by E. Nesbit
‘The old man said it would be thus – all emptiness, and not profit to a man; and he died, and I tended him. Dear Jesus! How our good deeds come home to us! And he told me how the last of the great family had gone away none knew whither. And the tales I heard in the town – how the great man had not gone, but lived here in hiding – it is not possible. There is the silence of death in this house.’
He moistened his lips with his tongue. The stillness of the place seemed to press upon him like a solid thing. ‘It is like a dead man on one’s shoulders,’ thought the thief, and he straightened himself up and whispered again: ‘The old man said, “The door with the carved griffin, and the roses enwreathed, and the seventh rose holds the secret in its heart.”’
With that the thief set forth again, creeping softly across the bars of moonlight down the corridor.
And after much seeking he found at last, under the angle of the great stone staircase behind a mouldering tapestry wrought with peacocks and pines, a door, and on it carved a griffin, wreathed about with roses. He pressed his finger into the deep heart of each carven rose, and when he pressed the rose that was seventh in number from the griffin, he felt the inmost part of it move beneath his finger as though it sought to escape. So he pressed more strongly, leaning against the door till it swung open, and he passed through it, looking behind him to see that nothing followed. The door he closed as he entered.
And now he was, as it seemed, in some other house. The chambers were large and lofty as those whose hushed emptiness he had explored – but these rooms seemed warm with life, yet held no threat, no terror. To the dim yellow flicker from the lantern came out of the darkness hints of a crowded magnificence, a lavish profusion of beautiful objects such as he had never in his life dreamed of, though all that life had been one dream of the lovely treasures which rich men hoard, and which, by the thief’s skill and craft, may come to be his.
He passed through the rooms, turning the light of his lantern this way and that, and ever the darkness withheld more than the light revealed. He knew that thick tapestries hung from the walls, velvet curtains masked the windows; his hand, exploring eagerly, felt the rich carving of chairs and presses; the great beds were hung with silken cloth wrought in gold thread with glimmering strange starry devices. Broad sideboards flashed back to his lantern’s questionings the faint white laugh of silver; the tall cabinets could not, with all their reserve, suppress the confession of wrought gold, and, from the caskets into whose depths he flashed the light, came the trembling avowal of rich jewels. And now, at last, that carved door closed between him and the poignant silence of the deserted corridors, the thief felt a sudden gaiety of heart, a sense of escape, of security. He was alone, yet warmed and companioned. The silence here was no longer a horror, but a consoler, a friend.
And, indeed, now he was not alone. The ample splendours about him, the spoils which long centuries had yielded to the grasp of a noble family – these were companions after his own heart.
He flung open the shade of his lantern and held it high above his head. The room still kept half its secrets. The discretion of the darkness should be broken down. He must see more of this splendour – not in unsatisfying dim detail, but in the lit gorgeous mass of it. The narrow bar of the lantern’s light chafed him. He sprang on to the dining-table, and began to light the half-burnt chandelier. There were a hundred candles, and he lighted all, so that the chandelier swung like a vast living jewel in the centre of the hall. Then, as he turned, all the colour in the room leapt out at him. The purple of the couches, the green gleam of the delicate glass, the blue of the tapestries, and the vivid scarlet of the velvet hangings, and with the colour sprang the gleams of white from the silver, of yellow from the gold, of many-coloured fire from strange inlaid work and jewelled caskets, till the thief stood aghast with rapture in the strange, sudden revelation of this concentrated splendour.
He went along the walls with a lighted candle in his hand – the wax dripped warm over his fingers as he went – lighting one after another, the tapers in the sconces of the silver-framed glasses. In the state bed-chamber he drew back suddenly, face to face with a death-white countenance in which black eyes blazed at him with triumph and delight. Then he laughed aloud. He had not known his face in the strange depths of this mirror. It had no sconces like the others, or he would have known it for what it was. It was framed in Venice glass – wonderful, gleaming, iridescent.
The thief dropped the candle and threw his arms wide with a gesture of supreme longing.
‘If I could carry it all away! All, all! Every beautiful thing! To sell some – the less beautiful, and to live with the others all my days!’
And now a madness came over the thief. So little a part of all these things could he bear away with him; yet all were his – his for the taking – even the huge carved presses and the enormous vases of solid silver, too heavy for him to lift – even these were his: had he not found them – he, by his own skill and cunning? He went about in the rooms, touching one after the other the beautiful, rare things. He caressed the gold and the jewels. He threw his arms round the great silver vases; he wound round himself the heavy red velvet of the curtain where the griffins gleamed in embossed gold, and shivered with pleasure at the soft clinging of its embrace. He found, in a tall cupboard, curiously-shaped flasks of wine, such wine as he had never tasted, and he drank of it slowly – in little sips – from a silver goblet and from a green Venice glass, and from a cup of rare pink china, knowing that any one of his drinking vessels was worth enough to keep him in idleness for a long year. For the thief had learnt his trade, and it is a part of a thief’s trade to know the value of things.
He threw himself on the rich couches, sat in the stately carved chairs, leaned his elbows on the ebony tables. He buried his hot face in the chill, smooth linen of the great bed, and wondered to find it still scented delicately as though some sweet woman had lain there but last night. He went hither and thither laughing with pure pleasure, and making to himself an unbridled carnival of the joys of possession.
In this wise the night wore on, and with the night his madness wore away. So presently he went about among the treasures – no more with the eyes of a lover, but with the eyes of a Jew – and he chose those precious stones which he knew for the most precious, and put them in the bag he had brought, and with them some fine-wrought goldsmith’s work and the goblet out of which he had drunk the wine. Though it was but of silver, he would not leave it. The green Venice glass he broke and the cup, for he said: ‘No man less fortunate than I, tonight, shall ever again drink from them.’ But he harmed nothing else of all the beautiful things, because he loved them.
Then, leaving the low, uneven ends of the candles still alight, he turned to the door by which he had come in. There were two doors, side by side, carved with straight lilies, and between them a panel wrought with the griffin and the seven roses enwreathed. He pressed his finger in the heart of the seventh rose, hardly hoping that the panel would move, and indeed it did not; and he was about to seek for a secret spring among the lilies, when he perceived that one of the doors wrought with these had opened itself a little. So he passed through it and closed it after him.
‘I must guard my treasures,’ he said. But when he had passed through the door and closed it, and put out his hand to raise the tattered tapestry that covered it from without, his hand met the empty air, and he knew that he had not come out by the door through which he had entered.
When the lantern was lighted, it showed him a vaulted passage, whose floor and whose walls were stone, and there was a damp air and a mouldering scent in it, as of a cellar long unopened. He was cold now, and the room with the wine and the treasures seemed long ago and far away, though but a door and a moment divided him from it, and though some of the wine was in his body, and some of the treasure in his hands. He set about to find the way to the quiet night outside, for this seemed to him a haven and a safeguard since, with the closing of that door, he had shut away war
mth, and light, and companionship. He was enclosed in walls once more, and once more menaced by the invading silence that was almost a presence. Once more it seemed to him that he must creep softly, must hold his breath before he ventured to turn a corner – for always he felt that he was not alone, that near him was something, and that its breath, too, was held.
So he went by many passages and stairways, and could find no way out; and after a long time of searching he crept by another way back to come unawares on the door which shut him off from the room where the many lights were, and the wine and the treasure. Then terror leaped out upon him from the dark hush of the place, and he beat on the door with his hands and cried aloud, till the echo of his cry in the groined roof cowed him back into silence.
Again he crept stealthily by strange passages, and again could find no way except, after much wandering, back to the door where he had begun.
And now the fear of death beat in his brain with blows like a hammer. To die here like a rat in a trap, never to see the sun alight again, never to climb in at a window, or see brave jewels shine under his lantern, but to wander, and wander, and wander between these inexorable walls till he died, and the rats, admitting him to their brotherhood, swarmed round the dead body of him.
‘I had better have been born a fool,’ said the thief.
Then once more he went through the damp and the blackness of the vaulted passages, tremulously searching for some outlet, but in vain.
Only at last, in a corner behind a pillar, he found a very little door and a stair that led down. So he followed it, to wander among other corridors and cellars, with the silence heavy about him, and despair growing thick and cold like a fungus about his heart, and in his brain the fear of death beating like a hammer.
It was quite suddenly in his wanderings, which had grown into an aimless frenzy, having now less of search in it than of flight from the insistent silence, that he saw at last a light – and it was the light of day coming through an open door. He stood at the door and breathed the air of the morning. The sun had risen and touched the tops of the towers of the house with white radiance; the birds were singing loudly. It was morning, then, and he was a free man.
He looked about him for a way to come at the park, and thence to the broken wall and the white road, which he had come by a very long time before. For this door opened on an inner enclosed courtyard, still in damp shadow, though the sun above struck level across it – a courtyard where tall weeds grew thick and dank. The dew of the night was heavy on them.
As he stood and looked, he was aware of a low, buzzing sound that came from the other side of the courtyard. He pushed through the weeds towards it; and the sense of a presence in the silence came upon him more than ever it had done in the darkened house, though now it was day, and the birds sang all gaily, and the good sun shone so bravely overhead.
As he thrust aside the weeds which grew waist-high, he trod on something that seemed to writhe under his feet like a snake. He started back and looked down. It was the long, firm, heavy plait of a woman’s hair. And just beyond lay the green gown of a woman, and a woman’s hands, and her golden head, and her eyes; all about the place where she lay was the thick buzzing of flies, and the black swarming of them.
The thief saw, and he turned and he fled back to his doorway, and down the steps and through the maze of vaulted passages – fled in the dark, and empty-handed, because when he had come into the presence that informed that house with silence, he had dropped lantern and treasure, and fled wildly, the horror in his soul driving him before it. Now fear is more wise than cunning, so, whereas he had sought for hours with his lantern and with all his thief’s craft to find the way out, and had sought in vain, he now, in the dark and blindly, without thought or will, without pause or let, found the one way that led to a door, shot back the bolts, and fled through the awakened rose garden and across the dewy park.
He dropped from the wall into the road, and stood there looking eagerly to right and left. To the right the road wound white and sinuous, like a twisted ribbon over the great, grey shoulder of the hill; to the left the road curved down towards the river. No least black fly of a figure stirred on it. There are no travellers on such a road at such an hour.
THE MYSTERY OF THE SEMI-DETACHED
He was waiting for her; he had been waiting an hour and a half in a dusty suburban lane, with a row of big elms on one side and some eligible building sites on the other – and far away to the south-west the twinkling yellow lights of the Crystal Palace. It was not quite like a country lane, for it had a pavement and lampposts, but it was not a bad place for a meeting all the same: and farther up, towards the cemetery, it was really quite rural, and almost pretty, especially in twilight. But twilight had long deepened into night, and still he waited. He loved her, and he was engaged to be married to her, with the complete disapproval of every reasonable person who had been consulted. And this half-clandestine meeting was tonight to take the place of the grudgingly sanctioned weekly interview – because a certain rich uncle was visiting at her house, and her mother was not the woman to acknowledge to a moneyed uncle, who might ‘go off’ any day, a match so deeply ineligible as hers with him.
So he waited for her, and the chill of an unusually severe May evening entered into his bones.
The policeman passed him with but a surly response to his ‘Good night’. The bicyclists went by him like grey ghosts with fog-horns; and it was nearly ten o’clock, and she had not come.
He shrugged his shoulders and turned towards his lodgings. His road led him by her house – desirable, commodious, semi-detached – and he walked slowly as he neared it. She might, even now, be coming out. But she was not. There was no sign of movement about the house, no sign of life, no lights even in the windows. And her people were not early people.
He paused by the gate, wondering.
Then he noticed that the front door was open – wide open – and the street lamp shone a little way into the dark hall. There was something about all this that did not please him – that scared him a little, indeed. The house had a gloomy and deserted air. It was obviously impossible that it harboured a rich uncle. The old man must have left early. In which case—
He walked up the path of patent-glazed tiles, and listened. No sign of life. He passed into the hall. There was no light anywhere. Where was everybody, and why was the front door open? There was no one in the drawing-room, the dining-room and the study (nine feet by seven) were equally blank. Every one was out, evidently. But the unpleasant sense that he was, perhaps, not the first casual visitor to walk through that open door impelled him to look through the house before he went away and closed it after him. So he went upstairs, and at the door of the first bedroom he came to he struck a wax match, as he had one in the sitting-rooms. Even as he did so he felt that he was not alone. And he was prepared to see something; but for what he saw he was not prepared. For what he saw lay on the bed, in a white loose gown – and it was his sweetheart, and its throat was cut from ear to ear. He doesn’t know what happened then, nor how he got downstairs and into the street; but he got out somehow, and the policeman found him in a fit, under the lamppost at the corner of the street. He couldn’t speak when they picked him up, and he passed the night in the police-cells, because the policeman had seen plenty of drunken men before, but never one in a fit.
The next morning he was better, though still very white and shaky. But the tale he told the magistrate was convincing, and they sent a couple of constables with him to her house.
There was no crowd about it as he had fancied there would be, and the blinds were not down.
As he stood, dazed, in front of the door, it opened, and she came out.
He held on to the door-post for support.
‘She’s all right, you see,’ said the constable, who had found him under the lamp. ‘I told you you was drunk, but you would know best—’
When he was alone with her he told her – not all – for that would not bear telling –
but how he had come into the commodious semi-detached, and how he had found the door open and the lights out, and that he had been into that long back room facing the stairs, and had seen something – in even trying to hint at which he turned sick and broke down and had to have brandy given him.
‘But, my dearest,’ she said, ‘I dare say the house was dark, for we were all at the Crystal Palace with my uncle, and no doubt the door was open, for the maids will run out if they’re left. But you could not have been in that room, because I locked it when I came away, and the key was in my pocket. I dressed in a hurry and I left all my odds and ends lying about.’
‘I know,’ he said; ‘I saw a green scarf on a chair, and some long brown gloves, and a lot of hairpins and ribbons, and a prayer book, and a lace handkerchief on the dressing-table. Why, I even noticed the almanac on the mantelpiece – October 21. At least it couldn’t be that, because this is May. And yet it was. Your almanac is at October 21, isn’t it?’
‘No, of course it isn’t,’ she said, smiling rather anxiously; ‘but all the other things were just as you say. You must have had a dream, or a vision, or something.’
He was a very ordinary, commonplace, City young man, and he didn’t believe in visions, but he never rested day or night till he got his sweetheart and her mother away from that commodious semi-detached, and settled them in a quite distant suburb. In the course of the removal he incidentally married her, and the mother went on living with them.
His nerves must have been a good bit shaken, because he was very queer for a long time, and was always inquiring if anyone had taken the desirable semi-detached; and when an old stockbroker with a family took it, he went the length of calling on the old gentleman and imploring him by all that he held dear, not to live in that fatal house.
‘Why?’ said the stockbroker, not unnaturally.
And then he got so vague and confused, between trying to tell why and trying not to tell why, that the stockbroker showed him out, and thanked his God he was not such a fool as to allow a lunatic to stand in the way of his taking that really remarkably cheap and desirable semi-detached residence.