“Fancy, like the finger
of a clock,
Runs the great circuit, and is still at home.”
- COWPER.
The uproar of rushing waters was still
in my ears. But I was in my chair before the
hearth in the living room of the farmhouse, and the
noise was the din of a tempest outside.
Opposite me, Phillida and Desire were
clinging together, watching me with such looks of
gladness and anxiety that I felt myself abashed before
them. Bagheera, the cat, sat on the table beside
the lamp, yellow eyes blinking at each flash and rattle
of lightning and thunder, while he sleeked his recently
wetted fur. Wondering where that wet had come
from, I discovered presently that the fire was out,
and the hearth drenched with soot-stained water.
I looked toward the windows, from which the curtains
had been drawn aside. Rain poured glistening down
the panes, but the clean storm was empty of horror.
“Drink some of this, Mr. Locke,”
urged Vere, whose arm was about me. “Sit
quiet, and I guess you’ll be all right in a few
moments.”
I took the advice. Strength was
flowing into me, as inexplicably as it had flowed
away from me a while past. How can I describe
the certainty of life that possessed me? The
assurance was established, singularly enough, for
all of us. None of my companions asked, and I
myself never doubted whether the danger might return.
The experience was complete, and closed. Moreover,
already the Thing that had been our enemy, the horror
that had been Its atmosphere, the mystery that haunted
Desire all were fading into the past.
The phantoms were exorcised, and the house purified
of fear.
But there was something different
from ordinary storm in this tempest. The tumult
of rain and wind linked another, deeper roar with theirs.
The house quivered with a steady trembling like a
bridge over which a train is passing. Pulling
myself together I turned to Vere.
“What is happening outdoors?” I asked.
“The cloudburst was too much
for the dam,” he answered regretfully. “It
went off with a noise like a big gun, a while back.
I expect the lake is flooding the whole place and
messing up everything from our cellar to the chickenhouse.
Daylight is due pretty soon, now, and the storm is
dying down. We’ll be able to add up the
damage, after a bit.”
“The water came down the chimney
and drowned Bagheera,” Phillida bravely tried
to summon nonchalance. “Isn’t it lucky
you and Desire could not get started in the car, after
all? Fancy being out in that!”
Desire Michell steadied her soft lips
and gave her quota to the shelter of commonplace speech
we raised between ourselves and emotions too recently
felt.
“It was like the tropical storms
in Papua, where I lived until this year,” she
said. “Once, one blew down the mission house.”
Vere’s weather prediction proved
quite right. In an hour the storm had exhausted
itself, or passed away to other places. Sunrise
came with a veritable glory of crimson and gold, blazing
through air washed limpidly pure by the rain.
The east held a troop of small clouds red as flamingoes
flying against a shining sky; last traces of our tempest.
We stood on the porch together to
survey an unfamiliar scene in the rosy light.
Water overlay lawns and paths, so the house stood in
a wide, shallow lake whose ripples lapped around the
white cement steps and the pillars of the porte-cochère.
Phillida’s Pekin ducks floated and fed on this
new waterway as contentedly as upon their accustomed
pastures. Small objects sailed on the flood here
and there; Bagheera’s milk-pan from the rear
veranda bobbed amidst a fleet of apples shaken down
in the orchard, while some wooden garden tools nudged
a silk canoe-cushion.
In contrast to all this aquatic prospect,
where the real lake had been there now lay some acres
of ugly, oozing marsh; its expanse dotted with the
bodies of dead water-creatures and such of Vere’s
young trout as had not been swept away by the outpouring
flood. The dam was a mere pile of debris through
which trickled a stream bearing no resemblance to the
sparkling waterfall of yesterday. Already the
sun’s rays were drawing a rank, unwholesome
vapor from the long-submerged surface.
We contemplated the ruin for a while, without words.
“Poor Drawls!” Phillida
sighed at length. “All your work just rubbed
out!”
“Never mind, Vere,” I
exclaimed impulsively. “We will put it all
back in the same shape as it was.”
But even as I spoke, I felt an odd
shock of uneasiness and recoil from my own proposition.
I did not want the lake to be there again; or to hear
the unaccountable sounds to which it gave birth and
the varying fall of the cataract over the dam.
Did the others share my repugnance? I seemed
to divine that they did. Even the impetuous Phil
did not break out in welcome of my offer. Desire,
who had smoothed her sober gray dress in some feminine
fashion and stood like Marguerite or Melisande with
a great braid over either shoulder, moved as if to
speak, then changed her intention. A faint distress
troubled her expression.
As usual, Vere himself quietly lifted us out of unrest.
“I’m not sure that couldn’t
be bettered, Mr. Locke,” he demurred. “That
is if you liked, of course! That marsh could be
cleaned up and drained into pretty rich land, I guess.
And down there beyond the barn, on the other side
where the creek naturally widens out into a kind of
basin, I should think might be the spot for a smaller,
cleaner lake.”
“Doesn’t it seem to you,
Ethan,” I said, “that we have progressed
rather past the Mr. Locke stage?”
A little later, when Desire and I
were alone on the porch, we walked to the end nearest
the vanished lake. Or rather, I led her to a swinging
couch there, and sat down beside her.
“Point out the path down the
hill by which you used to come,” I asked of
her.
She shook her head. There are
no words to paint how she looked in the clear morning,
except that she seemed its sister.
“It is only the end of a path
that matters,” she said. “Look instead
at the marsh. Do you see nothing there stranger
than a path through the woods even when trodden by
a wilful woman?”
Following her lifted finger, I saw
a series of long mounds out there in the muddy floor
not far from the dam. Not high, two or three feet
at most, the mounds formed an irregular square of
considerable area.
“The old house!” I exclaimed.
“It was set on fire by the second
Desire Michell one night deep in winter. Her
father built this house of yours and put in the dam
that covered the ruins with water. I think he
hoped to wash away the horror upon the place.”
“I know so little of your history.”
“You can imagine it.”
She turned her head from me. “The first
child came back from England when it was a man grown,
and claimed the house and name of the first Desire.
He settled and married here. For two generations
only sons were born to the Michells. I do not
know if the Dark One came to them. I believe
it did, but they were hard, austere men who beat off
evil. Then, a daughter was born. She looked
like the first Desire and she was not good.
She was a scandal to the family. She listened
to It! The tradition is that she
set fire to the house after a terrible quarrel with
her people, but herself perished by some miscalculation.
There were no more girls born for another while after
that. Not until my father’s time. He
had a sister who resembled the two Desires of the
past. My grandfather brought her up in harshness
and austerity, holding always before her the wickedness
to which she was born. Yet it was no use.
She fled from his house with a man no one knew, and
died in Paris after a life of great splendor and heartlessness.
Everyone who loved the Desires suffered. That
is why I covered myself from you.”
I took her hand, so small a thing
to hold and feel flutter in mine.
“But what of me, Desire?
The darkness covered no beauty in me, but a defect.
You never saw me until last night and now in the morning.
Now that you know, can you bear with a man who limps?
You, so perfect?”
She turned toward me. Her kohl-dark
eyes, vivid as a summer noon, opened to my anxious
scrutiny.
“But I have seen you often,”
she said, the heat of confession bright on cheek and
lip. “I never meant you to know, but now!
After the first time you spoke to me so kindly and gayly I was so very sorrowfully alone and
the convent was so dull! My father’s field-glasses
were in my trunk.”
“Desire?”
“I fear I have no vocation for
a nun. I there is a huge rock half-way
down the hill with a clear view of this place.
I have spent hours there, watching these lawns and
verandas, and the things you all did. It all
seemed so amusing and, and happy. You see, where
I lived there were almost no white people except my
father and a priest at the Catholic mission.
So I learned to know Phillida and Mr. Vere and”
“Then, all this time, Desire”
“The glasses brought you very
close,” she whispered. “I knew you
by night and by day.”