“Life hath its term, the
assembly is dispersed,
And we have not described Thee from the first.”
- GULISTAN.
I have come to the end of this narrative
and with the end, I come to what people of practical
mind may call its explanation. Of the four of
us who were joined in living through the events of
that summer, my wife and I and Ethan Vere agree in
one belief, while Phillida holds the opinion of her
father, the Professor. I think Bagheera, the cat,
might be added to our side also, if his testimony
was available.
The press reports of the cloudburst
and flood brought the Professor up to Connecticut
to verify with his own eyes his daughter’s safety.
Aunt Caroline did not come with him, but I may here
set down that she did come later. They found
their son-in-law by no means what their forebodings
menaced, so reconciled themselves at last to the marriage;
to Phillida’s abiding joy.
But first the little Professor arrived
alone, three days after the storm. Characteristically,
he had sent no warning of his coming, so no one met
him at the railway station. He arrived in one
of those curious products of a country livery stable
known as a rig, driven by a local reprobate whom no
prohibition could sober.
I shall never forget the incredulous
rapture with which Phillida welcomed him, nor the
pride with which she presented Vere.
The damages to the place were already
being repaired, although weeks of work would be needed
to restore a condition of order and make the changes
we planned. The automobile had been disentangled
from the wreckage of garage and willow tree and towed
away to receive expert attention. We were awaiting
the arrival of the new car I had ordered for the honeymoon
tour Desire and I were soon to take. Phillida
had declared two weeks shopping a necessary preliminary
to the wedding of a bride who was to live in New York
“and meet everybody.” Nor would I
have shortened the pretty orgy into which the two
girls entered, transforming my sorceress into a lady
of the hour; happiness seeming to me rather to be
savored than gulped.
Needless to say, there was no more
talk of the convent whose iron gates were to have
closed between the last Desire Michell and the world.
She had been directed there by the priest whose island
mission was near her father’s. In her solitude
and ignorance of life, the sisterhood seemed to offer
a refuge in which to keep her promise to her father.
But she had to learn the principles of the Church
she was about to adopt, and during that period of
delay I had come to the old house.
On the second day of his visit, we
told all the story to the Professor. We could
not have told Aunt Caroline, but we told him.
“It is perfectly simple,”
he pronounced at the end. “Interesting,
even unique in points, but simple of explanation.”
“And what may be the explanation?”
I inquired with scepticism.
“Marsh gas,” he replied
triumphantly. “Have none of you young people
ever considered the singular emanations from swamps
and marshes where rotting vegetation underlies shallow
water? Phillida, I am astonished that you did
not enlighten your companions on this point. You,
at least, have been carefully educated, not in the
light froth of modern music and art, but in the rudiments
of science. I do not intend to wound your feelings,
Roger!”
“I am not wounded, sir,” I retorted.
“Just incredulous!”
“Ah?” said the Professor,
with the bland superiority of his tribe. “Well,
well! Yet even you know something of the evils
attending people who live in low, swampy areas; malaria,
ague, fevers. In the tropics, these take the
form of virulent maladies that sweep a man from earth
in a few hours. Your lake was haunted,
so was the house that once stood in its basin, as
some vague instinct strove to warn the generations
of Michells as well as you. Haunted by emanations
of some powerful form of marsh gas given forth more
plentifully at night, which lowered the heart action
and impeded the breathing of one drawing the poison
into his lungs through hours of sleep, producing nightmare.
Science has by no means analyzed all the possibilities
of such phenomena.”
“Nightmare!” I cried.
“Do you mean to account by nightmare for the
wide and repeated experiences that twice brought me
to the verge of death? And Desire? What
of her knowledge of that same nightmare? What
of the legend of her family so exactly coinciding
with all I felt? And why did not Phillida and
Ethan suffer the nightmare with me?”
He held up a lean hand.
“Gently, gently, Roger!
Consider that of all the household you alone slept
in the side of the house toward the lake. I know
that you always have your windows open day and night a
habit that used to cause great annoyance to your Aunt
Caroline when you were a boy. Thus you were exposed
to the full effect of the water gases. That you
did not feel the effects every night I attribute to
differences in the wind, that from some directions
would blow the fumes away from the house, thus relieving
you. I gather from your account that the phenomena
were most pronounced in close, foggy weather, when
the poisonous air was atmospherically held down to
the earth. You have spoken of miasmic mists that
hung below the level of the tree-tops. When Mr.
Vere experienced a similar unease and depression,
he was on the shore of the lake at dawn after precisely
such a close, foggy night as I have described as most
dangerous. The symptoms confirm this theory.
You say you awakened on each occasion with a sense
of suffocation. Your heart labored, your limbs
were cold and mind unnaturally depressed, owing to
slow circulation of the blood. You were a man
asphyxiated. After each attack you were more sensitive
to the next, as a malaria patient grows worse if he
remains in the swamp districts. It is remarkable
that you did not guess the truth from the smell of
decaying vegetation and stagnant damp which you admit
accompanied the seizures! However, you did not;
and in your condition the last three days of continuous
fog brought on two attacks that nearly proved fatal.
Now as to the character of your hallucinations, and
their agreement with the young lady’s ideas.
That is a trifle more involved discussion, yet simple,
simple!”
He put the tips of his fingers together
and surveyed us with the benign condescension of one
instructing a class of small children.
“The first night that you passed
in your newly purchased house, Roger, you accidentally
encountered Miss Michell; or she did you!” He
smiled humorously. “While your feelings
were excited by the unusual episode, the strange surroundings
and the dark, she related to you a wild legend of
witchcraft and monsters. Later, when you suffered
your first attack of marsh-gas poisoning, your consequent
hallucination took form from the story you had just
heard. Later conversations with your mysterious
lady fixed the idea into an obsession. Recurrent
dreams are a common phenomenon even in healthy persons.
In this case, no doubt the exact repetition of the
physical sensations of miasmic poisoning tended to
reproduce in your mind the same sequence of ideas or
semi-delirious imaginings. These were of course
varied or distorted somewhat on each occasion, influenced
by what you had been hearing or reading in advance
of them. This mental condition became more and
more confirmed as you steeped yourself more deeply
in legendary lore and also pardon me in
the morbid fancies of the young lady; whose ghostly
visits in the dark and whose increasing interest for
you put a further bias upon your thoughts.”
“What were the noises I heard
from the lake, and the shocks we all felt?”
I demanded.
He nodded amiably toward Vere.
“Mr. Vere has mentioned the
large bubbles which formed and burst on the surface
of the lake. That is a common manifestation of
ordinary marsh gas. Possibly the singular and
unknown emanation that took place at night came to
the surface in the form of a bubble or bubbles huge
enough to produce in bursting the smacking sound of
which you speak. But I am inclined to another
theory, after a walk I took about your place this
morning. When you put up your cement dam instead
of the old log affair that held back only a part of
the stream, you made a greater depth and bulk of water
in the swamp basin than it has contained these many
years, if ever. As a result, I believe the sloping
mud basin began to slip toward the dam. Oh, very
gradually! Probably not stirring for weeks at
a time. Just a yielding here, a parting there,
until the cloudburst precipitated the disaster.
You had, my dear Roger, a miniature landslide, which
would account for sounds of shifting mud and water
in your lake, and for the shocks or trembling of your
house when the earth movements occurred.”
The rest of us regarded one another.
I think Vere might have spoken, if he had not been
unwilling to mar Phillida’s contentment by any
appearance of dispute with her father.
“It is very cleverly worked
out, sir,” I conceded. “But how do
you explain that Desire knew what I experienced with
the Thing from the Barrier, if my experiences were
merely delirious dreams?”
“I have not yet understood that
she did know,” said the Professor dryly.
“She put the suggestions into your head; innocently,
of course. When you afterward compared notes
and found they agreed, you cried ‘miraculous’!
How is that, Miss Michell? Did you actually know
what Roger experienced in these excursions before
he told you of them?”
Desire gazed at him with her meditative
eyes, so darkly lovely, yet never quite to lose their
individual difference from any other lovely eyes I
have ever seen. The eyes, I thought then and still
think, of one who has seen more, or at least seen
into farther spaces, than most of treadmill-trotting
humanity. She wore one of the new frocks for which
Phillida and she had already made a flying trip to
town; a most sophisticated frock from Fifth Avenue,
with frivolous French shoes to correspond. Her
hair of a Lorelei was demurely coiled and wound about
her little head. Yet some indescribable atmosphere
closed her delicately around, an impalpable wall between
her and the commonplace. Even the desiccated,
material Professor was aware of this influence and
took off his spectacles uneasily, wiped them and put
them on again to contemplate her.
“I am not sure,” she answered
him with careful candor. “I believe that
I could always tell when the Dark One had been with
him. I could feel that, here,” she touched
her breast. “I knew what its visits were
like, because I was brought up to know by my father
and was told the history of the three Desire Michells.
My father had studied deeply and taught me I
shall not tell anyone all he taught me! I do not
want to think of those things. Some of them I
have told to Roger. Some of them are quite harmless
and pleasant, like the secret formula for making the
Rose of Jerusalem perfume; which has virtues not common,
as Roger can say who has felt it revive him from faintness.
But there are places into which we should not thrust
ourselves. It is like like suicide.
One’s mind must be perverted before certain
things can be done. And that is the true sin to
debase one’s soul. All men discover and
learn of science and the universe by honest duty and
effort is good, is lofty and leads up. Nothing
is forbidden to us. But if we turn aside to the
low door which only opens to crime and evil purpose,
we step outside. I am unskilful; I do not express
myself well.”
“Very well, young lady,”
the Professor condescended. “Unfortunately,
your theories are wild mysticism. The veritable
fiend that has plagued the house of Michell is the
mischievous habit of rearing each generation from
childhood to a belief in doom and witchcraft.
A child will believe anything it is told. Why
not, when all things are still equally wonderful to
it? Let me point out that your theory also contradicts
itself, since Roger certainly did not enter upon any
path of crime, yet he met your unearthly monster.”
“Because he chose to link his
fate with mine, who am linked by heredity with the
Dweller at the Frontier,” she said earnestly.
“He was in the position of one who enters the
lair of a wild beast to bring out a victim who is
trapped there. It may cost that rescuer his life.
Roger nearly paid his life. But he mastered It
and took me away from It, because he was not afraid
and not seeking his own good. I never imagined
anyone so brave and strong and unselfish as Roger.
I suppose it is because he thinks of others instead
of himself, which gives the strongest kind of strength.”
“The Thing nearly had me, though,”
I hastily intervened to spare my own modesty.
“And It did have me worse than afraid!”
“I seem to be arguing against
an impenetrable obstinacy,” snapped the Professor.
“Do you, Roger, who were educated under my own
eye, in my house, have the effrontery to tell me that
you believe Miss Michell is descended from the union
of an evil spirit and a human being; as the Eastern
legends claim for Saladin the Great?”
“Your own theory, sir, being?”
I evaded.
“There is no theory about the
matter,” he declared. “Excuse me,
Miss Michell! The child was undoubtedly Sir Austin’s
son. Which accounts for the madness of the first
Desire Michell.”
We were all silent for a while.
Whatever thoughts each held remained unvoiced.
“Come, Phillida, you take my
sane point of view, I hope?” the Professor finally
challenged his daughter, with a glance of scorn and
compassion at the rest of our group. “You
observe that I have explained every point raised,
Miss Michell’s testimony being of the vaguest?”
“Yes, Papa,” Phillida
agreed hesitatingly. “I do believe you have
solved the whole problem. Only, if Cousin Roger
was suffering from marsh-gas poisoning last night
when he seemed to be dying, I do not quite see why
Ethan’s prayer should have cured him.”
The Professor was momentarily posed.
He looked disconcerted, took off his glasses and put
them on again, and at length muttered something about
storm-wind dissipating the miasma in the air and events
being mere coincidence.
The house was never again visited
by the Dark Presence. Phantom or fancy, the horror
was gone as if it never had brooded about the place.
Desire Locke is a fatal companion only to my heart.
But whether all this is so because
the lake is drained and the Shetland pony of a young
Vere browses over the green pasture that was once a
miasmic swamp; or whether it is so for more subtle,
wilder reasons, no one can say. I, recalling
that colossal Barrier I visioned as closed and a certain
cleaving arrow of light, must at least call the coincidence
amazing.
As I have said, my wife and I, Ethan
Vere and Bagheera the cat have an understanding between
us.