“An excellent
way to get a fayrie and when you have her,
bind
her!” - ANCIENT
ALCHEMIST’S RECIPE.
In the darkness Time crept along like
a crippled thing, slow-moving, hideous. Outside
fell the monotonous drip, drip from trees and bushes,
likened by Phillida to a horrid clock. The fog
was a sounding-board for furtive noises that grew
up like fungi in the moist atmosphere. The thought
of Phillida and Vere down in the pleasant living room
tempted me almost beyond resistance. I wanted
to spring up, to rush out of the room; to fling myself
into my car and drive full speed until strength failed
and gasoline gave out.
Was that the lake which stirred in
the windless night? The lake, under which lay
the fire-blackened ruins of the house where the first
Desire Michell flung open an awful door that her vengeance
might stride through!
Was it too late for my Desire to come,
and time for the coming of that Other?
The step of Vere sounded on the gravel
path where he walked beneath the window. He was
making a trip of inspection, and would find no light
shining from the room. I was about to rise and
call down a word of reassurance to him, when a current
of spiced air passed by me. I sat arrested in
hope and expectancy.
“Here, after my warning, after
last night?” her soft voice panted across the
dark. “Will you die, then? Cruel to
me, and wicked to come here again! Oh, must I
wish you were a coward!”
Every vestige of her calmness gone,
she was sobbing as she spoke. I could imagine
she was wringing the little hands that once had left
a betraying print upon my table’s surface.
“I was cruel to you last night,
Desire; yet afterward you saved my life by sending
Ethan Vere to wake me. Would you have had me leave
without meeting you again, neither thanking you nor
asking your forgiveness?”
I thought she came nearer.
“For so little, you would brave
the Dread One in Its time of triumph? O steadfast
soldier, who faces the Breach even in the hour of death,
in all that you have done you have remembered me.
Why speak of anger or forgiveness? Have I not
injured you?”
“Never. I love you.”
“Is not that an injury?
Even though I hid my ill-omened face from you, reared
as I was to sad knowledge of the wrath upon me, the
wrong has been done. Weak as water in the test,
I kept the letter of my promise and broke the intent.
Yet go; keep life at least.”
“Desire, I do not understand
you,” I answered. “No matter for that,
now! I am content to share whatever you bring.
Not roughly or in challenge as I asked you last night,
but earnestly and with humility I ask you to come
away with me now. If trouble comes to my wife
and me, I do not doubt we can bear it. Let us
not be frightened from the attempt. Come.”
“I, to take happiness like that?”
she marveled in desolate amazement. “No.
At least I will go to my own place, if tardily.
Roger, be kind to me. Give me a last gift.
Let me know that somewhere you are living. Out
of my sight, out of my knowledge, but living in the
same world with me. Each moment you stay here
is a risk.”
In that warning she had reason.
I rose. It was time to act, but action must be
certain. If my groping movements missed her in
the dark there might be no second chance.
“Desire, if all is as you say
and we are not to meet again as we have done, you
shall let me touch you before I go,” I said firmly.
“No!”
“Yes. Why, would you have
me live all the years to come in doubt whether you
were a woman or a dream? Perhaps you might seem
at last a phantom of my own sick brain to which faithfulness
would be folly? Here across the table I stretch
my arm. Lay your palm in my palm. I may die
tonight.”
Whether she wished it also, or whether
my resolve drew obedience, I do not know. But
a vague figure moved through the dark toward me.
A hand settled in mine with the brushing touch of
an alighting bird. I closed my hand hotly upon
that one. I sprang a step aside from the table
between us, found her, and drew her to me.
What did I hold in my arms? Softness,
fragrance, draperies beneath which beat life and warmth.
As I stooped to reassure her, her breath curled against
my cheek. So with that guide I turned my head,
and set my lips on the lips I had never seen.
Did Something uprear Itself out there
in the black fog? A cold air rushed across the
summer heat of the fog; air foul as if issued from
the opened door of a vault. As once before, a
tremor quivered through the house. The hanging
chains of the lamps swung with a faint tinkling sound.
I snatched Desire Michell off her
feet and sprang for the door. Somehow I found
and opened it at the first essay. We were out
into the hall. With one hand I dragged the door
shut behind us, then carried her on to the head of
the stairs. There I set her down, but stood before
her as a bar against any attempt at escape.
A lamp shed a subdued light above
us. I looked at my captive. Never again
after that kiss could she deny her womanhood or pose
as a phantom. So far my victory was complete.
The lady might be angry, but it must be woman’s
anger. I knew she had not suspected my intention
until I lifted her in my arms. She had struggled
then, after her defenses had fallen.
She was quiet now, as though the light
had quelled her resistance. She stood drooped
and trembling; not the old-time witch, not the dazzling
adventuress, only a small fragile girl wound and wrapped
in some gray stuff that even covered the brightness
of her hair. Her face was held down and showed
no more color than a water-lily.
“I thought,” she whispered,
just audibly. “I thought you would
say, good-bye!”
“I know,” I stammered.
“But I could not. That way was impossible
for us.”
She did not contradict me. She
was so very small, I saw, that her head would reach
no higher than where the bright spot had rested above
my heart when I had last stood at the Barrier.
One hand gripped the veils beneath her chin, and seemed
the clenched fist of a child.
The crash of my door had startled
the household. I had heard Phillida cry out,
and Vere’s running steps upon the gravel path.
Now he came springing up the stairs. At the head
of the flight he stopped, staring at us.
“Desire,” I spoke as naturally
as I could manage, “this is Mr. Vere. Vere,
my fiancee, Miss Michell. Shall we go down to
Phillida?”
And Desire Michell did not deny my claim.
I am not very sure of how we found
ourselves downstairs. Nor do I remember in what
words we made the two girls known to one another.
Presently we were all in the living room, and Phillida
had possession of Desire Michell while Vere and I
looked on stupidly at the proceedings.
Phil had placed her in a chair beside
a tall floor-lamp and gently drew off the draperies
that hooded her. With little murmurs of compassion,
she unbound and shook free her guest’s hair.
“My dear, you are all damp!
This awful fog! You must have been out a long
time? You shall drink some tea before we start.
Drawls, will you light the alcohol lamp on the tea-table?
The kettle is filled.”
Now I could understand how Desire
had appeared amid a drift of fireshot smoke in the
beam of my electric torch, the night before. Her
hair was a garment of flame-bright silk flowing around
her, curling and eddying in rich abundance. Over
this she had worn the gray veils to smother all that
color and sheen into neutral sameness with night and
shadows. No wonder her face had seemed wraith-like
when her startled shrinking away from the light had
set all that drapery billowing about her.
She was the voice that had been my
intimate comrade through weeks of strange adventure.
She was the woman of the faded, yellow book, and the
painted beauty at the Metropolitan. She was all
the Desires of whom I had ever dreamed; and she was
none of them, for she was herself. Her long dark
eyes, suddenly lifted to me, were individual by that
ancestral blending of drowsiness with watchfulness;
yet were akin to the eyes of youth in all times by
their innocence. Her mouth, too, was the soft
mouth of a young girl kept apart from sordid life.
But her forehead, the noble breadth between the black
tracery of her eyebrows, expressed the student whose
weird, lofty knowledge had so often abashed my ignorance.
Only my ignorance? Now as she
looked at me across the room, all self-confidence
trickled away from me. What distinguished me from
a thousand men she might meet on any city street?
What had I ever said worth note in the hours we had
spent together? Now she saw me in the light,
plainly commonplace; and remembering myself lame, I
stood amazed at the audacity with which I had laid
claim to her.
She was rising from the chair, gently
putting aside Phillida’s detaining hands.
She had not spoken one word since her faltered speech
to me, upstairs. Neither Vere nor Phillida had
heard her voice. She had given her hand to each
of them and submitted to Phil’s care with a docility
I failed to recognize in my companion of the dark.
Her decisive movement now was more like the Desire
Michell I knew. Only, what was she about to do?
Repudiate my violence and me perhaps go
back to her hiding-place?
She came straight to where I stood,
not daring even to advance toward her. We might
have been alone in the room. I rather think we
were, to her preoccupation.
“You must go away,” she
said. “If there is any hope, it is in that.
Nothing else matters, now; nothing! If you wish,
take me with you. It would be wiser to leave
me. But nothing really matters except that you
should not stay here. I will obey you in everything
if you will only go. Take your car and drive drive
fast anywhere!”
It is impossible to convey the desperate
urgency and fervor of her low voice. Phillida
uttered an exclamation of fear. Vere wheeled about
and left the room. The front door closed behind
him. The gravel crunched under his tread on the
path to the garage, and the rate at which the light
he carried moved through the fog showed that he was
running. He obviously accepted the warning exactly
as it was given. After the briefest indecision,
Phillida hurried out into the hall.
For my part, I did nothing worth recording.
I had made discovery of two places where I was not
the “lame feller.” And if the first
place was the dreary Frontier, the second country
was that rich Land of Promise in Desire Michell’s
eyes.
What we said in our brief moment of
solitude is not part of this account.
Phillida was back promptly, her arms
full of garments. With little murmurs of explanation
by way of accompaniment, she proceeded to invest Desire
in a motor coat and a dark-blue velvet hat rather like
an artist’s tam-o’shanter. I noticed
then that the girl wore a plain frock of gray stuff,
long of sleeve and skirt, fastened at the base of her
throat with severe intent to cover from sight all loveliness
of tint and contour. Nothing farther from the
fashion of the day or the figure of my cousin could
be imagined.
“You must wear the coat because
it is always cool motoring at night,” Phillida
was murmuring. “And of course you will want
it at a hotel; until you can do some shopping.
I will just tie back your gorgeous, scrumptious hair
with this ribbon, now. I know I haven’t
enough hairpins to put it up without wasting an awful
lot of time, but we will buy them in the morning.
We are going to take the very best care of you every
minute, so you must not worry.”
“You are so kind to me,”
Desire began tremulously. “No one was ever
so kind! It does not matter about me, or what
people think of me, if he will only go from here quickly.”
“Right away,” Phillida
soothed. “My husband has gone for the car.
I hear him coming now!”
In fact, Vere was coming up the veranda
steps. His hand was on the knob of the outer
door, fumbling with it in a manner not usual to him,
then the knob yielded and he was inside.
“But how slow you are, Drawls,”
his wife called, with an accent of wonder.
Vere crossed the threshold of the
room, his gaze seeking mine. He was pale, and
drops of fog moisture pearled his dark face like sweat.
“I am sorry, Mr. Locke,”
he addressed me, ignoring the others. “Perhaps
you felt that shake-up, a quarter-hour ago? Like
a kind of earthquake, or the kick from a big explosion
a long ways off? It didn’t seem very strong
to me. It was too strong for that old tree by
the garage, though! Must have been decayed clear
through inside. Willows are like that, tricky
when they get old.”
“Ethan, what are you
talking about?” cried Phillida, aghast.
He continued to look at me.
“I guess it must have fallen
just about when you slammed your door upstairs.
Seems I do remember a sort of second crash following
the noise you made. I was too keen on finding
out what was happening up there to pay much heed.”
“Well, Vere?”
“Tree smashed down through the
roof of the garage,” he reluctantly gave his
report. “Everything under the hood of the
automobile is wrecked. There is no motor left,
and no radiator. Just junk, mixed up with broken
wood and leaves and pieces of the stucco and tiles
of the garage.”
So there was to be no going tonight
from the house beside the lake. A frustrated
group, we stood amid our preparations; the two girls
wearing cloaks and hats for the drive that would never
be taken. Had we ever really expected to go?
Already the project was fading into the realm of fantastic
ideas, futile as the pretended journeys of children
who are kept in their nursery. Desire lifted
her hands and took off the blue velvet cap with a
resignation more expressive than words. Only my
practical little cousin charged valiantly at all obstacles.
“We aren’t ever going
to give up?” she cried protest. “Cousin
Roger? Ethan? You cannot mean to give
up. Why ’phone to the nearest
garage to send us another car. If we pay them
enough they will drive anywhere. Or if they cannot
take us to New York, they will take us to the railroad
station where we can get a train for some place.
Can’t we, Drawls?”
“We could,” Vere admitted.
“I’d admire to try it, anyhow. But
the telephone wire came across the place right past
the garage, you know”
“The tree tore the wire down, too?”
“I’m afraid it snapped right in two, Phil.”
“We we might walk,” she essayed.
But even her brave voice trailed into
silence as she glanced toward the black, dripping
night beyond the windows.
“Or if we found a horse and wagon,” she
murmured a final suggestion.
Vere shook his head.
“Come!” I assumed charge
with a cheerfulness not quite sincere. “None
of us are ready for such desperate efforts to leave
our cozy quarters here. Especially as I fancy
Vere’s ‘earthquake’ was the tremor
of an approaching thunderstorm. I felt it, myself.
Let us light all the lamps and draw the curtains to
shut out the fog which has got on everyone’s
nerves by its long continuance. We are overwrought
beyond reason. Suppose we sit here together,
strong in numbers, for the few hours until daylight?
I think that should be safeguard enough. Tomorrow
we will do all we had planned for tonight. Come
in, Vere, and close the door.”
He obeyed me at once. Desire
Michell passively suffered me to unfasten and take
off the coat she wore, too heavy for such a night.
She had uttered no word since Vere announced the destruction
of the car. She did not speak now, when I put
her in the low chair beneath the lamp. I had a
greed of light for her, as a protection and because
darkness had held her so long.
“It seems as if we should do
something!” Phillida yielded unwillingly.
Vere’s eyes met mine as he turned
from drawing the last curtain. We were both thinking
of the force that had driven the frail old willow tree
through tile and cement of the new building to flatten
the metal of motor and car into uselessness.
The mere weight of the tree would not have carried
it through the roof. To “do something”
by way of physical escape from that
The ribbon had glided from Desire’s
hair, almost as if the vital, resilient mass resentfully
freed itself from restraint by the bit of satin.
Now she put up her hands with a slow movement and drew
two broad strands of the glittering tresses across
her shoulders, veiling her face.
“Wait,” she answered Phillida,
most unexpectedly. “I must be sure quite
sure! I must think. If you will wait.”