Moreover, as I have said, I no longer quite understood Muriel. For if she was not jealous of her companions at Ormesby, and I could not think her so, then why did she treat me, of late, with such marked coldness and disdain? Nor could I attribute this attitude to anything of “the woman scorned” by my refusal to accept her frank offer of a new marriage. She had lived with me too long not to have borne many such rejections of her advances. It might have been different had we never before been man and wife.
But how could we leave the place? At least, how could I leave it? If I left it, I should live every day of my future life in terror of the hand of the law. At any moment Grayce might become mad again. Nor could I hope that insanity would long delay its mastery of her sister and her aunt. Hobbs also. Some day Hobbs would be as mad as his wife had undoubtedly been at the last, if he did not put an end to himself as she had. How could I go away and leave all that? I had neither money nor prospects. That, in itself, might not have held me there, though it could make it uncommonly difficult for me to go. But I was still young enough and strong enough to suppose that somewhere must be waiting for my hand a work that a man could do. No, it was not altogether reluctance to leave the warmth and the shelter and the decent food.
I had been once to Pittsfield, performing an errand for Gray. The journey and my business there occupied me not more than two hours. Still, though I believed myself to be enjoying my interval of freedom, I drove homeward at breakneck speed. So many things might have happened! I should not have been astonished had I headed into the drive at Ormesby to see a policeman’s car under the porte cochère and to learn that I was under arrest.
Nor was this fear groundless. It might have happened. It might happen at any hour of the day or night. How could I be sure that Doctor Barnes would suspect nothing amiss? How could I be sure that Ormes’s creditors, who were now carefully investigating his affairs, not only in New York but at Ormesby, would not stumble onto an inkling, at least, of the truth? He might have left any kind of letter or note among his papers. I lived over a powder mine, and I was fast losing the ability to “take a chance,” which had carried me through the things I had done and helped to do. Every day Barbara was growing more reckless. It began to seem to me that she would have welcomed discovery. The secrets within her had nearly reached their full time and must some day be delivered at whatever cost of shame and pain. And every day Gray’s eyes grew more sombre and more hollow and her wide lips more silent. And Hobbs went about his duties like a man dazed. And the animated Grayce’s singing and laughter rang ever more lewdly and demoniacally in my tortured brain.
Nor could Muriel, perhaps the least affected of any of us, live long in constant contact with such ghosts as walked at Ormesby and be in no wise changed. There was already growing up in her a bitter cynicism which had never before shown itself to me. She sneered at me and snubbed me, making her manner all the more pointed and poignant by the tenderness with which she treated Barbara and Grayce and Gray.
Muriel had certain duties. All of us had work to do. It had been agreed that no new servant should be brought to Ormesby, at least for a while. Hobbs cooked for us and performed all duties incident to the work of the kitchen. But he could not be everywhere; he could not do everything; and the general housekeeping was divided among the women. Upon me devolved, more and more as the days passed, the handling of Gray’s financial and business affairs. She required me to pay bills, to consult with tradesmen, to undertake the overseeing of the estate. It was I who dealt with her brother’s executors and with his business partners and with his creditors. She gave me a power of attorney to act for her in small matters, and then she broadened it, broadened it repeatedly. She insisted that I use her money, without troubling to consult her about it, or even to account to her for it, for the defraying of such minor expenses as Muriel and I could not help incurring.
I did not think then, nor do I think it now, that Gray did all this to bind me to her in the way a woman naturally wishes to bind a man when she loves him. Nor did I then think, though today I am not so sure of it, that Muriel was jealous of Gray.
But it was undoubtedly becoming more and more difficult to live comfortably at Ormesby. We had not buried our troubles. On the contrary, we had, as it were, loosed a new swarm of them out of the graves we had dug. Murder will out. We had not committed murder, but we had done things of whose consequences we stood as much in dread as if we had intentionally slain Ormond Ormes and Agnes. Terror dogged our heels and tore at the ends of our tortured nerves. The approaching footfalls of one of our company set the rest a-tremble. The distant opening or closing of a door threw us into a funk. We dreaded going alone into certain rooms; we feared what we might encounter in any and all of the halls; and yet we slept so badly at night that, one and all, we roamed those halls and haunted the library and could not keep away from the room in which Ormond had met his death. I had stumbled against Hobbs in the front hallway, and I had encountered Barbara in the little room where I had found Alice Hobbs lying on that filthy pallet. She came to me and stood close against me for the space of a moment. The beauty of her face and body tempted me to clasp her against my breast, despite the loathing I felt for her. But then, with a brittle little laugh, dry and crackling as twigs on winter ground, she slipped away into the darkness. She did not go into the hall. And I did not learn, until afterwards, that she could pass from that chamber to her own room through a passage similar, though shorter, to that which led from my apartment to the room where hung the portrait of the avidly evil eyes.
Once I entered Ormond’s room at three in the morning, thinking I had heard a noise there. It had been made by Gray. She was dressed as she had been during the previous day, and she was standing in darkness in the middle of the room. I saw her only dimly, yet I knew it to be she. When I entered she brushed swiftly past me and climbed to the third floor without a word. Shuddering in spite of myself, for something I had not seen but had felt to be showing in her face, I crept back to bed.
One silent night, awaking out of troubled dreams, I snapped on a light and ran to the mirror on my dressing table. I had had a feeling that someone had been very near me; and my first thought was that one or another of the Ormesby women had stolen to my bedside and kissed my throat, as on the first night of my lying in that bed. But if the thing had happened, the woman had not bruised the skin by sucking it. Perhaps it had not happened. None the less, the skin of my neck tingled slightly, but continuously, as though it had been chafed. I do not say that this sensation was not induced by nerves. It may very well have been. But my nerves were not befooling me into thinking that I was smelling the odor of a woman’s body.
I went to the little closet. The smell there was unmistakable, for my olfactory sense had become so acute of late that I had a great many times detected the recent presence of a woman in a room, now empty, which I had entered. And this in spite of the fact that none of the women at Ormesby was addicted to the use of perfume. And this in spite, also, of the fact that all of the women at Ormesby were clean of person.
I felt drawn along the passage. I did not require a light, for I knew the way well enough now. I dreaded going on, into the room where the portrait still hung. Yet I could not turn back. Something drew me along that passage in spite of my horror and disgust. I knew that the eyes of that man on the wall would be shining through the darkness with the same devilish and redly malevolent glare I had seen so many times. I knew that those eyes would follow my every movement. I knew that they were even now looking at me through the door of the closet in which I stood and trembled. I would have given ten years of my life to have been able to turn back and creep under the covers of the bed. But I could not do it. I was drawn forward by a force stronger than my fears. I opened the door and looked into the room.
There were the eyes! I had never seen them so menacing, so triumphantly ablaze. But also there was something else. I could not make it out, at first. Then, grad
ually, I saw that it was a woman’s naked arms. One arm embraced the wall on either side of the portrait, and against the breast of the portrait was a woman’s head. Her face was pressed to the canvas as it might have been pressed to a man’s chest or throat. And her nude body clung to the wall lasciviously, ecstatically, in so deep an abandon that she neither heard me nor noticed me.
Released, after I do not know how long a time, from the spell which had drawn me forward, I stole back through the passage to my own room. It had been Barbara Ormes, brought, at long last, to this avowal of that love for which her brother had killed his wife and been in turn murdered by his own son. I could no longer doubt that Barbara had taken from that bite in her throat the strange virus which made a wolf of her. She, too, must have blood from the bodies of living persons to maintain her horrid and precarious hold upon consciousness and the world. No wonder that Undead Thing which had been her brother followed her movements about the house! I knew, at last, what poor Alice Hobbs had meant when telling me that she had been afraid of a woman. No wonder the eyes of the man in the portrait had gleamed in evil triumph!
On another occasion, also at night, though this was a night when the wind howled through the hills like giant wolves, I, who had not been able to sleep after midnight, distinctly heard my name called from somewhere. The voice had seemed to come from below stairs. It had sounded like a man’s voice, though Hobbs should have been asleep in his room. I listened. The call was not repeated. Yet I had not been asleep, nor had I been dreaming, and I knew that the sound had not been caused by the wind. Someone had plainly shouted my name—“Seaverns!”—and it had been a man who had done it. And the name had been shouted, not spoken in that inaudible voice which one hears sometimes, inside the brain itself.
Snatching up a bath robe, I pulled it swiftly on and went out into the hallway. The house creaked and groaned in the wind. There was so much noise all about it that I could not have heard a tiny noise within. Therefore I did not stand and listen for one, but went directly to Hobbs’s room. I could hear no breathing from a sleeper in there. I turned the handle of the door and opened it. Hobbs lay there, covered to the chin with a sheet, and that he slept soundly I could not doubt. I turned away.
Down the stairs I went and through the dining-room and thence into the library. With every step I shivered. Ghosts? Do you think a man grows used to them and ceases to shudder when he feels them near? Do not think, then, that I strode boldly into that library. On the contrary I crept in stealthily, fearfully, dreading what I might find. For that voice might have been Grayce’s deep voice, and if she had called me thus in the angry night, it meant that she was abroad again, raving and in search of living blood. But there was nothing in the library which could have brought me there, nor was there any person.
None the less, Grayce, if it had been she, might be now in the passage behind the books, but I would not seek her there. Wherever she was, she ought to be found and forced to go back to bed, yet I could not drive myself to go and look for her beyond that panel. Down at the foot of those winding stairs we had laid Ormes’s body. Now, unreasonably and yet persistently, I felt that it was again lying there. I knew I had not strength of will to go and look. If Grayce were down there, then she must stay there alone.
But I did go and look. It wasn’t a matter of willing myself to do so. It was simply that my feet moved in that direction, and this in spite of any will within me to keep them from so going. I could not help myself. Little by little I approached the panel. Reluctantly and yet surely my hand went out and pressed the spring which opened it. My feet moved into the passage as by the urging of some unseen force. Certainly it was not by any driving of my brain. It was very dark in there. There was not the slightest sound to tell me that any living thing waited in that gloom ahead. Slowly I groped my way along the passage and came to the head of the stairs. Down there, at least, I would not go. I swore it to myself as a man swears he will not throw himself over the cliff before him. And I do not remember moving down those iron steps. Yet, somehow, I went down them.
By the time I had come to the first landing, I had died a thousand deaths. I would have given my right hand to have escaped the necessity of going farther. It seemed to me to be a cruelty greater than my flesh could stand to force it to go farther. But I went on. It must have taken me many minutes to reach the bottom. But I did reach it. I had willed my body to go in the opposite direction. Yet it took me to the foot of those winding stairs. I stood in the crypt in darkness so absolute as to seem a palpable thing.
There was nothing there. Feeling all about the walls of the crypt, I learned that there was nothing there. Nor any person. Just where my feet stood, Ormes’s body had lain. I knew that, though I could not see my position with relation to the stairs.
Stooping over it in that inky blackness, without groping over the floor and with as sure a grasp as if I had seen it plainly, I picked up a small object from between my slippered feet. It was soft to the touch, and silky, as if it might have been a piece of stuff, shredded and raveled with much chafing. I could ascend the stairs, now. Nothing held me any longer. Swiftly, then, I mounted them and ran through the passage and came again to the library. I found a lamp and lighted it. I examined the object I had picked up from the floor of the crypt.
It was a lock of human hair! It was a piece of the scalp of Ormond Ormes! It must have become torn in some way from his broken head, and Hobbs and I must have overlooked it in lifting the body to carry it up and lay it outside for the dogs to tear.
But how had it been able to draw me so unerringly from my bed to find it in that darkness?
And how had it been able to call me by my name?
XVI
Such was my life! Such, in brief outline, were the lives of all of us at Ormesby. Of necessity, such a situation could not long endure. Something, somewhere, must break. Gray might go mad. Barbara was already more than half way there. Grayce must come, sooner or later, to another period of frenzy. Hobbs was rapidly cracking. My own nerves, though I was yet a young man and owned to no bodily weakness, could not long stand the strain that was being put upon them.
It was not only that ghosts walked in that house of Ormesby. If that had been all, one might have escaped their evil influence by leaving the place. But where could one go to be out of reach of ghosts that had longer arms than memory? And how leave a place to which one was tied with stronger bonds than fear? Muriel could not go away, for all her aversion to me. She had threatened to leave and she could not do it. Hobbs could not go. He had already been away, and he had come slinking back, after two days, trembling and gibbering and begging to be allowed to remain. I could not leave. I dared not leave. To be out of the house so long as one hour filled me with an abject terror. The ghosts that walked in the house of the Ormeses were the ghosts that walked in the souls of men.
As I have said, such a situation could not long continue. And as it happened, the first moves made to relieve the tension were moves made by the lunatic Grayce. She had begun by talking more freely with Muriel than she perhaps intended. To all appearance, as Muriel afterwards maintained, the girl was quite sane at the moment. They two had met by chance in the library and had seated themselves there. Grayce had begun the conversation by asking, rather abruptly, whether Muriel intended staying much longer in the house.
“Why, I hardly know,” Muriel replied. “I suppose we ought to be leaving.”
“We?”
“Yes, certainly. We’re married, you know,” and I suppose she smiled at Grayce in the unconsciously superior manner affected by married women everywhere. The statement was not true, but only Gray and Barbara were aware of the real situation.
“I know you are, of course. At least, I’ve heard you are. But what of that? He doesn’t care for you, you know.”
“Indeed?”
“Really he doesn’t. He’s my lover, you see.”
“Is h
e? You astonish me!”
Muriel looked sharply at the other to be sure she was not about to slip into one of her fits of lunacy. But Grayce appeared to be calm enough.
“Yes, he is. I don’t think he quite knows his own mind, but . . .” Her words died away. She sat dreamily gazing into distance. There was a little smile playing on her lips.
Muriel who, for all her present dislike of me, knew that I could not be so great a fool as to make love to such a creature, thought it best to humor Grayce. She did not contradict anything, but waited for the other to proceed. She might learn something.
“Poor Selden,” Grayce went on, after a time, “I’m afraid he’s very hard up. At least he was. Fortunately he now has enough for both of us.”
“He has?” For it was perfectly well known to Muriel that I owned nothing but the suit of clothing given me by Hobbs; and she knew, also, that Grayce owned nothing at all.
“A hundred thousand. It’s in bonds, I believe. Don’t you think that enough?”
Muriel agreed that it ought to be enough for the present. But a hundred thousand dollars? And in bonds? A hundred thousand in bonds was what Ormond Ormes had given to his wife.
“What kind of bonds are they?” she asked, casually. She did not wish to arouse any suspicion in the girl’s cunning, if clouded, mind.
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