On his visits to the Websters, Dr. Bealby had studiously avoided any allusion to the strange event, or by circumlocution, trying to reach it from afar, had arrived at so little satisfaction, that he decided on methods more direct. One day when he and Mary were alone, he turned to her abruptly.
“Mrs. Webster,” lowering his brows and speaking to her with great intentness, “why did you do it?” He almost barked it at her, wishing to startle her, if possible, into some sudden confession.
Mary was not startled: she looked at him with that puzzled, inquiring expression that had become habitual to her.
“I couldn’t help it.”
“Nonsense,” said Bealby with brutal force, “you had no business to!”
“Why?”
The tables were turned: it was Bealby who was startled.
“Why?” repeated Bealby, in order to gain time and wisdom, “why?” He raised his eyebrows judicially, with an aspect tolerant of absurdities. “Because it was a ridiculous and unnatural thing to do, and,” shaking his forefinger at her, “thoroughly unscientific.”
He could picture to himself the Mary of other days and hear her mocking laugh. He felt foolish and self-conscious—as self-conscious as a schoolboy—and he rose quickly and took a turn about the room. He paused momentarily before a little portrait of Mary as she used to be only a year ago. It was done by a famous man in Paris, and succeeded wonderfully in bringing out the fascinating qualities of the healthy, buoyant girl.
“Because I loved him,” said Mary.
Bealby turned and looked at the weak, colorless woman reclining in the corner of a deep, wide chair. When his eyes fixed her, she put a hand to her head as if to remember.
“I think that was it—but it was such a long time ago.”
“Stuff and nonsense,” growled Bealby, “it was less than a year ago.” Then he leaned down in order to be on a level with her eyes, and shook his forefinger at her—in a fashion which would have provoked much merriment in the old days—“Mrs. Webster, why didn’t you do your work better? Were you experimenting, or had you done this sort of thing before, eh?”
“I don’t think so,” said Mary.
“Don’t think what?”
“I don’t know.”
Bealby was sorry he had confused the questions. “You made a bad job of it, Mrs. Webster. Your husband hasn’t enough life in him to count, nowadays. You made a bad job of it, Mrs. Webster—and with that, I say good-by!”
Mary looked at him as if she wanted to detain him. “It isn’t what it used to be,” she said vaguely, and then, as if the effort were too great, she sighed and lost consciousness.
* * * *
It was not before she opened her eyes and looked at him that Bealby left—with a sense of having reached his first station on the road to a new discovery.
Mary went upstairs slowly to where Godfrey sat alone in his study, always in the same place, facing a window, his eyes fixed on the line of the horizon. He rose instinctively as she entered, but he did not turn or greet her in any way. His eyes did not leave their hold on that far distance.
The room was warm and very cheerful. A blaze of crackling logs lighted the creeping twilight. But it could not warm the strange pair seated side by side in the deep window. It played on them as to give a semblance of life. But the other side of them was gray and cold. They were two strange friends, passing and meeting like shadows, never kissing, never touching hands. Mary’s eyes were fixed on Godfrey with that puzzled, wistful look they always had; but Godfrey’s were far off, filled with longing and loneliness and pain.
There was a slight note of reproach in Mary’s voice when she broke into a subject never before alluded to.
“You answered me, Godfrey.”
“You called me.” His voice was cold and strange and singularly remote and he did not turn or move his eyes.
“You answered me, Godfrey.” There was a shade of defense in the dull voice. Those were the first words that had passed between them that day and they were the last. They sat side by side at the window. She looked out at the line of the horizon, too. She saw vaguely a dull, gray-green sea tossing under a wintry sky, and against it, very dimly, a little sail far off. But Godfrey saw more.
* * * *
Dr. Bealby felt that it would be absolutely necessary for him to look in on the Websters, if not every day, at least several times a week. This would be impossible while they remained at Newport; so, making the anniversary of Godfrey’s return an excuse, he arrived in his happiest mood and insisted on taking them back in his own car to New York.
Servants and luggage would go a little ahead of them in their own car. They offered no resistance, nor any comment.
“I feel,” said Bealby, “that I must drink to the continued health and long life of our friend here. What do you say, Mrs. Webster? Will you have me to dinner tonight?”
A shudder seemed to pass through Godfrey, and Mary said nothing. Bealby stayed.
* * * *
The dinner was as good as a good cook could make it, and the wine was better, but it was still a dull affair. Not so Bealby, who began to make a new discovery at every course. He left early and ordered them both to bed and rest.
A call by phone next morning caused Dr. Bealby to cancel an important appointment and hasten to the Websters’. The call explained nothing—in fact, said nothing, and was made by a servant—but something about it struck Dr. Bealby as unusual; moreover, this was the very first time since the strange occurrence that he had been called to the Websters’ home at all. His visits had always been taken as a matter of course.
He went upstairs with a sense of he knew not what. His pulse beat so fast that for a moment he lingered at their bedroom door to steady his nerves. Then he tapped lightly, as was his habit, with the tip of his middle finger. There being no response, he turned the handle softly and went in, closing the door behind him. Although it was already daylight, the curtains were drawn and the room dim, the only light being a heavily shaded bulb that hung over the bed.
Bealby closed his eyes a moment, fearing to look. When he opened them he saw two figures on the bed. One, Godfrey Webster, a smile upon his lips, handsome, young—dead. The other, Mary, crouched beside him, her dark hair hiding her face and covering his shoulder, her hands clasped about the back of her head. There was an awful stillness.
Dr. Bealby bent down to ascertain if the crouching figure breathed. He found it did, so he stood at the foot of the bed and waited. He waited a long time, and then, unable to endure the torture of suspense, touched her very gently.
“Mrs. Webster—”
The touch and the voice brought from her a long, deep sob, followed by longer and deeper ones. Presently Bealby took her by the hand and drew her into a sitting position and looked into her face.
“Good God!” There was a sudden, unrestrained note of exultation. It was the Mary Webster of a year ago.
“I had to do it,” she sobbed.
Bealby bent closer.
“Had to?” he whispered, apprehensively. “Why did you?”
“He wanted to go back, and I had to let him.”
“How did you do it?” he repeated, with a sickening sense of dread.
She looked at him with her wonderful clear eyes. “I couldn’t hold him any longer,” she answered simply. She turned to what had been her husband. “See how glad he is! Oh—” She broke off suddenly, her voice choked with sobs, “I—I can’t bear it!”
“Go look at yourself in the glass. Mrs. Webster,” said Bealby with authority, as he turned to examine the dead man. Mechanically she obeyed, and the reflection which Bealby took pains to notice, had streaming eyes, but the mouth twitched upward at the corners.
“You’ve come back again!” he said. “You had gone part way to meet him. That was your mistake. You were too impatient. You were neither here nor there, and he was neither here nor there. A little longer and he would have come all the way. You were too impatient!”
“Oh, how cru
el you are! Why do you say such things?” Bowing her beautiful head, her body shook with sobs. “Isn’t it bad enough?”
“No!” Bealby spoke reflectively. “Anything is better than the past year, even—separation. At any rate, he is—there—wherever that may be—and you are here.”
UNHALLOWED HOLIDAY, by O. M. Cabral
The front door slammed with a gusty bang, and Julia Lathrop jumped nervously, dropping the book she had been reading. From the hallway came the sound of a child’s clear treble, then light, running feet.
“Virginia!” Julia called, trying to suppress the strange quaver in her voice, the sudden hard beating of her heart. “That you—Gin?”
“’Course it’s me, mother!” And Gin came into the room.
The child was thin like a growing reed, awkwardly graceful and tall for her nine years. She as proud of her missing front tooth and her two taffy-colored braids which were still too short, really, to ever stay braided. Julia noted the look of luminous happiness on the child’s delicate face, the wind-ruffled hair like a fine, spun web, the too-bright eyes that had of late become a little secret and remote.
“Must you, darling, slam the door when you come in?”
“It wasn’t me,” Gin protested, a trifle sulkily.
“Virginia!”
“Well, but it wasn’t. It was Tommy, really. He came in when I did, but he ran right out again—”
Julia’s lips tightened a little as she studied the child’s face. She could discern nothing but candor there. Virginia’s hurt air of being misunderstood seemed real enough.
“Virginia—you’re not to tell that story again, do you hear? It’s silly—just something you made up. There isn’t any such person, and you know it! I know it’s just a game, but it’s a wicked one, and—”
Virginia stamped her foot. Her childish face contorted with grief and anger. Two huge tears squeezed out of her stricken eyes and worked their way down her smooth apple cheeks.
“It isn’t!” she sobbed. “It isn’t just a story! It’s true—every bit! Tommy’s real! We—we played tag in the orchard before we came in! He isn’t a fib, I didn’t make anything up, I didn’t!
Frightened, Julia jumped up and crossed the room in quick strides. She grasped the thin, heaving shoulders and looked down into Gin’s tearful, accusing face. Trying to mask the unsteadiness in her voice, she spoke casually:
“Don’t do that, Ginny—don’t cry. Mother didn’t mean anything bad. Here’s a hankie—that’s better, isn’t it?” Her fingers flew, smoothing the fine, taffy-colored hair. “You must have been playing tag with the wind! Look—you’ve lost a ribbon and torn your skirt.”
“Tommy runs faster than me,” said the child, more calmly. “I chased him but he got away in the briar patch. I guess that’s how I tore my new dress.”
Suddenly Julia swept the taffy-colored head close. She didn’t want Gin to see her face just then.
“Seems to me,” Julia said gaily, “this Tommy of yours is always running away. He must be quicker than a rabbit. Is that why I’ve never seen him?”
“Oh, Mother! He’s scared of people!”
“Yes? And why?”
“Because—well, because.”
The childish voice trailed off. The room was very quiet. Julia stiffened, staring fixedly over Gin’s bowed head—staring through the wide-open casement windows, at the clean, warm, yellow afternoon sunlight.
Beyond the white sashes were the massed blooms of the hollyhocks, trim, precise and sane. Beyond the flower-bed she could see a shaven slope of lawn, and still further away the ripe grass uncut at the foot of the old orchard.
The orchard, she thought frantically—forcing herself to think—was frightfully run-down. The twisted, wind-tortured trees assumed such grotesque shapes at night. Those dead husks should have been cut down long ago—they were unsightly, and spoiled the place. The orchard field itself was grown over with lank weeds and sparse wild hay that had seeded itself on the wind. She watched how the wind wove a path through the tall grass of the orchard field—invisible feet retreating from the edge of the lawn back toward the shadows of the twisted apple-trees.
She watched intently how the yellow grass rippled at the base of a gnarled trunk, and a big sooty crow suddenly flapped from a dead limb, rancously crying.
At first, Julia had been crazy about the place. The sprawling white house on a hilltop had seemed exactly what they were looking for. The land itself was considerably run-down, but for that reason rather wild, very charmingly diversified, and not really like a farm at all.
Cliff Lathrop had joked to their friends about their recently-acquired thirty-acre “estate.” It had, he proudly boasted, a hill, a gully, a house, a red barn, a private road, an orchard (no good), a strip of woods (second growth), and a private, spring-fed lake.
Yes, the pond (really a lake to their city-bred eyes) had just about clinched the sale. It lay in a hollow behind the house and at the base of the hill—far enough away so that they were not really troubled with mosquitoes that must have bred in the strip of swamp that surrounded the pond.
The swamp didn’t matter, for it was not unsightly. Thick rhododendron grew there, a mass of pink bloom in the late spring. And there were trees and ferns and purple iris. In the muddy shallows of the water grew thin, tall sedge-grass, water-lilies and graceful cat-tails. A shallow ridge of cleared, dry ground—maybe once an old wagon-road—led from the house itself down through the woods to a small floating dock built by some previous owner.
They had planned such a grand summer, but Julia was beginning, now, to hate the place. Even in the bright sunlight she would remember suddenly, and shiver wondering if, after all, the place were really some sort of trap in which, slowly, sanity slipped away until at last you came to accept as a matter of course that which was beyond reason or credibility.
Virginia…
What was happening—what in heaven’s name was wrong with the child? From the first, just as they had hoped, she had blossomed happily in the clean country air—frolicked and played from dawn to dusk. But Julia, watchful and puzzled, alert to every nuance of strangeness in Gin’s behavior, could no longer deny to herself that there was something weirdly wrong with the child. For either Gin had become obsessed with some vast, elaborate and very complicated kind of lying, or else—
But the alternative she refused, steadfastly, to permit herself to believe, even yet.
“But why be upset?” Cliff asked innocently when, at last, Julia brought herself to speak to him about Gin’s lying. “Kid’s are always making up things—it’s only harmless imagination working overtime.”
“It isn’t—exactly,” Julia said slowly, choosing her words with a certain amount of care. “And you musn’t scold her about it—it has the strangest effect. She gets upset, terribly unnerved. And it frightens me because—well, because I can see that she really believes in this imaginary playmate. Oh, you don’t know what it’s been like! It frightens me—but I didn’t want to say anything to you until I was really sure!”
Cliff’s mouth opened. He looked at his wife curiously.
“Sure of what? Of her belief, you mean? Well, suppose she does believe, sort of, in this fictitious Tommy? Maybe she’s lonely—maybe he’s real, in a sort of way, to her childish imaginations—you know, the way people in fairy-tales were real to her, when she was younger? It’s just a fad, and she’ll outgrow it—maybe get tired of the game when she sees we don’t take it very seriously. Seems to me that’s the thing to do—tease her out of it, not pull a long face and get all wrought up about something that doesn’t even exist—”
But at dinner Cliff’s teasing brought unexpected results.
“Well, I hear Virginia’s got a beau, eh, Julia?” Cliff winked at his wife, ladling out a liberal helping of cold chicken for the child. “Young man name of Tommy—or so I’ve been told.”
“Who told you?” Virginia’s clear cyes clouded with suspicion. The bantering tone was evidently not to her liki
ng.
“Who told me?” Cliff mocked his small daughter. “Well, now—is it a secret?”
“Yes,” the child answered, with a scowling glance at her mother. “Sort of.”
“Oh! Well, since the secret’s out now, might we be told where the young gentleman lives? Seems to me he must do quite a cross-country hike to get out here from—well, wherever he’s from.”
“Oh, no!” The child’s eyes, round and serious, were vaguely troubled. She hesitated, then as though under some dim necessity to make herself somehow understood, added quietly: “You wouldn’t understand. He lives right nearby, you see—”
“Oh—some little boy staying at the Jackson farm?”
“Daddy, don’t be silly! He lives right here on our place—in the pond. That’s where he goes when he goes back in again—and I know ’cause I’ve seen him.”
Not again that evening did they make any reference to Gin’s queer obsession—for otherwise the child behaved normally enough. Cliff played checkers with his small daughter and allowed her to beat him twice. After that, she went happily and triumphantly to bed.
Afterward, with the child asleep upstairs and the eerie moonlight glistening like frost on the clipped lawn, Julia abruptly drew the curtains over black panes.
“Heaven knows,” said Cliff, amused, “we’ve no lack of privacy out here!”
“I—was just jittering,” Julia confessed, unable to tell him just then how she had felt—that overpowering warning instinct of being watched, of not being alone. That the moonlit lawn had been bare, without blur or shadow, had only made the feeling somehow more terrible. “Cliff—what are we going to do?”
“About Gin? Well—I think she’s lonely. You ought to send for one of her friends. Having some other kid around will chase this funny idea out of her head quick enough—what say?”
“I’ve thought of that,” Julia told him. “I’ve already sent for Elsie. She’s at the seashore now, but her mother wrote that she can come out and stay with Gin for a week or two. Oh, Cliff—you don’t think there’s something wrong? I mean, that she really sees things and—”
The Third Macabre Megapack Page 21
