University of Virginia Library

15. CHAPTER XV.
ARRIVAL OF REINFORCEMENTS.

MYRTLE HAZARD waited until the steps of Master
Byles Gridley had ceased to be heard, as he
walked in his emphatic way through the long entry of the
old mansion. Then she went to her little chamber and
sat down in a sort of revery. She could not doubt his sincerity,
and there was something in her own consciousness
which responded to the suspicions he had expressed with
regard to the questionable impulses of the Rev. Joseph
Bellamy Stoker.

It is not in the words that others say to us, but in those
other words which these make us say to ourselves, that we
find our gravest lessons and our sharpest rebukes. The
hint another gives us finds whole trains of thought which
have been getting themselves ready to be shaped in inwardly
articulated words, and only awaited the touch of a
burning syllable, as the mottoes of a pyrotechnist only wait
for a spark to become letters of fire.

The artist who takes your photograph must carry you
with him into his “developing” room, and he will give you
a more exact illustration of the truth just mentioned. There
is nothing to be seen on the glass just taken from the
camera. But there is a potential, though invisible, picture
hid in the creamy film which covers it. Watch him as he
pours a wash over it, and you will see that miracle wrought
which is at once a surprise and a charm, — the sudden
appearance of your own features, where a moment before
was a blank without a vestige of intelligence or beauty.

In some such way the grave warnings of Master Byles
Gridley had called up a fully shaped, but hitherto unworded,
train of thought in the consciousness of Myrtle Hazard.
It was not merely their significance, it was mainly because
they were spoken at the fitting time. If they had been
uttered a few weeks earlier, when Myrtle was taking the
first stitch on the embroidered slippers, they would have
been as useless as the artist's developing solution on a plate
which had never been exposed in the camera. But she
had been of late in training for her lesson in ways that
neither she nor anybody else dreamed of. The reader who
has shrugged his (or her) shoulders over the last illustration
will perhaps hear this one which follows more cheerfully.
The physician in the Arabian Nights made his
patient play at ball with a bat, the hollow handle of which
contained drugs of marvellous efficacy. Whether it was
the drugs that made the sick man get well, or the exercise,
is not of so much consequence as the fact that he did at any
rate get well.

These walks which Myrtle had taken with her reverend
counsellor had given her a new taste for the open air, which
was what she needed just now more than confessions of faith
or spiritual paroxysms. And so it happened that, while he
had been stimulating all those imaginative and emotional
elements of her nature which responded to the keys he
loved to play upon, the restoring influences of the sweet
autumnal air, the mellow sunshine, the soothing aspects of
the woods and fields and sky, had been quietly doing their
work. The color was fast returning to her cheek, and the
discords of her feelings and her thoughts gradually resolving
themselves into the harmonious and cheerful rhythms
of bodily and mental health. It needed but the timely

word from the fitting lips to change the whole programme
of her daily mode of being. The word had been spoken.
She saw its truth; but how hard it is to tear away a cherished
illusion, to cast out an unworthy intimate! How
hard for any! — but for a girl so young, and who had as
yet found so little to love and trust, how cruelly hard!

She sat, still and stony, like an Egyptian statue. Her
eyes were fixed on a vacant chair opposite the one on which
she was sitting. It was a very singular and fantastic old
chair, said to have been brought over by the first emigrant
of her race. The legs and arms were curiously turned in
spirals, the suggestions of which were half pleasing and half
repulsive. Instead of the claw-feet common in furniture of
a later date, each of its legs rested on a misshapen reptile,
which it seemed to flatten by its weight, as if it were squeezing
the breath out of the ugly creature. Over this chair
hung the portrait of her beautiful ancestress, her neck and
arms, the specialty of her beauty, bare, except for a bracelet
on the left wrist, and her shapely figure set off by the
ample folds of a rich crimson brocade. Over Myrtle's bed
hung that other portrait, which was to her almost as the
pictures of the Mater Dolorosa to trustful souls of the
Roman faith. She had longed for these pictures while she
was in her strange hysteric condition, and they had been
hung up in her chamber.

The night was far gone, as she knew by the declining
of the constellations which she had seen shining brightly
almost overhead in the early evening, when she awoke, and
found herself still sitting in the very attitude in which
she was sitting hours before. Her lamp had burned out,
and the starlight but dimly illuminated her chamber. She
started to find herself sitting there, chilled and stiffened by

long remaining in one posture; and as her consciousness
returned, a great fear seized her, and she sprang for a
match. It broke with the quick movement she made to
kindle it, and she snatched another as if a fiend were after
her. It flashed and went out. O the terror, the terror!
The darkness seemed alive with fearful presences. The
lurid glare of her own eyeballs flashed backwards into her
brain. She tried one more match; it kindled as it should,
and she lighted another lamp. Her first impulse was to
assure herself that nothing was changed in the familiar
objects around her. She held the lamp up to the picture
of Judith Pride. The beauty looked at her, it seemed as if
with a kind of lofty recognition in her eyes; but there she
was, as always. She turned the light upon the pale face
of the martyr-portrait. It looked troubled and faded, as it
seemed to Myrtle, but still it was the same face she remembered
from her childhood. Then she threw the light on
the old chair, and, shuddering, caught up a shawl and flung
it over the spiral-wound arms and legs, and the flattened
reptiles on which it stood.

In those dead hours of the night which had passed over
her sitting there, still and stony, as it should seem, she had
had strange visitors. Two women had been with her, as
real as any that breathed the breath of life, — so it appeared
to her, — yet both had long been what is called, in
our poor language, dead. One came in all the glory of
her ripened beauty, bare-necked, bare-armed, full dressed
by nature in that splendid animal equipment which in its
day had captivated the eyes of all the lusty lovers of complete
muliebrity. The other, — how delicate, how translucent,
how aerial she seemed! yet real and true to the
lineaments of her whom the young girl looked upon as her
hereditary protector.

The beautiful woman turned, and, with a face full of
loathing and scorn, pointed to one of the reptiles beneath
the feet of the chair. And while Myrtle's eyes followed
hers, the flattened and half-crushed creature seemed to
swell and spread like his relative in the old fable, like the
black dog in Faust, until he became of tenfold size, and at
last of colossal proportions. And, fearful to relate, the
batrachian features humanized themselves as the monster
grew, and, shaping themselves more and more into a remembered
similitude, Myrtle saw in them a hideous likeness
of — No! no! it was too horrible! Was that the
face which had been so close to hers but yesterday? were
those the lips, the breath from which had stirred her growing
curls as he leaned over her while they read together
some passionate stanza from a hymn that was as much
like a love-song as it dared to be in godly company? A
shudder of disgust — the natural repugnance of loveliness
for deformity — ran all through her, and she shrieked, as
she thought, and threw herself at the feet of that other
figure. She felt herself lifted from the floor, and then a
cold thin hand seemed to take hers. The warm life went
out of her, and she was to herself as a dimly conscious
shadow that glided with passive acquiescence wherever
it was led. Presently she found herself in a half-lighted
apartment, where there were books on the shelves around,
and a desk with loose manuscripts lying on it, and a little
mirror with a worn bit of carpet before it. And while she
looked, a great serpent writhed in through the half-open
door, and made the circuit of the room, laying one huge
ring all round it, and then, going round again, laid another
ring over the first, and so on until he was wound all round
the room like the spiral of a mighty cable, leaving a hollow

in the centre; and then the serpent seemed to arch
his neck in the air, and bring his head close down to Myrtle's
face; and the features were not those of a serpent,
but of a man, and it hissed out the words she had read
that very day in a little note which said, “Come to my
study to-morrow, and we will read hymns together.”

Again she was back in her little chamber, she did not
know how, and the two women were looking into her eyes
with strange meaning in their own. Something in them
seemed to plead with her to yield to their influence, and
her choice wavered which of them to follow, for each
would have led her her own way, — whither she knew
not. It was the strife of her “Vision,” only in another
form, — the contest of two lives her blood inherited for
the mastery of her soul. The might of beauty conquered.
Myrtle resigned herself to the guidance of the lovely
phantom, which seemed so much fuller of the unextinguished
fire of life, and so like herself as she would grow
to be when noon should have ripened her into maturity.

Doors opened softly before them; they climbed stairs,
and threaded corridors, and penetrated crypts, strange yet
familiar to her eyes, which seemed to her as if they could
see, as it were, in darkness. Then came a confused sense
of eager search for something that she knew was hidden,
whether in the cleft of a rock, or under the boards of a
floor, or in some hiding-place among the skeleton rafters,
or in a forgotten drawer, or in a heap of rubbish, she could
not tell; but somewhere there was something which she
was to find, and which, once found, was to be her talisman.
She was in the midst of this eager search when
she awoke.

The impression was left so strongly on her mind that,

with all her fears, she could not resist the desire to make
an effort to find what meaning there was in this frightfully
real dream. Her courage came back as her senses assured
her that all around her was natural, as when she left
it. She determined to follow the lead of the strange hint
her nightmare had given her.

In one of the upper chambers of the old mansion there
stood a tall, upright desk of the ancient pattern, with
folding doors above and large drawers below. “That
desk is yours, Myrtle,” her uncle Malachi had once said to
her; “and there is a trick or two about it that it will pay
you to study.” Many a time Myrtle had puzzled herself
about the mystery of the old desk. All the little drawers,
of which there were a considerable number, she had
pulled out, and every crevice, as she thought, she had
carefully examined. She determined to make one more
trial. It was the dead of the night, and this was a fearful
old place to be wandering about; but she was possessed
with an urgent feeling which would not let her wait until
daylight.

She stole like a ghost from her chamber. She glided
along the narrow entries as she had seemed to move in her
dream. She opened the folding doors of the great upright
desk. She had always before examined it by daylight,
and though she had so often pulled all the little drawers out,
she had never thoroughly explored the recesses which received
them. But in her new-born passion of search, she
held her light so as to illuminate all these deeper spaces.
At once she thought she saw the marks of pressure with
a finger. She pressed her own finger on this place, and,
as it yielded with a slight click, a small mahogany pilaster
sprang forward, revealing its well-kept secret that it was

the mask of a tall, deep, very narrow drawer. There was
something heavy in it, and, as Myrtle turned it over, a
golden bracelet fell into her hand. She recognized it at
once as that which had been long ago the ornament of the
fair woman whose portrait hung in her chamber. She
clasped it upon her wrist, and from that moment she felt
as if she were the captive of the lovely phantom who had
been with her in her dream.

“The old man walked last night, God save us!” said
Kitty Fagan to Biddy Finnegan, the day after Myrtle's
nightmare and her curious discovery.