The Thing from the Lake Part 31

"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 Mich.e.l.ls. 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-gla.s.ses 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 gla.s.ses brought you very close," she whispered. "I knew you by night and by day."

CHAPTER XXII

"Life hath its term, the a.s.sembly 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 Mich.e.l.l 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 p.r.o.nounced 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 Mich.e.l.ls 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 a.n.a.lyzed 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 p.r.o.nounced 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 sh.o.r.e 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 cla.s.s of small children.

"The first night that you pa.s.sed in your newly purchased house, Roger, you accidentally encountered Miss Mich.e.l.l; 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 repet.i.tion 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 Mich.e.l.l? 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 s.p.a.ces, 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 Mich.e.l.ls. 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 Mich.e.l.l 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 Mich.e.l.l 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 Mich.e.l.l! The child was undoubtedly Sir Austin's son. Which accounts for the madness of the first Desire Mich.e.l.l."

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 compa.s.sion at the rest of our group. "You observe that I have explained every point raised, Miss Mich.e.l.l'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."