Anna Katharine Green

“ Packard’s lips, every fiber in her tense form quivering and the gleam of hope shining brighter and brighter in her countenance. “No, not dead!” Then while Nixon trembled and succumbed inwardly to this spectacle of a gentle-hearted woman transformed by some secret and overwhelming emotion into an image of vindictive delight, her hands left the stair-rail and flew straight up over her head in the transcendent gesture which only the greatest crises in life call forth, and she exclaimed with awe-inspiring emphasis: “God could not have been so merciful!” ”

“ It is not often, perhaps it is only once in a lifetime, that it is given us to look straight into the innermost recesses of the human soul. Never before had such an opportunity come to me, and possibly never would it come again, yet my first conscious impulse was one of fright at the appalling self-revelation she had made, not only in my hearing, but in that of nearly her whole household. I could see, over her shoulders, Letty’s eyes staring wide in ingenuous dismay, while from the hall below rose the sound of hurrying feet as the girls came running in from the kitchen. ”

“ But the mayor, satisfied that he made his point, smiled calmly, saying:
“No, not the devil, but yourself. You, even the you of seven years back, would not have lived in any country town if necessity, or let us say, safety, had not demanded it. You, with your looks and your ambitions,—to marry at twenty-five a girl from the kitchen! any girl, even if she had the making of an Olympia Packard, if you did not know that it was in your power to shake her off when you got ready to assert yourself, or better prospects offered? ”

“ That I could not be left alone, with life in every part of the house, and the sound of the piano and cheerful talking just across the hall, without the sense of the morbid and unearthly entering my matter-of-fact brain!
Uttering an ejaculation of contempt, I reseated myself. The impulse came again to look behind me, but I mastered it this time without too great an effort. I already knew every feature of the room: its old-fashioned mantel, large round center-table, its couches and chairs, and why should I waste my attention again upon them? ”

“ She wore a look of dismay which I felt fully accounted for when I looked inside. Disorder reigned from one end of the room to the other, transcending any picture I may have formed in my own mind concerning its probable condition. Mrs. Packard must have forgotten all this disarray, or at least had supposed it to have yielded to the efforts of the maid, when she proposed my awaiting her there. There were bureau-drawers with their contents half on the floor, boxes with their covers off, cupboard-doors ajar and even the closet shelves showing every mark of a frenzied search among them. ”

“ Observing the breathless interest her manner evoked, or possibly realizing how nearly she had come to an unnecessary if not unwise self-betrayal, she suddenly smoothed her brow and, catching up a piece of embroidery from the table, sat down with it in her hand.
“A wife is naturally heart and soul with her husband,” she observed, with an assumption of composure which restored some sort of naturalness to the conversation. “You are a thinking person, I see, and what is more, a conscientious one. There are many, many such in town; many amongst the men as well as amongst the women. ”

“ Packard, you may trust me.” The earnest, confiding look, which for a moment disturbed the melancholy of her large eyes, touched me closely as I shut the door between us.
“Now what is the meaning of this mystery?” I asked myself after I had seen Nixon go downstairs, shaking his head and casting every now and then a suspicious glance behind him. “It is not as trivial as it appears. That laugh was tragedy to her, not comedy.” And when I paused to recollect its tone I did not wonder at its effect upon her mind, strained as it undoubtedly was by some secret sorrow or perplexity. ”

“ Footfalls on the stairs. The library door, locked by Mr. Dennison’s own hand, is heard to unclose. The timepiece on the library mantel-shelf strikes twelve; but it is slightly fast, and Mr. and Mrs. Dennison, who have crept from their room to the stair-head, listen breathlessly for the deep boom of the great hall clock—the one which had stopped the night before. No light is burning anywhere, and the hall below is a pit of darkness, when suddenly Mrs. Dennison seizes her husband’s arm and, gasping out, “The clock, the clock!” falls fainting to the floor. ”

“ Steele, if you will be so good, give me the names of some of those halfhearted ones—critical people who have to see in order to believe. I shall have them at my table—I shall let them see that the shadow which enveloped me was ephemeral; that a woman can rise above all weakness in the support of a husband she loves and honors as I do Mr. Packard. ”

“ I have had some training as a nurse and, perceiving that Mrs. Packard had simply fainted, I was not at all alarmed, but simply made an effort to restore her with a calmness that for some reason greatly irritated the old man.
“Shall I call Ellen? Shall I call Letty?” he kept crying, shifting from one foot to another in a frightened and fussy way that exasperated me almost beyond endurance. “She doesn’t breathe; she is white, white! Oh, what will the mayor say? I will call Letty.” ”

“ Packard herself spoke with unexpected self-control, if not disdain.
“You are a very honest man, Mr. Steele. I commend the nicety of your scruples and am quite ready to trust myself to them. I own to no blot, in my past or present life, calling for public arraignment. If my statement of the fact is not enough, I here swear on the head of my child—”
“No, no,” he quickly interpolated, “don’t frighten the baby. Swearing is not necessary; I am bound to believe your word, Mrs. Packard.” ”

“ And though she did not know I saw it, she withdrew the key and slipped it into her pocket. “This is Nixon’s night out,” she murmured, as she led the way to the library. “Ellen will wait on us and we’ll have the baby down and play games and be as merry as ever we can be,—to keep the ghosts away,” she cried in fresh, defiant tones that had just the faintest suggestion of hysteria in them. “We shall succeed; I don’t mean to think of it again. I’m right in that, am I not? You look as if you thought so. Ah, Mr. Packard was kind to secure me such a companion. ”

“ Careful to forestall Nixon in his duty, I opened the front door, and, drawing her into the room where I had been waiting, I blurted out my whole story before she could remove her hat.
“O Mrs. Packard,” I cried, “I have such good news for you. The thing you feared hasn’t any meaning. The house was never haunted; the shadows which have been seen here were the shadows of real beings. ”

“ What reason have you for that, Miss Saunders? What motive could they have for depreciating the value of what was once their own property?”
So he knew nothing of the lost bonds! Mrs. Packard had made no mistake when she assured me of the secrecy with which they had endured their misfortune. It gave me great relief; I could work more safely with this secret unshared. But the situation called for dissimulation. It was with anything but real openness that I declared:
“You can not calculate the impulses of an affected mind. Jealousy of the past may influence these unfortunate women. ”

“ Recognizing at once that any attempt at ingratiation would fail with this man, I entered at once upon my errand by asking a question direct enough to command his attention, if it did not insure the desired reply.
“Mr. Searles, when you purchased the house on Franklin Street, did you know enough about it to have an answer ready for any one who might declare it haunted?”
The abruptness of the attack produced its effect. Annoyance swept every hint of patience from face and manner, and he exclaimed in a tone which conveyed, only too openly, how disagreeable the subject was to him. ”

“ Steele’s further duplicity, coming so immediately upon the first, roused fresh surmises and awakened thoughts which soon set my wits working in a direction as new as it was unexpected. I had believed my work over in this house, but as I recalled all the occurrences of the evening and turned the situation, as it now confronted me, over and over in my mind, I felt that it had just begun. There must be something in this latest development to help us in the struggle which lay before us. ”

“ Two women, total strangers to me, united in an unceasing watch upon me in my room! I own that the sense of mystery which this discovery brought struck me at the moment as being fully as uncanny and as unsettling to contemplate as the idea of a spirit haunting walls in which I was destined for a while to live, breathe and sleep. However, as soon as I had drawn the shade and lighted the gas, I forgot the whole thing, and not till I was quite ready for bed, and my light again turned low, did I feel the least desire to take another peep at that mysterious window. ”

“ Without a droop of his eye, or a tremor in his voice, the answer came short, sharp and emphatic:
“Yes.”
“Then, you are a villain! and I shall not feel myself called upon to show you any consideration beyond what justice demands. Have you any plea to urge beyond the natural one of her seemingly unprovoked desertion of you? Has not my wife—” the nobility with which he emphasized those two words made my heart swell—“spoken the truth?”
Ah! then the mask of disdainful serenity with which the other had hitherto veiled the burning anguish of his soul fell in one burst of irresistible passion. ”

“ The interest in her look was not the simple one to be expected. In another person in other circumstances I should have characterized her glance as one of inquiry and wonder. But neither inquiry nor wonder described the present situation, and I put myself upon my guard.
Seeing me look her way, she flushed, and, throwing wide the door, remarked in the pleasantest of tones:
“This is your room. Mrs. Packard says that if it is not large enough or does not seem pleasant to you, she will find you another one to-morrow.” ”

“ The social distinctions in such a place being small and my birth and breeding really placing me on a par with my employer and his family, I was given the parlor for this celebration and never, never, shall I forget its mean and bare look, even to my untutored eyes; or how lonely those far hills looked, through the small-paned window I faced; or what a shadow seemed to fall across them as the parson uttered those fateful words, so terrible to one whose heart is not in them: What God hath joined together let no man put asunder. ”

“ No unreal and purely superstitious reason would account for the extreme joy and self-abandonment with which she had hailed the possibility of Mr. Steele’s death. The “no” she had given me when I asked if she considered this man her husband’s enemy had been a lying no. To her, for some cause as yet unexplained, the secretary was a dangerous ally to the man she loved; an ally so near and so dangerous that the mere rumor of his death was capable of lifting her from the depths of despondency into a state of abnormal exhilaration and hope. ”

“ I can not bear that!” leaped in anguish from her lips. “I am a pure woman, let no such torture be inflicted upon me. Speak! tell the truth as you are the son of a woman you would have us believe honest.”
A smile then, cold but alive with gloating triumph, altered the straight line of his lips for an instant as he advanced toward the door. “A woman over the possession of whom it is an honor to quarrel!” were his words as he passed the mayor with a bow. ”

“ To any response he might give of the same nature I had no clue, but his tone when he answered was as cool and deferentially polite as was to be expected from a man chosen by Mayor Packard for his private secretary. “Mrs. Packard, your fears are very natural. A woman shrinks from such inquiries, even when sustained by the consciousness that nothing can rob her name of its deserved honor. But if we let one innuendo pass, how can we prevent a second? The man who did this thing should be punished. In this I agree with Mayor Packard.” ”

“ There’s nothing to fear here, Miss Saunders; absolutely nothing for you to fear. I should not have allowed you to remain here a night if there had been. No ghost will visit you.”
“No, I hear they never wander above the second story,” I laughed. “If they did I should hardly anticipate the honor of a visit. It is not ghosts I fear; it is something quite different which affects me,—living eyes, living passions, the old ladies next door,” I finished falteringly, for Mrs. Packard was looking at me with a show of startling alarm. “They stare into my room night and day. ”