by Louise Welsh
“Emeline! Emeline!”
“What is it?” asked Mrs. Dent’s voice from the bed. The voice was stern, but had a note of consciousness in it.
“Who – who was that playing ‘The Maiden’s Prayer’ in the sitting-room, on the piano?”
“I didn’t hear anybody.”
“There was some one.”
“I didn’t hear anything.”
“I tell you there was some one. But – there ain’t anybody there.”
“I didn’t hear anything.”
“I did – somebody playing ‘The Maiden’s Prayer’ on the piano. Has Agnes got home? I want to know.”
“Of course Agnes hasn’t got home,” answered Mrs. Dent with rising inflection. “Be you gone crazy over that girl? The last boat from Porter’s Falls was in before we went to bed. Of course she ain’t come.”
“I heard—”
“You were dreaming.”
“I wasn’t; I was broad awake.”
Rebecca went back to her chamber and kept her lamp burning all night.
The next morning her eyes upon Mrs. Dent were wary and blazing with suppressed excitement. She kept opening her mouth as if to speak, then frowning, and setting her lips hard. After breakfast she went upstairs, and came down presently with her coat and bonnet.
“Now, Emeline,” she said, “I want to know where the Slocums live.”
Mrs. Dent gave a strange, long, half-lidded glance at her. She was finishing her coffee.
“Why?” she asked.
“I’m going over there and find out if they have heard anything from her daughter and Agnes since they went away. I don’t like what I heard last night.”
“You must have been dreaming.”
“It don’t make any odds whether I was or not. Does she play ‘The Maiden’s Prayer’ on the piano? I want to know.”
“What if she does? She plays it a little, I believe. I don’t know. She don’t half play it, anyhow; she ain’t got an ear.”
“That wasn’t half played last night. I don’t like such things happening. I ain’t superstitious, but I don’t like it. I’m going. Where do the Slocums live?”
“You go down the road over the bridge past the old grist mill, then you turn to the left; it’s the only house for half a mile. You can’t miss it. It has a barn with a ship in full sail on the cupola.”
“Well, I’m going. I don’t feel easy.”
About two hours later Rebecca returned. There were red spots on her cheeks. She looked wild. “I’ve been there,” she said, “and there isn’t a soul at home. Something has happened.”
“What has happened?”
“I don’t know. Something. I had a warning last night. There wasn’t a soul there. They’ve been sent for to Lincoln.”
“Did you see anybody to ask?” asked Mrs. Dent with thinly concealed anxiety.
“I asked the woman that lives on the turn of the road. She’s stone deaf. I suppose you know. She listened while I screamed at her to know where the Slocums were, and then she said, ‘Mrs. Smith don’t live here.’ I didn’t see anybody on the road, and that’s the only house. What do you suppose it means?”
“I don’t suppose it means much of anything,” replied Mrs. Dent coolly. “Mr. Slocum is conductor on the railroad, and he’d be away anyway, and Mrs. Slocum often goes early when he does, to spend the day with her sister in Porter’s Falls. She’d be more likely to go away than Addie.”
“And you don’t think anything has happened?” Rebecca asked with diminishing distrust before the reasonableness of it.
“Land, no!”
Rebecca went upstairs to lay aside her coat and bonnet. But she came hurrying back with them still on.
“Who’s been in my room?” she gasped. Her face was pale as ashes.
Mrs. Dent also paled as she regarded her.
“What do you mean?” she asked slowly.
“I found when I went upstairs that – little nightgown of – Agnes’s on – the bed, laid out. It was – laid out. The sleeves were folded across the bosom, and there was that little red rose between them. Emeline, what is it? Emeline, what’s the matter? Oh!”
Mrs. Dent was struggling for breath in great, choking gasps. She clung to the back of a chair. Rebecca, trembling herself so she could scarcely keep on her feet, got her some water.
As soon as she recovered herself Mrs. Dent regarded her with eyes full of the strangest mixture of fear and horror and hostility.
“What do you mean talking so?” she said in a hard voice.
“It is there.”
“Nonsense. You threw it down and it fell that way.”
“It was folded in my bureau drawer.”
“It couldn’t have been.”
“Who picked that red rose?”
“Look on the bush,” Mrs. Dent replied shortly.
Rebecca looked at her; her mouth gaped. She hurried out of the room. When she came back her eyes seemed to protrude. (She had in the meantime hastened upstairs, and come down with tottering steps, clinging to the banisters.)
“Now I want to know what all this means?” she demanded.
“What what means?”
“The rose is on the bush, and it’s gone from the bed in my room! Is this house haunted, or what?”
“I don’t know anything about a house being haunted. I don’t believe in such things. Be you crazy?” Mrs. Dent spoke with gathering force. The colour flashed back to her cheeks.
“No,” said Rebecca shortly. “I ain’t crazy yet, but I shall be if this keeps on much longer. I’m going to find out where that girl is before night.”
Mrs. Dent eyed her.
“What be you going to do?”
“I’m going to Lincoln.”
A faint triumphant smile overspread Mrs. Dent’s large face.
“You can’t,” said she; “there ain’t any train.”
“No train?”
“No; there ain’t any afternoon train from the Falls to Lincoln.”
“Then I’m going over to the Slocums’ again tonight.”
However, Rebecca did not go; such a rain came up as deterred even her resolution, and she had only her best dresses with her. Then in the evening came the letter from the Michigan village which she had left nearly a week ago. It was from her cousin, a single woman, who had come to keep her house while she was away. It was a pleasant unexciting letter enough, all the first of it, and related mostly how she missed Rebecca; how she hoped she was having pleasant weather and kept her health; and how her friend, Mrs. Greenaway, had come to stay with her since she had felt lonesome the first night in the house; how she hoped Rebecca would have no objections to this, although nothing had been said about it, since she had not realized that she might be nervous alone. The cousin was painfully conscientious, hence the letter. Rebecca smiled in spite of her disturbed mind as she read it, then her eye caught the postscript. That was in a different hand, purporting to be written by the friend, Mrs. Hannah Greenaway, informing her that the cousin had fallen down the cellar stairs and broken her hip, and was in a dangerous condition, and begging Rebecca to return at once, as she herself was rheumatic and unable to nurse her properly, and no one else could be obtained.
Rebecca looked at Mrs. Dent, who had come to her room with the letter quite late; it was half-past nine, and she had gone upstairs for the night.
“Where did this come from?” she asked.
“Mr. Amblecrom brought it,” she replied.
“Who’s he?”
“The postmaster. He often brings the letters that come on the late mail. He knows I ain’t anybody to send. He brought yours about your coming. He said he and his wife came over on the ferry-boat with you.”
“I remember him,” Rebecca replied shortly. “There’s bad news in this letter.”
Mrs. Dent’s face took on an expression of serious inquiry.
“Yes, my Cousin Harriet has fallen down the cellar stairs – they were always dangerous – and she’s broken her hip, an
d I’ve got to take the first train home tomorrow.”
“You don’t say so. I’m dreadfully sorry.”
“No, you ain’t sorry!” said Rebecca, with a look as if she leaped. “You’re glad. I don’t know why, but you’re glad. You’ve wanted to get rid of me for some reason ever since I came. I don’t know why. You’re a strange woman. Now you’ve got your way, and I hope you’re satisfied.”
“How you talk.”
Mrs. Dent spoke in a faintly injured voice, but there was a light in her eyes.
“I talk the way it is. Well, I’m going tomorrow morning, and I want you, just as soon as Agnes Dent comes home, to send her out to me. Don’t you wait for anything. You pack what clothes she’s got, and don’t wait even to mend them, and you buy her ticket. I’ll leave the money, and you send her along. She don’t have to change cars. You start her off, when she gets home, on the next train!”
“Very well,” replied the other woman. She had an expression of covert amusement.
“Mind you do it.”
“Very well, Rebecca.”
Rebecca started on her journey the next morning. When she arrived, two days later, she found her cousin in perfect health. She found, moreover, that the friend had not written the postscript in the cousin’s letter. Rebecca would have returned to Ford Village the next morning, but the fatigue and nervous strain had been too much for her. She was not able to move from her bed. She had a species of low fever induced by anxiety and fatigue. But she could write, and she did, to the Slocums, and she received no answer. She also wrote to Mrs. Dent; she even sent numerous telegrams, with no response. Finally she wrote to the postmaster, and an answer arrived by the first possible mail. The letter was short, curt, and to the purpose. Mr. Amblecrom, the postmaster, was a man of few words, and especially wary as to his expressions in a letter.
“Dear madam,” he wrote, “your favour rec’ed. No Slocums in Ford’s Village. All dead. Addie ten years ago, her mother two years later, her father five. House vacant. Mrs. John Dent said to have neglected stepdaughter. Girl was sick. Medicine not given. Talk of taking action. Not enough evidence. House said to be haunted. Strange sights and sounds. Your niece, Agnes Dent, died a year ago, about this time.
“Yours truly,
“Thomas Amblecrom.”
A TRESS OF HAIR
Guy de Maupassant
Guy de Maupassant (1850–1893) grew up in Normandy. He was a protégé of Flaubert who introduced him to Émile Zola, Ivan Turgenev and Henry James. In 1868 he saved the poet Algernon Swinburne from drowning. Swinburne’s collection of ghoulish objects made a great impression on Maupassant, especially the skinned hand of a parricide, which helped inspire his short story, The Hand (1875). Although often referred to as a naturalist, Maupassant resisted association with any particular school of writers.
The walls of the cell were bare and white washed. A narrow grated window, placed so high that one could not reach it, lighted this sinister little room. The mad inmate, seated on a straw chair, looked at us with a fixed, vacant and haunted expression. He was very thin, with hollow cheeks and hair almost white, which one guessed might have turned gray in a few months. His clothes appeared to be too large for his shrunken limbs, his sunken chest and empty paunch. One felt that this man’s mind was destroyed, eaten by his thoughts, by one thought, just as a fruit is eaten by a worm. His craze, his idea was there in his brain, insistent, harassing, destructive. It wasted his frame little by little. It – the invisible, impalpable, intangible, immaterial idea – was mining his health, drinking his blood, snuffing out his life.
What a mystery was this man, being killed by an ideal! He aroused sorrow, fear and pity, this madman. What strange, tremendous and deadly thoughts dwelt within this forehead which they creased with deep wrinkles which were never still?
“He has terrible attacks of rage,” said the doctor to me. “His is one of the most peculiar cases I have ever seen. He has seizures of erotic and macaberesque madness. He is a sort of necrophile. He has kept a journal in which he sets forth his disease with the utmost clearness. In it you can, as it were, put your finger on it. If it would interest you, you may go over this document.”
I followed the doctor into his office, where he handed me this wretched man’s diary, saying: “Read it and tell me what you think of it.” I read as follows:
“Until the age of thirty-two I lived peacefully, without knowing love. Life appeared very simple, very pleasant and very easy. I was rich. I enjoyed so many things that I had no passion for anything in particular. It was good to be alive! I awoke happy every morning and did those things that pleased me during the day and went to bed at night contented, in the expectation of a peaceful tomorrow and a future without anxiety.
“I had had a few flirtations without my heart being touched by any true passion or wounded by any of the sensations of true love. It is good to live like that. It is better to love, but it is terrible. And yet those who love in the ordinary way must experience ardent happiness, though less than mine possibly, for love came to me in a remarkable manner.
“As I was wealthy, I bought all kinds of old furniture and old curiosities, and I often thought of the unknown hands that had touched these objects, of the eyes that had admired them, of the hearts that had loved them; for one does love things! I sometimes remained hours and hours looking at a little watch of the last century. It was so tiny, so pretty with its enamel and gold chasing. And it kept time as on the day when a woman first bought it, enraptured at owning this dainty trinket. It had not ceased to vibrate, to live its mechanical life, and it had kept up its regular tick-tock since the last century. Who had first worn it on her bosom amid the warmth of her clothing, the heart of the watch beating beside the heart of the woman? What hand had held it in its warm fingers, had turned it over and then wiped the enamelled shepherds on the case to remove the slight moisture from her fingers? What eyes had watched the hands on its ornamental face for the expected, the beloved, the sacred hour?
“How I wished I had known her, seen her, the woman who had selected this exquisite and rare object! She is dead! I am possessed with a longing for women of former days. I love, from afar, all those who have loved. The story of those dead and gone loves fills my heart with regrets. Oh, the beauty, the smiles, the youthful caresses, the hopes! Should not all that be eternal?
“How I have wept whole nights-thinking of those poor women of former days, so beautiful, so loving, so sweet, whose arms were extended in an embrace, and who now are dead! A kiss is immortal! It goes from lips to lips, from century to century, from age to age. Men receive them, give them and die.
“The past attracts me, the present terrifies me because the future means death. I regret all that has gone by. I mourn all who have lived; I should like to check time, to stop the clock. But time goes, it goes, it passes, it takes from me each second a little of myself for the annihilation of tomorrow. And I shall never live again.
“Farewell, ye women of yesterday. I love you!
“But I am not to be pitied. I found her, the one I was waiting for, and through her I enjoyed inestimable pleasure.
“I was sauntering in Paris on a bright, sunny morning, with a happy heart and a high step, looking in at the shop windows with the vague interest of an idler. All at once I noticed in the shop of a dealer in antiques a piece of Italian furniture of the seventeenth century. It was very handsome, very rare. I set it down as being the work of a Venetian artist named Vitelli, who was celebrated in his day.
“I went on my way.
“Why did the remembrance of that piece of furniture haunt me with such insistence that I retraced my steps? I again stopped before the shop, in order to take another look at it, and I felt that it tempted me.
“What a singular thing temptation is! One gazes at an object, and, little by little, it charms you, it disturbs you, it fills your thoughts as a woman’s face might do. The enchantment of it penetrates your being, a strange enchantment of form, color and appearance
of an inanimate object. And one loves it, one desires it, one wishes to have it. A longing to own it takes possession of you, gently at first, as though it were timid, but growing, becoming intense, irresistible.
“And the dealers seem to guess, from your ardent gaze, your secret and increasing longing.
“I bought this piece of furniture and had it sent home at once. I placed it in my room.
“Oh, I am sorry for those who do not know the honeymoon of the collector with the antique he has just purchased. One looks at it tenderly and passes one’s hand over it as if it were human flesh; one comes back to it every moment, one is always thinking of it, wherever ore goes, whatever one does. The dear recollection of it pursues you in the street, in society, everywhere; and when you return home at night, before taking off your gloves or your hat; you go and look at it with the tenderness of a lover.
“Truly, for eight days I worshipped this piece of furniture. I opened its doors and pulled out the drawers every few moments. I handled it with rapture, with all the intense joy of possession.
“But one evening I surmised, while I was feeling the thickness of one of the panels, that there must be a secret drawer in it: My heart began to beat, and I spent the night trying to discover this secret cavity.
“I succeeded on the following day by driving a knife into a slit in the wood. A panel slid back and I saw, spread out on a piece of black velvet, a magnificent tress of hair.
“Yes, a woman’s hair, an immense coil of fair hair, almost red, which must have been cut off close to the head, tied with a golden cord.
“I stood amazed, trembling, confused. An almost imperceptible perfume, so ancient that it seemed to be the spirit of a perfume, issued from this mysterious drawer and this remarkable relic.
“I lifted it gently, almost reverently, and took it out of its hiding place. It at once unwound in a golden shower that reached to the floor, dense but light; soft and gleaming like the tail of a comet.