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Thing from the Lake, The

<h2>CHAPTER XVI</h2> <div class="blockquot"> "I have had a dream past the wit of man to say what dream it was."—Midsummer Night's Dream. </div> "Mr. Locke! Mr. Locke!" I opened heavy eyes to meet the eyes of Ethan Vere, who bent over me. Phillida was there, too, pale of face. But what was That just vanishing into the darkness beyond my window-sill? What malignant glare seared disappointment and grim promise across my consciousness? Had I brought with me or did I hear now a whispered: "Pygmy, again!" "Cousin, Cousin, are you very ill?" Phillida was half sobbing. "Won't you drink the brandy, please? Oh, Ethan, how cold he is to touch!" "Hush, dear," Vere bade, in his slow steadfast way. "Mr. Locke, can you swallow some of this?" I became aware that his arm supported me upright in my chair while he held a glass to my lips. Mechanically I drank some of the cordial. Vere put down the glass and said a curious thing. He asked me: "Shall I get you out of this room?" Why should he ask that, since the spectre was for me alone? Or if he had not seen It, how did he know this room was an unsafe area? My stupefied brain puzzled over these questions while I managed a sign of refusal. Any effort was impossible to me. The cold of the unearthly sea still numbed my body. My heart labored, staggering at each beat. Vere's support and nearness were welcome to me. His tact let me rest in the mute inaction necessary to recovery, while my body, astonished that it still lived, hesitatingly resumed the task of life. Somehow he reassured and directed Phillida. Presently she was busied with the coffee apparatus in the corner of the room. It was too much weariness even to turn my eyes aside from the expanse of the table before me. The vase was upset, I noted, as I had seemed to see it. The spray of purple heliotrope Phillida had put there the day before lay among the wet sheets of music. The Book of Hermas lay open at the page I had last turned, the rosy lamplight upon the text. "Behold, I saw a great Beast that he might devour a city—whose name is Hegrin. Thou hast escaped—because thou didst not fear for so terrible a Beast. If, therefore, ye shall have prepared yourselves, yet may escape——" What did they mean, the old, old words men have rejected? What had Hermas glimpsed in his visions? How many men are written down liars because they traveled in strange lands indeed, and explorers, strove to report what they had seen? Who before me had stood at the Barrier and set foot on the Frontier between the worlds? The fog still dense outside was whitening with daybreak. A few hours while the sun ran its course once more for me, then night again, bringing completion of the menace. I recognized that this delay could not affect the end. Perhaps it would have been easier if all had finished for me tonight, easier if Vere and Phillida had not found me in time to bring me back. How had they found out my condition? Wonder stirred under my lethargy. Had I called or cried out? It did not seem that I could have done so. Certainly I had not tried! I was not quite so poor an adventurer as that. Phillida was back with a cup of steaming black coffee, tiptoeing in her anxiety and questioning Vere with her eyes. He took the cup, stooping to receive my glance of assent to the new medicine. The brandy had stimulated, but sickened me. The coffee revived me so much that I was able to take the second cup without Vere's help. When I had walked up and down the room a few times, leaning on his arm, life had taken me back, if only for a little while. The two nurses were so good in their care of me that our first words were of my gratitude to them. Then my curiosity found voice. "How did you happen to come in at this hour?" I asked. "How did you know I was—ill?" "I cannot imagine what made Ethan wake up," said Phillida, with a puzzled look toward her husband. "He woke me by rushing out of the room and letting the door slam behind him. Of course I knew something must be wrong to make Drawls hurry like that. Usually he does such a tremendous lot in a day while looking positively lazy. So I came rushing after and found him in here, trying to waken you. I—I thought at first that you were not living, Cousin Roger. It was horrible! You were all white and cold——" she shivered. Vere poured another cup of coffee. He said nothing on the subject, merely observing that the stimulant would hardly hurt me and some might be good for Phil. I asked her to bring cups for them both. "I am not sure I really care about the coffee, but I'll make some more," she nodded, dimpling. "I love to drink from your wee porcelain cups with their gold holders. You do have pretty things, you bachelors from town." When she was across the room, I asked quietly: "What was it, Vere? What sent you to me?" He answered in as subdued a tone, looking at the tinted shade of the lamp instead of at my face. "The young lady woke me, Mr. Locke. She came to the bedside, whispering that you were dying—would be dead if I didn't get to help you in time. She was gone before Phillida roused up so she doesn't know anything about it." My heart, so nearly stopped forever and so lethargic still, leaped in a strong beat. Desire, then, had come back to save me. For all my doubt and seemingly broken faith, she had brought her slight power to help me in my hour of danger. For my sake she had broken through her mysterious seclusion to call Vere and send him to my rescue. Neither he nor I being unsophisticated, I understood what Vere believed, and why he looked at the lamp rather than at me. But even that matter had to yield precedence to my first eagerness. "You saw her?" I demanded. "You call her young. You saw her face, then?" "I could forget it if I had," he said dryly. "As it happened, I didn't. She was wrapped in a lot of floating thin stuff; gray, I guess? The room was pretty dark, and I was jumping out of sleep. I don't know why she seemed young unless it was the easy, light way she moved. By the time I got what she was saying and sat up, she was gone." "Gone?" "She went out the door like a puff of smoke. I just saw a gray figure in the doorway, where the hall lamp made it brighter than in the room. When I came into the hall there wasn't a sign of anybody about. Nor afterward, either!" I considered briefly. "I suppose I know what you are thinking, Vere. It is natural, but wrong. The lady——" "Mr. Locke," he checked me, "I'm not—thinking. I guess you're as good a judge as I am about what goes on in this house. After the way you've treated us from the first, I'd be pretty dull not to know you're as choice of Phillida as I am; and she is all that matters." "Who is?" demanded Phillida, returning. "Me? I haven't the least idea what you are talking about, Drawls, but I think Cousin Roger matters a great deal more than I do, just now. Perhaps now he is able to tell us about this attack, and if he should have a doctor. I have noticed for weeks how thin and grave he has been growing to be. If only he would drink buttermilk!" I looked into the candid, affectionate face she turned to me. From her, I looked to her husband, whose New England steadiness had been tempered by a sailor's service in the war and broadened by the test of his experience in a city cabaret. A new thought cleaved through my perplexities like an arrow shot from a far-off place. "How much do you both trust me?" I slowly asked. "I do not mean trust my character or my good intentions, but how much confidence have you in my sanity and commonsense? Would you believe a thing because I told it to you? Or would you say: 'This is outside usual experience. He is deceiving us, or mad'?" They regarded one another, smiling with an exquisite intimacy of understanding. "Don't you see yourself one little, little bit, Cousin?" she wondered at me. "Anything you say, goes all the way with us," Vere corroborated. "Wait," I bade. "Drink your coffee while I think." "Please drink yours, Cousin Roger, all fresh and hot." I emptied the cup she urged upon me, then leaned my forehead in my hands and tried to review the situation. They obeyed like well-bred children, settling down on a cushioned seat together and taking their coffee as prettily as a pair of parakeets. They seemed almost children to me, although there was little difference in years between Vere and myself. But then, I stood on the brink where years stopped. With the next night, my triumphant enemy could be put off no longer. That I could not doubt. I cannot say that I was unafraid, yet fear weighed less upon me than a heavy sense of solemnity and realization of the few hours left during which I could affect the affairs of life. What remained to be done? On one of my visits to New York, I had called on my lawyer and made my will. There were a few pensioners for whom provision should continue after my death. The aged music master under whom I developed such abilities as I had, who was crippled now by rheumatism and otherwise dependent on a hard-faced son-in-law; the three small daughters of a dead friend, an actor, whose care and education at a famous school of classic dancing I had promised him to finance—a few such obligations had been provided for, and the rest was for Phillida. But now, what of Desire Michell? She had seemed so apart from common existence that I never had thought of her possible needs any more than of the needs of a bird that darted in and out of my windows. Until tonight, when I had seen her and she had proved herself all woman by her appeal to Ethan Vere. It was not a spirit or a seeress or "ye foule witch, Desire Michell" who had fled to him for help in rescuing me. It was simply a terrified girl. What was to become of this girl? Under what circumstances did she dwell? Had she a home, or did she need one? Could I care for this matter while I was here? Day was so far advanced that a clamor of birds came in to us along with a freshening air. The strangely persistent fog had not lifted, but the lamps already looked wan and faded in the new light. I switched them out before speaking to the pair who watched me. "I have a story to tell you both," I said. "The beginning of it Phillida has already heard. Perhaps——Have you told Vere about the woman who visited this room, the first night I spent in the house? Who cut her hair and left the braid in my hand to escape from me?" "Yes," she nodded, wide-eyed. "Will you go to my chiffonier, there in the alcove, and bring a package wrapped in white silk from the top drawer?" She did as she was asked and laid the square of folded silk before me. I put back the covering, showing that sumptuous braid. The rich fragrance of the gold pomander wrapped with it filled the air like a vivifying elixir. Phillida gathered up the braid with a cry of envious rapture. "Oh! The gorgeous thing! How do some lucky girls have hair like that? If it was unbound, my two hands could not hold it all. What a pity to have cut it! Look, Ethan, how it crinkles and glitters." She held it out to him, extended across her palms. Vere refrained from touching the braid, surveying it where it lay. Being a mere bachelor, I had no idea of Phillida's emotions, until Vere's usual gravity broke in a mischievous, heart-warming smile into the brown eyes uplifted to him. "Beautiful," he agreed politely. No more. But as I saw the wistful envy pass quite away from my little cousin's plain face and leave her content, I advanced in respect for him. In the beginning, it was even harder to speak than I had anticipated. When Phillida laid the braid back in its wrapping, I left it uncovered before me and looked at its reassuring reality rather than at my listeners. How, I wondered, could anyone be expected to credit the story I had to tell? How should I find words to embody it? Only at first! Whether there clung about me some atmosphere of that land between the worlds where I so recently had stood; or the room indeed kept, as I fancied, the melancholy chill of the unseen tide that had washed through it, I met no scepticism from the two who heard my tale of wild experience. They did not interrupt me. Phillida crept close to her husband, putting her hand in his, but she did not exclaim or question. Silence held us all for a while after I had finished. I had a discouraged sense of inadequacy. After all, they had received but a meagre outline. The color and body of the events escaped speech. How could they feel what I had felt? How could they conceive the charm of Desire Michell, the white magic of her voice in the dark, the force of her personality that could impress her image "sight unseen" beyond all time to erase? How convey to a listener that, understanding her so little, I yet knew her so well? "I have told you all this because I need your help," I said presently. "Will you give it to me?" "Go away!" Phillida burst forth. She beat her palms together in her earnestness. "Cousin Roger, take your car and go away—far off! Go where—nothing—can reach you. You must not spend another single night here. Ethan will go with you. I will, too, if you want us. You must not be left alone until you are quite safe; perhaps in New York?" "And, Desire Michell?" "She is in no danger, I suppose. She is not my cousin, anyhow. And even she told you to go away." "You believe my story, then? You do not think me suffering from delusions?" "Ethan saw the girl, too. If he had not come here in time to save you, I believe you would have died in that terrible stupor. Besides, I have seen for weeks that something was changing you." "What does Vere say?" I questioned, studying the absorbed gravity of his expression. I wondered what I myself would have said if anyone had brought me such a story. He passed his arm around Phillida and drew her to him with a quieting, protective movement. His regard met mine with more significance than he chose to voice. "I'm satisfied to take the thing as you tell it, Mr. Locke," he answered. "Phil is right, it seems to me, about you not staying here. I don't think the young lady ought to stay, either." "She refuses to leave, Vere. What can I offer her that I have not offered? How can I find her? You have heard how I searched the countryside for a hint of such a girl's presence. No one has ever seen her; or else someone lies very cleverly." In the pause, Phillida hesitatingly ventured an idea: "Perhaps she is not—real. If the monster is a ghost thing, may not she be one, too? If we are to believe in such things at all——? She almost seems to intend that you shall believe her the ghost of the witch girl in that old book." I shook my head with the helpless feeling of trying to explain some abstruse knowledge to a child. I had spoken of the colossal spaces, the solemn immensities of the place where I had set my human foot. I had tried to paint the desolate bleakness of that Borderland where the unnamed Thing and I met, each beyond his own law-decreed boundary, and locked in combat bitter and strong. Phillida had listened; and talked of ghosts the bugbears of grave-yard superstition. Did Vere comprehend me better? Did he visualize the struggle, weirdly akin to legends of knight and dragon, as prize of which waited Desire Michell; forlornly helpless as white Andromeda chained to her black cliff? Could the Maine countryman, the cabaret entertainer, seize the truths glimpsed by Rosicrucians and mystics of lost cults, when the highly bred college girl failed? It seemed so. At least his dark eyes met mine with intelligence; hers held only bewilderment and fear. "They are not ghosts," I said only. "But how can you be sure?" she persisted. Beneath the braid and the pomander lay the sheet of paper on which Desire had written weeks before; the first page of that composition now pouring gold into my hands. This I passed to Phillida. "Do ghosts write?" I queried. She read the lines aloud. "'We walk upon the shadows of hills, across a level thrown, and pant like climbers.'" "They do write, people say, with ouija boards and mediums," she murmured. I looked at Vere with despair of sustaining this argument. He stood up as if my appeal had been spoken, drawing her with him. "Now that it's a decent hour, don't you think Cristina might give us some breakfast?" he suggested. "I guess bacon and eggs would be sort of restoring. If you feel up to taking my arm as far as the porch, Mr. Locke, the fresh air might be good medicine, too." I have speculated sometimes upon how civilized man would get through days not spaced by his recurrent meals into three divisions. Those meals are hyphens between his mind and his body, as it were. What sense of humor can view too intensely a creature who must feed himself three times a day? Are we not pleasantly urged out of our heroics and into the normal by breakfast, luncheon and dinner? Deny it as we will, when we do not heed them we are out of touch with nature. We went downstairs. After breakfast was over, Vere and I walked across the orchard to a seat placed near the lake. There I sat down, while he remained standing in his favorite attitude: one foot on a low boulder, his arm resting on his knee as he gazed into the shallow, amber-tinted water. Fog still overlay the countryside, but without bringing coolness. The damp heat was stifling, almost tropical as the sun mounted higher in the hidden sky. I watched my companion, waiting for him to speak. He appeared intent upon the darting movements of a group of tiny fish, but I knew his thoughts were afar. "Mr. Locke, I didn't want to speak before Phillida, because it would not do any good for her to hear what I have to say," he finally began. "It is properly the answer to what you asked upstairs, about our believing you had not imagined that story. Did anything slip out over the window-sill when you were waking up?" Startled, for I had not spoken of this, I met his gaze. "Yes. Did you see——" "Nothing, exactly. Something, though! Like—well, like something pouring itself along; a big, thick mass. Something sort of smooth and glistening; like black, oily molasses slipping over. Only alive, somehow; drawing coils of itself out of the dark into the dark. I can't put it very plain." "What did you think?" "The air in the room was bad and close, hard to breathe. I guessed maybe I was a little dizzy, jumping out of bed the way I did and finding you like dead, almost." He paused, and returned his contemplation to the fish darting in the lake. "That is what I thought," he concluded. "What I felt—well, it was the kind of scare I didn't use to know you could feel outside of bad dreams; the kind you wake up from all shaking, with your face and hands dripping sweat. That isn't all, either!" This time the pause was so long that I thought he did not mean to continue. "My excuse for speaking of such matters before Phillida is that I may need a woman friend for Desire Michell," I reverted to the implied rebuke I acknowledged his right to give. "I wanted her help, and yours. More than ever, since you have shared my experience so far, I want your advice." "I'll be proud to give it, in a minute. First, it's only fair to say I've felt enough wrong around here to be able to understand a lot that once I might have laughed at. Nothing compared to you! But—I've been working about the lake sometimes after dark or before daylight was strong, when a kind of horror would come over me—well, I'd feel I had to get away and into the house or go crazy. That morning when you called from your window to ask where I'd been so early, and I told you looking for turtles—that was one time. I had gone out looking for turtles, but that horror drove me in. When you hailed me, I had it so bad that I could just about make out not to run for the house like a scared cat, yelling all the way. Turning back to the lake with you was a poser. But I did; and the feeling was all gone as quick as it came. We had a nice morning's shooting. Once in a while I've felt it sort of driving me indoors when I stepped off the porch or over to the barn at night. That's a funny thing: the fear was always outside, not in the house. I thought of that while you were telling us how the Thing at the window kept trying to get in at you. We haven't got a haunted house, but a haunted place!" "Why have you not spoken of this before?" I asked, deeply stirred. He made a gesture, too American to be called a shrug. He said nothing, watching a large bubble rise through the pure, brown-green water, float an instant on the surface, then vanish with the abrupt completeness of a miniature explosion. I watched also, with an always fresh interest in the pretty phenomenon. Then I repeated my question, rather impatiently as I considered what a relief his companionship in experience would have afforded all these weeks. "Why not, Vere?" "Mr. Locke, I don't like to keep saying that you never exactly got used to me as your cousin's husband," he reluctantly replied. "But I can see it's a kind of surprise to you right along that I don't break down or break out in some fashion. Of course I haven't known that you were meeting queer times, too! If you hadn't been through any of this, what would you have thought if I'd come to you with stories of the place being haunted by something nobody could see? You would have judged I was a liar, trying to fix up an excuse for getting away from the work here and shoving off. I don't want to go away. I don't intend to go. I can't see any need of it for Phil and me. But—and this is the advice you spoke of! I think you ought to leave and leave now. It's little better than suicide to stay." "And abandon Desire Michell?" He turned his dark observant eyes toward me. "If I said yes, you wouldn't do it. Phil and I will take care of the young lady, if she will let us. Couldn't a note be left for her, telling her to come to us?" I shook my head. "She would not come. Now, less than ever——" I broke off, shot with sharp self-reproach at the memory of how I had driven her from me last night. "You won't be any help to her if you're dead," he bluntly retorted. At that I rose and walked a few paces to knock out my post-breakfast pipe against an apple-tree. I was not so sure that he was right, self-evident as his statement appeared. Ideas moved confusedly in my mind, convictions somehow impressed when that golden-bronze spot of light so gently came to rest above my heart when I last stood at the Barrier; the light so like the bright imagined head of Desire. To fly from my place now, herded like a cowardly sheep by the Thing of the Frontier, would that not be to thrust her away to save myself? No! Not myself, my life! I had the answer now. I walked back to Vere and took my seat again. "Both of us, or neither," I told him. "If you can help me make it both by any ingenuity, I shall be mighty glad. It's a pleasant world! But we will not talk any more of my running for New York like a kicked pup. The question is, will you and Phillida take care of the lady who calls herself Desire Michell, if tomorrow morning finds her free, but alone and friendless?" "As long as we live, Mr. Locke," he answered. "But I guess there isn't any disgrace in your going to New York, running or not, if you take her with you. And that is what ought to have been done long ago." "Vere?" He nodded. "You've got me! Just pick the lady up, carry her out of that room, and have a show-down. Put her in your car and take her to town." "I gave her my word not——" "People can't stand bowing to each other when the ship's afire. If she is worth dying for, she doesn't want you to die for her." The simplicity of it! And, leaping the breach of faith, the temptation! What harm could I do Desire by this plan of Vere's? What good might I not do her? Was it mere slavishness of mind on my part not to overrule her timid will? She must pardon me when she realized my desperate case. A dying man might be excused for some roughness of haste, surely. Whether flight could save us I did not know. I did know absolutely that my enemy had crossed the Barrier last night, and I was prey merely withheld from It by the chance respite of a few daylight hours. Suppose our escape succeeded? A whole troup of pictures flitted across the screen of my fancy. Desire beside me in the city, my wife. Desire in those delightful shops that make Fifth Avenue gay as a garden of tulips, where I might buy for her frocks and hats, shoes of conspicuous frivolity and those long white gloves that seem to caress a woman's arm—everything fair and fine. Restaurants I had described for her, where she might dine in silken ease and perhaps hear played the music she had named—— I aroused myself and looked at Vere. "You'll do it?" he translated my expression. "I will, if she gives me the opportunity." "Do you judge she will?" "I hope so. Since she went so far as to show herself to you in order to send help to me when I was in danger, I believe she will come to my room tonight if I wait there——" He looked at me silently. The consternation and protest in his face were speech enough. "If I wait there alone," I finished somewhat hurriedly. "If she comes in time, we will try the plan. Have the car ready. You and Phillida will be prepared, of course. We will waste no time in getting away as far as possible." "And if that Thing comes before she does, Mr. Locke?" "Is there any other way?" "I guess you haven't considered that you're inviting me to stand by while you get yourself killed," he said stiffly. "I'm not an educated man. I never heard the names you mentioned this morning of people who used to study out things like this. I never heard of any worlds except earth and heaven and hell. But then I couldn't explain how an electric car runs. I know the car does run; and I know you nearly died last night. If you go back and stay alone in that room, we both know what you are going to meet." I turned away from him because I sickened at the prospect he evoked. The memory of that death-tide was too near and rolled too coldly across the future. If the trial had been hard when mercifully unanticipated, what would it be to meet my enemy now that I knew myself conquered? Would It not deliberately forestall Desire's coming, tonight? "Mightn't you help the lady more if you went away now, and came back?" he urged. The deserter's argument, time without end! Was I to fall as low as that? Phillida's voice called to Vere from the veranda, summoning him to some need of farm or household. "In a moment, Pretty," he called assent. But he did not move. I guessed that he hoped much from my silence and would not disturb me lest my decision be hindered or changed. By and by I stood up. "Vere, in your varied experiences in peace and war, did you ever chance to meet a coward?" "Once," he answered briefly. "And, did you like the sight?" "No." "Then," I said, "let us not invite one another to that display. Shall we go in to Phillida?" <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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