All was still within. The air was thick with the curdling horror that had poured into it. We paused an instant to listen.
A little muffled moan crept feebly forth from a room on the left. It hardly reached us, so faint it was. It crept forth, and seemed to perish at our feet, like a hopeless suppliant. We entered the room. It was a shabby parlor, meanly furnished. The stained old paper on the walls was covered with Arcadian groups of youths and maidens, dancing to the sound of a pipe played by a shepherd, who sat upon a broken column under a palm. On the floor was a tawdry carpet, all beflowered and befruited,—such a meretricious blur of colors as a hotel offers for vulgar feet to tread upon. So much I now perceive that I marked in that mean reception-room. But I did not note it then.
For there, among the tawdry flowers of the carpet, lay Densdeth,—dead, or dying of a deadly wound. The long, keen, antique dagger I had noticed lying peacefully on my table was upon the floor. Its office had found it at last, and the signet of a new blood-stain was stamped upon its blade, among tokens of an old habit of murder, latent for ages.
Beside the wounded man sat Towner. His spasm was over. The freed serf had slain his tyrant. All his life had been crowded into that one moment of frenzy. He sat pale and drooping, and there was a desolate sorrow in his face, as if his hate for his master had been as needful to him as a love.
“I could not help it,” said Towner, in a dreary whisper. “He came to me while I was waiting here. He told Huffmire to send you off, and leave me to him. And then he stood over me, and told me, with his old sneer, that I belonged to him, body and soul. He said I must obey him. He said he had work for me now,—just such mean villany as I was made for. I felt that in another instant I should be his again. I only made one spring at him. How came I by that dagger? I never saw it until I found it in my hand, at his heart. Is he dead? No. I am dying. Shall I be safe from him hereafter? I haven’t had a fair chance in this world. What could a man do better—born in a jail?”
Towner drooped slowly down as he spoke. He ended, and his defeated life passed away from that worn-out body, the comrade of its ignominy.
I raised Densdeth’s head. The strange fascination of his face became doubly subtle, as he seemed still to gaze at me with closed eyelids, like a statue’s. I felt that, if those cold feline eyes should open and again turn their inquisition inward upon my soul, devilish passions would quicken there anew. I shuddered to perceive the lurking devil in me, slumbering lightly, and ready to stir whenever he knew a comrade was near.
“Spare me, Densdeth!” I rather thought than spoke; but with the thought an effluence must have passed from me to him.
His eyes opened. The look of treachery and triumph was gone. He murmured something. What we could not hear. But all the mockery of his voice had departed when in that dying scream it avowed itself despair. The tones we caught were sweet and childlike.
With this effort blood gushed again from his murderous wound. He, too, drooped away and died. The soul that had had no other view of brother men than through the eyes of a beast of prey, fled away to find its new tenement. His face settled into marble calm and beauty. I parted the black hair from his forehead.
There was the man whom I should have loved if I had not hated, dead at last, with this vulgar death. Only a single stab from another, and my warfare with him was done. I felt a strange sense of indolence overcome me. Was my business in life over, now that I had no longer to struggle with him daily? Had he strengthened me? Had he weakened me? Should I have prevailed against him, or would he have finally mastered me, if this chance, this Providence, of death had not come between us?
I looked up, and found Churm studying the dead man.
“Can it be?” said I, “that a soul perilous to all truth and purity, a merciless tempter, a being who to every other man was the personification of that man’s own worst ideal of himself,—can it be that such an unrestful spirit has dwelt within this quiet form? What was he? For what purpose enters such a disturbing force into the orderly world of God?”
“That is the ancient mystery,” said Churm, solemnly.
“Can it never be solved in this world?”
“It is not yet solved to you? Then you must wait for years of deeper thought, or some moment of more fiery trial.”
29
Dreeme His Own Interpreter
We left the dead, dead.
“Where is Huffmire?” Churm asked.
A sound of galloping hoofs answered. We saw him from the window, flying on Densdeth’s horse. Death in his house by violence meant investigation, and that he did not dare encounter. He was off, and so escaped justice for a time.
The villanous-looking porter came cringing up to Churm.
“You was asking about a lady,” said he.
“Yes. What of her?”
“With a pale face, large eyes, and short, crisp black hair, what that dead man brought here at daybreak yesterday?”
“The same.”
“Murdoch’s got her locked up and tied.”
“Murdoch!” cried Raleigh. “That’s the hell-cat I saw in the carriage.”
“Quick,” said Churm, “take us there!”
I picked up my dagger, and wiped off the blood; but the new stain had thickened the ancient rust.
The porter led the way up-stairs, and knocked at a closed door.
“Who is there?” said a voice.
“Me, Patrick, the porter. Open!”
“What do you want?”
“To come in.”
“Go about your business!”
“I will,” said the man, turning to us, with a grin. He felt that we were the persons to be propitiated. He put his knee against the door, and, after a struggle and a thrust, the bolt gave way.
A large, gipsy-like woman stood holding back the door. We pushed her aside, and sprang in.
“Cecil Dreeme!” I cried. “God be thanked!”
And there, indeed, was my friend. He was sitting bound in a great chair,—bound and helpless, but still steady and self-possessed. He was covered with some confining drapery.
He gave an eager cry as he saw me.
I leaped forward and cut him free with my dagger. Better business for the blade than murder!
He rose and clung to me, with a womanish gesture, weeping on my shoulder.
“My child!” cried Churm, shaking off the Murdoch creature, and leaving her to claw the porter.
I felt a strange thrill and a new suspicion go tingling through me as I heard these words. How blind I had been!
Cecil Dreeme still clung to me, and murmured, “Save me from them, Robert! Save me from them all!”
“Clara, my daughter,” said Churm, “you need not turn from me. I have been belied to you. Could I change? They forged the letters that made you distrust me.”
“Is it so, Robert?” said the figure by my heart.
“Yes, Cecil, Churm is true as faith.”
There needed no further interpretation. Clara Denman and Cecil Dreeme were one. This strange mystery was clear as day.
She withdrew from me, and as her eyes met mine, a woman’s blush signalled the change in our relations. Yes; this friend closer than a brother was a woman.
“My daughter!” said Churm, embracing her tenderly, like a father.
I perceived that this womanish drapery had been flung upon her by her captors, to restore her to her sex and its responsibilities.
“Densdeth?” she asked, with a shudder.
“Dead! God forgive him!” answered Churm.
“Let us go,” she said. “Another hour in this place with that foul woman would have maddened me.”
She passed from the room with Churm.
Raleigh stepped forward. “You have found a friend,” said he to me; “you will both go with her. Leave me to see to this business of the dead men and this prison-house.”
“Thank you, Raleigh,” said I; “we will go with her, and relieve you as soon as she is safe, after all these terrors.”
&
nbsp; “A brave woman!” he said. “I am happy that I have had some slight share in her rescue.”
“The whole, Raleigh.”
“There he lies!” whispered Churm, as we passed the door where the dead men were.
Cecil Dreeme glanced uneasily at me and at the dagger I still carried.
“No,” said I, interpreting the look; “not by me! not by any of us! An old vengeance has overtaken him. Towner killed him, and also lies there dead.”
“Towner!” said Dreeme, “he was another bad spirit of the baser sort to my father. Both dead! Densdeth dead! May he be forgiven for all the cruel harm he has done to me and mine!”
Cecil and I took the back seat of the carriage. I wrapped her up in Towner’s great cloak, and drew the hood over her head.
She smiled as I did these little offices, and shrank away a little.
Covered with the hood and draped with the great cloak, she seemed a very woman. Each of us felt the awkwardness of our position.
“We shall not be friends the less, Mr. Byng,” said she.
“Friends, Cecil!”
I took the hand she offered, and kept it. For a moment I forgot old sorrows and present anxieties in this strange new joy.
Churm had now got his bays into their pace. He turned and looked with his large benignancy of expression upon his daughter. Then tears came into his eyes.
“I have missed you, longed for you, yearned after you, sought you bitterly,” he said.
“Not more bitterly than I sorrowed when I saw in your own hand that you had taken the side of that base man, and abandoned me.”
“My brave child! My poor, forlorn girl!”
“Never forlorn after Mr. Byng found me,” said Cecil. And when I looked at her she flushed again. “He has been a brother,—yes, closer than a brother to me. I should have died, body and soul, starved and worn out for lack of affection and sympathy, unless he had come, sent by God.”
“And I, Cecil,—all my better nature would have perished utterly in the strange temptations of these weeks, except for your sweet influence. You have saved me.”
“We have much to tell each other, my child,” said Churm.
“Much. But I owe it to Mr. Byng to describe at once how I came to be under false colors, unsexed.”
“Never unsexed, Cecil! I could not explain to myself in what your society differed from every other. It was in this. In the guise of man, you were thorough woman still. I talked to you and thought of you, although I was not conscious of it, as man does to woman only. I opened my heart to you as one does to—a sister, a sweet sister.”
“Well,” said Dreeme, “I must tell you my little history briefly, to justify myself. I cannot make it a merry one. Much of it you know; more perhaps you infer. You can understand the struggle in my heart when my father said to me, ‘Marry this man, or I am brought to shame.’ How could I so desecrate my womanhood? Here was one whom for himself I disliked and distrusted, and who was so base, having failed to gain my love, as to use force—moral force—and degrade my father to be the accomplice of his tyranny.”
Dreeme—for so I must call him—spoke with a passionate indignation. I could comprehend the impression these ardent moods had made upon Densdeth’s intellect. It was, indeed, splendid tragedy to hear him speak,—splendid, if the tragedy had not been all too real, and yet unfinished.
“Dislike and distrust, repugnance against him for his plot,—had you no other feeling toward Densdeth?” Churm asked.
“These and the instinctive recoil of a pure being from a foul being. Only these at first. Then came the insurrection of all my woman’s heart against his corruption of my father’s nature and compulsion of me through him. Mr. Densdeth treated me with personal respect. He left the ugly work to my father, his slave. Ah, my poor father!”
“And your sister,—what part did she take?”
“My sister!” said Cecil Dreeme, with burning cheeks, and as she spoke her hand grasped mine convulsively. “My sister kept aloof. She offered me no sympathy. She repelled my confidence, as she had long done. I had no friend to whom I could say, ‘Save me from him who should love me dearest, who should brave whatever pang there is in public shame, rather than degrade his daughter to such ignominy.’ Ah me! that Heaven should have so heaped misery upon me! And the worst to come!—the worst—the worst to come!”
“And I was across seas!” said Churm, bitterly.
“I had said to my father at the beginning, ‘If Mr. Churm were here, you would not dare sacrifice me.’ ‘Mr. Churm,’ he replied, ‘would have no sympathy for this freak of rejecting a man so distinguished and unexceptionable as Mr. Densdeth.’ And, indeed, there came presently a letter from you to that effect. It was you,—style, hand, everything, even to the most delicate characteristic expressions. How could I suspect my own father of so base a forgery? Then came another, sterner; and then another, in which you disowned and cast me off finally, unless I should consent. That crushed my heart. That almost broke down my power of resistance.”
“My poor child! my dear child!” Churm almost moaned; “and I was not here to help!”
“I might have yielded for pure forlornness and despair,” Dreeme went on, “when there was suddenly revealed to me, by a flash of insight, a crime, a treason, and a sin, which changed my repugnance for that guilty man, now dead, into utter abhorrence and loathing. Do not ask me what!”
We need not ask. All divined. And now, in the presence of these two who had warned me, their neglected cautions rushed back upon my mind. All were silent a moment, while Churm’s bays bowled us merrily over the frost-stiffened road,—merrily as if we were driving from a rural wedding to the city festival in its honor.
“When this sad sin and shame flashed upon me,” said Dreeme, “I did not wait one moment to let the edge of my horror dull. I sent for Densdeth. Was that unwomanly, my father?”
“Unwomanly, my child! It was heroic!”
“I sent for him. I faced him there under my father’s roof, which he had so dishonored. For that moment my fear of him was vanished. I said to him but a few words. God’s angel in my breast spoke for me.”
God’s angel was speaking now in Dreeme’s words. With the remembrance of that terrible interview,—that battle of purity against foulness,—his low deep voice rang like a prophet’s, that curses for God.
“But the man was not touched,” continued the same solemn voice. “Strange power of sin to deaden the soul! He was not touched. No shudder at his sacrilege! No great heart-breaking pang of self-loathing! He answered my giant agony with compliments. ‘A wonderful actress,’ he said, ‘I was. It was sublime,’ he said, ‘to see me so wrought up. The sight of such emotion would be cheaply bought with any villany’; and he bowed and smiled and played with his watch-chain.”
Dreeme’s voice, as he repeated these phrases, had unconsciously adopted the soft, sneering tone of their speaker. It was as if Densdeth were called back, and sitting by our side.
“Forget that man, if man he were, Cecil,” I breathed, with a shiver. “Let his harm to us die with him! Let his memory be an unopened coffin in a ruined and abandoned vault!”
“Ah Robert! his harm is not yet wholly dead; nor are the souls he poisoned cured. The days of all a lifetime cannot heap up forgetfulness enough to bury the thought of him. He must lie in our hearts and breed nightshade.”
“It was after this interview, I suppose,” said Churm, “that the thought of flight came to you.”
“The passion—the frenzy—of those terrible moments flung me into a fever. I went to my room, fell upon my bed, and passed into a half-unconscious state. I was aware of my father’s coming in, and muttering to himself: ‘Illness will do her good. This wicked obstinacy must break down,—yes, must break down.’ I was aware of my sister looking at me from the door, with a pale, hard face, and then turning and leaving me to myself. While I lay there in a half-trance, with old fancies drifting through my mind, I remembered how but yesterday, in passing Chrysalis, I had marked
the notice of studios to let, and how I had longed that I were some forgotten orphan, living there, and painting for my bread.”
“They never told me, Cecil,” said I, “that you had been an artist.”
“I had not been, in any ripe sense, an artist. No amateur can be. I was a diligent observer, a conscientious student, a laborious plodder. I had not been baptized by sorrow and necessity. Power, if I have it, came to me with pangs.”
“That is the old story,” said I. “Genius is quickened, if not created, by throes of anguish in the soul.”
“Such is the history of my force. Well, as I said, that fancy of an artist’s life in Chrysalis came back to me. It grew all day, and as my fever heightened,—for they left me alone, except that the family physician came in, and said, ‘Slight fever,—let her sleep it off!’—as the fever heightened, and I became light-headed, the fancy developed in my mind. It was a mad scheme. In a sane moment I should not have ventured it. But all the while something was whispering me, ‘Fly this house: its air is pollution!’ Night came. I rose cautiously. How well I remember it all!—my tremors at every sound, my groping in the dark, my confidence in my purpose, my throbs of delirious joy at the hope of escape,—how I laughed to myself, when I found I had money enough for many months,—how I dressed myself in a suit of clothes I had worn as the lover in a little domestic drama we played at home in happier days! Do not think me unwomanly for this disguise.”
“Unwomanly, my child!” said Churm. “It was the triumph of womanhood over womanishness!”
“I wrapped myself,” Dreeme continued, “in a cloak, part of that forgotten costume; I stole down the great staircase, half timorous, half bold, all desperate. I looked into the parlors. They were brilliantly lighted. In the distant mirror, at the rear, I could see the image of my sister, sitting alone, and, as I thought, drooping and weary. Ah, how I longed to fling myself into her arms, and pray her to weep with me! But I knew that she would turn away lightly and with scorn. I shrank back for fear of detection. You know that draped statue in the hall?”
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