“All right,” I said, “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Good! Then let’s turn in. I’m tired, after that drive. I’ll show you the room I want you to have, since all the servants seem to be in bed.”
I had left my bag in the hallway near the front door. I picked it up as, following Ormes, I passed through that passage and up the broad winding stairs. At the top a small wall lamp was burning. The wide hallway on the second floor ran the length of the house also, from east to west, though it evidently did not continue across that wing in which the library was situated. Ormes indicated a door near the front of the building.
“That’s my room,” he said. “My wife’s is just across. Gray sleeps on the third floor. My aunt’s there at the back. You may have this room. There’s an individual bathroom in it.”
As he spoke he opened a door next his own, slid his arm around the frame of the doorway as if to press a button. To do this, it was necessary that he lean far forward, nearly out of my sight, because, as I was soon to learn, the partition was just short of being three feet thick.
But my host started suddenly backward, straightened, cleared his throat.
“What do you want?” he demanded.
His voice was harsh. There was a note of defiance in it, as though he had addressed his question to some unwelcome, strange intruder in his house. It flashed into my mind, during that second, that he must have surprised a burglar within the room.
“What is it?” I whispered behind him.
And I moved closer to him as a man moves when he wishes to assure a friend that he will not be deserted in danger.
“Oh! I— That is, I was thinking——”
I could see something of the man’s face in the light from the landing. I observed that he continued staring fixedly at something, or someone, within the room.
“Where the deuce is that button?” demanded Ormes, abruptly and peevishly. “Ought to be here. Funny how it—ah!”
He pressed the switch, spreading a softly shaded glow of light across the floor and walls. I was directly behind him, now, looking into the room over his shoulder. Then he moved aside, as if to allow me to pass him. I did so. There was no one within the chamber. Well, then, to whom, or to what, had he addressed that question? Then he spoke again to me.
“You see, Seaverns, I was— Well, I was just wondering whether you’d want anything for—for your work, you know.”
I turned and stared into his face. He had voiced that question several times before. He had told me repeatedly to seek what I might need of Gray. Why should he have asked such a question again?
Nor, as I continued staring at him, did I believe that his stridently startled “What do you want?” had been directed at me. He had addressed someone else. Of that I was certain now. And yet, since the room was quite empty, to all appearances, at any rate, to whom had he spoken? Or to what?
But now his face was a mask. I knew that I should learn nothing by questioning him. Therefore I turned from him. I looked about the room, seeing with one glance that I was to have as comfortable quarters as a man could reasonably ask. The chamber was a very large one, containing some good old furniture, a vast four-poster, a heavy carpet of a dull red tone, and a great case full of ancient books. Ormes had followed me.
There was defiance in his bearing, now, and I am certain that there was fear in his face. But he had regained control of his nerves. Once more I felt intuitively that I could gain nothing by asking the meaning of what he had said and done. He would lie to me; he might even grow angry. After all, what right had I to suspect him, here in his own house?
“O.K.?” he asked, lifting one eyebrow in the way he had.
“Could I want anything better?”
“Then I’ll say good night. Hope you sleep well! If I’m gone in the morning, just make yourself at home. As I told you, ask Gray for anything you want and don’t happen to see. I’ll be back on Saturday, a week from day after tomorrow. Good luck, Seaverns. Hope you sleep.”
“Thanks, Ormes. Good night.”
He turned away. He had twice expressed a hope that I should sleep. He must be in a very nervous state. Were the ghosts of the house wont to walk in the room he had assigned to me? I shuddered. What had he seen? To whom had he spoken before pressing that electric switch?
Gradually, however, my tenseness went away. I was not in darkness. Whatever happened, I should have light to see by. So then I shrugged, drew off my coat and threw it onto the bed. Composure came swiftly after that. Going, as one naturally does when entering a bedroom for the first time, to one of the windows, I saw that it looked out to the eastward over a stretch of lawn. By reason of the moonlight I could make out that the road ran in east and west directions past the house. The place fronted toward the south. Northward from my window extended a wing which I took to be that housing the library we had lately quitted. But there was nothing of great interest to be seen outside, so I turned back and started to unpack my bag.
In the midst of this operation, I wheeled, darted toward the door of the single closet in the room, and dragged the door open. The closet was quite empty. Then I ran to the bathroom, switched on the light in there, and carefully examined the little room, even stooping to look under the tub. Nothing of a suspicious nature was to be seen.
And I do not know, even now, why I did these things. I had thought myself calm and composed. Perhaps my composure was of the body only, and not of the mind. Perhaps I was still as tense, mentally, as I had lately been physically. I can only say that I did what I was impelled to do. Having done it, instead of breathing easier for the relief of learning that I was alone in the apartment, I became again conscious that I suffered from conscious fear. But of what, I did not know.
Slowly I undressed. I entered the bathroom, shaved, bathed, and was ready for bed. I stood still in the middle of the room, looking about me and carefully noting the position of every article of furniture. And I grew aware that I was now harboring an unaccountable feeling of being watched. I listened intently. Not a sound was to be heard within the house. The silence seemed deeper than it should have been, since I knew that four or five persons lay in the rooms about mine.
I could not throw off that feeling of being an object of scrutiny. Yet I asserted my will against it. I struggled to regain courage. I was alone in the room. I would not allow superstitious fancies to overcome my reason. Nevertheless, when I passed a hand across my face, I felt it to be wet with a cold and clammy dew of perspiration.
The bed, when I approached it and extended my length upon it, was an excellent one. I told myself that if a man could sleep anywhere it must be here, ghosts or no ghosts. And at last, safely under the light covering, I felt I might laugh at the fear which had driven me—to my shame I confess it!—into bed more expeditiously than strict dignity would have allowed.
I lay in the middle of the bed, forcing my thoughts to take hold on Gray Ormes. I had not yet seen her face, since my eyes had not penetrated the shadows in which the upper part of her body had been wrapped while she stood in the doorway downstairs. What would she be like when we met tomorrow morning? And what, also, might Agnes Ormes be like? Her husband had called her a hellion. That, coming from a husband, might mean anything, or nothing. I amused myself with fancying that Gray was dark of eyes and hair. Tall I knew her to be, and slender, and I supposed she would be rather dark, with regular, haughty features, very red lips and large expressive eyes. Agnes must be an Amazon in appearance. It seemed strange that the owner of the voice I had heard at the entrance should be called Gray, while the hellion of a wife bore a name of such undeniably feminine gender as Agnes. It meant chaste and gentle, didn’t it? It would be amusing to compare my present notions with realities over the breakfast table and through the days to come.
I considered that I’d probably not be here over a week. But a week is a week, and to
a man so nearly cast upon the rocks as I had been it is leisure in which to seek a permanent haven, leisure for which he ought to give due thanks. He ought to give thanks. He ought to give . . .
The damned house was so very still! And the night outside was too still, also. The dogs were perfectly silent. It was only by listening very intently that I could hear the faint murmur of the distant brook. Not a bird of the night called anywhere. For all my urban existence I had spent enough time in the country to have, ordinarily, no fear of the quiet. Yet I could not rid myself of the weight of that stillness now. It weighed upon me as a material thing might have weighed. I wrenched my mind away from that oppression and turned to a deliberate thinking that Muriel . . . For a long while I lay there, thinking that Muriel and Gray . . .
I awoke to find myself struggling to a sitting position, convinced that someone had but now been very close to me.
But no. When I turned on the light at my bed’s head, there was no one. Nothing had been disturbed. Nothing was in the room. I must have been dreaming.
After some minutes of hesitation, I snapped the light out. Since my windows opened toward the east, the moonlight did not, of course, stream directly into them, but the world outside was so well lighted that my room was far from being completely dark. No sound reached my ears.
“Fool!” I thought. “You’ve been dreaming of the Ormesby ghosts. You’re afraid. Go back to sleep.”
I lay back again on the pillow. My own angry explanation for the mysterious sensation which had awakened me seemed, in the light of such reasoning as I could at that time summon, to be quite sufficient. Somehow, though only after a long while, I fell asleep again.
When I next awoke it was full day. My watch showed it to be nearly seven-thirty, an unconscionable hour in town, but not too early for rising in the country, or so I thought. I slipped out of bed, yawning and stretching luxuriously, then staggered sleepily toward the dressing table and confronted my tousled reflection in the mirror, thinking that wives must be quite anesthetic to manly ugliness, since they can look upon their husbands in the early morning and still make shift to love them.
And then, abruptly, I was fully awake and trembling. For there, on the left side of my throat, just where I had fancied I had felt the faintest of faint touches in the hall downstairs, and just where I could feel the great artery throbbing against the tips of my fingers, was a vivid scarlet mark.
I had been touched, then, upon entering this house.
But no! I had shaved and bathed before getting into bed. I could be sure that no such mark had been upon my throat before I slept.
When I bent closer toward the mirror and examined the mark with care, I saw that it had been made, or appeared to have been made, by the pressure of a pair of thickly rouged human lips.
But when I had rubbed that place with my hand, and then with a moistened towel, and then had washed it thoroughly with soap and water, I knew that the mark was not a mark made by rouge. It was the mark of blood. It was of blood which had been drawn almost through the skin of my throat. And it seemed to have been drawn there by the sucking action of a woman’s young and evil mouth!
III
I have set down “a woman’s young and evil mouth” and I do not know how to account for the words. There was nothing to indicate that the mark might not have been made by a hag; and there was nothing to indicate that it might not have been made by a man. I can say only that I have written that which was indicative of the conviction which swept upon me as I stared into the mirror.
I dressed hastily and not so carefully as I might otherwise have done. Leaving that chamber I shuddered, glad to be out of it.
Downstairs there was no one to be seen. An odor of cooking came from the kitchen, however, telling me that the servants were abroad and that I was hungry and ready to do justice to my first meal in these mountains in spite of the depression which weighed upon my spirits. I strolled about the house. I was too nervous to sit still. So I pretended to be making myself familiar with the arrangement of the rooms and their furnishings. As to the rooms, there was nothing remarkable about them. They seemed to be all of ample proportions, furnished in haphazard fashion, though such pieces and carpets and pictures as I paused to examine were good enough for any man’s house. I was thus engaged in one of the rooms near the library when a servant came to me. He was tall, lean, middle-aged; he squinted villainously; he wore a coarse apron in place of a coat; and he bade me good morning in a high-pitched nasal twang.
“You can have breakfast at any time, sir,” he informed me.
“Oh! Oughtn’t I to wait for the ladies?”
“Mrs. Ormes never rises before noon, sir. Miss Barbara always takes breakfast in bed. And I don’t think Miss Gray would want you to wait for her, sir.”
“Very well. I’ll have it now. Has Mr. Ormes gone back to town?”
“Yes, sir. He left at daybreak, sir.”
I supposed Hobbs’s statement—the fellow had given me his name, adding that his wife cooked for the household and that there were no other servants—that Miss Gray would not want me to await her coming had been prompted by some feeling of reticence against meeting me for the first time so early in the day. But I was scarcely seated at table when the door opened and a young woman entered. It must be Gray herself. After one searching glance at her, I did not need to be better informed of her identity. Whatever else she was, she was an Ormes, for the family likeness to her brother could not be mistaken.
“Good morning, Mr. Seaverns,” she greeted me.
I started inwardly. The voice in which she addressed me, though it was a full rich feminine voice, was certainly not the heavy commanding tone I had heard from her lips last night. She had spoken then under stress of some emotion. I had caught the tenseness of it vibrant within her words. But it is natural for a person, certainly for a woman, to raise the pitch of the voice in excitement or under strong emotion, not to lower it. As I say, I was startled, and I fear that I rose and bowed more awkwardly than I might otherwise have done.
While she murmured a commonplace about hoping that I had slept well, she came to the table and seated herself across from me.
“Without a break all night,” I lied, wondering whether the wide lips I was seeing had been pressed against my throat while I lay asleep.
I thought, also, how little she resembled the mental image I had made of her. She was not beautiful. That is, I at the first thought that she was not. Afterward I could not be sure of that impression, and I began to understand something of the difficulty under which Ormond had labored in describing her to me. For when she had seated herself and had turned her head sidewise to speak to Hobbs, who served us still wearing his apron, I noted that her face, in profile, clean-cut, proud, almost classical, telling of poise and grace, resembled an Englishwoman’s of good birth. Yes, seen in profile, her face was beautiful enough. She wasn’t dark, as I had thought she would be. On the contrary, she was so blond as to present an altogether startling appearance. Her heavy hair, which she wore long and caught into a great knot at the nape of her neck, was of that peculiarly white color known as ash, though her brows and lashes were somewhat darker than the hair of the head, nor could I discern that they were artificially darkened. Her face, seen fully, as I was not seeing it, was far from being regular in cast. The eyes were large and they were yellow, like the eyes of a cat. Had I been in love with her at the moment, I suppose I should have said they were golden; and indeed they were not opaquely yellow, but were translucently so, the color seeming to come from far depths and not to be plainly seen when one looked steadily into them. But her face was too broad through the cheek bones, and her mouth was far too large. I do not mean that the lips were gross or badly shaped. They were, on the contrary, exquisitely carved, and the teeth were very white and even. Even so, the mouth was too wide for a pretty woman’s mouth, though this feature was not particularly
noticeable, save when she spoke or smiled. The skin of her throat and hands, I noticed, was flawlessly white and gleaming.
She made some remark about the work I was to do, repeating her brother’s statement that if I needed anything she would see that it was provided. From this the conversation ran, for some minutes, on the same subject, and I could not but marvel at the way this girl, even as Ormes had done, accepted my purely theoretical literary ability as sufficient guaranty that I was competent to write an Outline of the Elizabethan Influence on Colonial Literature. From her manner and words the thing seemed as good as accomplished. I marveled, but I was not yet ready to admit to Gray what I had hinted to her brother.
“It will mean that I’ve got to dig in and work like—well, pretty hard,” I said. “But if I’m not interrupted, perhaps——”
“Interrupted? By what? By whom?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking of any thing or person in particular. I merely meant——”
“But I’m thinking of particular things—persons, too. You’ll probably be interrupted, Mr. Seaverns.”
“Indeed!”
“Didn’t Ormond tell you about our ghosts?”
She asked the question without the slightest appearance of levity. She said it in the most casual tone in the world, just as she might have asked whether I had been informed that they kept a kennel.
“Yes, he mentioned them. But are they . . . do they interrupt one?”
“They are. They do. They will. You’ll probably not be allowed to work very long in peace. I hope you’re not afraid of such things. I’m not. They try to influence me—oh, often and in many ways. But I usually pay no attention. You’ll be wise to ignore them.”
Fingers of Fear Page 3
