The Lock and Key Library: Classic Mystery and Detective Stories

by Ambrose Bierce

  So I thought, as I looked out of my window that morning and for many mornings after that, and every day it all seemed more real than ever before, and much nearer. But the old nurse looked at me askance, and muttered odd sayings about the Woman of the Water. I cared little what she said, for I was far too happy.

  At last the time came near for the wedding. Lady Bluebell and all the tribe of Bluebells, as Margaret called them, were at Bluebell Grange, for we had determined to be married in the country, and to come straight to the Castle afterwards. We cared little for traveling, and not at all for a crowded ceremony at St. George’s in Hanover Square, with all the tiresome formalities afterwards. I used to ride over to the Grange every day, and very often Margaret would come with her aunt and some of her cousins to the Castle. I was suspicious of my own taste, and was only too glad to let her have her way about the alterations and improvements in our home.

  We were to be married on the thirtieth of July, and on the evening of the twenty-eighth Margaret drove over with some of the Bluebell party. In the long summer twilight we all went out into the garden. Naturally enough, Margaret and I were left to ourselves, and we wandered down by the marble basins.

  “It is an odd coincidence,” I said; “it was on this very night last year that I first saw you.”

  “Considering that it is the month of July,” answered Margaret with a laugh, “and that we have been here almost every day, I don’t think the coincidence is so extraordinary, after all.”

  “No, dear,” said I, “I suppose not. I don’t know why it struck me. We shall very likely be here a year from today, and a year from that. The odd thing, when I think of it, is that you should be here at all. But my luck has turned. I ought not to think anything odd that happens now that I have you. It is all sure to be good.”

  “A slight change in your ideas since that remarkable performance of yours in Paris,” said Margaret. “Do you know, I thought you were the most extraordinary man I had ever met.”

  “I thought you were the most charming woman I had ever seen. I naturally did not want to lose any time in frivolities. I took you at your word, I followed your advice, I asked you to marry me, and this is the delightful result—what’s the matter?”

  Margaret had started suddenly, and her hand tightened on my arm. An old woman was coming up the path, and was close to us before we saw her, for the moon had risen, and was shining full in our faces. The woman turned out to be my old nurse.

  “It’s only Judith, dear—don’t be frightened,” I said. Then I spoke to the Welshwoman: “What are you about, Judith? Have you been feeding the Woman of the Water?”

  “Aye—when the clock strikes, Willie—my Lord, I mean,” muttered the old creature, drawing aside to let us pass, and fixing her strange eyes on Margaret’s face.

  “What does she mean?” asked Margaret, when we had gone by.

  “Nothing, darling. The old thing is mildly crazy, but she is a good soul.”

  We went on in silence for a few moments, and came to the rustic bridge just above the artificial grotto through which the water ran out into the park, dark and swift in its narrow channel. We stopped, and leaned on the wooden rail. The moon was now behind us, and shone full upon the long vista of basins and on the huge walls and towers of the Castle above.

  “How proud you ought to be of such a grand old place!” said Margaret, softly.

  “It is yours now, darling,” I answered. “You have as good a right to love it as I—but I only love it because you are to live in it, dear.”

  Her hand stole out and lay on mine, and we were both silent. Just then the clock began to strike far off in the tower. I counted— eight—nine—ten—eleven—I looked at my watch—twelve—thirteen—I laughed. The bell went on striking.

  “The old clock has gone crazy, like Judith,” I exclaimed. Still it went on, note after note ringing out monotonously through the still air. We leaned over the rail, instinctively looking in the direction whence the sound came. On and on it went. I counted nearly a hundred, out of sheer curiosity, for I understood that something had broken and that the thing was running itself down.

  Suddenly there was a crack as of breaking wood, a cry and a heavy splash, and I was alone, clinging to the broken end of the rail of the rustic bridge.

  I do not think I hesitated while my pulse beat twice. I sprang clear of the bridge into the black rushing water, dived to the bottom, came up again with empty hands, turned and swam downward through the grotto in the thick darkness, plunging and diving at every stroke, striking my head and hands against jagged stones and sharp corners, clutching at last something in my fingers and dragging it up with all my might. I spoke, I cried aloud, but there was no answer. I was alone in the pitchy darkness with my burden, and the house was five hundred yards away. Struggling still, I felt the ground beneath my feet, I saw a ray of moonlight- -the grotto widened, and the deep water became a broad and shallow brook as I stumbled over the stones and at last laid Margaret’s body on the bank in the park beyond.

  “Aye, Willie, as the clock struck!” said the voice of Judith, the Welsh nurse, as she bent down and looked at the white face. The old woman must have turned back and followed us, seen the accident, and slipped out by the lower gate of the garden. “Aye,” she groaned, “you have fed the Woman of the Water this night, Willie, while the clock was striking.”

  I scarcely heard her as I knelt beside the lifeless body of the woman I loved, chafing the wet white temples and gazing wildly into the wide-staring eyes. I remember only the first returning look of consciousness, the first heaving breath, the first movement of those dear hands stretching out toward me.

  That is not much of a story, you say. It is the story of my life. That is all. It does not pretend to be anything else. Old Judith says my luck turned on that summer’s night when I was struggling in the water to save all that was worth living for. A month later there was a stone bridge above the grotto, and Margaret and I stood on it and looked up at the moonlit Castle, as we had done once before, and as we have done many times since. For all those things happened ten years ago last summer, and this is the tenth Christmas Eve we have spent together by the roaring logs in the old hall, talking of old times; and every year there are more old times to talk of. There are curly-headed boys, too, with red-gold hair and dark-brown eyes like their mother’s, and a little Margaret, with solemn black eyes like mine. Why could not she look like her mother, too, as well as the rest of them?

  The world is very bright at this glorious Christmas time, and perhaps there is little use in calling up the sadness of long ago, unless it be to make the jolly firelight seem more cheerful, the good wife’s face look gladder, and to give the children’s laughter a merrier ring, by contrast with all that is gone. Perhaps, too, some sad-faced, listless, melancholy youth, who feels that the world is very hollow, and that life is like a perpetual funeral service, just as I used to feel myself, may take courage from my example, and having found the woman of his heart, ask her to marry him after half an hour’s acquaintance. But, on the whole, I would not advise any man to marry, for the simple reason that no man will ever find a wife like mine, and being obliged to go farther, he will necessarily fare worse. My wife has done miracles, but I will not assert that any other woman is able to follow her example.

  Margaret always said that the old place was beautiful, and that I ought to be proud of it. I dare say she is right. She has even more imagination than I. But I have a good answer and a plain one, which is this,—that all the beauty of the Castle comes from her. She has breathed upon it all, as the children blow upon the cold glass window panes in winter; and as their warm breath crystallizes into landscapes from fairyland, full of exquisite shapes and traceries upon the blank surface, so her spirit has transformed every gray stone of the old towers, every ancient tree and hedge in the gardens, every thought in my once melancholy self. All that was old is young, and all that was sad is glad, and I am the gladdest of all. Whatever heaven may be, there is no earthly para
dise without woman, nor is there anywhere a place so desolate, so dreary, so unutterably miserable that a woman cannot make it seem heaven to the man she loves and who loves her.

  I hear certain cynics laugh, and cry that all that has been said before. Do not laugh, my good cynic. You are too small a man to laugh at such a great thing as love. Prayers have been said before now by many, and perhaps you say yours, too. I do not think they lose anything by being repeated, nor you by repeating them. You say that the world is bitter, and full of the Waters of Bitterness. Love, and so live that you may be loved—the world will turn sweet for you, and you shall rest like me by the Waters of Paradise.

  From “The Play-Actress and the Upper Berth,” by F. Marion Crawford. Copyright, 1896, by G. P. Putnam’s Sons.

  Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

  The Shadows on the Wall

  “Henry had words with Edward in the study the night before Edward died,” said Caroline Glynn.

  She was elderly, tall, and harshly thin, with a hard colourlessness of face. She spoke not with acrimony, but with grave severity. Rebecca Ann Glynn, younger, stouter and rosy of face between her crinkling puffs of gray hair, gasped, by way of assent. She sat in a wide flounce of black silk in the corner of the sofa, and rolled terrified eyes from her sister Caroline to her sister Mrs. Stephen Brigham, who had been Emma Glynn, the one beauty of the family. She was beautiful still, with a large, splendid, full-blown beauty; she filled a great rocking-chair with her superb bulk of femininity, and swayed gently back and forth, her black silks whispering and her black frills fluttering. Even the shock of death (for her brother Edward lay dead in the house,) could not disturb her outward serenity of demeanor. She was grieved over the loss of her brother: he had been the youngest, and she had been fond of him, but never had Emma Brigham lost sight of her own importance amidst the waters of tribulation. She was always awake to the consciousness of her own stability in the midst of vicissitudes and the splendor of her permanent bearing.

  But even her expression of masterly placidity changed before her sister Caroline’s announcement and her sister Rebecca Ann’s gasp of terror and distress in response.

  “I think Henry might have controlled his temper, when poor Edward was so near his end,” said she with an asperity which disturbed slightly the roseate curves of her beautiful mouth.

  “Of course he did not KNOW,” murmured Rebecca Ann in a faint tone strangely out of keeping with her appearance.

  One involuntarily looked again to be sure that such a feeble pipe came from that full-swelling chest.

  “Of course he did not know it,” said Caroline quickly. She turned on her sister with a strange sharp look of suspicion. “How could he have known it?” said she. Then she shrank as if from the other’s possible answer. “Of course you and I both know he could not,” said she conclusively, but her pale face was paler than it had been before.

  Rebecca gasped again. The married sister, Mrs. Emma Brigham, was now sitting up straight in her chair; she had ceased rocking, and was eyeing them both intently with a sudden accentuation of family likeness in her face. Given one common intensity of emotion and similar lines showed forth, and the three sisters of one race were evident.

  “What do you mean?” said she impartially to them both. Then she, too, seemed to shrink before a possible answer. She even laughed an evasive sort of laugh. “I guess you don’t mean anything,” said she, but her face wore still the expression of shrinking horror.

  “Nobody means anything,” said Caroline firmly. She rose and crossed the room toward the door with grim decisiveness.

  “Where are you going?” asked Mrs. Brigham.

  “I have something to see to,” replied Caroline, and the others at once knew by her tone that she had some solemn and sad duty to perform in the chamber of death.

  “Oh,” said Mrs. Brigham.

  After the door had closed behind Caroline, she turned to Rebecca.

  “Did Henry have many words with him?” she asked.

  “They were talking very loud,” replied Rebecca evasively, yet with an answering gleam of ready response to the other’s curiosity in the quick lift of her soft blue eyes.

  Mrs. Brigham looked at her. She had not resumed rocking. She still sat up straight with a slight knitting of intensity on her fair forehead, between the pretty rippling curves of her auburn hair.

  “Did you—hear anything?” she asked in a low voice with a glance toward the door.

  “I was just across the hall in the south parlor, and that door was open and this door ajar,” replied Rebecca with a slight flush.

  “Then you must have—”

  “I couldn’t help it.”

  “Everything?”

  “Most of it.”

  “What was it?”

  “The old story.”

  “I suppose Henry was mad, as he always was, because Edward was living on here for nothing, when he had wasted all the money father left him.”

  Rebecca nodded with a fearful glance at the door.

  When Emma spoke again her voice was still more hushed. “I know how he felt,” said she. “He had always been so prudent himself, and worked hard at his profession, and there Edward had never done anything but spend, and it must have looked to him as if Edward was living at his expense, but he wasn’t.”

  “No, he wasn’t.”

  “It was the way father left the property—that all the children should have a home here—and he left money enough to buy the food and all if we had all come home.”

  “Yes.”

  “And Edward had a right here according to the terms of father’s will, and Henry ought to have remembered it.”

  “Yes, he ought.”

  “Did he say hard things?”

  “Pretty hard from what I heard.”

  “What?”

  “I heard him tell Edward that he had no business here at all, and he thought he had better go away.”

  “What did Edward say?”

  “That he would stay here as long as he lived and afterward, too, if he was a mind to, and he would like to see Henry get him out; and then—”

  “What?”

  “Then he laughed.”

  “What did Henry say.”

  “I didn’t hear him say anything, but—”

  “But what?”

  “I saw him when he came out of this room.”

  “He looked mad?”

  “You’ve seen him when he looked so.”

  Emma nodded; the expression of horror on her face had deepened.

  “Do you remember that time he killed the cat because she had scratched him?”

  “Yes. Don’t!”

  Then Caroline reentered the room. She went up to the stove in which a wood fire was burning—it was a cold, gloomy day of fall— and she warmed her hands, which were reddened from recent washing in cold water.

  Mrs. Brigham looked at her and hesitated. She glanced at the door, which was still ajar, as it did not easily shut, being still swollen with the damp weather of the summer. She rose and pushed it together with a sharp thud which jarred the house. Rebecca started painfully with a half exclamation. Caroline looked at her disapprovingly.

  “It is time you controlled your nerves, Rebecca,” said she.

  “I can’t help it,” replied Rebecca with almost a wail. “I am nervous. There’s enough to make me so, the Lord knows.”

  “What do you mean by that?” asked Caroline with her old air of sharp suspicion, and something between challenge and dread of its being met.

  Rebecca shrank.

  “Nothing,” said she.

  “Then I wouldn’t keep speaking in such a fashion.”

  Emma, returning from the closed door, said imperiously that it ought to be fixed, it shut so hard.

  “It will shrink enough after we have had the fire a few days,” replied Caroline. “If anything is done to it it will be too small; there will be a crack at the sill.”

  “I think Henry ought to be ashamed of himself f
or talking as he did to Edward,” said Mrs. Brigham abruptly, but in an almost inaudible voice.

  “Hush!” said Caroline, with a glance of actual fear at the closed door.

  “Nobody can hear with the door shut.”

  “He must have heard it shut, and—”

  “Well, I can say what I want to before he comes down, and I am not afraid of him.”

  “I don’t know who is afraid of him! What reason is there for anybody to be afraid of Henry?” demanded Caroline.

  Mrs. Brigham trembled before her sister’s look. Rebecca gasped again. “There isn’t any reason, of course. Why should there be?”

  “I wouldn’t speak so, then. Somebody might overhear you and think it was queer. Miranda Joy is in the south parlor sewing, you know.”

  “I thought she went upstairs to stitch on the machine.”

  “She did, but she has come down again.”

  “Well, she can’t hear.”

  “I say again I think Henry ought to be ashamed of himself. I shouldn’t think he’d ever get over it, having words with poor Edward the very night before he died. Edward was enough sight better disposition than Henry, with all his faults. I always thought a great deal of poor Edward, myself.”

  Mrs. Brigham passed a large fluff of handkerchief across her eyes; Rebecca sobbed outright.