“Oh, little booke how darst thou put thyself in press for
drede?” - CHAUCER.
We sat quietly waiting. I had
drawn a chair near Desire. Phillida and Vere
were together, chairs touching, her right hand curled
into his left. Bagheera the cat had slipped into
the room before the door was closed, and lay pressed
against his mistress’s stout little boot.
Our small garrison was assembled, surely for as strange
a defense as ever sober moderns undertook. For
my part, it was wonder enough to study that captive
who was at once so strange yet so intimately well known
to me.
The Tiffany clock on the mantel shelf
chimed midnight. Soon after, we began to experience
the first break in the heavy monotony of heat and
fog that had overlaid the place for three days.
The temperature began to fall. The fog did not
lift. The flowered cretonne curtains hung straight
from their rods unstirred by any movement of air.
But the atmosphere in the room steadily grew colder.
I saw Phillida shiver in the chill dampness and pull
closer the collar of her thin blouse. When Desire
finally spoke, we three started as if her low tones
had been the clang of a hammer.
“I have tried to judge what
is best,” she said, not raising her face from
its shadowing veil of hair. “I am not very
wise. But it seems better that there should be
no ignorance between us. If I had been either
wise or good, I should never have come down from the
convent to draw another into danger and horror without
purpose or hope of any good ending.”
“The convent?” I echoed,
memory turning to the bleak building far up the hillside.
“You came from there?”
“There is a path through the
woods. I am very strong and vigorous. But
I had to wait until all there were asleep before I
could come. Sometimes I could not come at all.
For this house, I had my father’s old key.
It was only for this little time while I am being
taught. Soon I will put on a nun’s dress
and cut my hair, and and never never
leave there any more.”
Stupefied, I thought of the black
loneliness of the wooded hillside behind us.
No wonder the fog was wet upon her hair! Her slight
feet had traversed that path night after night, had
brought her to the door her key fitted, had come through
the dark house to the door of the room upstairs.
When she left me, she had toiled that desolate way
back. For what? Humility bent me, and bewilderment.
“But why?” Phillida gasped.
“Why? Cousin Roger hunted everywhere to
find you. He would have gone anywhere you told
him to see you. Didn’t you know that?”
“I never meant him to see me.”
“Why not?”
“I am Desire Michell, fourth
of that name; all women who brought misfortune upon
those who cared for them,” she answered, her
voice lower still. “How shall I make you
understand? I was brought up to know the wrath
and doom upon me, yet I myself can scarcely understand.
My father knew all, yet he fell in weakness.”
“Your father?” I questioned,
recalling Mrs. Hill’s positive genealogy of
the Michells in which there was no place for this daughter
of the line.
“He was the last of his family.
When he was very young the conviction came to him
that his duty was never to marry, so our race might
cease to exist. He lived here and preached against
evil. He studied the ancient learning that he
might be fitted to wrestle with sin. But in the
end horror of what was here gained upon him so that
he closed the house and went abroad to work as a missionary.
There was a girl; the daughter of the clergyman who
was leaving the mission. My father fell
in love. He forgot all his convictions and married
her. He knew it was a sin, but it was stronger
than he was. She only lived one year. When
I was born, she died. He prayed that I would
die, too. But I”
Her voice died into silence.
I ventured to lean nearer and take her hand into mine.
“Desire,” I said, “why
should you be a sufferer for the actions of a woman
who died over two centuries ago? What is the long
dead Desire Michell to you?”
A strange and solemn hush followed
my question. The words seemed to take a significance
and importance beyond their simple meaning. The
hand I held trembled in my clasp. She answered
at last, just audibly:
“You know. You said that you had read her
book.”
“But the book tells so little,
Desire. Just such a chronicle of superstition
as may be found in a hundred old records.”
She shook her head slightly.
“Not that! Bring me the book.”
The book was upstairs in the room
from which I had carried her half an hour before in
something very like a panic flight. Before I could
release her hand and rise, before I comprehended his
intention, Vere was out of the living room and upon
the stairs. It was too late to overtake him.
The man who had been a professional skater covered
the stairs in a few easy, swinging strides. We
heard his light tread on the floor overhead, heard
him stop beside the table where the book lay.
Then, he was returning. My door closed.
His step sounded on the stairs again; in a moment
he was back among us, and quietly offering the volume
to our guest. His dark eyes met mine reassuringly,
deprecating the thoughts I am sure my face expressed.
“Lights burning and all serene up there,”
he announced.
Desire touched the book with a curious repugnance.
“I was looking for this, the
first night I came here,” she murmured.
“That is why I came to America after my father
died. I had promised him to destroy this record.
When I heard that the house was sold to a gentleman
from New York, I came down from the convent on the
hill to find the bookcase holding the old history.
I did not know anyone was here, that night, until
you touched my hair.”
I remembered the bookcase near the
bed, where I stood my candle and matches. Unaware,
I had prevented her finding the thing she sought, and
so forced her to return. Afterward, the house
had been full of workmen making alterations and improvements,
until later still Phillida had transferred the bookcase
and its contents to her sewing room. If I had
not taken the whim to sleep in the old house on the
night of my purchase, or if I had chosen another room,
the existence of Desire Michell might never have been
known to me.
Would the creature from the Barrier
have appeared to me, if I had not known her?
She was drawing something from behind
the portrait of the first Desire Michell; a thin,
small book that had lain concealed between the cover
of the larger volume and the page bearing the woodcut,
where a sort of pocket was formed that had escaped
our notice. Laid upon the table, the little book
rolled away from the girl’s fingers and lay curled
upon itself in the lamplight. The limp morocco
cover was spotted with mildew and half-revealed pages
of close, fine writing blotched in places with rusty
stains. It gave out an odor of mould and age in
an atmosphere made sweet by Desire’s presence.
Phillida, who had been silent even
when Vere left her to go upstairs, shrank away from
the book on the table. She darted a glance over
her shoulder at the curtained windows behind her.
“Drawls, I cannot help what
everybody thinks of me,” she said plaintively.
“I am cold. The fire is ready laid in the
grate. Will you put a match to it, please?”
No one smiled at the request.
Her husband uttered some soothing phrase of compliance.
We all looked on while the flame caught and began to
creep up among the apple-logs. Bagheera rose and
changed his position to one before the hearth.
When Vere stood erect, Desire leaned toward him.
“Will you read, aloud, sir?”
she asked of him, and made a gesture toward the morocco
book.
She surprised us all by that choice.
I was unreasoning enough to feel slighted, although
the task was one for which I felt a strong dislike.
I fancied Vere liked the idea no better, from his
expression. However, he offered no demur, but
sat down at the table and began to flatten the warped
pages that perversely sprang back and clung about his
fingers. Desire slowly turned her lovely eyes
to me, eyes that looked by gift of nature as if their
long corners had been brushed with kohl. She said
nothing, yet somehow conveyed her meaning and intent.
I understood that she did not wish to hear me read
those pages; that it was painful to her that they
should be read at all.
Vere was ready. He glanced around
our circle, then began with the simple directness
that gave him a dignity peculiarly his own.
“’Mistress Desire Michell,
her booke, Beginning at the nineteenth year of her
Age,’” he read, in his leisurely voice.
The living Desire Michell and I were
regarding one another. I smiled at the quaint
wording, but she shuddered, and put her hands across
her eyes.
Yet there was nothing in those first
pages except a girl’s chronicle of village life.
This book evidently carried on a diary kept from early
childhood; a diary written out of loneliness.
Apparently the bare colonial life pressed heavily
upon the writer; who, having no companions of the
intellect, turned to this record of her own mind as
a prisoner might talk to his reflection in a mirror
rather than go mad from sheer silence. Discontent
and restlessness beat through the lines like fluttering
wings. She wrote of her own beauty with a cool
appraisal oddly removed from vanity, almost with resentment
of a possession she could not use.
“Like a man who finds treasure
in a desert isle, I am rich in coin that I may not
spend,” she wrote. “I stand before
my mirror and take a tress of my hair in either hand;
I spread wide my arms full reach, yet I cannot touch
the end of those tresses. Nor can my two hands
clasp the bulk of them. There have been other
women who had such hair, who were of body straight
and white, and had the eyes but I cannot
read that they stayed poor and obscure.”
There followed some quotations from
the classics of which I was able to give but vague
translations when Vere passed the book to me, both
because my knowledge was scanty and because of their
daring unconventionality. There were allusions,
too, to ladies of later history who had found fairness
a broad staircase for ambition to mount. Of the
writer’s learning, there could be no question;
a learning amazing in one so young and so situated.
The source of this became apparent. Her father
was consumed with the passion of scholarship, and the
girl’s hungry mind fed in the pastures where
he led the way.
Here crept into view an anomaly of
character. The austere Puritan divine, whose
life was open and blank, bare and cold as a winter
field, cherished a secret dissipation of the mind.
He labored upon a book on the errors of magic.
So laboring, he became snared by the thing he denounced.
He believed in the hidden lore while he condemned it.
Deeper and deeper into forbidden knowledge his eagerness
for research led him. Unsanctioned by any church
were the books Dr. Michell starved his body to buy
from Jews or other furtive dealers in unusual wares.
The titles in his library comprehended the names of
more charlatans than bishops. He could define
the distinctions between necromancy, sorcery, and magic.
The marvelous calculations of the Pythagoreans engaged
him, and the lost mysteries of the Cabiri.
From such studies he would arise on
the Sabbath to preach sermons that held his dull flock
agape. Bitter draughts of salvation he poured
for their spiritual drinking. He scarcely saw
how any man might escape hell-fire, all being so vile.
Against witchcraft and tampering with Satan’s
agents he was eloquent. He rode sixty miles in
midwinter to see a Quaker whipped and a woman hung
who had been convicted as a witch.
Of all this, his daughter wrote with
an elfin mockery. Her brilliant eye of youth
saw through the inconsistency of the beliefs he strove
to reconcile. She learned his lore, read his
books, and discarded his doctrine.
“I study with him, but I think
alone,” she set down her independence.
Without his knowledge, she proceeded
to actual experiment with rude crucible and alembic
in her own chamber. She essayed some age-old
recipes of blended herbs and ingredients within her
reach, handled at certain hours of the night and phases
of the moon. All were innocent enough, it seemed.
She cured a beloved old dog of rheumatism and partial
blindness. She discovered an exquisite perfume
which she named Rose of Jerusalem.
But the experiments were not fortunate,
she made obscure complaint. The dog, cured, lived
only a few weeks. The perfume, in which she revelled
with a fierce, long-denied appetite, steeping her rich
hair in it and her severely dull garments, awoke many
whispers in a community where sweet odors were unknown
and disapproved. She alluded, with a mingling
of freezing scorn and triumph, to the young men who
followed after her “seeking a wife
who would be at their hearth as fatal a guest as that
fair woman sent by an enemy to Alexander the Great,
whose honey breath was deadly poison to who so kissed
there.”
Into this situation rode the fine
gentleman from the colonial world of fashion who was
to fix the fate of Desire Michell and his own.
From this point on, the diary was
a record of the same story as the “History of
Ye foule Witch, Desire Michell.”
The love affair that followed Sir
Austin’s visit to the clergyman’s house
leaped hot and instant as flame from oil and fire brought
together. The girl was parched with thirst for
life, yet despised all around her. The man was
dazzled by a beauty and mentality foreign as a bird
of paradise found nested in Connecticut snow.
A mad, wild passion linked them that was more than
half a duel. For Sir Austin was already betrothed.
Honor might not have chained him for long, but his
need of his betrothed’s fortune proved more
enduring. He was a man bred to wealth, who did
not possess it. He offered Desire Michell his
left hand.
He was turned out of her father’s
house with a red weal struck across his face like
a brand.
Of course he returned. The arrow
was firmly fixed. He asked her to marry him,
and was refused with savage contempt. He would
not take the refusal. Her heart and ambition
were hidden traitors to his cause. In the end
she surrendered and the marriage day was set.
Sir Austin rode away to set his house
in order, while Desire turned from alchemy to make
her wedding garments.
The entries during this interval were
sweetly gentle and feminine. Her Rose of Jerusalem
fragrance was all her own, and was kept so, but she
made less-rare essences and sold them through a pedlar
in order to buy fine linen and brocade for a trousseau
not designed to be worn in a Puritan village.
She was happy and at rest in expectation.
On her wedding day the destroying
news fell. Sir Austin hid a weak spirit within
a strong and handsome body. Away from Desire’s
glamour, back in New York, he had not broken his engagement
to the heiress. Instead, he had married her on
the day arranged before he met the clergyman’s
daughter.
There was never again a connected
record in the diary. Pages were torn out in places,
entries were broken off, half-made. But the story
Vere’s slow, steady voice conveyed to us was
the one we knew; the one my Desire had told to me
the first night I slept in this house. The half-mad
girl turned to her father’s deadly books.
Sir Austin died as his waxen image dissolved before
the fire, where the girl sat watching with merciless
hate. He died, raving and frothing, on her door-sill.
She never saw him after the day he rode away to prepare
for their marriage. She set open her window that
she might hear his progress to that hard death, but
never deigned to turn her glance upon him.
The clergyman was dead, now; of shame,
or perhaps of terror at the child he had reared.
The girl was alone.
The diary grew wilder, with gaps of
weeks where there were no entries. More frequently,
pages were missing and paragraphs obliterated by the
reddish blotches like rust or blood. There were
accounts of weird, half-told experiments ranging through
the three degrees of magic set forth by Talmud and
Cabala. She wrote of legions of kingdoms between
earth and heaven, and the twelve unearthly worlds of
Plato. She alluded to a Barrier between men and
other orders of beings, beyond which dwelt Those whom
the magicians of old glimpsed after long toil and
incantation.
“Those of whom Vertabied, the
Armenian, says: ’Their orders differ
from one another in situation and degree of glory,
just as there are different ranks among men, though
they are all of one nature.’ They cannot
cross nor overthrow this Wall, nor can man alone; but
if they and man join togetherOne
there beyond whispers to me of power, splendor, victory”
Days later, there was entered a passage
of mad triumph and terror. The Barrier was broken
through. Out of the breach issued the One whom
she had invited to her silver lamps; colossal, formless,
whose approach froze blood and spirit. Eyes of
unspeakable meaning glared across the dark, whispers
unbearable to humanity beat upon her intelligence and
named her comrade.
Now as Vere read this, I felt again
that quiver of the house or air he had likened to
an earth shock and held responsible for the fall of
the willow tree that had destroyed our hope of escape
by automobile. I looked at my companions and
saw no evidence of anyone having noticed what I had
seemed to feel. Vere indeed was pale; while Phillida,
who sat beside him, was highly flushed with excitement
and wonder as she listened. Desire had not stirred
in her chair, except to bend her head so her face
was shaded by the loosened richness of her hair.
Seeing them so undisturbed, I kept silence. A
storm might be approaching, but I made no pretense
to myself of believing that shock either thunder or
earthquake.
The tone of the diary altered rapidly.
At first, the unknown from beyond the wall appalled
the woman only by its unhuman strangeness, the repugnance
of flesh and blood for its loathly neighborhood.
Fear emanated from its presence, seen yet unseen,
a blackness moving in the black of night when it visited
her. Yet she had courage to endure those awful
colloquies. She listened. She strove by the
spell and incantation to subdue This to her service,
as the demon Orthone served the Lord of Corasse, as
Paracelsus was served by his Familiar, or Gyges by
the spirit of his ring.
Alas for the sorceress, misguided
by legend and fantasy! She had evoked no phantom,
but a fact actual as nature always is even if nature
is not humanly understood. The Thing was real.
The awe of the magician became the
stricken panic of the woman. She had unloosed
what she could not bind. She had called a servant,
and gained a master. Gone forever were the dreams
of power and splendor and triumph. Now she learned
that only pure magic can discharge the spirits it has
summoned, nor could a murderess attain that lofty art.
We were given a glimpse of a frantic
girl crouched in the useless pentagram traced on the
floor for her protection, covering her beauty with
the cloak of her hair against the eyes that burned
upon her between the overturned silver lamps.
A deepening horror gathered about
the house of Mistress Desire Michell. The old
dame who had been the girl’s nurse and caretaker
fled the place and fell into mumbling dotage in a
night. No child would come near the garden, though
fruit and nuts rotted away where they dropped from
overripeness. No neighbor crossed the doorstep
where Sir Austin had died. She lived in utter
solitude by day. By night she waged hideous battle
against her Visitor; using woman’s cunning, essaying
every expedient and art her books suggested to her
desperate need.
With each conflict, her strength and
resource waned, while That which she held at bay knew
no weariness. Time was not, for it, nor change
of purpose.
“I faint, I fail!” she
wrote. “The Sea of Dread breaks about my
feet. It is midnight. The pentagram fades
from the floor the nine lamps die the
breath of the One at the casement is upon me”
Vere stopped.
“A handful of pages have been
torn out here,” he stated. “The next
entry that I can read is in the middle of a stained
page, and must be considerably later on.”
Phillida made an odd little noise
like a whimper, clutching at his sleeve. The
third shock for which I had been waiting shuddered
through the house, this time distinctly enough for
all to feel. A gust of wind went through the
wet trees outside like a gasp.
“Ethan, what was that?”
she stammered. “Oh, I’m afraid!
Cousin Roger?”
I had no voice to answer her.
In my ears was the rush and surge of that sea whose
waters had gripped me in the past night. I felt
the icy death-tide hiss around me in its first returning
wave, rise to my knee’s height, then sink away
down its unearthly beach. What I had dimly known
all day, underlying Vere’s sturdy cheerfulness
and our plans and efforts, was the truth. Through
those intervening hours of daylight I had remained
my enemy’s prisoner, bound on that shore we both
knew well, until It pleased or had power to return
and finish with me. No doubt It was governed
by laws, as we are.
As before, the cold struck a paralysis
across my senses. Vere’s reassurance sounded
faint and distant.
“The thunder is getting closer,”
he said. “That was a storm wind, all right!
Would you rather go upstairs and lie down, and not
hear any more of this stuff tonight?”
“No! Oh, no! I could
not bear to be alone,” she refused. “Just,
just go on, dear. Of course it is the coming
storm that makes the room so cold.”
He put his left arm around her as
she nestled against him. His right hand held
the diary flattened on the table under the light.
“The next entry is just one
line in the middle of a page where everything else
is blotted out,” Vere repeated. “It
reads: ’The child is a week old today.’”
The wave crashed foaming in tumult
up the strand, flowing higher, drenching me in cold
sharp as fire. The tide rose faster tonight.
The silence that held the others dumb before the significance
of that last sentence covered my silence from notice.
Desire’s face was quite hidden; lamplight and
firelight wavered and gleamed across her bent head.
I wanted to arise and go to her, to take her hands
and tell her to have patience and courage. But
when this wave ebbed, my strength drained away with
the receding water. Moreover, the darkness curdled
and moved beyond the window opposite me. The
curtains hung between were no bar to my vision, as
the light and presence of my companions were no bar
to the Thing that kept rendezvous with me. Since
last night, we were nearer to one another.
A breath of chill foulness crept across
the pungent odor of the burning apple-log in the fireplace.
A whisper spoke to my intelligence.
“Man conquered by me, fall down
before me. Beg my forbearance. Beg life
of me and take the gift!”
“No,” my thought answered Its.
“You die, Man.”
“All men die.”
“Not as they die who are mine.”
“I am not yours. You kill
me, as a wild beast might. But I am not yours;
not dying nor dead am I yours.”
“Would you not live, pygmy?”
“Not as your pensioner.”
The logs on the hearth crackled and
sank down with a soft rustle, burned through to a
core of glowing red. Phillida spoke with a hushed
urgency, drawing still closer to her husband, so that
her forehead rested against his shoulder.
“Go on, Ethan. Finish and let us be done.”
Vere bent his head above the book
on the table to obey her. Across the dark I suddenly
saw the Eyes glare in upon him.
“On the next page, the writing begins again,”
he said. “It says:
“’I am offered the kingdoms
of earth. But I crave that kingdom of myself
which I cast away. The child is sent to England.
The circle is drawn. The names are traced and
the lamps filled. Tonight I make the last essay.
There remains untried one mighty spell. This Mystery’”
A clap of thunder right over the house
overwhelmed the reader’s voice. Phillida
screamed as a violent wind volleyed through the place
with a crashing of doors and shutters, upstairs and
down. The diary was ripped from beneath Vere’s
hand and hurled straight to the center of that nest
of fire formed by the settling of the logs. A
long tongue of flame leaped high in the chimney as
the spread leaves of the book caught and flared, fanned
by wind and draft. Vere sprang up, but Phillida’s
clinging arms delayed him. When he reached the
fire-tongs there was nothing to rescue except a charring
mass half-way toward ashes.
He turned toward me, perhaps at last
surprised by my immobility.
“I am sorry, Mr. Locke,” he apologized.
Desire had started up with the others
when the sudden uproar of the storm burst upon them.
Now she cried out, breaking Vere’s excuse of
the loss. Her small face blanched, she ran a
few steps toward me.
“It has come! He will die he
is dying. Look, look!”