walked with her arm
about _my_ girl's waist--how jealous I was of her! I watched until Aunt
Paula dragged me away. As I went, I shouted over my shoulder, 'Hello,
little girl!' The little dark girl saw me, and shouted back, 'Hello!'
Dear little thing. I hope she's grown up safe and very happy! She'll
never know what she meant to me!"

Her lips quivered again. Looking up into her face, Blake wondered for
an instant at the sudden softness of her eyes. Then he realized that
they were slowly filling with tears. He reached again to seize her
hands.

"Oh, no, no--wait!" she said, weakly. After a pause, she resumed:

"That got up rebellion in me. All children have such periods, I've
heard. I'm docile enough now. But before I was through with this one,
Aunt Paula had to make my destiny clear to me--long before she meant to
do so. And I grew to be resigned, and then glad, because it was a
greater thing."

Here a rapid, inexplicable change crossed her face. From its firmness
of health and strength, it fell toward the look of one "called"--

"I must go back again. Between Aunt Paula and me there was always a
great sympathy. It's hard to describe. Often we do not have to speak
even of the most important things. When I come to know more about other
people, I wondered at first why they needed to do so much talking.
Things have happened--things that I would not expect you to believe--"

She had kindled now, and she looked into his eyes like some sybil,
divinely unconscious, preaching the unbelievable.

"I knew dimly, as a child knows, and accepts, that Aunt Paula had some
wonderful mission and that it had to do with the other world--all
you're taught when they teach you to say your prayers. Little by little
she made me understand. I grew up before I understood fully. The
Guides--Aunt Paula's--I have none as yet--had told her that I was a
Light."

He caught at this word, for his lover's impatience was burning and
beating within him.

"Light!" he said; "my Light!"

She regarded him gravely, and then, as though his fervor had frightened
her, she looked beyond at the apple leaves.

"Don't--you'll know soon why you mustn't. Oh, help me, for I am
unhappy!" She controlled a little upward ripple of her throat. "She,
the Guides say, is a great Light, but I am to be a greater. They sent
her to find me, and they directed her to keep me as she has--away from
the world. When she first told me that, I was terrified. She had to sit
beside me and hold my hand until I went to sleep. It's wonderful how
quickly I do sleep when Aunt Paula's with me--she's the most soothing
person in the world. If it weren't for her, I don't know what I'd do
when I get into my tired times."

"You're never going to have any more tired times, Light," he said.

She went on inflexibly, but he knew that she had heard:

"There was one thing which I did not understand, and neither perhaps
did Aunt Paula. The Guides sometimes seem foolish, but in the end
they're always wise; I suppose they waited until the time should come.
Though I tried to help it along, though I cried with impatience, I
couldn't begin to get voices. I've sat in dark rooms for hours, as Aunt
Paula wished me to do. I've felt many true things, but I could never
say honestly that I heard anything. But the Guides told Aunt Paula
'wait.' And at last she learned what was the matter.

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