University of Virginia Library

53. CHAPTER LIII.
A LITTLE CREEPING FLAME.

Night fell sombre and starless—one of
the dark, breathless nights of summer, when
the perfume of the flowers seems to cling
close to the earth, too languid, too oppressed
by its own sweetness to rise heavenward;
when the straining eyes find themselves
unable to penetrate the dense blackness of
the atmosphere, and the ears, growing preternaturally
acute, seem to discover a strange
and mysterious meaning in the cries of insect
and night-bird—seem to listen to a half-revealed
secret in every sigh of the fitful wind,
every whisper among the invisible foliage of
the trees: nights filled with melancholy and
with electricity, when a sadness, equally without
explanation and without remedy, weighs
upon the spirit, and wakes in its profoundest
depths vague memories, regrets, longings, but
half understood, half believed, and yet more
real than the grossest realism of daylight, for
they are the voice of the soul struggling to assert
itself without the limitations of mind and
body; they are the utterances of the life that
lies hidden deep within the recesses of every
man's existence—hint of the life hereafter to
be developed from this germ which every one
of us carries within him, and yet so seldom
recognizes.

Sombre and starless fell the night, and the
dense shadow of Moloch Mountain, stretching
across the valley and the wood, touched the
distant hill-side and the lonely grave where
Mary Brewster lay asleep, with her murdered
husband at her side—that hill-side upon whose
green slope the farewell glance of that husband
had dwelt, as he rode forth from his
own door, and went to meet his doom; and
then the shadow crept on and clung about
the old house beyond, wrapping it close
and fatally as the veil is wrapped about the
head and shoulders of the doomed slave
led from her luxurious harem to her cold
bed beneath the Bosphorus. The old house,
dreary and lonely in its best estate, and in
these latter days showing a desolation and a
doom in its every faltering line, every unshuttered
and staring window, in the atmosphere
that seemed to cling like a visible
curse about it. Within, sat the wife of
Joachim Brewster, deserted now of him as of
all mankind, and left alone in that melancholy
house—alone, yet never alone, for the
memories of the past and the terrors of the
future were there, and never left her—sitting
beside her at hearth or board, lying down
with her upon the haunted couch, waking her
remorselessly to the dawning of a new day of
torment. She had not seen her thirtieth
birthday, this woman, and yet her hair was
white, her skin cadaverous, her limbs faltering
and distorted. She had lived fast with
these constant companions of hers, and the
life was telling upon her. But chief among her
torments was a shadowy horror—intangible,
yet none the less real; forever near, yet never
within her reach; never seen, yet never to be
eluded—a presence at her side, although
neither eye nor hand discovered other than
empty air—a something waiting just behind
each door she opened in the dreary house,
lurking in every shadow, waiting for her in
her chamber as she crept stealthily up-stairs
to bed, sitting close beside her in the darkness
of the night, mingling with the shadows

of the dawn when the weary night was
through—a something tormenting her with a
sense of being just beyond her range of vision,
seeming, however sharply she might turn
upon it, to be just gone from the spot at which
she looked, just visible at some point behind
or beside her, if she could but reach it soon
enough; for here was the horrible fascination
of this horror—while dreading nothing so
much as to encounter it, she yet must spend
her whole life in its pursuit, waiting, watching,
with bated breath and staring eyes, now
wandering from room to room, now sitting
motionless—struggling, as a drowning man
struggles for breath, to overcome this forever
receding and invisible barrier behind which
her tormentor hid. So she sat sometimes the
whole night through, sleepless and vigilant,
her cars alive to the dim, uncertain sounds that
filled the remoter chambers of the empty house,
her unresting eyes following with fierce and
hungry glances that formless presence forever
eluding their pursuit.

So she sat, while the night fell sombre and
starless, while the shadow of the mountain
stretched across the valley and the wood
laid a finger upon the hill-side graves, and
then crept on, spreading itself like a black
pall around and above the doomed house, and
stealing shade by shade through the room
where she, the woman sat, crouched in the
farthest corner, watching and waiting, her
white face and gleaming eyes showing in
ghastly contrast upon the sombre background
of the wall.

A sullen fire was dying upon the hearth,
the last charred stick flickering and blackening
above the gray ashes of the rest, then
breaking in the centre, and falling, over half
extinguished by the fall, the other rolling
across the hearth, and resting upon the edge
of the boards beyond. Opposite the fireplace
stood the old brass-bound secretary where
Peleg Brewster had kept the will that his
wife had so often urged him to destroy, the
picture of his wife Mary, with the letters that
she had written him before their marriage.
So often she had seen him sit there, his head
upon his hand, his eyes fixed upon the little
drawer where she knew these treasures lay—
his sorrowful, introspective eyes, that never
had met her own with love, so often with reproof.
The picture and the letters were there
still—she never had dared look at them but
once—and the other things too lay just as he
had left them. She would almost as soon have
opened his coffin as open that secretary, for it
still was his, his very own.

His? Whose? That shadow's that flitted
over and past it, now seeming to sink through
the solid wood, now swiftly gliding aside or
upward, to lose itself in the obscure corners
of the room? What was it? Not a shadow,
for the night had fallen, and the room was
black-dark, save for a creeping bluish tongue
of flame fastening upon the floor where it
joined the hearth, and a strange light that
seemed to her to float about the old secretary—
the secretary, as much Peleg Brewster's own
possession still as was the coffin wherein his
murdered body mouldered. Was this light
then the thing that so long had troubled her?
Was it the light or something which it presently
would disclose? Was that a form just disappearing
behind the end of the secretary—no,
at the other side—where? Gone? No, but
coming, growing within that light, taking
form and shape, and then disappearing when
she turned to watch it. Disappearing and
again appearing, as it had always done through
all these weary years, the years since—well,
since what? She did not know now, but
it was no matter, for that thing was just
about to disclose itself—surely, surely it was
about to confront her at last, and what would
it be? Those sorrowful, stern eyes? Did
they look at her out of that shadow—nay, that
light? Well, light or shadow, what matter?
Why must even that remain a bewildering
doubt, vexing her with its unending question?
Light or shadow, IT was there, more
nearly visible than ever it had been before;
and now she could grapple with it, demand
its meaning, deny its accusations, retort its
reproaches. But no, no, it was gone again,
hiding in the farthest corner of the room,
creeping along the walls, brooding above her
head, wrapped in this cloud of hot, stifling
smoke, crouching behind her. Behind her?
Why, how could that be, when she was pressing
back against the wall with all her might?
for it must not get behind her, she could not
endure that—and, no, it was not near her now,
but flashing angry glances from behind this
cloud which wrapped it and the secretary,
and the room, and crowded down so fiercely
upon her breath, almost stifling her beneath its
awful pressure. Such red, fiery glances, such
consuming and withering wrath as they
flashed upon her! Was it coming at last

then, coming in visible presence to seize upon
her, helpless and unheard, with no chance to
struggle or retort? And what were those
words the minister said the last time she ventured
within the church? Something about
the “worm that never dies, and the fire which
is not quenched.” The fire which is not
quenched, is this it—this scorching and devouring
flame which creeps along the floor,
and climbs the walls, and reaches out its long
tongues toward her? And now it sinks, and
now it rises, and she, huddled there in the
farthest corner, sits glaring at it, and drawing
her garments closer about her, and cowering
to the wall which shuts her in, yet opens to
shut out that Thing, which haunts her even
in the flames, until, as one long serpent-tongue
sweeps out and fastens upon her clothes, she
breaks into maddest frenzy, shouting, laughing,
screaming, rushing recklessly forward to
meet and defy the foe she thinks to have
found at last, and who wraps her about in his
fiery mantle, and scorches the breath upon her
lips, the blood within her veins!

When morning dawned, and old Moloch,
drawing toward himself the shadow that had
wrapped the scene, looked across valley and
forest to the grave upon the hill-side, he saw
beyond them a heap of smoking and smouldering
ruins which no human being had yet
approached, although the scene was not without
its mourners, for a gaunt hound sat beside
the blackened doorsteps, howling dismally,
and upon the blasted pine behind the house
hung, flapping and croaking, a pair of carrion-crows.