The Shadow on the House

by Mark Hansom

  I switched out the light, and was shutting the door again, when I thought of the window. The window of that room has been of tremendous significance to me ever since Makepeace told me of the sixty-year-old tragedy.

  It was thrown right up, as it had been that afternoon. And, so much had I been affected by the isolated position of the room and by the eerie corridors and by the stories that I myself had told about the place, that I could not help looking out to see that everything was in order. I do not know whether I expected to see young Wetherhouse’s body lying inert on the gravel below, but I know that I did look out and was relieved to see that no accident had occurred.

  For a moment I stood surveying the calm, mysterious, moonlit valley that stretches away towards the sea, and then my attention was attracted to a movement on the edge of the lawn below.

  Two figures were coming towards the house. They were partly hidden from my sight by the overhanging branches of some trees that grew from the edge of the gravel, but I could see that they were a man and a woman, and I could also see that they were strolling along very close together.

  I was about to withdraw, for it was no business of mine that some of our guests should do their courting out in the moonlit grounds; but I was held spellbound to my post, for at that moment the couple stopped and turned and faced one another, and I could see that they were Sylvia and young Wetherhouse.

  They were talking. At least, Sylvia was talking; but only the soft murmur of her voice reached me. Then I saw Wetherhouse look at his watch and turn as though to come across the gravel towards the house. But Sylvia gripped his arm and detained him for a further half minute, and there continued to reach me that soft murmur that was so maddeningly indistinct.

  I do not know what I thought. But at that moment a thousand little impressions came back to me — impressions of Sylvia’s coldness towards me — a coldness that I had thought to be part of her undemonstrative nature — impressions of her lack of enthusiasm over our marriage and our future, impressions of a quickening of her interest in the presence of that young man to whom she was now talking.

  I could hardly contain myself. Perhaps it was fortunate that I was separated from them by such a height, for in the first shock of seeing these two together in such a position of familiarity I could think of only one thing — the utter destruction of both.

  I turned from the window and flew downstairs. I did not go by the main staircase, but by the winding and rarely used stair within the tower, deciding instinctively to take the shortest way down.

  But the journey was not so short but what I had time to put some sort of a check upon myself. What I had seen had every appearance of a secret intrigue between these two; but the truth was that even in the midst of my tumultuous thoughts I was seeking for some other explanation. Had the affair concerned anything but the love of Sylvia I should probably have simply given way to the dictates of impulse and settled the matter summarily. But when it touched Sylvia’s love for me my whole nature rose up against my accepting the evidence of my own eyes. I did not want to believe what I had seen.

  By the time I had reached the bottom of the old stairway and had unbolted the heavy door that gives out on to the gravel Sylvia and Wetherhouse were ascending the steps towards the hall. They were walking apart now and were conversing with every appearance of aimless innocence.

  I did not show myself, but waited until they were both well within, then sauntered round to the front door. By the time I reached the hall they had both disappeared. I assumed that they had gone upstairs; but chancing to look into the billiard-room I found young Wetherhouse had joined the company there.

  “Seen my wife?” I asked him, with as much casualness as I could command.

  “Why, yes,” he replied, with a frankness that quite disarmed me. “She has just gone to her room.”

  “Did she find it cold outside?”

  He looked at me in surprise.

  “Out on the lawn,” I continued, and was about to tell him what I had seen, when we were interrupted by one or two of the group who wanted me to take a cue.

  I excused myself. I wanted to have this matter settled without delay. But before I could say a word to prevent it young Wetherhouse had accepted a challenge to play a hundred up for a pound, and I had to chafe in silence for, disturbed as I was, I could not raise a to-do in the presence of so many of my guests.

  I left the room and dashed upstairs to the bedroom occupied by Sylvia and me.

  She was standing by the window when I entered. The wrap that she had been wearing lay at her feet where it had fallen from her shoulders.

  At my entrance she turned, gave me that polite smile of hers that seems to hide so much more than it reveals, and turned again to her contemplation of the scene without.

  I was tempted then to say nothing. Perhaps I was imagining more than had actually occurred. To suggest in cold words that she was being false to me would be to destroy all the happiness that I had. If she were not being false, my accusation would be an unforgivable insult. If she were being false, a word would set her on her guard. I had felt all along that I had not the power to hold her. She was my wife because she chose to be my wife. I was her husband because I had come under the spell of her wonderful beauty; but with her, I had always felt, the marriage had been one of the head rather than of the heart. And, that being so, I hesitated to speak.

  “Sylvia,” I said at length, “was that you I saw out under the trees with Sydney Wetherhouse?”

  “Yes,” she said, without turning round.

  There was a pause. I looked at her back, which was bare almost to the waist.

  “I didn’t see you,” she said, still without turning round.

  “No, I don’t suppose you did,” I remarked. “I was up at one of the bedroom windows. Don’t you think it was rather — rather indiscreet to stroll about the grounds with one of the men guests when most of the others were in bed?”

  She did not answer.

  “Especially arm in arm,” I added.

  Still she did not answer.

  “Would you care to tell me,” I went on, my voice coming with an effort, “what you were talking about? You seemed to have a lot to say.”

  She turned then, and though we had almost the breadth of the room between us I started back a step.

  Her face was a deathly white. Her eyes were keen and hard with the intensity of her feelings, and they looked at me with such piercing scorn that for the moment I was utterly aghast.

  “I was telling him how completely miserable I am: that’s what I was telling him,” she spat out at me. “I was telling him that I had been put up in the market to the highest bidder, and that the highest bidder happened to be that self-satisfied popinjay, Martin Strange. That’s what I was telling him.”

  “Sylvia!” I exclaimed, shocked and astounded.

  “Don’t deny it!” she said, pointing at me, her face now turned to an angry pink. “You’ve questioned my behaviour. Now I’m going to question yours . . . You wormed yourself into my aunt’s favour — wormed yourself in like the despicable being you are — and made her agree to our marriage. Don’t say you didn’t! There was no word about marriage until the day your cousin died. You asked me at a time when I wasn’t myself — when I was suffering from the shock of your cousin’s death. Then you kept me to my word. Or you made my aunt keep me to my word, which was more despicable. You knew I had no money of my own. I couldn’t defy my aunt . . . You must have known I didn’t care for you. I have never taken any pains to hide the truth. You must have known it . . . You insisted on buying me. And my aunt refused to admit the sordidness of it. She said you were a very good friend to me when Christopher died. A very good friend! You did nothing more than any other man would have done. But a person like you would presume upon a favour of that sort. It wasn’t until you came into your wretched fortune that you spoke seriously to my aunt. And then my aunt couldn’t resist the temptation. One of the wealthiest men in England!”

  “Sylvia
! Sylvia!” I cried, interrupting the torrent of bitterness. “You’re out of your senses. I assure you that there’s no truth in anything you say. I assure you that I have acted throughout with the most scrupulous honour. I had no idea that you were being forced into the marriage.”

  “Scrupulous honour!” she exclaimed, her tone of scorn more triumphant and more bitter than before. “Was it an instance of scrupulous honour when you stood listening outside the door of the little study in Park Lane? Don’t try to deny that, because I saw you. And I saw you tip-toe back into the hall and make out that you had only just arrived.”

  “But Sylvia!” I began.

  “So much for your scrupulous honour!” she went on, silencing me by the very force of her anger. “Then you took me abroad, and I hated every minute of it. Your wealth found us plenty of friends, and they flattered me and petted me because I was the wife of one of the richest men in England. And you spent thousands of pounds on me, and every pound was an insult. You thought — ”

  “But Sylvia!” I said, trying to stop the flow of bitterness.

  I don’t know whether I fully realized the meaning of her words. I was too greatly amazed by this sudden outburst to feel the desolation that I was soon to feel.

  “Don’t keep on saying ‘But Sylvia!’ ” she exclaimed. “You question my conduct. You have the insufferable impudence to ask me whether I think it discreet to walk in the grounds with one of our guests. If I had known you were watching — spying — I should have given you something to watch. For now that it is all out I don’t care. I’ve had to consider my aunt. But now I don’t care what she says. And I don’t care what people think. Sydney asked me to marry him. Soon after you asked me. But my aunt wouldn’t hear of it. Sydney isn’t one of the wealthiest men in England.”

  I strode across the room and gripped her by the wrists.

  “Now listen to me,” I said. A sudden surge of blind anger had welled up within me. I was irritated beyond all patience by the unjust things she had said. I wanted to shake her, to force her to believe that I was one of the last to think of taking advantage of the accident of wealth in a matter of love, to prove to her that she had misjudged me.

  Her extraordinary beauty was never shown to better advantage than at that moment. It was enhanced by the spirit that flashed from her eyes. It made her more desirable than ever before, and I felt that I must convince her of her error and of the honourableness of all my actions.

  She did not shrink. She stood stolidly defying me; yet not altogether defying me, for now her anger had subsided, the hot flush had left her face, her eyes were lowered to the ground.

  “You’re hurting me,” she said quietly. “Don’t hold so tightly.”

  I dropped her wrists. She turned, took a step or two across the room, and sat down at her dressing-table. She was her old unemotional self again, and as I watched her marshalling the various brushes and gold-capped pots and bottles, my thoughts were on her extraordinary capacity for self-control.

  But for the accident of my seeing her and young Wetherhouse from that upper window I might never have known a tenth part of what she had spat out at me. And all these months she had kept her feelings under control. That was a staggering thing to realize. She had caught me eavesdropping, and she had never given a hint of it. Her opinion of me — mistaken though it was — could hardly be lower; and yet she had hidden it all. Circumstances had forced her to accept me, and she had accepted me. And she had kept everything locked up behind that coldly beautiful exterior until a word from me had broken through her reserve and the whole bitter truth had come out.

  “You have completely misjudged me, Sylvia,” I said, speaking to her reflection in the glass.

  “I think not,” she said, calmly unscrewing the cap off a bottle. “In any case, I don’t want to hear what you have to say.”

  “But that’s unfair,” I retorted. “If you will let me explain — ”

  At that she got up and wheeled about quickly, her hands clenched shoulder-high, her face the incarnation of outraged patience.

  “Oh, go away!” she screamed. “After what I’ve told you how can you ask me to listen to you? Go away! You know the truth. And all your explanations will not alter the truth.”

  Yes, the truth. That was the only thing that mattered. It was of no moment whatever that she should have misjudged me. The only thing that mattered was that she loved somebody else. All the talking in the world would not alter that.

  It was then that the full sense of my desolation came to me.

  There was nothing more to be said. I walked backwards away from her towards the dressing-room, and every slow step I took was an irrevocable step away from the object that I loved before everything else in the world.

  I did not speak. I could not speak. I was dazed by the unreasonable cruelty of it all.

  In the dressing-room there is a couch. I looked at that couch. That was the bed to which I, the husband of the celebrated Sylvia Vernon, was reduced.

  I sat for a long time in a state of uncomprehension before I started to change. I was not immediately capable of realizing the full force of the blow I had received.

  Curiously enough my feelings were not directed against young Wetherhouse. I hardly thought of him as being responsible for what had occurred. And did it matter whether he were responsible or not? The outstanding fact was that Sylvia had come to dislike me with a fierce, unreasonable dislike. All my feelings were directed against her, against her injustice, against the obdurate fact that all argument was futile.

  In the night I awoke, and sprang up from the couch.

  I had lain for hours trying to grasp the full bitterness of all I had learnt, but at last I had fallen asleep. And suddenly I was wide awake again and was through in Sylvia’s room before I realized what was afoot. So startling was the summons that had aroused me that I do not actually remember getting off the couch.

  Sylvia was crouching against the wall at the farther side of the room in an attitude of the most abject fear. The moonlight coming through the window showed her up clearly — showed even the fearful expression in her wide-open eyes.

  She was silent now, but I knew that her shrieks had awakened me. I could still hear their echo in my brain.

  I was by her side in an instant, and had lifted her on to the bed, where she suddenly burst into a most violent fit of crying.

  By this time one or two of the others in the house had been aroused. I could hear voices in the corridor outside, and then there came a tap at the bedroom door.

  “Are you all right?” asked someone.

  “What’s the matter?” said the voice of the Professor.

  “Sylvia, darling!” pleaded Lady Somerton. “Whatever is wrong? May I come in?”

  It seemed that everybody in the place had been aroused.

  I looked at Sylvia. She was trembling from head to foot. I had never seen anyone in a fit of hysteria, but I guessed that that was what was the matter with her. Her hands were working incessantly — covering her face at one moment, clutching her throat at the next. Her weeping continued, violent and unrestrained.

  “Why don’t you let them in?” she suddenly demanded of me.

  “But what’s the matter?” I asked. “What happened?”

  She did not answer, but threw herself over on to her face, her sobs now becoming cries.

  I switched on the light and opened the door. A crowd of startled faces greeted me.

  Lady Somerton pushed past me, followed by Professor Wetherhouse and Dr. Grainger whose room was almost opposite. There was no need for them to ask my permission to enter. My face, apparently, showed that this was no time to stand on ceremony.

  Dr. Grainger immediately took the case in hand. He did not waste time in questioning Sylvia just then, but by some means best known to himself he succeeded first in pacifying her.

  This took some time; and it was while I was standing apart that there first came to me a horrible suspicion.

  The scene with Sylvia earlie
r in the night and the utter deadness of spirits which had followed that scene had driven my mind away from that weird power that had twice in the past taken a hand in the control of my affairs. But now the look of horror in Sylvia’s eyes recalled a similar look that I had seen on the dead face of Christopher Knight. I was trembling. I dreaded the moment when Sylvia should be able to speak and give an account of what had happened, lest her words should confirm my awful suspicion.

  Dr. Grainger turned to me, and spoke in a low voice, glancing from time to time at Sylvia who was now clinging to Lady Somerton and staring, with an expression of horror, into space.

  “She’s had a terrific shock of some sort,” he said. “What happened?”

  I told him that I didn’t know. I said that I had been sleeping on the couch in the dressing-room, that I had not felt like going to bed and had lain down on the couch to read for an hour or so, had fallen asleep and had been awakened by her screams. Even at that moment, when it almost seemed to me that Sylvia’s sanity was in the balance, I had to conceal the real reason for my being in the dressing-room.

  He returned to Sylvia and tried to induce her to lie down.

  But she would not. She shuddered as she glanced at the pillow. And suddenly she exclaimed, “Oh, it was horrible! Horrible! The wickedest face I’ve ever seen!”

  “You were dreaming,” I said; but I knew that she had not been dreaming.

  I saw the Professor glance at me. I wondered what he suspected. If he were on the trail of the ghost, as I believed him to be, then he had struck the trail at a most fortunate point. Here was first-hand phenomena ready for investigation.

  “Possibly!” said the doctor. “Though I hardly think a dream would put one into this state. You say you saw a face. Was it the face of anyone you know?”

  She shook her head.

  “Oh, no! It was too horrible. It wasn’t a human face. I can’t imagine a human face so — so bestial!”