WIDENER LIBRARY
HX 5LWS Z
SINISTER
HOUSE
BY LELAND HALL



1714.5.13
Harvard College
Library
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SINISTER HOUSE









Date
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33
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PAUSED A SECOND ON A SPOT WHENCE HE COULD SEE
THAT WOMAN (page 170)


SINISTER
HOUSE
DT LELID TILL
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMINY
Che Riverside Prers Carnage
1919


FLilit. 5.13
HARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY
BY EXCHANGE
MAR 22 1927
COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY LELAND B, HALL
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED


ILLUSTRATIONS
PAUSED A SECOND ON A SPOT WHENCE HE COULD
SEE THAT WOMAN
Frontispiece
LIKE Two WANDERERS STANDING EMBRACED ON
THE EDGE OF A CLIFF FAR ABOVE THE FIRES OF
EARTH
32
94
A VAGUE SHAPE PASSED LIKE A BLUR ACROSS THE
CANDLE-LIGHT
I SAW THE MALIGNANT TWO LOPE ROUND THE
HEAD OF THE BED, AND TRY TO TEAR HER FROM
202
HIM





Sinister House
CHAPTER I
We hit upon the same thought at precisely
the same instant, my wife and I, as we started
home from Julia's. Coming out from the
gloomy driveway and turning to the right
along the main road, the night a bit wild with
wind and the moonlight hitting the earth
hard through rifts in the racing cloud, my
wife spoke the words with me: “How gay she
was after all!”
Such little happenings are not always so
mysterious as they seem. In this case there
was cause enough for us to hit upon the same
thought at the same moment. A mournful
spirit always walked in the driveway to the
house in which Julia and Eric lived, and that
night Eric was away and Julia was alone in
the place. Many a time before, having left
them together in the dark house behind, my
wife and I half sighed with relief as we came
up from the blackness under the hemlocks


2
SINISTER HOUSE
that roofed the driveway and gained the flat
highroad, bare of trees and blessedly free
under sun, stars, or cloud from lugubrious
shadows. We had often spoken of the mel-
ancholy that breathed round the house and
grounds, puzzled to explain it, since Eric was
warm-hearted and cordial and Julia had a way
with her that put guests at their ease, and
they adored each other.
Perhaps he loved her too intensely. I have
since thought of that. His very ardor of atten-
tion, maybe, put it into our subconsciousness
that he was protecting her against - well,
anything. You see, it was easy enough to fill
the black shadows under those old hemlocks
with menaces to the welfare of Eric and Julia.
And since many others felt as we felt about
the place, though not so keenly, I suppose the
stimulus to the imagination must have been
something that was evident to all the friends
who visited the house. Nothing therein was
so evident as Eric's restless and forever pro-
tecting love of his wife. After spending an
evening with him and her, one might well
shiver with fear lest something harm her and
hence drive him mad. The black shadows


SINISTER HOUSE
3.
under those trees could easily secrete wicked-
ness.
To those who knew Eric and Julia less in-
timately than we, I am aware that this will
appear a little far-fetched. There was a very
noticeable element of tenderness in him which
might belie what, for the sake of my argument,
I must call his alertness as against an inexor-
able hostility. Then, too, wives who attract
a jealous watchfulness from their husbands
usually suggest the possibility of evasion, a
fling over the traces. But Julia loved Eric
with a love that would, and did, go through
hell-fire unchanged. He was wholly sure of her
love. We all were. I think no one lost sight of
that, even when to some it could not but seem
that his presence was to her a source of —
Well, let that go for the present. It was
natural enough for my wife and me to ejacu-
late at the same moment the surprising fact
that Julia, alone in the gloomy house save for
a grouchy servant, and with Eric gone from
her for the first time since they had been mar-
ried, had seemed unusually gay. Perhaps I
should say gay as she used to be in the first
days when we knew her.


SINISTER HOUSE
We had feared that she might be sadly
depressed by his absence. As we drove home
that night, we recalled to each other, in
phrases snatched from our lips by the gale,
Eric's sorrow at being forced to leave her even
for the brief space of two weeks. Lately she
had not been well. Her delicately colored face
had slowly been losing its color, and its deli-
cate lines were being drawn, especially about
the eyes, in which both Annette and I had
observed from time to time a look of apprehen-
sion. Sleeplessness might have made her look
so. Just before Eric went away she had come
to walk with a certain weariness; and Annette,
naturally a keener observer than I, had declared
to me that Julia struck her as a woman beset by
nervousness at night and exhausted by day.
While all this was slighter than my words
about it, it was real enough for Eric to feel
that Julia should not accompany him on a
tiresome business trip; and though Julia
dreaded being separated from him, she evi-
dently recognized the wisdom of her staying
quietly at home while he was gone.
“I cannot bear the thought of his leaving
me, and I want most dreadfully to go with


SINISTER HOUSE
5
him," she told Annette. “But — Well, I am
a little run down and we both think I had
better not try it. After all,” she went on with
a half-sad smile, "we simply are two persons
and we can't always be with each other.”
And then she added with a surprisingly dif-
ferent tone, which Annette could neither de-
scribe nor reproduce. “We must be sensible.
Yes; sensible — reasonable.”
When we got home that night, when I had
filled my pipe, and Annette, plumper than the
berry since the baby was born, had kicked off
her slippers, and we sat down for a little chat
together before going upstairs to bed, it was
the very reasonableness of Eric and Julia that
we agreed upon.
“Though,” I remarked judicially, “I should
think Eric would have sent her to pass the time
of his absence in some more cheerful place.
That would have been the wholly sensible
thing to do.”
“What more have you ever learned of that
house, Pierre?” my wife asked me by way of
rejoinder.
She had set me once to find out something.
We felt the place had almost a personality,


6
SINISTER HOUSE
not, as you will have gleaned, one wholly
pleasant to us. But that may not have been
entirely because of its spookiness. I am an
American; and I am chauvinist enough (is
that the word?) to be prejudiced in favor of
a new concrete house. As for Annette, with
two children to safeguard, she's all for the
up-to-date in ventilation, plumbing, and orien-
tation. Forsby, where we lived, was being
built of houses of the kind that are put up
quickly and that last — theoretically should
last — long. Most of them had not been built
long enough as yet to test the boast of archi-
tects and promoters that they'd call for next
to no repairs. While they were cheap, they
were good; and they were blessedly clean and
full of sun and air. Forsby was a settlement
of commuters, most of them well enough off
to own an automobile, few of them rich
enough to hire a chauffeur. There were per-
haps twenty young married couples bringing
up their infants there. We had n't yet much
of a community spirit; but such a thing was
beginning to crystallize round the general
need (we all had babies growing rapidly in the
way of nature) for schools.


SINISTER HOUSE
You see, there had never been a village of
Forsby. The Common Sense Realty Com-
pany - specially incorporated under the laws
of New York — had bought up some ten square
miles of land on the high plateau above the
river, had drained the swampy places, laid
out a few rods, cut down the moth-eaten trees,
and marked off the terrain into generous house
lots. The name Forsby had come from the
maternal grandfather of the up-and-coming
young man whose brain had engendered the
Common Sense Realty Company. He was
Bob Planter.
We had him to dinner once, Annette and
I, and took to him whole-heartedly. Like all
young American business men, he had an
eye out for the money in the scheme; but
equally like them — let me say like us — he
had a sort of glorious inspiration and
of the “Future” of the place and loved plan-
ning for it — saw it all in the rosy light of
enthusiastic yet common-sense youth.
After all, the United States of America were
born in a clearing, and they've cleared the way
before them as they've grown. If to me there's
romance about a brand-new cement house in a


SINISTER HOUSE
bare, flat plot of land, it's because I've inher-
ited the forward-looking temperament from
my grandfathers.
I write this by way of gentle protest, be-
cause I remember that Annette's second cou-
sin, Giles Farrow, a gifted but temperamental
artist, was staying with us the night young
Planter came to dinner, and that he called
Forsby hopeless, naked, new, and American.
Why, of course American; but that was the
very reason it was n't hopeless.
Nothing could down Planter's enthusiasm;
but on the other hand, nothing could soften
my wife's cousin's resentment. Meadow
grasses were beautiful; find a way to kill off
mosquitoes, but keep your meadows. You
can restore moth-eaten trees and protect them
from pests in the future. But drain your
meadows and cut down all your trees, you
take all natural charm and individuality
from the place.
“Well,” replied Planter with unperturbed
good-humor, “the sun still sets in the west,
over the river; and we have grand sunsets,
my friend.”
Giles paid no more attention to him than if


SINISTER HOUSE
9
he had not spoken. “Take that old place
behind the hemlocks, back in on the river
three miles or so up,” he went on. “That has
charm, softness, atmosphere.”
Atmosphere! I shudder now when I think
of that place. But I remember that then
Planter laughed heartily at picking as a model
for the Common Sense Realty Company
such a broken-down old wooden house, all
squat and dark, on the edge of a precipice
down to the river one way, and shut off from
the sun and the rest of the world by a bunch
of damp and half-rotten old evergreens the
other.
It was that same night I learned my first
about the house. I myself had never laid eyes
on it; but my wife's cousin, walking in a fever
of wounded susceptibilities and dragging my
wife along with him, had made a bee-line out
of the squarely planned and flat Forsby, on
across the fields towards a clump of trees on
a distant headland that jutted out into the
river. Having reached these, they pushed
their way through and came upon the wooden
house.
It was, as Planter said, built on the very


10
SINISTER HOUSE
edge of the cliff. On all but the river side it
was surrounded by a thicket of hemlocks,
which had been set out not more than fifty
feet from the house itself. Planter had pene-
trated the thicket in the early days of the
Forsby survey, and had found the narrow bit
of land between the house and the trees over-
grown with tall grass, weeds, and thistles.
He had found the house broken down: sashes
without glass, shutters dangling from one
hinge, sections of the gutters fallen askew, and
the paint peeled off.
But my wife and her cousin had found a
smooth lawn, a house which seemed to be in
good repair, and a charming lady and a lanky,
low-voiced gentleman, evidently living there,
tying up foxgloves in bloom along the southern
wall.
Since the afternoon of that chance encoun-
ter, both my wife and I had become intimate
with Eric and Julia Grier and had grown really
to love them; but to both of us the house had
remained rather antipathetic. Grier himself,
in answer to my direct inquiries, had told me
that Julia and he had stumbled on it during
their honeymoon, and Julia had fallen in love


SINISTER HOUSE
11
with it — “had felt drawn to it at once; which
was singular enough, since, as perhaps you
know, the old house was all a ruin, and to me,
at least, depressing."
Julia in her own sweet way, so bright and
vivacious in the early days of our acquaint-
ance, told several of us one night at dinner
there, some time before midsummer, that when
she first laid eyes on the house, she had a
queer feeling that all the doors and windows
opened to her and that something really
called to her from within to come and live
and be happy there. “Yes,” she went on, her
bright eyes glowing, “be happy there. Why,
it sang to me, really sang as I went towards it;
like a "
I forget her word, but I remember the radi-
ance in her eyes as she looked towards her
husband, and how his eyes gave back her
look.
Later on, when once more — not wholly
casually — I asked him about the house, I
remember he said: “To tell the truth, I did n't
feel — feel drawn to it, as Julia felt. But to
be able to give my wife the one thing she
desired above all others – it really took hold


CHAPTER II
“No, dear,” I said to Annette that night we
came from dining with a surprisingly happy
bachelor Julia, “I've found out nothing more
about the house."
Some time before, I may add here, we had
gleaned from an old storekeeper in Stanton,
within the bounds of which it stood, that it
had been built for a summer house by an
eccentric old man, very religious, Morgan
Snart by name. We thought the name had
an evil sound, but the old fellow had been
apparently more than respectable, and he had
not been near the place for many years before
he died, not, at any rate, since his daughter
Huldah had married. Huldah was dead, too,
had died “just on top of her father.” Accord-
ing to the old storekeeper, she had taken to
religion even more entirely than her father
had, and he guessed from what he had heard
the village people say, she had seen the light
powerful strong. Though the memory of them
was rather drab, they were holy enough. As
Annette said, they were too good to be denied


14
SINISTER HOUSE
heaven, and must have been wholly folded
up in bliss: a conclusion disappointing to us
who were given to thinking that the errant,
damned soul of at least a murderer must be
haunting the place.
I was rather puzzled to have my wife bring
up the subject of the house again. We had
come to accept the fact that Julia and Eric
loved it, even though we did n't; and think-
ing of this, I asked Annette abruptly whatever
had set her to suspecting the house again.
“Oh, nothing,” she replied thoughtfully.
“I was n't suspecting. Julia's being so at-
tached to it, and what you said about Eric's
leaving her in such a gloomy place, I suppose.
I wonder, Pierre, if you and I are — You
remember Cousin Giles thought it was a
charming old place. Perhaps we're not edu-
cated to see in those old places what other
people see. Let's get some books on architec-
ture and read it up, and then our eyes will be
opened. Of course, I should n't think for a
moment of bringing up my children in such
an unsanitary old shanty. I can't help it.
I think it's damp and horrid and gloomy.
There, now!”


SINISTER HOUSE
15
“Heavens, Annette,” I cried, turning to
face her, “what's the matter?” Phy
I knew that she was quite stirred up about
something. Usually she was gracious enough
to refer to Nettie and little Bobbie as our
children.
“Oh, nothing,” she said again, with the
airy inflection women use when they think it
hardly necessary to take their husbands into
their confidence.
“Nonsense,” I replied firmly but kindly;
"something's made you mad.”
She turned surprised round eyes at me.
“It has, too,” I went on.
“Why, Pierre,” she said, innocent as a
lamb, “just because I suggest that we improve
our minds!”
“But what," I asked, surer than ever,
“made you think of such a thing?"
“Well, it could be done, could n't it? Do
you think, dear, that I am not naturally am-
bitious?” (This with supreme pity.) “Do
you think that I do not want the best for
my children and myself — and you, dear? If
there's something in architecture more than
we think, we ought to get busy and learn


16
SINISTER HOUSE
about it. Cousin Giles tells me that my sense
of beauty is undeveloped. Heaven knows what
he'd say about yours, dear. But he's in the
family, and I don't mind him.”
“Now we'll get to the heart of this," I said,
smiling.
“It's nothing to get to the heart of,"
Annette went on serenely. “It's simply that
old house. I told Julia I thought it a horrid
old place.”
“Annette!"
“Well, not baldly like that, of course. It
was when we came. I — well-I invited Ju-
lia to come and stay with us while Eric's
away. “You know,' I said, 'we have a nice,
sunny spare room, and I think it would do
you much more good than to stay shut up in
a gloomy old house like this.""
“Well, that was going some! And then?"
“She was very toplofty —”
“No," I interrupted; "not toplofty, not
Julia.”
“Yes, Pierre. Will you let me finish? I tell
you she was very toplofty. 'Oh,' she said, just
like that, 'so you find this house a gloomy,
shut-up old place?' And since I'd gone that


SINISTER HOUSE 17
far, I was n't going to take anything back,
and I came out flat and told her I thought it
was horrid. Then she said, ‘But I love it.
Thank you a thousand times for asking me to
stay with you while Eric's gone. You must
n't think, though, that this house is — lone-
some.' She gave quite a queer little laugh, and
then she told me that it was a sweet old place:
and,' she said, 'you don't think, after all that
Eric and I have done with it, that I want to
leave it for a single night, do you? I know
some of the rooms are shady; but you would
n't have me driven from our nest by a shadow,
would you?' She got quite excited, so I said I
only thought our house would be more cheer-
ful for her in Eric's absence, and I admitted
that I did n't see in her old place what she
saw in it. And she just turned her back on
me and said, 'I suppose not.""
“Not like that!” I cried, for Annette had
given the little remark a most disagreeable,
almost an insolent, ring.
“Yes, Pierre,” Annette replied, with some-
thing like indignation. “She was very sharp
and rather snobbish. I know Julia's artistic
and all that, but goodness knows, though I
JULIO


18 SINISTER HOUSE
W-
IS
SO
may be only a plain, practical woman, I'm
not a country know-nothing, and she has no
right to put on airs with me just because I
don't happen to see in her old house what she
sees in it."
I say frankly that little else could have
made me sorrier than to have my wife fall out
with Julia Grier. I have never met two per-
sons to whom I have been so drawn as to Eric
and Julia Grier, and I have heard Annette
say the same thing for her part. They were
so good-looking and so generous, and they
had such warm voices. While I felt much the
same as Annette about their house, I could not
help confessing that compared with them An-
nette and I were — well, not ordinary, but
not extraordinary either. It is, of course, only
fair to Annette to remind you that the dis-
tinguished artist, Giles Farrow, was her cousin,
not mine. For my part, I could name perhaps
half a dozen colors, and could recognize the
names of twice as many more. But tones,
shades, and tints! Not that Julia and Eric
ever talked of such details with me; but Giles
used to talk such stuff with them and they
used to be very much interested in it.


SINISTER HOUSE
19
So I told Annette that Julia had meant
nothing, that the tone might easily be mis-
understood while the words in themselves were
entirely innocent. After all, no one but Julia
could be expected to see in that house just what
Julia saw.
Annette let me rave on awhile about beauty,
and then she asked me if I, too, found beauty
in that old house.
“Yes," I said valiantly;“a certain beauty.
Yes, I do.” .
But I blushed as I said it; and it was so
wholly sham - so wholly manly, Annette said,
that we both burst out laughing.
Suddenly, Annette stopped, poised a second,
and then fled upstairs in her stocking feet,
shouting down at me:
: “It's raining great guns and all the win-
dows are open. Go out and bring in the baby
carriage."
It was raining hard and the wind was blow-
ing a gale. I got pretty wet hauling the baby
carriage backwards to the front porch; but once
there with it, I was sheltered, and I stood there
a few moments, facing north.
The night was absolutely black, for we had


20
SINISTER HOUSE
as yet no street lights in the outer parts of
Forsby. The light from the bulb on the porch
behind me, however, lit up the heavy drops of
rain that fell from the coping, and down the
granolithic path a ways I saw long streaks of
rain reflect it back now and then like steel.
Through all the noise of rain and wind I
just barely heard the whistle of the last train
from the city. The tracks were a couple of
miles away.
Half-past twelve!
I went in and locked up the house for the
night.
Oh, serenity of the sound, new house. At
every stage of my toilet I thought of it: our
neat, square bedroom, with its window east
and its two windows south; and all Julia's
rooms were queer-shaped; our tiled bathroom,
with its white enamel, its shining nickel, its
open plumbing, and I don't believe Eric had
a bit of shining nickel or open plumbing in his
whole place; our electric light beside the beds
and over the mirror and everywhere one might
want it, and their dingy gas and flickering
candles.
My thoughts went on as I brushed my


SINISTER HOUSE
21
teeth over the bright nickel toothbrush basin.
The sanitary equipment of our house was up
to date and complete, as it always should be
in a house that shelters young children. If the
Griers had children, now, it would n't be so
lonesome over there; but they'd have to clear
the place up more: cut down those rotten old
trees and let the sun in all day all round.
Funny: Julia was as merry as a lark this eve-
ning, and looked as she looked the first day I
saw her, before the summer had— well, pulled
her down, I guess. And she was as fresh and
sparkling as the sun on a brook.
“Are n't you ever coming to bed?” Annette
called to me.
I snapped off the light and went into the
bedroom.
As I opened the window the wind roared
in, flapped my pyjamas about my legs, and
hurled the rain half way across the floor.
“Say, Annette, I don't know about opening
this window."
“Come along; the other'll be just as bad,
and we'll mop up the floor in the morning.
Roll the rug back, dear, and come to bed.”
That for good tight floors.
C01


CHAPTER III
As I have told you, our house has every mod-
ern convenience. We have electric doorbells
at every door; but whoever gave those re-
sounding thwacks — they seemed resounding,
I assure you, at that weird hour of the night
and in that storm – was probably unable in
the dark to find the button. So my mind rea-
soned in a second or two. You know, pound-
ing on a door is a very threatening noise, and
I confess I was startled.
Annette was really alarmed. For a long
while she would not loose my hand, but kept
dragging at me; and I was very awkward
trying to find the button of the lamp to my
left.
Once a little light in the room, however, she
became cautious and alert. She would not
let me leave my bed. Both of us sat up, and,
very strained, we listened for the blows to
come again.
It seemed a long time that we waited. It
was probably not more than a couple of min-
utes. At any rate, no sound but the roaring


26
SINISTER HOUSE
"There's nothing the matter with Julia,
is there?” I asked suddenly and without
thinking.
“With Julia!” he cried, his look transfixing
me and his deep-set brown eyes terribly
anxious and searching.
“I am an idiot. Of course not. We left her
not two hours ago. Never saw her looking so
well; never saw her livelier.”
That relieved him. He undid a button or
two of his coat (I always noticed how lean and
sensitive his hands were) and reached in for a
handkerchief to mop his face.
What an expressive wet face it was! He
cleared his throat, putting his fingers to his
mouth as he did so in a gesture characteristi-
cally apologetic. He was a tall, wiry, gaunt
fellow, whose face fairly burned with eagerness
at times, though he was a man of few words,
rather mute. I suppose he was self-effacing
and extremely considerate of others rather
than apologetic. Certainly there was no sug-
gestion of weakness about him. He was n't
assertive or aggressive, but he had unusual
power of endurance, both physical and, I found
out later, mental.
SS


SINISTER HOUSE 27
Weeks afterwards Giles said of him that he
was tempered in a white-hot resentment. But
Giles was an incorrigible phrase-maker. Eric
seemed to me just an attractive, magnetic,
dark-eyed fellow, taller and thinner than the
average and a good deal more what the women
call sympathetic. Resentment was the last
thing in the world I should have associated
with Eric Grier.
Ah, well, I am rambling. Eric had never
before been in our house without his wife, and
I felt as if he were lonesome. All the time my
son upstairs kept yelling as if he were scared
out of his life. It was like Eric to take upon
himself the blame of this, but I deprecated his
apologies. One was always doing that with
Eric. He told me then that he had found
himself in Buffalo with three days on his
hands, and had determined to take a flying
trip to his home and his wife.
"I can't bear being away from her,” he
added, but with no trace of apology there. He
burned when he spoke of his wife. “And it's
such a rotten night — I just got into Forsby
from New York. There was no cab at the sta-
tion and I started to walk it. When I saw the


28
SINISTER HOUSE
light in your window, I hoped I'd get to your
house before you had gone to bed, and that —
Well, I have only thirty-six hours to spend
with Julia at the best, and I thought you'd
perhaps run me over in your car.”
He would have driven himself over, but I
knew he could n't manage a Ford very well,
and besides, I was glad to do him a favor. So
I rushed upstairs to dress. There was some-
thing abroad in the night that took away all
thought of sleep. Even Bobbie kept up his
whimpering, which was very unlike him. I
stopped in his room a second to tell Annette,
who was watching with him, that it was Eric
who had roused us, and that I was going to
run him over in the Ford.
She had already assured herself of the nature
of our midnight visitor. She thought I was a
fool to drive him over in such a storm, that it
would be much more sensible to keep him with
us overnight. As a matter of fact, she did n't
want to be left alone in the house. Bobbie had
had terrible nightmares; she could n't wake
him up; she thought he had a fever; you know
how women are, even the best of them, like my
wife.


SINISTER HOUSE
29
Just the same, I got dressed, forced a dry
coat on Eric, cranked up the Ford, and started
out in that storm.
Eric paid no attention to the roughness of
the way. While my mind was wholly intent
upon steering the light car through the heavy
mud and keeping her out of ruts, he asked me
anxious questions about the condition of his
wife. Now and then, when we came to a
smooth stretch, I would say — you know how,
with my mind only half in it — “She's as
bright as a cricket. She's improved wonder-
fully.” Or, as a joke, “She seems to thrive on
your absence, Eric.” I wonder if that pleased
him.
Perhaps he did n't hear anything I said, with
the wind roaring about us. At any rate, he
could n't get enough out of me. He even asked
me if she was sleeping better.
What a question from one husband to an-
other! I answered, “Like a top.” I never knew
she had slept in any other way.
All the way the rain was bouncing and run-
ning all over the wind-shield, and steaming on
the engine hood; the wind was trying to tear
the top off the car; and the whole shebang was


30
SINISTER HOUSE
rocking and pitching along the road like a
bump the bumps at Coney Island. Even the
lights got to playing tricks. From time to time
the rain or something reflected them in a queer
way, so that it seemed to me as if a ball of
light, or a sort of thick string of it, were flying
along just ahead of us, now just over the engine,
now right on the edge of the wind-shield. It was
so queer that it made me jumpy and nervous.
I found the next morning that the reflector
in the right lamp was broken. That accounted
for it simply enough; but I remember how
I jumped when we turned down into Eric's
driveway and that uncanny light — it was like
an eel then — darted ahead of us and round
the corner as if it were alive.
At Eric's request I stopped the car under the
hemlocks, some little way from the house, and
as luck would have it, I stalled the engine do-
ing so. That left us in absolute darkness, and
it felt and sounded as if the wind and rain
doubled their fury.
What a friend to man is light. I don't know
why I insisted on stumbling along with Eric
towards where we knew the house must be if
the storm had n't blown it from the edge of the


SINISTER HOUSE
31
cliff into the river. We did n't know where to
put our feet, and in the darkness the wind
sounded like all sorts of unearthly things.
Once it was so like an anguished human cry
that we both stopped, trembling. I'm not
sure now that it was n't.
We kept on going, trying to feel the edge
of the driveway with our feet. Of course we
could n't see a sign of the house. Finally I said
to Eric, “This is absurd. I'll go back and start
the engine. That will give us some light, and
you've got to wake Julia anyhow.”
Though he remonstrated, I had already
turned, when I heard the noise of bolts shot
back with a loud click. We were much nearer
the house than we knew.
The front door was suddenly thrown open
and I saw Julia standing in the doorway. She
wore a long white nightgown and she carried
in her hand a lighted candle. She was the only
visible thing in the night, save right before me
the clear-cut but lightless edge of Eric's face.
Behind her there was a sort of rosy glow. She
must have lighted a lamp back in the narrow
hallway, one wall of which I remembered was
hung with a damask of deep rose color.


32
SINISTER HOUSE
She cried out, “Who's there?” and though
she was not more than ten feet from us, I could
hardly hear her voice over the noise of the
storm.
Eric answered her, almost with a sob, and
sprang towards her across the lawn and up the
steps. He had her caught up in his arms in a
second, and she let the candle fall.
In an instant the night was black again
save for that rosy glow, against which I saw
their two figures almost as one, shapeless yet
strangely heroic, like two wanderers standing
embraced on the edge of a cliff far above the
fires of earth.
Slipping and almost falling in the mud, I
ran back to my Ford. I bumped good and hard
into a tree-trunk before I got there, but I had
her cranked and backing before they could
have thought of me, and I doubt if even the
glare of my lights over their lawn or the roar
of the engine in reverse recalled to their minds
that there was such a man as Pierre Smith
living in the world.
The house was still as death when I got
back, and I tried to sneak into bed without a
sound. But the wife of my bosom was on a



CA
LIKE TWO WANDERERS STANDING EMBRACED ON THE
EDGE OF A CLIFF FAR ABOVE THE FIRES OF EARTH





SINISTER HOUSE
33
still watch, and in the dark she tried to pump
me for all she could get; and that being little
for her pains, she fell to thinking that Eric
and Julia were both “crazy nuts.” Not an
elegant phrase, but expressive.
It was after two before I fell asleep. Just
drowsing away, I remembered to ask Annette
how Bobbie was.
He had had terrible nightmares, but had
dropped off to sleep again as soon as Eric and
I had left the house. He had no fever.


CHAPTER IV
All this happened early in September. The
weather had been uncertain from the middle
of August; and the day after Eric came home
was furious with rain and wind.
We had n't a very cheerful breakfast, An-
nette and I and the children. Felicia had had
nightmares, too, and had let the eggs burn.
But I remember saying to my wife when I got
home that night, very wet and tired, that it
was sure to blow and rain itself out at last in
time for my vacation; which I always took in
the fall and which was due to begin the next
week.
That's just what happened. After the 14th
or 15th of September, we had a three weeks'
spell of the loveliest weather you can imagine.
I always have been lucky on my vacation.
But it was n't the spell of weather, but the
visit of Giles to our house and what he brought
with him or stirred up that have made that
epoch a vivid memory to me, one which has
stayed just behind my every-day sense for
nearly four years.


SINISTER HOUSE
35
At the time none of that was so real to me as
my enjoyment of the mild fall days: sowing the
lawn, setting out bulbs, Annette and I - cro-
cuses, daffodils, squills (she can tell you what
they were, though I think it was Giles that set
us to doing it), tinkering with the Ford and
polishing it, days of golf, and picnics with the
children up the river.
It may be temperamental with me (and the
word makes me laugh), but I've always found
joy just as real as sorrow; more real indeed.
Everything bad that comes to me seems like
an unpleasant dream, from which I'm always
looking to wake up; whereas, when I'm having
a good time, I don't want to go to bed at all.
Half our sorrows come from an overbalanced
mind, and the other half are aggravated by
too much thinking on one's self.
I went on having a sensible, happy time,
while two persons whom I knew intimately
were being stretched tighter and tighter on a
rack; and not until I was caught in the infernal
thing myself had I the slightest suspicion of
what was going on.
Of course I heard the gossip, but I did n't
heed it, and in our nightly councils I scolded


SINISTER HOUSE
37
take a little schooling at his hands; but she
used in those days to ask him questions, as if
she were humoring him and entirely noncha-
lantly, and she quite fooled me. Not until I
began to hear queer words of his lingo — such
as composition, values, chiaroscura — fall
from her own serene lips, did I realize what
she was up to.
And he? He must have known it, too, and if
he gave out anything at all to her, it must have
been with utmost carelessness. He did n't care
a snap of his finger about our sense of beauty.
He knew us for just what we were, pitied us
for that, liked us for that, and once confessed
to me, envied us for that. Which last I take to
mean that no one would be an artist if he could
help it.
But I must say Giles is a fine fellow and a
gentleman. He has since died, fighting for
France, which he was the first to make me
understand would be fighting for the soul of
the world.
As for the gossip, I had rather pass over it,
but since I am going to plunge into the heart
of the affair and must, perforce, confine myself
to what either Annette or I actually saw or


38
SINISTER HOUSE
experienced, I had better tell you some of the
many yarns so that you will have an idea
of how the strange drama impressed the circle
of Forsby's best.
So far as I can remember, up to the time of
Giles's long stay with us the only thing Forsby
had against Eric and Julia — and gossip, you
know, is always what you have against the
other fellow — was the fact that they lived in
that gloomy old house. Julia was exceedingly
charming; Eric was, by contrast, reserved. I
have already told you that the house was un-
canny to most of us. Added to their choice of
such a dwelling, their dress, their independent
manners, and their way of speech were enough
to brand them as “different.” To be “differ-
ent” is, I have observed, invariably blame-
worthy; and in this case Eric, naturally, was
held to blame. There was something queer
about him. I mean, that was the gossip.
It never got going very strong. To tell the
truth, I think most of us stood a little in awe of
him. But during the six weeks that followed
his dramatic home-coming, it so happened that
he was now at home, now off on another trip;
and Forsby noticed, not only that in the peri-


40 SINISTER HOUSE
been a Friday night that Eric came home so
unexpectedly from his first trip away. Though
he told me that he had only thirty-six hours to
pass at home with his wife, he did not leave
until Monday morning. This I remember be-
cause early Monday morning I telephoned
Julia I was going down to the train from New
York to meet Giles, from whom we had re-
ceived a telegram the night before. I wanted
to see Julia and I thought that perhaps I might
give her a lift along the road somewhere, or
take some letter down to the station for her.
Besides, the Ford was working wonderfully
well that morning.
You understand we had seen nothing of
Eric or Julia since that Friday night. They
were at that time so wrapped up in each other
that we should not have thought of breaking
in on them.
To my surprise, Eric answered the tele-
phone, and it was he who was glad of a chance
to be taken to the station. There was a train
down to New York just before Giles's train up
from there was due. Eric was leaving on that.
So I hustled over for him in the Ford.
· It was a wonderful morning. The shadows


SINISTER HOUSE
41
under the hemlocks by Eric's house were the
only dark things I saw, and I always felt,
rather than saw, them.
Eric was waiting for me on the steps to the
front door, with his bags at his feet. Julia was
standing beside him, heavily veiled.
“Will you be good enough to take me along,
too?" she asked in an unusually low voice. “I
want to go with Eric as far as I can.”
“And,” Eric added, with great tenderness,
“I want her to have a lot of this sweet, fresh
air.”
“Then for Heaven's sake, take off that thick
veil, Julia!” I cried. “It's a gorgeous day;
don't shut it out. There's no dust. The roads
are still wet.”
“Do, my dear,” Eric urged. “No one will
see that mark. All the black-and-blue spots in
the world would n't make any difference to me
or to any one."
She stood beside him — I was going to say
trembling. I never saw Julia tremble while she
had strength enough to stand on her feet. But
there was something about her that morning
suggestive of extreme weakness, and I had a
feeling of uncertainty about her health.


42
SINISTER HOUSE
“Have you had a fall, Julia?" I asked,
anxiously.
“The silly girl walked in her sleep last night,”
Eric explained, “and bumped her cheek.”
In the way of a joke, I shouted, “Oh, you
Lady Macbeth!” I had a moment's pride of
my knowledge of Shakespeare.
But Julia put her hand up in protest.
“Don't say that!” she cried. “I have done
nothing — nothing I can think of.”
I could see that I had upset her.
"All right, Julia,” I said. “I'll take your
word for it. Only, please take off that funeral
crepe and enjoy the morning sunshine. There's
nothing better than cool fresh air for black-
and-blue spots."
That was a fatuous remark, but it pleased
Eric. We could not persuade Julia to lift her
veil, however. In her simple gray frock she
looked like a girl but for the wretched black
drapery about her head, a device which in my
eyes always gives women the appearance of
victims going to the block to have their heads
cut off.
Not one word did either of them say to or
for me as I drove them through flat Forsby to


44
SINISTER HOUSE
I saw the mark — high on the right cheek-
bone, the discoloration spreading up under the
outer corner of the eye. She had forgotten
about her veil's being lifted. Indeed, I now
know that she wore it to hide her face from
Eric only. Up to the final scene, it remained
her greatest care to conceal from Eric, as far
as she could, the signs of her suffering, the
nature of which she had determined he must
not know. After a while she blew her nose a
little, coughed, and then turned her moist gray
eyes to meet my too anxious look.
“How foolish I am to love him so," she said,
smiling a little.
In the few minutes we had to wait for Giles's
train we said nothing. She was completing the
mastery over herself. From time to time I
stole a glance at her sweet, determined, little
face. After her tears had ceased to flow, she
sat quietly with her hands folded in her lap
and devoted herself more and more to her own
thoughts, no detail of which was recorded on
the sensitive, white mask of her face. Under
her breast and throat I saw waves of emotion
rise and fall, but her firm lips were locked
against the force of them.


SINISTER HOUSE 45
It was a relief to hear Giles's train come
rumbling into the station. We were waiting
on the inbound side. After the train had
pulled out, I saw Giles on the other platform
across the tracks. He had a couple of heavy
bags at his feet, and he was looking irascibly
up and down and all round, shouting “Porter”
at men on our side of the rails, pointing his
cane at them, behaving as he usually behaves,
as if the whole world were reprehensibly indif-
ferent to him, and he would n't put up with
it much longer.
What I really envied in Giles was not his
ability as an artist, or his money, or his swag-
ger English clothes; but his contemptuous in-
difference to making a scene.
The two or three huskies on our side of the
station merely gave him the once-over and
went on about their business. Oh, my be-
loved America, have we not much to learn
about the treatment of artists? But believe
me, I was tickled, just the same.
Of course, it was up to me to go get his bags;
he could not be expected to carry them himself.
So I ran down through the tunnel under the
tracks, up to Cousin Giles, took his bags,


SINISTER HOUSE
47
and that's what he was, I now believe, to his
country and to the world.
As we approached the Ford that morning
and he saw that there was a woman in it, he all
but balked. Probably he had had no sleep the
night before, for he had come from somewhere
down in Maine; and the thought of having to
ride so early in the morning with a common-
place woman gave his nerves another twist of
the screw.
But I said, “Come on, now, Giles, you've
got to be civil on such a fine morning. Besides,
it's Mrs. Grier."
“Grier! Grier!” he roared, making me hot
all over, “I don't know any Griers. Why the
devil should I be civil to Mrs. Grier?”
“Because," I answered in a low but angry
voice, “she's a damned fine woman whether
you know her or not and she is n't very well.”
"Huh! So you're going to give me a sick
one on this fine morning, are you? Damned if
I won't walk!”
We did n't often damn ourselves and each
other so freely, and I was mortified at the
thought that Julia might have heard. By the
way, I have never heard Eric use an oath of


SINISTER HOUSE 49
judge, was not what he was used to having
women do; and we rode on in silence for a good
while.
All of a sudden he asked her if she lived in
one of the new concrete stables they were put-
ting up out here. She laughed and told him
that she lived in the one old house that had
been left standing.
“I knew it!” he roared. “You've got sense.
I've seen you before, too. I stumbled on that
old place when I was here in June. Saw you
and your husband setting out flowers — fox-
gloves, n'est-ce pas ? How did you happen to
hit on that place? Look at all these other in-
sufferable boxes of houses! Look at that one
over there, like a county jail! No shade any-
where, either. But I say, you don't look so
well as when I saw you before. What's the
matter? Been ill?” .
“You don't think that old houses are
healthy, do you, Giles?" I threw back at him
over my shoulder.
“To blazes with health!” he cried inconti-
nently. “Always thinking of your bodies, you
Americans.” (If Giles was out of sorts, he al-
ways sailed into the Americans, just as if he
es


50
SINISTER HOUSE
were n't one himself.) “There's a spirit and
a soul to consider. These things you call
homes — Look at them! Garages, jails, me-
morial banks. Give me a house that has a
spirit in it, like Mrs. "
Julia's laugh was a little strained, I thought;
but the two of them fell into conversation.
They had both lived in Europe and all that
sort of thing; so I, who have never been farther
across the water than to Staten Island, gave
my thoughts to the smoothness of the Ford
and the good September sunshine and air. It
was Giles who did most of the talking, but
now and then Julia asked a question, and
once or twice she laughed.
At last we reached our home. I got Giles's
heavy luggage out on to the granolithic walk.
Annette came flying through the front door
and down to the car to greet him. My sensible
wife was not insensible of the fact that her
relationship to Giles gave her something of a
standing in the community. This morning,
largely for the sake of Julia, I imagine, she
greeted him with more enthusiasm than the
tie of second cousin usually prompts.
Lord, how human that is! But Giles stuck


SINISTER HOUSE
51
fast in the car. He hardly acknowledged
Annette's greeting at all, but tried to continue
his conversation with Julia just as if Annette
had not been there beside the car, looking right
pretty, too, in the bright sunlight. You see,
she has a good skin and pretty hair.
Well, it was a little humiliating for Annette;
still that was no excuse for her taking it out
on Julia Julia was really very sweet to
Annette that morning and thanked her spe-
cially for having been good to Eric Friday
night; and what did Annette do but say some-
thing about having brought a couple of night-
mares to the house with him!.
"I only said it half-jokingly,” she explained
to me later when I took her to task for it.
“You heard me, Pierre. I only said he had
brought a couple of nightmares to Bobbie and
Felicia. How could she have taken it so?
She knows that Bobbie adores Eric; she knows
old Felicia would lie down on the ground for
Eric to walk over her. She should n't be so
sensitive."
At the time I felt that a wrong had been
done; and I tried to relieve the situation by
reminding Annette that Eric had been good
ren


52
SINISTER HOUSE
enough to take the nightmares away with him.
That did n't improve the situation, but it
covered up the silence which had fallen upon
Julia's strange, inarticulate distress. Her
eyes looked quite horror-struck.
I remember thinking — well, women beat
the Dutch; and being glad that Annette
could n't see the mark on Julia's other cheek.
When women get going, no mere man can tell
where they'll end.
Giles was determined not to get out of the
car, but to go on with Julia and me to the old
house. I don't think he cared a hang about
seeing it, but he wanted to stay with Julia. ;
How he puffed and roared along the way.
In spite of him, however, there were silent
spaces. Julia said absolutely nothing and
laughed no more. The consciousness that
Annette's brusqueness had pained her never
left my mind.
But I had little idea how nearly Julia was
done for. To my utter dismay she fainted as
she stepped out of the car. Luckily, Giles,
who could be as courteous as a bear, had got
round to the door on her side to help her out;
and he caught her in his powerful arms as she
vas


SINISTER HOUSE
53
sank forward. My, he was strong! I think
he could have carried Annette, and he carried
Julia into the house as if she were a feather.
I ran ahead to open the door, fortunately on
the latch; and knowing the house, I piloted
him down the narrow hallway, hung with that
rosy stuff, and to the sitting-room, across the
floor of which the sunlight, streaming between
the rich curtains, lay in bright bars. It
touched the pillow on the sofa, just the place
for her head to rest. Her hat fell off as Giles
laid her down, and the sunbeams glistened
in her dark chestnut hair.
need to loosen anything round the
slender white throat, which rose spotless from
the loose blouse she wore. Giles, the thick-set,
knelt down beside her and chafed her hands.
For him at that moment there was but one
person in the world besides himself. He was
wholly absorbed in watching her face.
But only for a moment or two. He began
shouting for some one, any one; and ordered
me not to stand like a blockhead, but to fetch
water, find the servant, do something. He
himself rushed to part the curtains wider, and
he nearly tore them down from their rods
0


54
SINISTER HOUSE
doing so, and to open the windows and let in
more air.
Before I left the room, I heard Julia say
in a low voice: “Keep that thing away from
me! Don't let it touch me! Oh, Eric!”
How her whisper shook with horror.
By the time I returned to the room with a
carafe of water and word that the servant
would follow me with cologne, Giles had
dragged the couch, with Julia on it, to the
west windows, giving upon the veranda and
overlooking the river. A cool breeze came up
from the water and blew the curls round her
pale face; and Giles was standing looking at
her, his chin in his hand, his legs far apart,
his whole body tense and motionless.
“Is she better?" I whispered.
“Eh — yes,” he growled. “Wet a hand-
kerchief and put it on her forehead, you —
you."
I did so, and Julia opened her eyes. Dazed
at first, she asked for Eric; and when I told
her that he was gone, she said cryptically,
“He must not come back yet, not yet.” I was
at a loss to understand this until, as she re-
gained more of her strength, she repeated


SINISTER HOUSE
55
several times, “He must not see me like this.
He must not know.”
He would indeed have been tortured.
At last the old servant came in with the
cologne, and Julia held out a hand to me.
She spoke a word of thanks to Giles too, and
said to both of us, “It's a feminine absurdity.
It means nothing except that — Well, noth-
ing. I trust you not to say a word to Eric
about it."
She closed her eyes. The tears came push-
ing out slowly from beneath her pallid lids.
We knew it was time for us to go.
I had left the motor running. There's ex-
travagance for you, with gasoline mounting
towards the sky; but I did n't care. Giles got
up in the front seat beside me; and we started
off without a word. At last I said:
“That for your old houses. I don't believe
that one's healthy. I'll bet it's haunted,
TS
too."
But Giles never opened his lips, except to put
a cigarette between them, which he did not
try to light. We must have gone a mile be-
fore he shot out at me:
“Her husband?”


56
SINISTER HOUSE
“What about him?” I gasped, startled.
“Her husband?” he roared again.
“Look here, Giles,” I said, feeling pretty
serious; “he's a fine fellow, and she adores
him."


CHAPTER V
My temper was harrowed. The picture I
carried in my mind of Julia, pale and ex-
hausted, lying on the couch before the open
window over the river, away from the sun-
beams and with no glittering response in her
hair to the blue western light of early morning,
was one to stir in a man more nervous than
I that rising of feeling as against something
wrong.
Indeed, I was so upset that I managed to
put one over on my wife, whom I found paring
cucumbers in the kitchen and whom I treated
with great firmness, ending all resistance with
the flat statement that Julia was all in and no
fit subject to be told that her husband carried
nightmares round with him.
As for Giles, he kept to his room all the
morning; but at lunch he fairly put us through
an inquisition. He wanted to know about
Eric: who he was, where he came from, and
what he did.
We could n't tell him much. In fact, we
m mu


58
SINISTER HOUSE
did n't know anything about Eric — in that
way. Eric appeared to have a little money.
He had spoken to me of real estate in Chicago,
once, and I always supposed his income came
from that, and I supposed likewise that he had
just been to Chicago to see about it. I don't
know how it was that Giles put the little we
knew and the much we did not know about
Eric in an unpleasant light. He did just that,
in rather a nasty way; that is, he made Eric
out a man of mystery.
Furthermore, Giles's sympathy for Julia
was very intense, and that, too, somehow,
deepened the shadow on Eric. About her he
apparently knew far more than we had ever
known, though he utterly ignored our ques-
tions. Annette was pleased to frame up a
little mystery round Julia, then. It was rather
in the way of a joke, and chiefly to protect
Eric, who, after all, if his wife was going to be
sickly and nervous, had a claim on us for
sympathy too.
Giles's aspersions on the character of Eric
seemed to me quite unjustified. I brought to
his attention the evidence of Julia's own be-
havior and condition, which still I took to
was


60
SINISTER HOUSE
that there was something uncanny in this
business of Julia's ill turns.
It was amazing how Julia was herself again
the very next day; yet I saw a new look in her
face. It was n’t only a look. There was a
slight drawing of the lips you see on the faces
of persons who are concentrating all their
energies to meet a prolonged strain on their
nervous force. Her manner changed, too.
She was not stand-offish, but a little on her
guard.
As for Eric, during the next six weeks he
became more and more reserved. He grew
thinner, too, and his face too, had a wholly
somber expression. I noticed that he was
reserved even with Julia; and while his at-
tentions to her seemed no less actuated by
an unusually passionate and devoted love,
they were more controlled and perhaps more
formal. His hair, already touched with gray
when I first saw him, became almost white at
the temples and over the ears. I took it he
was worrying over Julia's health. There was
no doubt that she fell off when he was round,
and each time he went away she regained a
little less before he came back.


SINISTER HOUSE 61
was
Whatever was going on between them,
Annette and I knew it was none of our busi-
ness. So long as the weather stayed fine, we
had our own happy outdoor lives to lead.
We had our children, the Ford, and my vaca-
tion.
It was nothing to either of us what Giles
did with himself. We thought it very odd
that he tolerated Forsby so long. We more
than tolerated him. We learned to put up
with his tempers, to take him at his best.
We should have been glad to take Julia
with us on our outings now and then, but I
can't remember that she ever made one with
us at that time. I wonder why. I know she
needed company. Though our children are a
bit noisy, she loved them and they would have
done her good. I remember thinking that
they would be better company for a woman
in her state than Giles could be; but though
Giles was nervous and restless, there was
something resolute and straightforward about
him which may have been, I used to think,
what helped her best to pass the hours of her
separation from Eric. I let it go at that; fail-
ing utterly to realize how at that time she
din


62 SINISTER HOUSE
needed for a friend just such a man as Giles,
one who would keep her mind busy and vary
her thoughts.
The house, which most of Forsby consid-
ered an unwholesome place, fell under a
deeper shadow. Julia entertained fewer and
fewer guests there, and towards the end, before
she and Eric left it for good and all, Giles and
my wife and I were almost the only neighbors
who went there.
Nothing could throw Giles into a more
furious tantrum than Annette's antipathy to
the house. He liked the house, himself, but
in his self-assumed rôle of detective in regard
to Eric, he was always seeking to know what
had brought Eric to it. That used to irritate
me. I thought it unfair to Eric. I said to him
again and again:
: “He took it because Julia liked it at first
sight.”
Invariably he would reply that that did n’t
explain what had brought Eric to this God-
forsaken part of the world in the first place.
On one occasion, Annette, stung by his
ungracious allusions to Forsby, gave him back
an unusually vivid account of Julia's spooky


SINISTER HOUSE 63
0
JO
reception by the house in question, a house
which had a spirit in it, maybe two or three,
that flung open the windows and sang to un-
suspecting victims to tempt them into it.
“Tumble-down old haunted shanty," she
said, "fit for an insane asylum. Or for the
company of artists, of course, dear Giles, and
artistic people. Eric must have been crazy
to get it for her.”
Giles grew very icy. “You cannot be ex-
pected to see the spiritual charm in such
places, Annette."
“Yes,” said Annette with a little toss of her
head; “so Julia once told me. And no house
ever sang to me, either; and if one did, I hope
I'd have sense enough to stay out of it.” .
Giles pounded on the table — we were still
at lunch.
“But what I want to know," he roared in
his best style, “is why he brought her here
in the first place. Where does he come from?
What brought a man like him down to this
flat, deadly part of God's earth?”
“Maybe he, too, heard the singing over the
long-distance wire to New York,” I answered,
trying to smooth things out.


64
SINISTER HOUSE
Our little Bobbie was at the table. He
adored Eric and Julia and he seemed to have
caught the idea of the conversation as chil-
dren will, and to have taken an interest in it.
Childlike, too, he began, softly at first, but
with increasing clamor and violent approaches
to his mother's face, to ask over and over
again:
“Ma — ma, what brought Uncle Eric to the
Singing House? Ma - Ma! What brought
Uncle Eric to the Singing House?”
It got fearfully on Giles's nerves.
“Hush,” said his mother; "hush, hush.”
And then, unwinding his two arms with im-
patience: “If you don't stop your noise this
minute, Robert, you shall go to bed without
any supper to-night.”
He got down from his mother's lap then,
and crawled under the table. We tried to re-
gain our composure. But unobserved, that
lad of mine got round to Giles, and tugging
at his coat for attention (I wonder how ma-
licious children are), demanded his answer.
“Cousin Giles, what brought Uncle Eric
to the Singing-House?”
Giles sprang up in a fury.


SINISTER HOUSE 1 65
“Nothing good, you pest! Nothing good!”
he shouted and went raging out of the room.
I think that at first “Singing House” sug-
gested to Bobbie merely his cuckoo clock.
He had always been enchanted and a bit
frightened by the flying open of the little
door, the inexplicably sudden apparition of
the wooden songster, its song, and its equally
sudden silence and disappearance. Many
children tire of this regular, self-performing
miracle, and most boys will sooner or later
have the thing apart. Bobbie, on the con-
trary, would have been aghast at the mere
thought of dismembering even a wooden bird.
He was a sensitive little fellow. He feared
the clock at first, and his curiosity never got
liberated from his fear sufficiently for him to
venture a finger into the black hole from out
of which the bird sprang to sing. As for what
went on behind that door after it had closed
the poor bird in, I am sure he had lurid imagin-
ings.
How deep an impression the idea of a whole
Singing House made on the child we did not
suspect. I do not know what his mind peo-
pled it with besides his Uncle Eric and his


66
SINISTER HOUSE
Aunt Julia. Anyhow, the place began to be
somewhat fearful for him. Whenever we
drove past it in the Ford, he drew up closer
to me. He always sat on the front seat unless
we were out after dark; and there was, I felt,
something communicative in his fear.
At one time Annette — and I, too - used
to tell the little boy spooky stories, just to
make his eyes grow big and round. It is an
unwise and a cruel practice with children like
him, and we don't do it any more. Besides,
we know too well ourselves now how much
torture lurks in a dim and inconceivable thing
of terror. But at that time we were both ca-
pable of adding touches of gruesome horrors
to the stories we told him. We had no premoni-
tion of the lesson we were to learn, and that,
very soon.
Late one afternoon we were in a field, the
three of us, well up the river. It was still
warm, though the sun was dropping low. It
had been hazy all day, and we had been at
peace, untroubled by worry of any sort.
Annette had taken along with her a book
of myths and folklore, and had read one or
two of them to Bobbie, who would sit enrap-


SINISTER HOUSE
tured as long as she would read them. Just
before it was time for us to be starting back
home, she finished that rather revolting one
of the Lorelei. It was some Lorelei in that
version of the story – one with a hearty
appetite for human flesh. I can see the little
boy now, snuggled very close under his mo-
ther's arm. He was looking at the pages as
she read them, though he had n't begun to
learn his letters.
Facing the last page of the story there was
a crude engraving of the fascinating, man-
eating lady. Maybe you have seen it. She
sits alone on the top of a high rock above the
river, clothed only in her long bright hair and
a very scanty smock, which Bobbie probably
thought was her bib. She has horrid bold eyes
and her mouth looks well-fed. The narrow
plateau on which she sits is encumbered all
round her with thigh bones, presumably hu-
man, and skulls undoubtedly so.
Bobbie just stared at that. He had had his
finger on every bone and on every one of the
five strings in the harp she held in her hand.
I picked up the rugs and the lunch-basket
and went up to the car to make all ready for


68
SINISTER HOUSE
the ride home. But when I came back down
through the tall dry grass of the field to sum-
mon Annette and the boy to the car, I found
that they had not moved to prepare them-
selves for the start, that Bobbie was really
afraid to make a move in the twilight that
had already fallen upon the disappearance of
the sun. I had to pick him up in my arms
and carry him to the car.
The night air was already cool. I felt then
that it was wrong to read the little fellow
such horrible stuff and to let him see such
pictures. I spanked him in a friendly way and
promised him he should ride home on the
front seat. But that did n't work. He wanted
to be close to some one; and I had scolded him
so often for getting in my way when he was
riding beside me, that he knew well his only
hope for snuggling lay in the back seat. His
mother laughed at him, but took him under
her wing, wrapped him warm against the cold
breeze, and in the dark we started off.
We had ten miles to go, down along the river,
from which before long the mists began to rise,
spreading eerily over the marshes and settling
in the hollows of the road.


SINISTER HOUSE 1 69
“Silly boy!" I heard his mother say; "silly
boy, to be afraid.”
“Did she sing when she was hungry?” I
heard him ask in his high, tense voice.
“You are thinking of Little Tommy Tucker,
who sang for his supper," I heard her answer.
“But what was the Lorelei's supper, mama?
Did she eat little boys and girls?”.
And so on, until Annette, to get the horrid
idea out of his head, resorted to that repre-
hensible mixture of terrorism with morality
which many mothers administer to their chil-
dren; as, for example, her telling Bobbie that
only naughty people heard the Lorelei sing
at all, and all naughty people ought to be
eaten if they were n't.
How careful we both are now to keep the
conception of horror from taking root in the
minds of our children.
The night settled darker and darker and
colder and colder. Here and there we passed
through a queer warm streak in the air.
I finally told Bobbie over my shoulder that
there were no such things as Loreleis anyhow,
that the whole thing was nonsense.
But in a few minutes I heard him again:


70
SINISTER HOUSE
“Are n't there any Loreleis on the Hudson,
mama?"
“No, dear, there are n't any anywhere.”
“But Uncle Eric heard the Singing House.
Was there a Lorelei in the Singing House?
Was Uncle Eric a bad man and heard her
sing?"
“Come, come, my boy; he did n't hear any
one sing."
“But who did?”
“Aunt Julia just played she did.”
“Then there is n't any Lorelei in the
Singing House?”
“No, darling, and there was n't any singing
in it."
“Then it won't eat Aunt Julia?”
“Come on, my son," I broke in; “I'm so
hungry that if you keep on talking this way
I'll eat you.”
“And papa can't sing,” said my wife, seiz-
ing, as she always seized, the chance to give
me a playful jibe.
Bang!
A blow-out, and we were four miles from
home, and the night already heavy upon us.
A forlorn predicament. I got out and by the


SINISTER HOUSE
71
light of a miserable candle-stub began my
repairs.
While I was working Annette heard, faint
in the distance, the whistle of the 7.30 train
from New York, due in Forsby at 8.30.
“I wonder if Eric's coming back on that
train,” she murmured with a yawn. “And
I wonder where Giles is getting his supper."
Supper! Is there a more maddening word
to distract the mind of a fellow in my fix?
We stayed by the roadside a good half-hour;
and by the time we started on again, the night
was thick. We were savagely hungry and our
nerves were on edge. Fortunately Bobbie
soon fell asleep. We rode on in silence, my
mind on the road before me — often shrouded
in the night mist which took strange shapes
before our lamps, and my whole body crying
out for something warm to eat.
But even against Fords Fate sometimes sets
herself. Just by the gloomy hemlocks that
bordered the highway where it runs by Eric's
house, we suffered another blow-out. I swore
and stopped the engine.
Immediately the night was black about us.
For a moment I thought it was silent, too; but


72
SINISTER HOUSE
then my ears caught the sound of a woman's
voice, singing. It came from somewhere be-
hind those hemlocks, round which the mist
was in a strange and sinuous movement,
without any other sound to accompany it,
without any gleam of light — a voice in the
blackness, so dissociated from human life as
to suggest something unearthly.
To make matters worse, Bobbie, half-wak-
ened by the stopping of the car, began to
scream in terror:
“I hear the Singing House! I hear the
Singing House! Oh, mama, it is going to eat
me, it is going to eat me!”
It got terribly on my nerves, not only the
nerve-racking yelling, but the association of
the faint thread of song with the hideous story
of sorcery and inhuman cruelty.
“Oh, shut up!” I shouted at my son in a
temper, as I got myself stiffly out of the car.
His screaming subsided at once into a sort
of frightened whimpering, through which I
could still hear, though very faintly, a note
or two of the song.
But he let loose again, and clutched fran-
tically at his mother, when she had to move


SINISTER HOUSE
73
herself and him in order to let me get at the
necessary implements in the chest under the
back seat.
By the uncertain light of matches I struck
one after the other, I found my jack, my
tire irons, and my mending tissues; but no
trace of the candle-stub. I must have left
it at the place where we had been held up
before.
Well, I tried to light one of the kerosene
lamps. As luck would have it, it was empty
of oil. I tried all the kerosene lamps. They
were all empty; even the tail light, which I
seldom troubled to light in this remote part
of the world.
My cursing was ardent but low. There was
something in the blackness of the night -
the stars were all obscured by the haze —
there was something in the blackness, I repeat,
in the damp, heavy clinging of the mist, ex-
tra chill by those forever sunless trees, and in
the mysterious and only half-audible sound of
singing coming to us through the fear-haunted
thicket, which cast a spell over me and mine,
one I was not venturesome enough to shatter
with a loud, ringing oath. And there was


74
SINISTER HOUSE
Bobbie's incessant and agitating whimpering,
too, a sort of cold rill of fear.
It was impossible to do my work in the
darkness, and I made up my mind to go to
the house and ask for a light rather than to
burn gasoline for half an hour or more and
keep the engine running just for the front
lamps.
“Well, hurry, then,” Annette said to me,
half-whispering, herself. “Don't leave me
alone in this black hole.”
“I thought you had some sense, Annette,"
I growled crossly.
Taking a long breath as if I were going to
plunge into a cold bath, I stumbled down into
the dark driveway. I had n't felt my way
more than a few steps, however, before such a
heavy feeling as if peril were closing in round
us settled on me that I turned and went back
to the car. I meant only to reassure Annette.
As a matter of fact, I made her scream.
A second time I braved the clammy dark-
ness of the driveway, and this time I came in
sight of the house.
I say, in sight, because at last my eyes had
definite perception. Through one of the south


SINISTER HOUSE 75
windows, against which the curtains had not
been drawn, the uncertain and not very pen-
etrating light from a branch of candles was
streaming.
At first this was heartening, but almost be-
fore I had taken another step, I stopped short
in my tracks. Against that bar of light I saw
distinctly the silhouetted head and shoulders of
a man. Had he not moved, I certainly should
have taken the bulk which revealed him as a
protuberance from the dark mass of shrubs
along that wall of the house, the outline of
which was only half-distinct against the light.
He was standing some four or five feet from
the window, evidently looking in. It was a
movement nearer that had arrested my at-
tention.
One thinks only of wickedness in such mo-
ments. It never occurred to me that the fel-
low, whoever he was, might have been drawn
towards the window by the sound of singing,
faint but sweet, that came from the house, re-
cently as I had been reminded of the drawing
power of the hungry and destructive Lorelei.
I thought only that Julia was in danger of in-
sult, of shock, or even of some bodily harm.


SINISTER HOUSE
77
I knew I must leap when I reached the
bushes, for I could not hope to creep nearer to
him through them without much crackling, to
which not even the sweet singing could have
made the prowler deaf. That singing kept
smoothly on. I had a feeling that the fellow
was really listening to it, and I was glad, for it
served my purpose. Just before I decided it
was time for me to make the leap, I prayed
for a more ringing note.
My prayer was not granted. Instead, I
heard the singing shiver to a sort of sob. I
jumped, nevertheless, for even at that moment
I heard my prey lurch forward. He was actu-
ally rattling the window, which was low and
made, in the French fashion, to open like a
door.
What my half-blinded eyes saw through
that window when I leapt up I shall never
forget.
First, let me say, I recognized the man who
was rattling it to get in. It was Eric.
Then, within the room, I saw Julia still sit-
ting at the piano, but with her face turned
towards her husband and on it a look of un-
speakable horror.


SINISTER HOUSE
79
He did get in. But even then, she could not
propel herself towards him. It was he who
rushed towards her, and he hid her from me
in his embrace.
I felt almost sick. Just before I hurried
away, my eyes saw Giles, risen to his feet, his
face, turned into the light, amazed and horror-
struck, even as my own must have been.


82 SINISTER HOUSE
went up the driveway again, stumbled along
to the house, and knocked on the door.
I heard a scream, faint and quickly choked,
but none the less real. It was probably Julia,
startled out of her self-control.
To my surprise Giles opened the door.
Prompted by an instinctive feeling that I
must bring cheerfulness into that house I
hailed him in a hearty voice, then called down
anathema on tires, and demanded a light in
tones that filled up the long, rose-colored,
shadowy hallway, and must have struck the
ears of Eric and his bride pleasantly.
Eric came out from the living-room and
Julia followed him. He had honest, cordial
words of welcome for me; but it was Julia who
almost hysterically commanded me to stay and
sup with them.
I was taken off my guard. Through the door
whence they had both issued, I caught a
glimpse of the candle-lit living-room, of its
odd, old-fashioned furniture, its small, deep-
colored rugs, its dark hangings, and just a yel-
low flame or two of the fire burning in the little
grate. But I was ill at ease; my nerves were
shaking. I did n't like the house, warm as it


SINISTER HOUSE 83
felt and picturesque and cozy as it looked to
my eyes.
Yet before I knew it, Julia had me by the
arm, and was leading me back down the drive-
way,.pulling me along, in a great hurry to get
to the Ford out in the blackness and comman-
deer Annette and Bobbie. All the way she
kept up a chattering about how cold it was,
how hungry we must be, and how, in celebra-
tion of Eric's home-coming, we must stay and
help them make merry.
Under the run of this somewhat too urgent
hospitality I felt the strain of despair. I knew
that Julia actually had need of us in that house
to-night, for some terrible reason I could not
hope to fathom. I made up my mind that
much as we should be acting our parts in ig-
norance, we would not go back on her. We
could at least stand by. So I was cheerful with
Annette, and enthusiastic for a good, warm
supper there and then. And Annette could not
but accept this odd turn.
We roused Bobbie and went back to the
house, Julia keeping up with my wife the nerv-
ous talk that on the way out she had loosened
on me.
ery-


84
SINISTER HOUSE
As we approached the door, left open,
through which the faint, rosy light came out
into the dark, my boy began to twist and turn
in my arms. Without his supper he was fretful
and nervous, and he was frightened by the
night, too. Indeed, as I carried him up the two
steps of the porch, he began to kick me and to
pound my shoulder with tightly clenched little
fists. As yet he made no outcry, but I felt the
wind gathering force in his little chest; and
when we got inside the house and I set him
down in the hall, there was something in the
way he grabbed my legs and hid his face
against them that made me fear for the worst.
This we received in full measure when Eric,
always up to that time a great favorite with
him, tried playfully to catch him up in his
arms. Bobbie let out shriek after shriek, a
sound too much of terror for me to think it an
outburst of temper.
“Papa, Papa!” he screamed; “take me
away from him, take me away!”
v amazed and hurt, and I
was at a loss as to how to make things more
pleasant. Nothing can make a child courteous
if his instinct sets in the other direction. Bob-


SINISTER HOUSE
85
bie had no idea of concealing his sudden aver-
sion to his beloved Uncle Eric.
While Eric knelt down beside him to ques-
tion the cause of this painful manifestation,
Bobbie only screamed the louder to papa to
keep Uncle Eric away.
“Keep him away from me! Keep him
away! It hurts!”
"Is something hurting him?” Eric asked me
quietly.
"I guess he's just a tired, hungry boy,” I
answered. “What hurts you, my son? What
hurts you?”
Eric stood back against the wall, a tall,
somber figure. As soon as he did this, the ten-
sion of Bobbie's nerves seemed to be relaxed,
though he gave me no answer to my question,
but with a little shudder hugged my knees
tighter.
When I tried to take off my coat, we had
another scene.
Then Eric said in a low, troubled voice:
“He seems to be frightened of me. For
Heaven's sake, Pierre, is there anything wrong
about me to-night? I frightened Julia terribly.
I can't get over it.”


86 SINISTER HOUSE
“No wonder,” I said without thinking of
my words. “You came sneaking up to the
window out of the dark.”
“Julia told you?” he asked, suggesting by
his manner that Julia and I had a secret un-
derstanding out of which he was left.
Julia had not, as you know, said a word of it
to me. I am glad I told him frankly I had seen
him myself, and that I had taken him for a
prowler, bent on mischief.
“On mischief !” he cried. “On mischief! To
Julia? Oh, my God! I heard her singing and I
wanted to feast my eyes on her without her
knowing. But it was n't that. For a long time
after she recognized me it was worse with her.
A blind man could have felt it. She shuddered
in my arms, as if I were a thing of terror to her.
She tried — tried not to push me away.”
I had altogether too vivid an impression of
what my own eyes had seen to enjoy this per-
sonal revelation. It was hard to give my voice
an encouraging ring when I tried to assure him
that he imagined too much.
“That's nonsense,” I said, “your trying to
tell me Julia was trying not to push you away.
She must have been fooling.”


SINISTER HOUSE 87
“Fooling!” he groaned.
But I did n't let him go on. “And as for my
son, here," I added, “Annette's just read him
that gruesome story about the Lorelei and has
got him plumb scared. He's heard of the Sing-
ing — you know Julia's phrase — about the
Singing House, and when he heard Julia's
voice out there in the dark, he probably
thought that there's a spell-binder here that
wants to eat him. He does not know, Eric, old
man, that only the ladies do such horrid things."
Eric muttered, and then cleared his throat.
“There's something about me, Pierre. I
know it. There's something about me. I used
to think that Julia — I can feel it. Look at the
child here. And it's been trying to push Julia
away."
Though I laughed loudly at this notion,
later, when we were all in the warm living-
room awaiting supper, I could see that it had
got a hold on him. It must have been his own
thought that held us all so strangely aloof from
him. He might as well have stood within a
ring of malevolence. His isolation was all but
palpable; and in the midst of those who loved
him, too.


88
SINISTER HOUSE
Everybody in the room but Giles seemed
screwed up to a high pitch, and laughed and
talked with an unnatural animation, directing
questions at Eric as if consciously trying to
pierce whatever it was ringed him off from us.
He, habitually so courteous, tried to send
his answers back to us through the evil thing
that set him apart. He tried at first, too, to
walk among us; but whenever he came into
our midst, Bobbie's aversion broke out in
frightened whimperings and agitation, so that,
to smooth things over, Eric was compelled to
stand outside the group.
I can see him now, leaning against the frame
of the window through which he had made his
way in from the garden; his face taking on a
serious, set look, quite different from the mo-
bile sadness of his natural expression; the un-
even light from the branch of candles over by
that window now deepening, now relieving the
shadows round his eyes, and, as his eyes grew
hard, glinting back from them.
It was with the expression of a man setting
himself to make a bitter, deadly struggle that
he watched Julia, playing like a gentle lunatic
with little Bobbie standing between my knees.


SINISTER HOUSE 89
Poor Julia, slender and like a girl in her
white dress, flitting through the warm room
from one to the other of us. I could not bear to
look at that delicate, gentle face or into those
clear, gray eyes in which I had so lately seen
the shadow of an unspeakable horror. My
heart ached for her, though I hardly knew why
Bobbie's behavior to her husband must have
been like a knife-thrust in her breast; and she
set herself to winning the little fellow from his
fear, for her husband's sake I do not doubt.
Laughing with unnatural eagerness, trembling
and nervous, always playing bravely to simu-
late gayety, though she could not hide her
agitation, she threw herself lightly on the floor
beside me and began quizzing him, patting his
hands, mocking him, challenging him, until
she brought a smile to his little face.
Annette, who, I could see, was made very
uncomfortable by the rudeness of her only son,
stood over the three of us, and laughed and
coaxed with us.
Well, it may have been a pretty scene to one
looking in from the outside, but I was anything
but happy. Julia's tenseness was harrowing,
and her determination to win Bobbie over and


90
SINISTER HOUSE
walk him right up to Eric somehow threw me
into the state of a too anxious onlooker at a
desperately vital game. I found myself, as it
were, pressing my little son away from me to
her, and holding my breath over every inch she
drew him from the protection of my knees.
It was a slow and nerve-racking business,
She drew him truly only an inch or two at a
time; and always he would have fallen back
against me had I not kept my hands ready to
block the way of his retreat. Was it cruel to
the child? We did not then know what evil
Julia, single-handed, was fighting. One look
at her face would have aroused your sympa-
thy. We did not mean to offer my boy as a —
The thought is too terrible.
I happened to glance towards Eric. God
knows, he was susceptible. Unable to bear the
sight of this wrestle of wills to force a way to
him, he had turned his face from us and, still
by the window, was looking fixedly out upon
the lawn.
Suddenly, and I know of no reason why it
should have been so, at that moment it flashed
upon me that he was the goat in all this, he
was the unfortunate object of the malevolence I


92 SINISTER HOUSE
Eric turned suddenly towards us and raised
his clenched fists above his head. His face was
distorted. But it was neither his gesture —
which, God knows, was of desperate rage
against some evil thing, not against Bobbie
and me — nor the frightful look on his face,
which stopped me dead short. I saw -
Wait a moment. My blood turns cold as I
write. I wish to set down precisely every de-
tail I can remember.
I must have been holding Bobbie well off the
ground, for as my hand that held him went
suddenly powerless, I heard him fall in a heap
on the floor, heard the thwack of his little
boots. His yelling was hushed to silence. And
then I heard — No, that thing was —
I was standing in the middle of the room,
about seven feet from Eric. He was still over
against the curtains by the window, the can-
dles at his right casting a dancing light upon
his ashen, distorted face, and his wild arms.
Mind you, this was all in a second or two.
Bobbie lay crumpled at my feet, the two wo-
men were behind me, and Giles, in an attitude
of lounging from which my extraordinary be-
havior was to make him spring, was on a sofa


SINISTER HOUSE
93
pulled out about three feet from the wall to
my left, leaving a free way along that wall.
Stepping from in front of Eric, against
whom it must have been invisible, a vague
shape passed like a blur across the candle-
light, and then, transparent yet visible in its
whole length against the dark hangings of the
wall, it walked along the side of the room, be-
hind Giles, and out the door into the dim, rose-
colored hallway. I say it walked; but really it
moved in some half-human, half-fiendish gait,
slowly yet in springs. It was the shape of a tall
woman. Though its eyes had no substance,
they had form, dreadfully flat; and color — a
washed-out, chalky blue. They were of the
kind that in a living, warm body never revolve
in their sockets, the gaze of which is directed
by a turn of the whole head; and as this thing
passed along the wall, its insubstantial head
was turned at me, so that I was subjected to
a lidless stare of incredibly sinister malice. I
felt frozen..
I believe I saw this thing; I believe that in a
horrible amazement I watched it every inch of
its way till it turned down the hall corridor in
the direction of the dining-room.


94
SINISTER HOUSE
It made absolutely no sound in its passage;
but what should have been its feet - I saw
movement under its skirt-like draperies —
touched the floor in time with the beat of
Julia's hands. I could not see Julia, but I be-
lieve that at that moment she was lying prone
on the floor, slowly beating her hands on the
rug, each hand alternately.
I cannot remember more details.
Giles sprang up and put an end to what I
am willing you should call my fit by roaring
out:
“What the devil are you looking at?”
There was something in his voice that stilled
every movement in the room. My hand,
which I had raised to brush a dank mist from
before my eyes, was arrested halfway to my
face. I believe the candle-flames burned sud-
denly straight into the air, without a tremor;
but that must have been because the uneasy
wind had ceased for an instant to blow in
through the window, still ajar behind Eric.
There was complete silence, too. My extra-
ordinary seizure and Giles's sharp cry prob-
ably frightened everybody. I know Bobbie
made not even a whimper, and Julia's monot-



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SINISTER HOUSE
95
onous drumming ceased. We were all spell-
bound in diverse, strained attitudes.
There came an answer to Giles's imperious
question. I can't tell you how or whence it
came.
Giles had asked me what I was looking at.
In the silence which followed his sharp ques-
tion a name echoed in my brain. Probably I
did not hear it. I dare say whatever vibration
made the impression of that name in my brain
had not rattled the little bones in my inner
ear; and that is the way they tell us we re-
ceive impressions of sound. Maybe it was n't
earthly sound. At any rate, the name was dis-
tinct. It was “Snart," and it was followed by
a disagreeable sound between a chuckle and a
whine.
I think my son received the same impression,
for through his body, huddled against my feet,
I felt a shudder pass. But I never spoke to him
about that night. I have protected him from
any mention of it; and I have faithfully and
seriously tried to protect his mind from every
hint of weirdness and horror whatsoever.
Call it the rattle of leaves on the stark
bushes outside the window; call it the moan of


SINISTER HOUSE
97
eyes, if one can call eyes the deep black holes
beneath his brows, behind which, I now know,
there must at that moment, when he was so
beset, have burned a feeling too terribly pro-
found to show the faintest glow.
I wonder would it have been better for that
unhappy man had I come out with the ghastly
name, as I had been on the point of doing.
Annette touched me on the arm. Neither
she nor I can remember whether she said any-
thing to me or not. I stooped down and picked
up my son. Giles was lending a hand to Julia,
and for an instant it struck me as funny, this
restoration, this setting up of what had been
knocked down by some unnatural passer-by.
Maybe I should have laughed aloud but for
Eric's face.
Annette's cry had not changed it. For
months she had called him Eric; to-night she
had called out to Mr. Grier. Was he then a
stranger to us all at once? I never felt closer
to him; and I never before wished so ardently
to befriend a fellow-being.
You see, it was that sudden inspiration I
had had, the sudden revelation that had set
me to go up to Eric with my boy, just before


98
SINISTER HOUSE
the ghost woman had appeared: a flash of
understanding that all the evil about the place
was directed at him. While it attacked Julia,
Bobbie, and me, who were most fond of him,
in that mysterious way the effect of which was
to keep us from him, I knew that its ultimate
victim was Eric himself.
I have since reasoned about what I felt
vaguely that night: that Eric, of all men, was
most sensitive to such a form of persecution.
Not only that, but also, that he was impreg-
nable to every other sort of malevolent attack.
That's what Giles meant by “tempered in
white hot resentment,” I now know.
Meanwhile, with my boy held tightly in my
arms and my anxious wife at my elbow, I had
Eric's face always before me. The uneasy
wind came in through the window again and
bent the candle-flames. I could not bear it
any longer.
I handed my son to his mother. The little
fellow at first would not let me go, clung
tightly to me, and hid his face against my
coat. But when I said, “Mother wants you,”
he turned quickly to her, where she stood
close beside me, reached out his arms, locked


100 SINISTER HOUSE
“Oh, no,” Eric said; “oh, no."
What would that name have meant to
Eric? It was just that I feared, yes, instinct-
ively feared, to know.
His jaw was set and his lips so tightly
closed that all the red had gone out of them;
yet I could not help feeling that his will was
engaged with some purpose other than self-
control or self-adjustment, because I never
stood by a man so rigidly under discipline of
himself. Though my hand was on his shoul-
der, I was as remote from him as one is from
a lion at the Zoo, whose terrible, fixed eyes
and stare cannot be diverted or altered by
any human trick to catch attention.
If Eric had seen nothing and had heard
nothing, then he scented something, had a
sense of it somehow; and he had become en-
tirely concentrated, entirely instinct.
Giles once said to me, as we were talking
over this affair later, that hate is the most
absorbing passion. He went on at a great rate
about man's reactions to things that hurt
him mortally, that threaten to spoil what is
dear to him, or to take something away from
him that is necessary, not only to his body, but


102 SINISTER HOUSE
Well, I went on saying “nonsense" with a
more and more absurdly “nice kitty” air.
Twice he started to speak, but he only
opened his lips enough to take in a breath
through his teeth. His jaw remained set.
When he did speak at last, I know he did not
think of my being near to hear him. But I
heard.
“I begin to suspect,” he said. “She said
she would, always. It's fiendish; but she
would if she could.”
Then he darted a look at me, and I just
babbled something as if I had not heard him
at all.
Suddenly the whole expression of his face
changed to one of what the novelists call
"infinite longing.” I did not need to turn
round to know that Julia was coming up to
him. Her eyes were shining, and I thought
she was laughing happily. It made me feel
good: just as if nothing had happened. She
reached one hand up to Eric's shoulder and
took me with the other, and then said:
“What are you two men talking about so
seriously here by yourselves? Supper is
ready. You, Pierre, must be starved.”


SINISTER HOUSE 103
She looked at me perfectly frankly. I was
astounded. In spite of myself, I began to feel
that my mind was queer, that I had imagined
the whole thing. I felt dazed, and also —
silly..


CHAPTER VII
THOROUGHLY ashamed, too. That's the word.
Books which teach etiquette of the drawing-
room had better put in a special clause to warn
students against behaving before their hosts
as if they were seeing the hideous family
specter pass along the wall of the dwellings
in which they are being entertained. My
behavior could hardly have been courteous
and a look I caught in Giles's eye once or
twice made me fairly cringe with shame.
I dared not look at Julia. Not once during
supper did I catch her eye. As for Eric, he
was quiet, but no more so than usual; yet I
think his smiles were only a subdued reflec-
tion of Julia's excessive merriment. Giles was,
of course, the life of the table, life with a good
deal of stinging snap in it. If only I could
have consoled myself with conviction that
there was an undercurrent of something mys-
terious; but I assure you there was not the
slightest sign of such a thing. Annette thought
I was n't very well; that's all. My sudden


SINISTER HOUSE - 105
understandings and my horrid vision - I
might as well have had a stomach-ache.
Just the same, deep down in my heart, or
stomach, if you will, I knew I had not been
dreaming and also that I had suffered from
no ordinary ill turn. My weird experience was,
I knew, overlaid with my usual habits of
thought and expression. I had been the first
to deny them, too. Yet that experience had
startled into shivering sensitiveness an un-
familiar nerve within me, one of which I had
not learned control. Thanks to my own ra-
tional way of living, and to the conduct of
those about me at table, the thrill of it was
subsiding. But it had been laid bare, it had
been awakened, it was tuned to respond to the
slightest vibrations, and it was not to leave
me long in quiet.
On the wall of the dining-room, opposite me,
there hung a long, rich curtain. I think I knew
there was a door behind it, though how I knew
I cannot say. At any rate, I am not by nature
inquisitive, and I had never wondered into
what passage, closet, or room it gave access.
I found during the supper that if I looked at
that curtain the new nerve trembled within


106
SINISTER HOUSE
me. This was inexplicable. There was little
enough design on the cloth, no shape I could
recognize, faded, heavy, gold embroidery that
stood out only faintly from the deep blue
velvet; yet I found I could not look at that
curtain for long without beginning to shiver
inside.
Mind you, I was crushed enough, I con-
trolled myself, I did not tell anybody what I
felt. Heaven forbid! I did n't even let any
one catch me looking at it. But once or twice
I caught Eric looking very sharply at it, and
very intently, as if he were trying to place a
noise that came from behind it. That made
me feel queer, too.
Now, when we rose from the table Eric
went straight to that curtain. I began to
shudder as with an ague. Bobbie began to
whimper, though he had been well-behaved
throughout the meal.
Eric drew the curtain a little to one side.
I saw the doorknob and I saw Eric put his
hand on it and turn it. He bent his head to
the panel of the door, as if listening. He
pushed the door gently, but it did not open.
Suddenly, like a flash, Julia rushed up to
real.


SINISTER HOUSE 107
him, put her small hand over his on the knob,
and laughing, but quite pale, she said:
“Now, my dear, remember what you prom-
ised me about that room."
She could n't move his hand from the knob,
however. Was it because of that she began
backing slowly from him? Was it because of
that her face took on the haggard look I had
seen on it before? For my own part, I began
to feel cold again, and in spite of all my efforts
to control myself, I shivered so that my teeth
chattered. I could have jumped at Eric and
thrown him from that door.
At that moment Giles caught sight of Eric.
“Where does that door lead to, Grier?” he
called out, going over to stand beside him.
“I've often been curious about it."
Julia stamped her foot and gave a shrill laugh.
“I will not have you men fooling round that
horrid place,” she said.
And then she told us that the shape of the
room was so ugly that she could not bear it,
that from the first she had made up her mind
never to have it opened, that she had thrown
a lot of their useless and broken-down furni-
ture into it, and locked it up.


SINISTER HOUSE
109
UC
from her husband's lips and laughing over it,
that she had not found a bolt on this side of
the door safeguard enough against some one's
opening it, perhaps quite innocently; and she
had sent to New York for a locksmith to come
and set a Yale lock in it.
“And she promptly mislaid the key,” Eric
concluded.
All this was in itself innocent enough; but
that new nerve of mine would n't cease shiv-
ering until they had all stepped away from the
door; and then I almost jumped a foot into the
air when Giles roared out the name of “Blue-
beard.”
There's another fearful story for you. Of
course we had told it to Bobbie many times.
He was familiar with all the details of it. I
thanked my stars that Annette had already
made off with him down the corridor towards
the living-room.
Julia darted ahead of us men and joined
my wife. We followed them down the narrow,
rosy way. Eric was half-smiling again, but
there was n't much light in his face. I remem-
ber he told Giles as we went along that the
only irrational thing he had ever discovered


SINISTER HOUSE 111
I laughed to hear myself talk to it when I set
it down on the running-board of the car.
I did my work carefully and well. I put my
mind wholly on it. I knew just what I was up
against, and that was a comfort. Yet I
could n't have been myself, because when, just
as I was making ready to pump up the mended
tire, I thought I heard the sound of footsteps
coming up from under the hemlocks, the cold
sweat broke out all over me.
I listened and strained my eyes. For a
hundred dollars I could not have picked up the
candle and walked to the place whence I fan-
cied the sound had come. I just stood still,
thoroughly scared.
In a moment or two I heard the same sound
again. It's a wonder to me I did n't turn and
run. Something white was moving up towards
me from the driveway. The sight of it took
all power of motion from my legs. It took the
strength from under my stomach, and that
organ felt as if it had dropped a foot inside
me.
When the thing came nearer and I recog-
nized Julia, I could not speak for the huskiness
in my throat. There I stood beside the Ford,


112
SINISTER HOUSE
in my shirt-sleeves, the pump dangling from
one hand; and there she stood beside me, in her
white evening dress; and the only light in all
the world to shine on us two was from the
candle on the running-board.
“Pierre,” she said, without waiting for me
to speak, “do you think I am crazy?”
I tried to call her name, but a queer noise
came out of my restricted throat.
“Do you think I'm crazy?" she repeated.
“What a question!” I said at last.
We were both hardly more than whispering.
“Never mind. Do you? Answer me, for
Heaven's sake.”
“Of course not, Julia, dear.”
“Good,” she said. Then she came very close
to me and whispered. “Neither do I think you
are. I know you saw something in my house
to-night.”
She took my sleeve and looked up at me, but
her face was not more than a deep shadow. I
was afraid her skirt would catch fire. It was
very near the candle-flame. I bent down and
moved the candle; and our shadows, vague
and enormous on the mass of foliage behind us,
made a gigantic swing.


SINISTER HOUSE
113
“Tell me,” she went on, still whispering.
“How many did you see?”
“One," I answered, feeling, I don't know
why, shamefaced.
"I thought so. The woman?”
“Yes.”
I began to be calmed by her matter-of-
factness. While I could not but feel she was
highly wrought, her voice, her manner, and
her quiet actions assured me that she faced
whatever the situation was without dismay.
It was a business to make the heart sick; but
in the certainty that it existed I found some-
thing soothing.
After a moment or two of silence, I asked:
“Is there more than one?”
“Two,” she answered. “An old man, be-
sides. He is n't so — so vile, but he makes it
all the harder for me. She comes first. He
comes later. She shan't do it alone, ever.”
“Do what, Julia, alone?" I asked, the words
catching in my throat and almost strangling
me.
“Kill me,” Julia replied quietly.
I thought she might be going to faint, her
voice was so low; but I had better have worried


114. SINISTER HOUSE
about myself. It was I who was nearest quak-
ing. My blood was like ice water in my veins.
I longed to run with her back to the warm
house, haunted though I believed it to be;
to sit near a warm fire, to escape from our cold
loneliness and our soundless, grotesque, vast,
black shadows.
But when she next spoke, her words stiffened
me with the thought that ever again to escape
from this horror must be at the price of quit-
ting her.
“They have nearly done for me," she said.
“You have come in the nick of time.”
“For God's sake, then,” I cried out, “leave
this dreadful house."
“It is not the house, Pierre.”
I don't know what I was thinking of. I had,
perhaps, no connected thoughts, and no sus-
picion. I just spoke; I just said:
“Eric."
“Eric,” Julia repeated after me; and I felt
as if my mind had been split from my body,
so instantly did a million terrible and vague
thoughts spring up and multiply in it.
Julia was shivering against me, and I said:
“You are cold.”


SINISTER HOUSE
115
Then I put my coat round her.
For ten minutes she talked to me, not rap-
idly and consecutively, but in sentences, or
even fragments of sentences, some of which
were like sparks to the tinder of my imagina-
tion, while others left me still in the dark.
Julia was proud and high-spirited. It was not
easy for her to ask help of me in her more than
distressful situation. I think, however, she
wanted me to understand. She needed, let
us say, my comradeship in what might lie
ahead of her.
As to her own conduct up to the present,
that I could see had been governed by her
entire and unquestioning love of Eric, which
was, also, the source of that strength of hers,
more valiant and enduring than I or any one
else can well appreciate. For instance, she and
her husband had not been settled in the house
a week before she acknowledged to herself
that there was an influence in the place, not
natural and not good, which was trying to
alienate her from her husband's companion-
ship. It was insidious, but it was real.
She had had even a vague suspicion that the
evil something emanated from Eric; but this


116
SINISTER HOUSE
was
was so intolerable that by sheer force of will
she banished it utterly from her mind. She
faced the possibility that the house was
“haunted.”
This was, she thought at the time, a gro-
tesque and an unsubstantiated fear. She
“fancied” she felt things; that was all. She
had bad “dreams.” She was in danger of
letting her imagination run away with her.
Up to the time that Eric first went away,
she could not say that she had really “seen”
anything; just once or twice the outline, per-
haps, of a woman; no body, no substance.
That this had appeared in the middle of the
night while Eric slept peacefully at her side
she held as evidence against the soundness of
her own mind. The feebly restraining touch
of cold finger-tips on her face when she turned
towards her husband, she took as a symptom
of slightly disordered circulation."
Never, then, had she thought of telling
Eric. She should have been ashamed, for one
thing. After urging him to take that particu-
lar house! Then, too, there was — it was —
something was — “vile.” She should have
suffered almost anything rather than let Eric


118
SINISTER HOUSE
lore
she had become afraid, that the nearness of
her husband was becoming more and more
dreadful to her. She had fought, fought with
all her strength to keep beside him, to preserve
their intimacy.
She could n't explain to Eric. It was all
unbelievable. She could substantia te nothing.
Eric saw nothing.
The greater the effort she made to draw
near him, on the other hand, the more that
malevolent thing became “incandescent."
She was terrified by the visible appearance.
She was losing her strength. Eric was in an
anguish of mind. He said little, but she knew
that he could explain her conduct only one
way. He thought that she was losing her love
for him, that he was unpleasant to her; and
she could do nothing but protest in words.
Her will to act, her insatiable desire to act,
aborted through fear.
She simply was powerless to explain to Eric.
There was something so loathsome in the
malice of that fiend that she could not speak
of it to Eric, whose ultra-sensitive nature
would have been sickened and revolted be-
yond endurance. Once she had tried.
2


SINISTER HOUSE
119
I knew the name. She had heard it, too.
Yes, once she had mentioned it to Eric. The
effect upon him was "indescribable.” She
would not speak of it to him again.
No; she would not leave the house. It was
plain to her that the “house” was not "in-
fected.” The source of the evil was in
She could n't utter that, but I guessed what
she had in mind. Undoubtedly, the evil was,
for some unknown and unimaginable reason,
strongest in that house; but what avail to go
elsewhere with Eric? The secret ghost would
follow him.
Did I not remember Annette had said that
Eric had brought “nightmares” to my son?
There would be nightmares everywhere for
Julia. If the horror were to be utterly routed,
then it must be overcome in its stronghold.
“What,” she cried out in torment, “has this
specter to do with Eric, and what has Eric
to do with this house?”
She made a movement of despair with her
arms, grotesquely and furtively imitated by
the huge black shadows on the foliage of the
hemlocks.
“I believe, Julia,” I replied, trying to speak


SINISTER HOUSE
121
hands. And the suspicion of the source of that
evil, once banished, intolerable to the mind,
had become –
“Eric must speak!” I called out.
Julia laid her hand over my mouth that
blasphemed the man who, in spite of all she
had undergone, remained to her dearest of all
things upon the earth.
“Don't,” she whispered. “Oh, don't. Per-
haps something in his life - you don't know
him as I know him — too terrible for — I can-
not dig him open like a grave. We cannot rifle
him. Say nothing. Say nothing to Eric. In due
time – He is great-souled. In due time, his
time.”
There was an end to our talk. We started
back to the house; but I had the tire still to
pump. I begged her to go on without me, for
the wind was cold and she was most thinly
clad; but she insisted upon standing by while
I pumped. The exercise brought up my spirits
a little. I asked her to try a hand, not wholly
jokingly, but knowing the exercise would warm
her as it had warmed me; yet she hardly heard
me.
She did not speak again until we went to-


122
SINISTER HOUSE
gether up the steps to the front door, and then
it was to implore me to respect Eric's dumb
“grief.”
We entered the rose-colored hallway. Be-
fore we reached the door to the living-room,
Eric had come out to meet us. He looked
anxiously at Julia.
“My dearest girl," he said reproachfully;
“out of doors this cold night without a
wrap!”
“Never mind, Eric, dear, I have been help-
ing Pierre mend the tire.”
She went gayly into the living-room, and I,
rubbing my hands, Eric's touch affectionately
upon my shoulder, followed her.
It was late, and when Annette saw me come
in she immediately stood up and prepared to
go home. Julia would have had us all stay; she
wanted company. Giles, too, feeling, I dare
say, that he had been cheated of Julia's society,
was all for settling down into another hour's
talk.
But Annette was right. She's always right.
We had to go on, for Bobbie's sake if for noth-
ing else.
“All ready, dear,” I called out cheerfully,


126
SINISTER HOUSE
At that, Annette leaned forward and whis-
pered, “Not really?”
“So,” cried Giles in a flash, "you have
heard that unsavory name before.”
“A man named Morgan Snart built the
house,” Annette explained with a troubled
look at me.
“Good,” said Giles. "I have tried to find
out from Grier who built that house. He is
not the man to ask. Morgan Snart. I must
n't forget that.” He took a little book from
his pocket and wrote the name down in it,
talking to me sarcastically all the time. “And
of course he was insane, this Morgan Snart,
a murderer, a suicide, or something. It's only
such unfortunates that come back to earth,
is n't it, Pierre? Nothing else would do."
He scribbled away.
“I don't know anything about him," I
grumbled, “except that he's dead.”
“Yes; of course, dead, too. That's the per-
fect idea of a ghost, is n't it, Pierre?” And
then, closing the little book with a slap, he
said cuttingly: “I tell you, my idea of a ghost
is something quite different. Dead men rise
up never – read even your poets. Ghosts


SINISTER HOUSE
127
breed in the living. That's where we'll catch
them.”
He stood up and started for the little room
under the stair, looking at his watch.
“What are you going to do, Giles?" I asked.
“It's only eleven. I'm going to telephone
to a friend of mine in New York — a lawyer.
I don't suppose your ghosts ever walk much
before midnight, do they? Maybe we'll lay
this one before the witching hour strikes."
I sprang up.
“For the love of Mike, Giles,” I cried,
“stop this damned mockery! You think
I'm nuts. All right; but I tell you there's
a woman in that rotten old house that —”.
“I have entire confidence in Julia,” he said
coolly. “She is a rational and an invincible
woman.”
“You are sure of that, are you?” I asked,
equally calm.
“Perfectly."
“Well, then, Julia may have something to
say that will change your opinions."
“I shall have something to say,” he an-
swered scornfully, “that will change yours.”
a
.


SINISTER HOUSE 129
while they were going I did n't have such
terrible pictures of what Julia might be going
through.
It must have had its comical side: Annette
stealing an anxious look at me every two or
three minutes, I looking mournfully at her,
and neither of us saying much.
After we put out the lights, we both lay in
our beds without moving, until about four
I heard Annette get up and go to the window.
“Have n't you been asleep, dear?" I whis-
pered. “What's the matter?”
"I can't sleep for worrying. You have
frightened the life out of me, Pierre. I don't
know whether your mind's all right or not.
You sound crazy. You looked wild to-night.
You ought to see a doctor. And Julia, maybe
she's crazy, too. I don't think you ought to
go there any more.”
“But she needs me, and you, too. She and
Eric are desperately afflicted. We must n't
go back on them. We must n't withhold
anything of comfort or strength to her. Don't
be afraid.”
Let me remind you that it was n't pleasant.
I cannot remember much that happened the


130
SINISTER HOUSE
next day. I remember that it was fair, that
the sun shone with a golden radiance in which
no ghost could survive. Giles was at breakfast
with us, though I found out later that he had
not gone to bed at all. I tried to get him to
come with my wife, the children, and me; but
he would not be prevailed upon, and I dare
say we had a jollier time without him.
We had a picnic — somewhere in away from
the river. We did not take the highway that
ran past Eric's house. It was near a haymow,
I think, against the side of which I slept in
the warm sun for a couple of hours. If Annette
read to Bobbie at all, it was from “Little
Men.” Or it may have been “Little Women."
Though I passed a not too melancholy day,
as we started home before sundown, I began
to feel depressed. We picked up Dr. Gresham
by the roadside on the way back. He was the
only physician in Forsby and his car had
broken down out in the country. I remember
we went a mile out of our way to take him
to his house, and one or the other of us said
half-seriously that he hoped there'd be no
sickness in the outlying parts of the commun-
ity that night.


132 SINISTER HOUSE
and looking far below, I could see its reflection
in the invisible water. My foot kicked against
a stone on the veranda floor. Absent-mindedly
I picked it up, and leaning over the veranda
rail, let it drop from loosened fingers. The
ping of its hitting the boulders below and a
faint splash were just audible in the otherwise
wholly silent night.
Why was it that in the midst of such tran-
quillity I had a sudden sense of evil's being
done? I straightened and turned round
sharply, man's natural physical reaction to the
spur of a sudden unpleasant thought.
Eric was just on the point of speaking. He
had actually said a word or two, which I
missed. I think he meant to unburden himself
of — Let it go. I have no proof. My sudden
movement put an end to it, anyhow.
“What's the matter, Pierre?” he asked me
quietly.
“Nothing,” I responded.
The side of the house was almost blotted
out in the darkness, but looking restlessly
towards the north I saw a faint, colorless
glow. It seemed to come from a window in a
bow that was built out from the side. . The


SINISTER HOUSE 133
VA
veranda did not run that far. Against the
uncertain light I saw something moving,
swinging slowly. It was a shutter; and as
there was hardly a breath of air stirring, the
movement struck me as queer and mysterious.
I called Eric's attention to it.
He started towards it and I followed his
vague form.
“I wonder,” he said, “what has loosened
that shutter? That is a window in the room
to which Julia has taken her strange aver-
sion."
We went to the end of the veranda, and he
leaned out trying to touch the shutter, but
could not reach it.
“There's some one in the room," I sug-
gested.
“That cannot be,” he replied. “The door's
always locked. You know. You heard. No
one is allowed to go into that room.”
“But the light?” I said.
“There's no light. Look for yourself.”
True enough ; there was no longer any
light.
Eric lit a match or two, which he held out
as far towards the window as he could reach,


138
SINISTER HOUSE
window that gave on the veranda over the
river. It was tightly fastened and the curtains
before it did not sway a hair's breadth. No
air blew in there from the outside. Besides,
there was no wind, anyhow.
As I came back to my place on the sofa,
Julia glanced up at me, and her look told me
that it would be useless to try to shut off that
discomforting draught. It came through no
window. It had no direction. Yet when I
settled down on the sofa, my neck below the
back of it, from time to time the hair on my
head was slightly moved, not by such a dis-
turbance of air as would be created by the
passage of a person behind me, but as if a
mischievous sprite were blowing on it.
Nothing could have been slighter or more
swiftly passing; yet nothing — in that warm,
firelit room and in the midst of a company
apparently absorbed in intercourse — could
have been more unnaturally and more insist-
ently tormenting, or more chilling.
Over our coffee we talked of nothing at all.
If I was ill at ease, then, it was only from
vague forebodings or troubled imaginings of
what Julia might be dreading or even already
IO


SINISTER HOUSE
139
suffering. I knew the specter was in our midst;
I had not begun to suffer from it.
For a minute or two after the old servant
had taken our cups away, too, the thing re-
frained from actual contact with me. Julia
knocked the black lumps of coal into smaller
pieces, from which bright yellow flames burst
out, illuminating our faces oddly; Annette
took up her knitting; Giles lit a cigar. It was
all peaceful enough. I remember that Eric
sat behind us all, farthest from the fire, into
which he gazed meditatively most of the eve-
ning, Annette tells me. Only she and Giles
could watch his face.
But Annette asked Giles quietly to tell us
now how he had passed the day; and it was
then I got up and went to the window to see
if it was open. It was then I first felt that
draught. I think it must have been the touch
of icy, spectral fingers.
I was able to listen to Giles's tale until this
touch became something worse. I made the
greatest effort of will I was capable of to follow
him all along. I suspected that he was put-
ting Eric through an inquisition. But later —
Later I both heard and did not hear.


140 SINISTER HOUSE
In response to Annette, Giles said he had
had a very interesting day; but before re-
counting it, he began to praise Julia for the
charm of her house: what she had been able
to make out of such a freakish old summer
cottage, built by a man, who — he had learned
- had been noted for a cold sense of piety
rather than a warm sense of beauty, and had
certainly “bequeathed” her little to work on.
I recall his accent on the word.
It was a good thing for the commuters who
lived in Forsby that Julia had come among
them. Her influence would not be wholly
lost.
"By the way,” — and he spoke to Eric, not
Julia, — “how did you ever happen to come
to this part of the world, Grier?”
You can imagine that Annette and I pricked
up our ears at that. As for Eric, Annette told
me afterwards that he never moved a muscle,
except to raise his eyebrows as if surprised
that Giles should suddenly drag him thus into
a conversation in which he had had but a
drowsy interest.
He answered lazily, clearing his throat a
little:


SINISTER HOUSE
141
“I don't remember, Farrow, just how it was.
Ask Julia. Do you, dear?”
Truly I believe that the past was dead for
him. By force of his will to live he had made
it as if it had never been. He denied it to him-
self. And if he denied it to himself, it was no
lie for him to deny it to others. But Giles kept
prodding and prodding into it, and was to do
even more; and I know that its sudden coming
to life again drove Eric for the time being mad.
Julia could have had no suspicion of what
Giles was doing. She remembered how Eric
and she had been led into this part of the
world, when, towards the end of their honey-
moon, they were wondering where to settle
down.
Dear me, there was no talk this night, as
there used once to be, of building a nest and
being so full of happy hopes that even the
houses sang to them. The song in this house
had been abominable.
But “some one” had told them about
Stanton, so — .
“We just came down to have a look around
and stumbled on this house.”
"Fancy that,” said Giles, perhaps not heed-


142
SINISTER HOUSE
ing the weary tone of Julia's voice. “I never
heard of Stanton until I came to Forsby,
though I have seen the Forsby scheme more
or less advertised. Some one in New York
told you, I suppose. It is hard to think that
it would occur to a New Yorker to recommend
such a sleepy, out-of-the-way village.”
“I don't remember who it was," Julia re-
turned, without much interest. “As a matter
of fact, some one told Eric and he told me."
She had a fit of painful coughing. Eric
started from his chair and left the room to
fetch her a warmer shawl.
By the time he had come back I had
changed the conversation. He laid the shawl
he brought with him tenderly about his wife's
shoulders, and then took his seat again quietly.
Giles began then to talk to us about reli-
gious mania. Judging by Eric's face, Annette
told me, his thoughts might have been far
away from the talk. He did n't move in his
chair and continued to look meditatively into
the fire.
It seemed to me a silly thing for Giles to
begin holding forth upon, but he was leading
up to his interesting experience of the after-


SINISTER HOUSE
145
were called to it, but not enough to notice
otherwise.
I tell you, my recollections of the rest of
that evening at Eric's are intolerable to me.
I will not put myself, even in imagination,
back in that room, warm and charming as it
was.
One night, last winter, Annette and I went
to visit some ancient relatives of mine, who
live in an old house near Boston. It was a cold
night, and we sat with the other guests before
the grate, hung in under an old-fashioned,
white marble, half-moon chimney-piece. The
fire was of cannel coal, and there was no other
light in the room. I stood it as long as I could,
and then, knowing well I should be branded
as a harsh and crude New Yorker by the sen-
timental (or was it thrifty?) gathering, I
demanded gas-light of my ancients. I would
not sit, no matter what the cost to my reputa-
tion, in a circle of faces distorted and made
luridly strange by the dancing light of cannel
coal. Even in that room, where sanctimony
masked nothing more hateful than compla-
cency, I had already begun to feel that deadly,
icy malice was taking the shape of a woman,


SINISTER HOUSE 147
any more about it. It's too horrible — what I
know. I'm going to bed.”
To bed! I walked the floor for a couple of
hours. Annette brought me some whiskey —
much whiskey. She was as calm and as patient
as a woman well can be. She undressed and
got into bed and went on with her knitting.
Her eyes grew more and more anxious, till at
last I caught a look in them which made me
ashamed of my frenzy.
Yet, all by my inner self, so to speak, I was
shocked and desperate. I never have been
able to see animals or persons suffer, and the
thought of the hideous torture Julia might be
undergoing, even as I paced up and down the
room, all but unmanned me.
I had seen them (yes, both, the woman and
the little old man) trying to strangle her; and
Annette thought she had tried merely to
change her position on the cricket.
You must imagine. The horrible picture
came back before me again and again. I knew
how those hands could clutch and pinch; they
had been on me. But, I give you my word, I
was nothing - nothing.
It was Julia: high-spirited, frail, little thing,


150
SINISTER HOUSE
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, Annette, you must believe what I say.
When Giles began to speak, the woman stood
behind Eric's chair. I did n't look, but I felt
and I know she was there. And that she kept
watching Julia and me. The little old man
came in later, and took his place behind Giles.
He rubbed his hands all the time, and looked
down at Julia often, ready to grab her if she
tried to get to Eric. Think how terrible for
a sensitive man like Eric if he ever — had to
be with things like them when they were
alive!”
Annette said nothing. Indeed, what could
she say? Except for the faint, regular sound
of Giles's snoring, the house was silent as
death.
But after a while Annette spoke again.
“Eric did n't seem very much interested,"
she said. “He was rather cynical. He was
nervous about Julia — she has a bad cold —
and Giles bored him, I guess. He got restless
after awhile, and began to clasp and unclasp
his hands. No wonder. Giles told some grue-
some things: how they starved themselves and
their animals, and how, though they were pil-


152
SINISTER HOUSE
“Annette,” I said, looking up at her, “I
have seen what I have seen —”.
“Do not talk about it. Do not mention
any more horrors. I can't bear it."
“ — and I have heard what I have heard.
Annette, Julia is in the most deadly and un-
natural peril. She is sick and weak, besides.
There may be a fiendish death in that house — "
“But they are going away, I tell you, day
after to-morrow.”
“If Eric goes, too — with her — "
“Good God, Pierre! You don't mean that
he will murder her?”
She leaned forward over me, and I reached
up for her hands. There was a moment's hush.
And then - Heaven save us — we heard the
terrified screams of our son.
Startled, Annette clutched me and almost
stifled me. Then, as I broke away and got to
my feet, her mother's instinct rose up within
her, she sprang out of bed, and ran barefooted
into the children's bedroom. I was hardly be-
hind her. Bobbie's screams had wakened the
baby, and she, too, began to cry.
All in the dark, my wife tore the little boy
from his bed and hugged him to her breast.


SINISTER HOUSE
153
N
.
She could not wake him. He yelled the louder
and beat at her with his fists.
I switched on the lights. Annette was walk-
ing up and down like a wild, fierce woman
(my buxom, merry wife), her hair flying about
her, her bare feet falling soundless like the
pads of a lioness's feet.
“Go away, bad dream! Boo! Boo! Go
away, bad, wicked dream! Boo! There, there,
my darling boy; mother's here. Mother will
kill the bad dream, mother will.”
Something, as it were, flashed in my brain.
I knew. Saying that the boy might be in pain
and that I would get hot water, I went out of
the room. But I had no sooner closed the door
behind me — as if to keep the sound of the
screaming from Giles - than I darted into
the northeast room, ripped off the shade from
the window, and looked out.
A waning moon shed light upon the high-
way; and on the highway I saw a man, hatless,
running towards our house. He was almost
here. If ever he got to my house, I knew my
son might not survive the force of the evil
that hounded him.
I raced downstairs. The bolts on the front


SINISTER HOUSE 155
I cranked it. I shoved Eric into the front
seat. I pushed the car off. And when I saw
him well down the road, I went back into the
house.
Upstairs in the children's room, there was
my son laughing in his mother's arms. I had
saved him.
But it was almost the last straw for me that
night. Annette said almost nothing to me until
we were returned to our own room; and then,
seeing that my face was “terribly pale,” she
was frightened. At her words of solicitude
I sat down on my bed and broke down.
Whereupon, treating me as if I, too, had had
a bad dream, she patted my bent shoulders,
caressed me, knelt down and took off my shoes
and stockings; and I, a grown man, let her
do it.
She all but undressed me, and then she
made me get into the bathtub, which she had
filled with hot water (just hot enough, because
Annette always does things just right). When
she tucked me into bed and gave me some hot
whiskey and lemon, I did n't know whether
I was laughing or crying.
Nothing, up to that stage in the affair, had


CHAPTER IX
It was with mixed feelings of fear and love
that I started out with Giles early the next
afternoon to walk over to Erics. I had slept
until nearly noon, and felt, if not refreshed,
at least calm. I realized instinctively that I
had need to be calm. I felt that we were walk-
ing on to the conclusion of the drama.
Annette had telephoned to Dr. Gresham —
Eric's line being still out of order; I guess the
poor fellow had n't thought to do anything
about it - and had learned that Julia was
suffering only from a heavy cold. The doctor
would n't say much, but he hinted that Julia's
nerves were highly wrought up, that she ought
to have a change.
The sky was overcast. It was cold and the
wind was rising. Giles and I swung along the
road against it, silent for a good quarter of an
hour; during which, thanks to the healthy
exercise and the buffeting wind, I straightened
out my mind and arrived at a rational de-
cision as to my stand and conduct in this
affair.


SINISTER HOUSE
159
that afternoon what more thoughtful natures
than mine understand in early manhood, what
certain temperaments are aware of instinc-
tively from the first. The conventions of
society and the activities of business all point
to the fact that a man is only a piece in a
machine, really not self-important, but im-
portant only in his relations to others.
Oh, I thought many things that are prob-
ably old and stale to the world, no matter
how new to what Annette calls my simple
nature. It is n't worth while recounting them.
But I was n't wholly converted. I could
turn Eric away from my house when he was
in trouble. I had to turn him away or my own
flesh and blood, my son, would suffer cruelly.
Just the same, I resented Giles's prodding into
Eric's past life.
As if Giles and I had been thinking along
the same line, he turned to me after we had
gone a mile or so and said:
“I'm sorry, Pierre, you did n't hear the
story of the Snarts as I told it last night.
Grier has been mixed up with them in the past.
It's a remarkable — ”
“Don't, for Heaven's sake, tell it to me!”


SINISTER HOUSE 161
think that perhaps it's because I held my
mouth shut so much during these horrid days
that I ever wrote this story at all. I used to feel
ashamed then. Now I don't.
Well, Giles went on:
“In regard to this affair between Mr. and
Mrs. Grier. They are nervous, sensitive, and
highly strung, not the sort of people you have
seen much of or can be expected to understand.
Therefore, they take on in your mind an
heroic shape, and trail you along into a world
of myths and goblins. The house they live in,
which I grant is not up to date, gives you the
creeps. The figures of speech they use assume
in your imagination a grotesque reality. On
such things your simple mind loves to dwell;
and you think them over and over until your
too easily stimulated imagination jumps out
of your control and you are no longer respons-
ible for what you claim to see and hear. You
must control your mind, and use it. You must
take facts for what they are.”
He would have gone on and on; but I
said:
“Giles, you are a wiser man than I, and
for these few remarks on myself many thanks.


162 SINISTER HOUSE
I suppose experience teaches us to know our-
selves, and I am learning in this, which will al-
ways remain one of the most horrible in my life.
I know that Annette thinks my mind is dis-
eased. You think that it is – unexercised? —
uncontrolled? Strangely enough, I think that
my wits are about me. No; let me talk a little
more. There are what you call facts. Well and
good. You can say that in French for me if
you want to. I will grant that my keen sym-
pathy for Julia, and for Eric, too, may have
made me a little blind. But they like me.
There's one fact; and neither an unexercised
mind nor a too keen sympathy can do away
with the fact that Julia, and I, too — have —”
You know, I could not say it.
“The great fact,” Giles broke in, “is that
Eric Grier has kept to himself something that
by preying on him has begun to prey on his
wife.”
“And on his friends."
“True. Crime or misadventure, and I am
inclined to think there are both, the one per-
haps palliated by the other — something in
his past life which demands an accounting or
a confession. There's my explanation. What's


SINISTER HOUSE 163
yours? Remember, I can substantiate what
I claim.”
I preferred to keep silent, and we walked
on without a word, tramp, tramp, against the
wind, along the flat highway, until the hem-
locks by Eric's house hove in view. Then
Giles turned suddenly to me and said:
“When there's a rotten thing in a man, the
surgeon must cut it out. Watch Eric, what-
ever happens this afternoon. I am glad Julia
will not be present.”
That took the wind out of me. I could not
imagine what Giles had arranged for.
My dear little Flivver was standing in the
driveway by the door; and just as we came up
Eric stepped from the house, evidently about
to drive it back to me. When he saw us,
however, he stood waiting, a finger on his
lips.
“How," I whispered, “is Julia?”
“She's asleep just now," he whispered back.
“The doctor judges that her cold is not seri-
ous, but I think we will go away for a change
in a day or two."
He looked pale and haggard, and his hand,
as I took it, felt cold.


SINISTER HOUSE - 165
quietly. Julia's right up there.” And he
pointed to the corner room.
“Have a cigar, then, Eric,” I offered, for-
getting that he did not smoke.
He declined it, and tipped his chair back
against the wall. Giles and I were both facing
him. From the way he pulled his cap down
over his eyes and rested his head against the
wall, I thought he must be tired; and his face,
what I could see of it, was hollow and lined.
“So you're going to leave us,” I began.
“Where are you going?”
“Julia will go to stay with her cousin in a
little town up State.”
“You are not going with her?”
“No,” Eric replied, in a very low voice.
“I-I-”
It sounded as if he had made up his mind
to say he had to go elsewhere for reasons of
business; but he broke off. I wondered if
Julia and he had come to an understanding.
I saw Giles look at his watch again, and it
struck me as queer because not five minutes
could have passed since he had looked at it
before.
Alongside the veranda the dead leaves on


166
SINISTER HOUSE
the bushes were rattling in the cold wind
which tore round the corner of the house. I
fancied I heard a sort of banging in the dis-
tance, as of a loosened shutter. Everything
was restless, gray, and chill; and we three men,
alone on the bleak veranda, must have looked
forlorn.
Eric, pulling his cap yet lower over his face,
so that all I could see of it was his mouth and
chin, said to me:
“I suppose, Pierre, you don't know of any
one who would hire this house.”
“Furnished?”
“Why, perhaps. That depends.”
The thought of Eric's leaving the neighbor-
hood, together with the cold dreariness of the
day, the knowledge that the sprightly Julia,
who used to enliven us so, was lying sick in
one of the gloomy rooms above us, and the
premonition that something disagreeable was
going to happen, made an ordinary business
conversation strange, indeed.
No. I thought the chances very unfavora-
ble. Tenants for that sort of house would be
rare in these days, anyhow, and at this time
of the year, etc., etc.


SINISTER HOUSE 167
.
“If I felt like selling, Pierre,” Eric went on,
in a dreary voice, “how much would the place
bring?”
“How much land do you own?”
“What you see here, within the trees, and
perhaps out to the road.”
“Well, it would n't bring very much, I'm
afraid, Eric. Perhaps twenty-five hundred;
possibly three thousand.”
“So little?” I saw a bitter smile twist his
lips. “So little,” he repeated; and the cold
wind swept his words away. “It was hardly
worth it.”
I turned round to size up the land, to do
anything rather than submit to the spirit of
desolation that was moaning about us. There
it was: the short, empty driveway, curving
from under the hemlocks as from a tunnel, the
half-moon of land within it, the little bit of
lawn on either side, where the grass was
already dead and brownish.
“'Fraid not more, Eric," I sighed, and
turned back to face him. “I'm afraid not
more.”
Though I could not see his eyes, I knew that
he had suddenly fixed them upon something


168
SINISTER HOUSE
behind me, something that must have come
into the driveway in the last second. So sure
was I of this that out of curiosity I should
have turned round again but for the amazing
transformation which came over him and
which held me fixed in my chair and powerless
to move.
His jaw dropped so that his mouth hung
open. He put up a trembling hand to cover
his eyes, pushing back the cap from his brow
as he did so. Then, very slowly, as if at the
cost of great effort over himself, he brought
that hand back to the arm of his chair. I saw
his eyes — dilated, horrified, starting out of
their sockets.
Still with a slowness that to me was excru-
ciating, he lowered one foot from the rung of
the chair, feeling for the floor of the veranda,
finding it; and then he let the chair, which had
been tilted back against the wall of the house,
come forward on its four legs. Slowly, terribly
slowly, he regained control of himself, closed
his mouth, set his jaw.
Behind me I heard the crunching of steps
on the gravel. Some one was approaching,
more or less hesitatingly, but steadily, some


SINISTER HOUSE
169
one whose appearance must have been to Eric
as unspeakably — what shall I say? — blast-
ing, as the apparition of the female specter of
malice had been to me.
Even Giles groaned, overcome by the look
on Eric's face. That ever fine, handsome fea-
tures, so often aglow with ardor and love, could
become such a mask of hateful tragedy!
He was getting to his feet, his loose raincoat,
fastened by only one button, flapping and
almost tearing in the wind. Instinctively I
put out a hand towards him. He did not see
it; he saw nothing but what was approaching
him with steps that were beginning to falter.
Under his breath he said:
“Come on. I am not afraid of you, you
rotting, white devil.”
It was not more than a whisper, but it was
terrible.
Suddenly he stiffened to his full height. He
snatched his cap from his head and flung it on
the floor. Nostrils dilated and quivering, eyes
blazing, he stamped on the floor. His hair
blew like a wildman's in the strong, cold
wind. He cried out with all the power of his
full voice:


170 SINISTER HOUSE
“Come on, I say! What do you want?”
There was about him at that moment a
nobleness of rage, a majesty of defiance, some-
thing greatly heroic.
I was fascinated by him; I could not take
my eyes from him, and I only heard what went
on.
A rather lisping voice, a woman's, answered:
“I want to see Mr. Grier.”
“Mr. Grier,” replied Eric, still in that
extraordinarily resonant, trumpet-like voice,
“is not at home. He has gone away."
“Oh,” said the woman, “then I will come
again.”
I heard her footsteps as she retreated. And
when they had grown faint and my mind told
me that the woman had descended into the
tunnel through the hemlocks and gone out of
sight, then I saw Eric lay a hand on the
veranda rail, vault over it, and light on the
brown grass just beyond the bushes. He
stumbled, but did not fall.
Astounded, I turned to watch him. Crouch-
ing like a tiger, he darted across the lawn to
the right, paused a second on a spot whence he
could see that woman, now out of my sight,


SINISTER HOUSE
173
“I am calm,” said Eric.
I took a long breath tentatively, to make
sure my lungs could function. Giles's temerity
had knocked me breathless.
“It was a sanctimonious family,” Giles
remarked, apparently incongruously.
“Was it?"
“Yes. Singularly colorless before the world,
like that blanched fungus which grows in
damp cellars. There was a sort of secret, evil
name in the neighborhood, though. That was
colorless, too. They were cold blooded. All
abnormally blond. I was going to tell you
last night, when you interrupted me, that
Morgan Snart built this house. I'm surprised
you are not more curious about it.”
“Who? Me?”
“Yes; especially you. You bought the
house, you know. I suppose through Grimmer
& Strode?”
Eric's reply was spoken quietly; but if the
gale had burst into a hurricane, I could not
have been more startled, or our mask of
tranquillity more wildly swept away.
“None of your business.”
That's what he said. For the first and only


174
SINISTER HOUSE
time I saw Giles flabbergasted. He paled with
anger. He stood up and began speaking
rapidly, the words almost tumbling over each
other.
“I happen to know that Grimmer & Strode
were Morgan Snart's executors. Through
them I know that this house was never for sale.
I know that on the death of Morgan Snart
this house passed to his daughter; and on the
death a few hours later of his daughter, it
passed to —”
The name, if ever it was spoken, was
drowned in Eric's loud, insane laughter. He
threw back his head and laughed at the sky,
peal after peal. It made me almost sick to hear
him. I had not known laughter could be such
a voice of anguish. All the time the wind was
flapping his raincoat behind him, flattening
his trousers against his thin legs. His long,
black hair, mixed with gray, tossed about his
head and face. He laughed until I thought I
must stuff my fingers in my ears.
He lifted his hands high before him, and
the section of the rotten railing he still held
fell from them with a dull noise to the floor.
Then he went slowly into the house, crying


SINISTER HOUSE 175
all
through his laughter: “Oh, my wife, Julia!
Oh, my wife Julia!”
His terrible laughter still came to us from
within. I was speechless. Giles said:
“Damned madman. Listen, Pierre —”
“Shut up!” I cried. “Not a word. You
have driven him mad. Keep your facts to
yourself.”
Presently — in not more than a minute -
Eric came out again. His laughter had been
in our ears; but at the sight of us, whose
presence he may have forgotten, he ceased
laughing suddenly. The sudden silence was
in itself unnerving.
“No,” he said, eyeing us mournfully. “I
may not go to my wife Julia. I am forbidden.”
He looked curiously at Giles and pointed
a finger at him. In the silence before he spoke
again I heard the distant banging of the
loosened shutter.
"I think you are a ghoul in a dead man's
grave,” he said in his habitual, melancholy
voice. “But you have not learned all. Even
you do not know who died first.”
Before Giles could make any reply to this
crazy statement, Eric stepped from the porch


176
SINISTER HOUSE
yas
and walked out of our sight, into the blackness
of the hemlocks.
He did not leave us to silence. There was
always the wind and the banging of that
shutter; and then I heard a weak voice above
my head, calling:
“Eric! Eric!”
Oh, but it sounded miles away, over a wind-
torn sea:
“Eric! Eric!”
I knew Eric was out of his head. I ran
into the house. Darkness was falling outside;
within was already deepest gloom. I rushed
upstairs. Like a wanderer in a nightmare, I
knew not where or which the door for me to
find; but I paused, and listened, and tried,
and at last I opened a door and walked into a
chamber, where, almost invisible in the dusk,
little Julia lay in a great bed.
“Julia,” I said, going softly to the bedside.
“Eric is away. I am Pierre.”
“Stay with me a moment. I am frightened.
I dreamed I heard Eric laughing like a man
gone mad.”
“What a horrid dream, Julia.”
“Where is Eric?”


SINISTER HOUSE 179
way in the other direction, looking for Eric.
The twilight had deepened into night. If Eric
had left the road, I could not hope to see him;
but until I turned back towards my house, I
thought my lights might pick him out ahead
of me. Even after I turned, I rather thought
I had guessed wrong on the direction he had
taken, and that I should discover him on the
road the other way. But I did n't, though my
eyes were strained for the sight of him.
Where was he on this wild night? I will say
that I never imagined him gone to the high
cliffs over the river to make an end of himself.
I apprehended nothing worse than roaming
half the night in search of him, and passing the
other half beside him, still tramping, perhaps,
but perhaps before a fire at the Karaway Club.
That could be arranged.
As I drew near my home, having missed
him so far on the way, I put on all speed.
There was a chance that he had set out for my
house. I meant that he should not enter it.
He was n't there. The children were in the
kitchen with Annette, having their supper.
I kissed them good-night there, and called
Annette into the living-room. A fire was


SINISTER HOUSE 183
At that she tried to get out of bed, but Annette
restrained her.
“But you will find him, Pierre?” she begged
me. “He must not be left alone. I am not sick
– that is, only my body. His mind, his spirit
- He will not tell me. I cannot help him
because — oh, you know why, Pierre. But
you _”
“He cannot help you, Julia.”
All she said to that was: “Together.”
She was n’t rambling, but she was terribly
excited. I tried to convince her that it would
be dangerous to her to bring him back to the
house. She understood; but she had a secret
faith of some sort in Eric's being able to save
her, even though his mere presence in her
room that night might deliver her to death at
the hands of his familiars. She was of two
minds.
I promised to find Eric; but I did not prom-
ise to bring him back to the house, and I am
not sure that she exacted that definitely of
me.
Annette followed me out into the hall and
whispered to me to stop in the kitchen for
something to eat, whether I felt hungry or


184 SINISTER HOUSE
not. “Make Giles eat something, too,” she
added.
When I was halfway downstairs she leaned
over from above to ask me where I should take
Eric if I found him.
“To the Karaway Club," I whispered back.
She has since told me that she felt “better”
to know that I should not bring him back to
the house. She both believed and did not
believe.
"If you don't find him, come back here,
sure,” she said, as she turned into the chamber.
On my way to the kitchen, I glanced into the
living-room for Giles. There was no warmth or
charm in the place. He had lit the gas, and
was sitting before the grate, in which a miser-
able, lightless fire was smouldering.
We could n't eat much, but we found some
wine in the kitchen and each drank a glassful.
To tell the truth I was glad to get away
from my wife's cousin. He was depressed and
sullen, as well he might be. I don't know what
it was kept him in the house, unless he shared
with the rest of us the feeling that some-
thing unusual was going to happen there that
night.


186 SINISTER HOUSE
room, to which the gas-light gave no look of
charm.
Nothing, Giles told me, had happened in
the house. Annette had not come down-
stairs.
No sound came from above. The silence
in the desolate room was depressing. I heard
only the rattle of a dead branch against one of
the windows now and then, the steady roar of
the high wind in the chimney and about the
house, and the continuous banging of that
loosened and forgotten shutter.
“That thing," said Giles, “will drive me
mad!”
I made a move to go out on the veranda.
“No use, Pierre. I've been out there. You
can't reach it from the outside. Got to get at
it from inside — through the Bluebeard room."
He groaned.
“Ah, Giles," I whispered, “you, too, begin
to feel something about this house."
“I feel death and desolation about it,” he
muttered. “I'm damned cold, and I can't
make this fire burn.”
I made no move to help him. Let the cold
and the bleakness get in their work on him.


SINISTER HOUSE 187
For my part, though I had yelled myself
hoarse over all the countryside and had re-
turned forlorn and tired, I felt the house was
harmless. Wearily I sat on the sofa where the
night before I had sat motionless with fear.
Under the rose-colored hanging in the hallway,
yellowish and faded in the dingy gas-light
that fell on it from the living-room, I saw
draughts of air pass like waves. I heard the
roaring of the wind and the banging of that
inaccessible shutter. I shivered with bodily
cold. But I knew there was nothing in the
house at present to fear. The very desolation
made me feel safe..
Somewhere a clock struck one. Still there
was no sound from upstairs.
"Are we going to sit like this all night?”
Giles grumbled.
“Why don't you stretch out on this sofa and
try to sleep?”
"I can't sleep with that shutter banging."
“Cover your head with sofa pillows."
He made no reply. The slow minutes
dragged on.
“I would to Heaven I had some whiskey,”
he said after awhile.


SINISTER HOUSE 189
So
dark, gruesome interior of that room, perhaps
a suicide hanging from the ceiling, vague in
the darkness, yet visibly swaying on the cord.
It was never my imagination that found evil
in the house. To-night there was not the
faintest thrill in that new nerve of mine.
The house was not as it had been. The evil
was gone from it. The gentle, sensitive master
was lost in the night, and had left his dwelling
bleak, lonely, but safe.
If only the wind would rest for awhile and
that nerve-racking banging cease.
I jumped up and began pacing the floor.
Giles poked at the fire.
A longing to speak with my wife grew
stronger and stronger in me. If I could talk
only five minutes with Annette, the remainder
of the night would pass more cheerfully. Had
she heard me return in the car and had not
called me?
No; I had tried to make no noise. Maybe
she was anxious about me.
I startled myself thinking that perhaps
Eric's familiars had come back without him
and had done mischief upstairs. No sound
from up there for hours: not a step on the


190
SINISTER HOUSE
floor, not the creak of a door's opening, not
the murmur of a voice.
Maybe Annette was cold.
I stood this as long as I could, and then I
took off my boots and stole up the stairs. It
was dark and draughty in the upper hallway.
I went on tiptoe to the door of the room in
which I knew Julia lay, and listened for some
sound.
Nothing.
I started to go down again, but I could n't.
“Annette,” I whispered; “Annette.”
I listened again. No response. Slowly and
without a sound I opened the door and looked
into the chamber.
In a big chair by the side of the bed away
from the door sat my wife, bundled in her
heavy coat. The bright light from the lamp
streamed over her hands, which lay upturned
upon the knitting in her lap; her head had
fallen back against the top of the chair, in
shadow. She was fast asleep.
Julia lay fast asleep in the bed, turned on
her side away from Annette, her cheek resting
on both her hands.
I could hardly see their breathing. There


192 SINISTER HOUSE
I sprang to my feet. In the doorway stood
Eric.
He looked as if something in the night had
wrung the blood out of him; his hair was wild
about his pale face; his clothes were all de-
ranged and in some places torn.
My first thought was to throw him out of
the house — his own house. The murderous
cry I had heard told me that his familiars had
come back with him. I had no doubt they
were already above in the chamber of restful
sleep. They had yelled out on their way up
the stairs. But as I looked at Eric, a mild
gentleness in his face cast a spell over me and
restrained me. He began to speak strange
words in an extraordinarily subdued voice:
“I have been walking in the wind. Out of
the whirlwind a voice spake unto me, saying,
the law of man cannot lay a finger upon thee,
nor hast thou sinned against the law of God.
Inasmuch as thou wast patient in His sight,
so will He care for thee. Yet though thou car-
riest thy burden to a secret part of the earth
and there bury it, it shall not be forgotten.”
Giles and I looked at him in silence. You
can hardly imagine the effect of his words and


SINISTER HOUSE
193
his manner upon us. While he went on talking
like a prophet from an ancient time, I caught
no sense in his words, which veiled rather than
made clear something about his responsibili-
ties under the just laws of Heaven and about
his wife Julia, who, as a human companion,
remained more dear to him than the purest
bliss in sanctimony he could dream of. And
he talked as if this style of expression were
the most familiar and the most natural to him.
At last he must have read our bewilderment
and our discomfiture in our eyes, which re-
mained fastened upon his face. He broke off
his rapt discourse, and stepping quietly into
the room, begged us to excuse his diffuseness
and asked us if we had been sleeping. I could
not but wonder if the night had changed him
into a mild idiot.
“Damnation! Sleeping!” cried the matter-
of-fact Giles. "In this desolate house? Listen!
That shutter has been banging without let-up.
How can a man sleep in such a racket?”
Eric recognized the sound, and looked at
me.
“Can you not fasten it, Pierre?”.
“No, Eric,” I answered, waking out of the


SINISTER HOUSE
195
Eric, misinterpreting my action, said cour-
teously:
“No, not you. Nor I, either; for, as you
know, I promised my wife Julia that while she
is in the house — she is still here, is she not?
But you, Mr. Farrow.”
He walked over to Giles and gave him the keys.
“You,” he went on kindly and without a
trace of emotion, “who are pleased to stir up
the dead. This night they will come to you.
Take the key. Do not be afraid. Let us go
together and fasten the shutter. Then you
will sleep soundly, and perhaps for a long
time. I would I could sleep."
A blast of wind swept through the room and
nearly tore the straining, whistling, blue gas-
flame from the burner. Very distinctly I heard
a moan from upstairs.
Giles got up and accepted the key.
“Upon my word,” he said, “sleep or no
sleep, we can have a look at that room.”
We all heard, at that moment, the sound of
hysterical weeping.
“That,” said Eric simply, “is my wife Julia.
She cannot sleep at night when I am in the
house.”


SINISTER HOUSE
197
to lift her in hopes that would ease her struggle
for breath; but it did no good. We were power-
less to help or relieve.
“Go for the doctor, quick!” Annette called
to me in anguish.
As I started to go, Julia began trying to
speak. I leaned over her and put my head
close to her lips. I felt awful things crawling
on my face, like the feet of giant moths.
“What is it, Julia?” I sobbed.
She made a sound as of words, but I could
not catch her meaning.
“She is trying to say something about a
room,” Annette whispered. “She has been
trying to say it for a long time. Oh, dear,
what does the poor child mean? Go for the
doctor, Pierre! Go for the doctor! She is
dying; she cannot live like this.”
Again I started, but Julia wrestled in
Annette's arms, and my wife called to me,
fearing she could not hold her.
Suddenly I guessed what Julia might mean
by the “room.” I ran for the stairs. Halfway
down something caught me from behind round
the neck and under the chin, so that I lost my
balance and fell forward to the lower floor.


SINISTER HOUSE
199
flat eyes, the cruel yet simpering malice. I
recognized them.
For a couple of seconds we stood without
moving. Then Eric swung the lamp high above
his shoulder and hurled it at the canvas. The
chimney crashed, there was a spurt of brown-
ish yellow flame; and as the instant darkness
settled, a piercing scream behind us and the
dull sound of a body fallen to the floor.
My eyes were at first blind in the sudden
gloom; but I smelt the oily smoke of the ex-
tinguished lamp, and I heard even above the
roar of the wind, Eric's loud and rapid breath-
ing, like the panting of a dog. In a moment
or two I felt him brush by me; and as I began
to see again, I made him out, kneeling beside
a white figure on the floor, vague and hardly
distinguishable. I knew it was Julia.
He picked her up in his arms and carried
her towards the dining-room door. I followed
them as closely as I could, anxious and full of
fear, for Julia was moaning, and I knew that
the as yet invisible powers of malice had left
me, to fasten themselves once more on her.
Eric carried her along the hallway and
started up the stairs. Annette, who had run


202
SINISTER HOUSE
dered by the evil that haunts you," I whis-
pered, bending to his ear.
Julia lay so still I thought she was already
gone. But no. At the doorway of death she
turned, opened her eyes, and looked at her
husband. She whispered, her lips hardly
moving:
“I have loved you; I trust you; but —"
The two fiends became incandescent. I saw
them try to throw themselves upon her.
They got in each other's way. But Julia, with
the last strength she had, swept them aside
with her arm, sat up in bed, and cried out in a
loud voice:
“Eric! Tell me! Who are they? You and
I together — we shall defeat them.”
Her strength was then exhausted, and she
fell over against him. He clasped her head
to his breast, as if he would save her merely
by enfolding her in his arms; but I saw the
malignant two lope round the head of the bed,
and try to tear her from him.
Could he see them? I do not know. Though
he raised his head as if to face them, I think
his eyes were sightless.
“Huldah Snart,” he said, and his voice was



I SAW THE MALIGNANT TWO LOPE ROUND THE HEAD
OF THE BED, AND TRY TO TEAR HER FROM HIM





SINISTER HOUSE .
203
full of the bitterest hatred, "you will burn in
hell for this at last.”
A terrible burst of wind ripped out the gas,
and in the darkened room the shapes of
Huldah and Morgan Snart glowed cold, like
phosphorus. They desisted from their mur-
derous work, cowed by his voice. They stood
above him as he knelt by the bed with Julia
in his arms, balked, on the verge of retreat,
motionless save for the flickering of their out-
lines. The cold that touched me from them was
like the cold of ether on the skin.
I heard Julia's faint voice:
“Who was that evil woman?”
Eric took a deep breath, held it an instant,
then, still with his face upturned and his eyes
like those of blind persons that look towards
what they do not see, he said:
“She — was — my — wife.”
They stepped back from him.
“I know your wickedness, Huldah Snart;
you know my crime. I will lay both for judg-
ment before my wife Julia.”
He half-rose from his knees, lifting Julia
with him, and shouted:
“Get out of this cursed house!”


204 SINISTER HOUSE
I know now that since a certain hour in the
past Eric had never feared them, living. He
did not fear them, dead. But I -
For an awful minute I held my breath.
But they went away.
As if caught in a whirlwind the door
slammed behind them. I heard a hideous
shrill whistle in the hallway; I heard the
crash of broken glass downstairs. A shriek
of hatred died away in the night. Outside,
the wind made only a low moan. The house
and the room were silent.
A clock struck three.


CHAPTER XI
In the room, Annette was the first to move.
She turned off the gas, which was escaping
from the burner. Then she came and took
my arm.
Together we looked down at Eric, still
kneeling, bent over the head of his wife, a
figure of unutterable woe.
Was Julia dead? She did not move; she
did not make a sound. Eric, too, was motion-
less and silent.
We waited a long time, my wife and I. At
last she went softly up to Eric and touched his
shoulder; and when even then he did not
notice us, she raised his head, and with calm
tenderness asked:
“Is Julia living, Eric ?"
He merely looked up at her dumbly; so she
lifted Julia from his arms and let her down on
the bed. She lay as white and as peaceful as
marble; but she was not cold. She lived.
After we had watched her for half an hour
and were assured that she slept tranquilly and
unmolested, Annette directed my attention


214
SINISTER HOUSE
PA
roused from her slumber at Julia's bed by his
cry, I got him back where he belonged. He had
exhausted his strength in a wild reënactment
of his great outburst upon Huldah. Just before
he relapsed into complete unconsciousness,
he had a moment's calm, in which he looked
up at Annette, mistaking her for Julia, and
said tenderly:
“She will not dare haunt me, dear. I fright-
ened her to death and she will be shut up fast
in hell for her wickedness."
There was something so childlike and
pathetic in the way he said this that the tears
came into my eyes. It does n't do any good
at all to say “Boo!” at the past when you're
afraid of it.
I went over to the window and parted the
curtains. The night was just beginning to
give way. I could n't see the river in the deep
shadow of its gorge, but to the right I could
make out against the dim, gray sky the bowing
and slipping of the hemlock tops in the cold
and steady wind. I don't know why I recalled
the picture of my wife's walking up and down
with her son in her arms, shouting “Boo!” at
the horrid dream.


SINISTER HOUSE
215
How they had dogged poor Eric! How
terribly they had scored against him once
more! But I had faith that against him and
Julia united they should never hereafter pre-
vail.
Annette said I had better go for the doctor,
so I stole out of the chamber. But when I
found myself in the dark upper hallway, the
memory of how earlier in the night we had
struggled up the stairs against the nameless
and then invisible evil swept over me like a
chill. For a moment I lost my nerve. I slunk
back into Eric's room for another word with
Annette. I did n't like to leave her and go
down those stairs alone.
I took a good long look at Eric's flushed
face. Even in his ravings there had been some-
thing human, something warm.
“What's the matter?” my wife asked me.
“I don't know," I answered foolishly. “I
feel queer in that hallway. It's cold and
ruined.”
I saw her turn pale.
“They will not come back again,” she
whispered.
“It gives me the creeps.”


218
SINISTER HOUSE
Well, here is an end to the strange story.
You would not be interested in the convales-
cence of Eric and his wife. They were not
your friends as they were mine; you never saw
them; you never went into their queer house.
What's more, you never will go into it, because
it was burned down the following Christmas.
Neither Annette nor I ever entered it again
after the doctor came and took charge of Eric,
bound up Giles's head, pronounced Julia
recovering from her cold, drew the glass from
my foot, and told my wife she looked tired
and had better go home for a little sleep. Julia
was up the very next day and had Eric taken
to New York. Later, while they were away,
they hired men to move out their furniture
and close up the house. It was presently for
sale. No one knows how the fire that de-
stroyed it started. By that time the old place
had been entirely deserted for more than six
weeks.
But oh, my own house, our good, clean, little
cement house! Nothing ever looked better to
my eyes than that did the morning we returned
to it.
And it was still locked up tight, too. Felicia


220
SINISTER HOUSE
to lay him low in a blood-soaked field. Some-
times I wonder if he did n't really save us, if
it was n't he that shocked out of Eric the
words that did the trick. When he left us, he
asked me to drive to the station by way of the
old house. We went right up to the front door
in the Ford. Boards were nailed over the
smashed glass panes in the door; every window
was shuttered. In perfect silence we cast an
eye over it all; each absorbed in his own
thoughts.
When we were back on the flat highway
again, he said, turning away from me:
“She is a fine woman, Pierre. I hope they
will be happy now.”
There's lightning, and lightning, and still
another lightning, after all.
As for Annette, she will not voluntarily
recall those dreadful nights to her mind. In
the three years that have passed we have
talked of them only once. I know she fears
the effect of them upon me. That's all. She
acknowledged, however, that there was some-
thing "unusual” in the house the night Julia
was so sick and Eric went out of his head.
Now if I try to talk of it again, she looks at


SINISTER HOUSE
221
me as if I were out of my mind. That worries
her, for I'm the bread-winner. So I go on
commuting and keep my mouth shut about
the upper, or nether, spheres. To tell the
truth, I shall be glad when the memory has
faded. Take it all in all, there was nothing
in it but terrible suffering for Julia and Eric.
- You should see Forsby in the winter-time.
There's a foot of snow on the ground, now in
the middle of January, and the nights are
very cold. But it's healthy for the children;
and hard as it is sometimes to get to and from
the station in the Ford, we would n't move
into the city for anything. Think of giving up
the spotless fields and roads of snow for the
city's soot, or the silence of the nights for the
racket in town, or the whole expanse of clear,
black sky with its brilliant, independent stars
for the street lights and a rift between the
roof-tops!
We have a blazing fire on the hearth every
night, and we sit before it until it's time to go
to bed, my wife and I, sometimes reading,
sometimes talking, sometimes dreaming, but
never haunted.
A day or two ago we had a letter from Julia,


222
SINISTER HOUSE
who with Eric has gone to France. They are
going to devote themselves and what is theirs
to the alleviation of the great suffering that
has come upon the world. I must n't forget
to tell you that Julia's small fortune has
recently been increased. As for what Eric
inherited from Morgan Snart (I will never,
please Heaven, write that name again), they
have made that over to some relief organization.
They, too, have gone - in the Red Cross.
Last night I sat here before the fire with
my pencil and my manuscript. Annette was
reading one of the two new magazines to
which we have subscribed: either “The House
Decorated,” or “The Home Beautiful.” Is n't
that a funny trace of it all? I could n't write
anything. As you know, there's nothing more
to write. My unguided pencil just went on
scrawling over the paper, “The Singing
House."
A piece of burning wood snapped and sent
a big spark out on the rug. I got up to kick
it back to the hearthstone, and then I went
over to the door and went out on the porch.
It was cold and still. There was no moon,
and the stars were like diamonds, just as the


SINISTER HOUSE 223
mighty things will always go on being to
humans when the air is clear. I looked to the
north, and in my mind I saw the black spread
of charred embers on the snow where the old
house had stood. I could not hear a sound,
and with my eyes could see nothing but the
expanse of white snow, and a long way down
the road to the right, a light in the window
of our nearest neighbor's house.
So I came back again to the fire, but not to
try to write, just to think.
Giles gone. Well, it will come to me, too,
and before very long. But what a life to look
back on, what a memory always, this house
and this life of mine, and this wife and my
children. That's the point: I've had it.
Whereas Eric —
They have gone and we shall not see them
again — at least, not for a long time. Only a
mass of charred embers marks the place where
their house of horror stood.
Here is my wife, training her mind to see
in houses a beauty she thought she missed in
theirs. Here am I, regarding still as a night-
mare what entered into my flesh as a most
terrible reality and has, I know, colored my
see


226
SINISTER HOUSE
“Of course not. What are you thinking
of?"
“Nothing.”
“Go to sleep, then.”
I did so, and met nothing on the way.
THE END





Che Riverside Prest
CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
U.S. A