There was some difference in that room. I was conscious of the fact as soon as I entered and closed the door behind me. The candle still burned where I had left it, flickering slightly in some current of air. There was no change that the eye could find, no sound except the rain, yet I felt an extreme reluctance to go on even a step from where I stood. What I wanted to do was to tear open the door behind me, to rush out into the hall and slam the door shut between this room and myself.
Why? I looked around me, sending the beam of the flashlight playing over the quiet place. Nothing, of course! I walked over to the bookcase, took up the braid I had left there, and sat down in an old armchair to study my trophy. On principle and by habit I had no intention of being mastered by nerves. It was humiliating to discover that I could be made nervous by the mere fact of being in an unoccupied farmhouse after midnight.
The braid was magnificent. It was as broad as my palm, yet compressed so tightly that it was thick and solid to the touch. If released over someone's shoulders, it would have been a sumptuous cloak, indeed! In what madness of panic had the girl sacrificed this beauty? How she must hate me, now the panic was past! The color, too, was unique, in my experience; a gold as vivid as auburn. Or was it tinged with auburn? As I leaned forward to catch the candle-light, a drift of that fragrance worn by my visitor floated from her braid.
At once I knew what had changed in the room. The air that had been so pure when the house was opened, now was heavy with an odor of damp and mould that had seeped into the atmosphere as moisture will seep through cellar walls. One would have said that the door of some hideous vault had been opened into my bedchamber. This stench struggled, as it were, with the volatile perfume that clung about the braid; so that my senses were thrust back and forth between disgust and delight in the strangest wavering of sensation.
I made the strongest effort to put away the effect this wavering had upon me. I forced myself to sit still and think of normal things; of the men whom I was to see next morning, of the plans I meant to discuss with them.
Useless! The stench was making me ill. A wave of giddiness swept over me, and passed. My heart was beating slowly and heavily. Something in my head pulsed in unison. I felt a frightful depression, that suddenly burst into an attack of fear gripping me like hysteria. I wanted to shriek aloud like a woman, to cover my eyes and run blindly. But at the same time my muscles failed me. Will and strength were arrested like frozen water.
As I sat there, facing the door of the room, I became aware of Something at the window behind my back. Something that pressed against the open window and stared at me with a hideous covetousness beside which the greed of a beast for its prey is a natural, innocent appetite. I felt that Thing's hungry malignance like a soft, dreadful mouth sucking toward me, yet held away from me by some force vaguely based on my own resistance. And I understood how a man may die of horror.
Yet, presently, I turned around. Weak and sick, with dragging effort I turned in my chair and faced the black, uncurtained window where I felt It to be.
Nothing was there, to sight or hearing. I sat still, and combated that which I knew was there. In the profound stillness, I heard the wind stir the naked branches of the trees, the flowing water through the fragments of the one-time dam, the sputtering of my candle which needed trimming. Sweat ran down my face and body, drenching me with cold. It crouched against the empty window, staring at me.
After a time, the presence seemed not so close. At last, I seemed to know It was gone. In the gush of that enormous relief my remaining strength was swept away like a swimmer in a torrent and I collapsed half-fainting in my chair.
When I was able, I rose and walked through the house again. Again the rooms showed nothing to my flashlight except dull furniture, walls peeling here and there from long neglect, pictures of no merit and dreary subject. I had expected nothing, and I found nothing.
It was on my way upstairs to my bedroom that a sentence from the invisible lady's story came back to my mind.
"What crouches behind her, unseen? The Horror takes Its own——"
The bedroom door opened quietly under my hand. The rain had ceased and a freshening breeze came from the west, filling the room with sweet country air. The candle had burned down. While I stood there, the flame flickered out.
After a brief indecision, I made my way to the bed, rolled myself in the blankets, and laid down between the four pineapple-topped posts. This time I kept the flashlight at my hand. But almost at once I slept, and slept heavily far into a bright, windy March morning.
CHAPTER III
"Wide is the seat of the man gentle of speech."
—Instruction of Ke' Gemni.
On the second day after my return to New York, my Aunt Caroline Knox called me up on the telephone.
There are reasons why I always feel myself at a disadvantage with Aunt Caroline. The first of these brings me to a trifling matter that I should have set down before, but which I have made a habit of ignoring so far as possible in both thought and speech. As was Lord Byron, I am slightly lame. I admit that is the only quality in common; still, I like the romantic association. Now, my limp is very slight, and I never have found it interfered much with things I cared to do. In fact, I am otherwise somewhat above the average in strength and vigor. But from my boyhood Aunt Caroline always made a point of alluding to the physical fact as often as possible. She considered that course a healthful discipline.
"My nephew," she was accustomed to introduce me. "Lame since he was seven. Roger, do not scowl! Yes; run over trying to save a pet dog. A mongrel of no value whatever!"
Which would have left some doubt as to whether she referred to poor Tatters or to me, had it not been for her exceeding pride in our family tree.
The second reason for my disadvantage before her, was her utter contempt for my profession as a composer of popular music.
Today her voice came thinly to me across the long-distance wire.
"Your Cousin Phillida has failed in her examinations again," she announced to me, with a species of tragic repose. "In view of her father's intellect and my—er—my family's, her mental status is inexplicable. Although, of course, there is your own case!"
"Why, she is the most educated girl I know," I protested hastily.
"I presume you mean best educated, Roger. Pray do not quite lose your command of language."
I meant exactly what I had said. Phillida has studied since she was three years old, exhaustively and exhaustedly. A vision of her plain, pale little face rose before me when I spoke. It is a burden to be the only child of a professor, particularly for a meek girl.
"She has studied insufficiently," Aunt Caroline pursued. "She is nineteen, and her position at Vassar is deplorable."
"Her health——" I murmured.
"Would not have hampered her had she given proper attention to athletics! However, I did not call up to hear you defend Phillida in a matter of which you are necessarily ignorant. Her father and I are somewhat better judges, I should suppose, than a young man who is not a student in any true sense of the word and ignores knowledge as a purpose in life. Not that I wish to wound or depreciate you, Roger. There is, I may say, a steadiness of moral character beneath your frivolity of mind and pursuit. If my poor brother had trained you more wisely; if you had been my son——"
"Thank you, Aunt," I acknowledged the benevolent intention, with an inward quailing at the clank of fetters suggested. "Was there something I can do for you?"
"Will