 Borgonev, Part 3 of the Lock and Key Library. At this juncture there arrived from Paris the woman to whom the great sorrow of my life is due. A fatalist might read in her appearance at this particular moment the signs of a prearranged doom. A few weeks later, and her arrival would have been harmless, I should have been shielded from all external influence by the absorbing force of love. But alas, this was not to be. My fate had taken another direction. The woman had arrived whose shadow was to darken the rest of my existence. That woman was Agalma Liebenstein. How is it that the head which we can only see surrounded with a halo, or a shadow, when the splendors of achievement, or the infamy of shame, instruct our eyes, is by the uninstructed eye observed as holy vulgar? We all profess to be physiognomists. How is it we are so lamentably mistaken in our judgments? Here was a woman in whom my ignorant eyes saw nothing at all remarkable except golden hair of unusual beauty. When I say golden I am not speaking loosely. I do not mean red or flaxen hair, but hair actually resembling burnished gold more than anything else. Its ripples on her brow caught the light like a coronet. This was her one beauty, and it was superb. For the rest her features were characterless. Her figure was tall and full, not graceful, but sweepingly imposing. At first I noticed nothing about her except the braided splendor of her glorious hair. He rose and went into his bedroom, from which he returned with a small trinket box in his hand. Once he laid open on the table, disclosing a long strand of exquisite fair hair lying on a cushion of dark blue velvet. Look at that, he said. Might it not have been cut from an angel's head? It is certainly wonderful. It must have been hair like this which crowned the infamous head of Lucrezia Borgia, he said bitterly. She too had golden hair, but hers must have been of paler tint like her nature. He resumed his seat, and fixing his eyes upon the lock continued. She was one of Ottili's friends, dear friends, they called each other, which meant that they kissed each other profusely, and told each other all their secrets, or as much as the lying nature of the sex permitted and suggested. It is, of course, impossible for me to distangle my present knowledge from my past impressions, so as to give you a clear description of what I then thought of Agalma. Enough that, as a matter of fact, I distinctly remember not to have admired her, and to have told Ottili so. And when Ottili, in surprise at my insensibility, assured me that men were in general wonderfully charmed with her, though for her part she never had understood why, I answered and answered sincerely, that it might be true with the less refined order of men, but men of taste would certainly be rather repelled from her. This opinion of mine, or some report of it, reached Agalma. It may have been the proximate cause of my sorrows. Without this stimulus to her vanity she might have left me undisturbed. I don't know. All I know is that over many men Agalma exercised great influence, and that over me she exercised the spell of fascination. No other word will explain her influence, for it was not based on excellences such as the mind could recognize to be attractions. It was based on a mysterious personal power, something awful in its mysteriousness, as all demonic powers are. One source of her influence over men I think I can explain. She had once captivated and repelled them. By artful appeals to their vanity she made them interested in her and in her opinion of them, and yet kept herself inaccessible by a pride which was the more fascinating because it always seemed about to give way. Her instinct fastened upon the weak point in those she approached. This made her seductive to men because she flattered their weak points, and hateful to women because she flouted and disclosed their weak points. Her influence over me began in the following way. One day at a picnic having been led by her into a conversation respecting the relative inferiority of the feminine intellect I was forced to speak rather more earnestly than usual, when suddenly she turned to me and exclaimed in a lower voice, I am willing to credit anything you say, only pray don't continue talking to me so earnestly. Why not? I asked, surprised. She looked at me with peculiar significance, but remained silent. May I ask why not? I asked. Perhaps if you do, somebody may be jealous. There was a laughing defiance in her eye as she spoke, and pray who has a right to be jealous of me. Oh, you know well enough. It was true, I did know, and she knew that I knew it. To my shame be it said that I was weak enough to yield to an equivocation which I now see to have been disloyal, but which I then pretended to have been no more than delicacy to artillery. As in point of fact there had never been a word past between us respecting our mutual feelings, I considered myself bound in honour to assume that there was nothing tacitly acknowledged. Peaked by her tone and look, I disavowed the existence of any claims upon my attention, and to prove the sincerity of my words I persisted in addressing my attentions to her. Once or twice I fancied I caught flying glances in which some of the company criticised my conduct, and Attili also seemed to me unusually quiet. But her manner, though quiet, was untroubled and unchanged. I talked less to her than usual, partly because I talked so much to Agalma, and partly because I felt that Agalma's eyes were on us, but no shadow of temper or reserve darkened our interchange of speech. On our way back I know not what devil prompted me to ask Agalma whether she had really been in earnest in her former allusion to somebody. Yes, she said, I was in earnest then. And now? Now I have doubts. I may have been misinformed. It's no concern of mine, anyway, but I had been given to understand. Here I admit that my own eyes have not confirmed what my ears heard. This speech was irritating on two separate grounds. It implied that people were talking freely of my attachment, which, until I had formally acknowledged it, I resented as an impertinence. And it implied that, from personal observation, Agalma doubted Attili's feelings for me. This alarmed my quick retreating pride. I too began to doubt. Once let loose on that field, imagination soon saw shapes enough to confirm any doubt. Attili's manner certainly had seemed less tender, nay, somewhat indifferent during the last few days. Had the arrival of that heavy lout her cousin had anything to do with this change? Not to weary you by recalling all the unfolding stages of this miserable story with the minuteness of detail which my own memory morbidly lingers on, I will hurry to the catastrophe. I grew more and more doubtful of the existence in Attili's mind of any feelings stronger than friendship for me. And as this doubt strengthened, there arose the flattering suspicion that I was becoming an object of greater interest to Agalma, who had quite changed her tone towards me and had become serious in her speech and manner. Weeks passed, Attili had fallen from her pedestal and had taken her place among agreeable acquaintances. One day I suddenly learned that Attili was engaged to her cousin. You will not wonder that Agalma, who before this had exercised great fascination over me, now doubly became an object of the most tender interest. I fell madly in love. Hitherto I had never known that passion. My feeling for Attili I saw was but the inarticulate stammerings of the mighty voice which now sounded through the depths of my nature. The phrase, madly in love, is no exaggeration. Madness alone knows such a fever of the brain, such a tumult of the heart. It was not that reason was overpowered. On the contrary, reason was intensely active, but active with that logic of flames which lights up the vision of maniacs. Although of course my passion was but too evident to everyone, I dreaded its premature avowal, lest I should lose her, and almost equally dreaded delay, lest I should suffer from that also. At length the avowal was extorted from me by jealousy of a brilliant pole, Kerinsky, who had recently appeared in our circle and was obviously casting me in the shade by his superior advantages of novelty, of personal attraction, and of a romantic history. She accepted me, and now for a time I was the happiest of mortals. The fever of the last few weeks was abating. It gave place to a deep tide of hopeful joy. Could I have died then? Could I have even died shortly afterwards when I knew the delicious mystery of a jealousy not too absorbing? For you must know that my happiness was brief. Jealousy, to which all passion of a deep and exacting power is inevitably allied, soon began to disturb my content. Agalma had no tenderness. She permitted caresses, never returned them. She was ready enough to listen to all my plans for the future, so long as the recital moved amid details of fortune and her position in society—that is, so long as her vanity was interested—but I began to observe with pain that her thoughts never rested on tender domesticities and poetic anticipations. This vexed me more and more. The very spell which she exercised over me made her want of tenderness more intolerable. I yearned for her love, for some sympathy with the vehement passion which was burning within me, and she was as marble. You will not be surprised to hear that I reproached her bitterly for her indifference. That is the invariable and fatal folly of lovers. They seem to imagine that a heart can be scolded into tenderness. To my reproaches she at first answered impatiently that they were unjust, that it was not her fault if her nature was less expansive than mine, and that it was insulting to be told she was indifferent to the man whom she had consented to marry. Later she answered my reproaches with haughty defiance, one day intimating that if I really thought what I said and repented our engagement it would be most prudent for us to separate ere it was too late. This quieted me for a while. But it brought no balm to my wounds. And now fresh tortures were added. Kerinsky became quite marked in his attentions to Agalma. These she received with evident delight, so much so that I saw by the glances of others that they were scandalized at it. And this, of course, increased my pain. My renewed reproaches only made her manner colder to me. To Kerinsky it became what I would gladly have seen towards myself. The stress and agitation of those days were too much for me. I fell ill and for seven weeks lay utterly prostrate. On recovering this note was handed to me. It was from Agalma. Bourgonnais here held out to me a crumpled letter and motioned that I should open it and read. It ran thus. I have thought much of what you have so often said that it would be for the happiness of both if our unfortunate engagement were set aside, that you have a real affection for me, I believe, and be assured that I once had a real affection for you. Not perhaps the passionate love which a nature so exacting as yours demands and which I earnestly hope it may one day find, but a genuine affection nevertheless, which would have made me proud to share your lot. But it would be uncandid in me to pretend that this now exists. Your incessant jealousy, the angry feelings excited by your reproaches, the fretful irritation in which for some time we have lived together, has completely killed what love I had, and I no longer feel prepared to risk the happiness of both of us by a marriage. You said the other night convinces me that it is even your desire our engagement should cease. It is certainly mine. Let us try to think kindly of each other and meet again as friends. Agal Malibenstein. When I had read this and returned it to him, he said, You see that this was written on the day that I was taken ill. Whether she knew that I was helpless, I know not. At any rate she never sent to inquire after me. She went off to Paris, Kerinsky followed her, and as I quickly learned on going once more into society they were married. Did you ever, in the whole course of your experience, hear of such heartless conduct? Burgeneuve asked this with a ferocity which quite startled me. I did not answer him for, in truth, I could not see that Agal Maliben had been very much to blame, even as he told the story, but felt sure that could I have heard her version it would have worn a very different aspect. That she was cold and disappointed in him might be true enough, but there was no crime, and I perfectly understood how thoroughly odious he must have made himself to her by his exactions and reproaches. I understood this perhaps all the better, because in the course of his narrative Burgeneuve had revealed to me aspects of his nature which were somewhat repulsive, especially was I struck with his morbid vanity and his readiness to impute low motives to others. This unpleasant view of his character, a character in many respects so admirable for its generosity and refinement, was deepened as he went on instead of awaiting my reply to his question. For a wrong so measureless you will naturally ask what measureless revenge I sought. The idea had not occurred to me. Indeed, I could see no wrong, and this notion of revenge was somewhat startling in such a case. I debated it long, he continued. I felt that since I was prevented from arresting any of the evil to myself I could at least mature my plans for an adequate discharge of just retributions on her. It reveals the impotence resulting from the trammels of modern civilization that while the possibilities of wrong are infinite, the openings for vengeance are few and contemptible. Only when a man is thrown upon the necessities of this wild justice does he discover how difficult vengeance really is. Had Agalma been my wife I could have wreaked my wrath upon her, with assurance that some of the torture she inflicted on me was to fall on her. Not having this power, what was I to do? Kill her? That would have afforded one moment of exquisite satisfaction, but to her it would have been simply death, and I wanted to kill the heart. He seemed working with an insane passion, so that I regarded him with disgust, mingled with some doubts as to what horrors he was about to relate. My plan was chosen. The only way to reach her heart was to strike through her husband. For several hours daily I practiced with the pistol, until, in spite of only having a left hand, I acquired fatal skill. But this was not enough. Firing at a mark is simple work. Firing at a man, especially one holding a pistol pointed at you, is altogether different. I had too often heard of crack shots missing their men to rely confidently on my skill in the shooting gallery. It was necessary that my eye and hand should be educated to familiarity with the real object. Part of the cause why dualists miss their man is from the trepidation of fear. I was without fear. At no moment in my life have I been afraid, and the chance of being shot by Kerinsky I counted as nothing. The other cause is unfamiliarity with the mark. This I secured myself against by getting a lay figure of Kerinsky's height, dressing it to resemble him, placing a pistol in its hand, and then practicing at this mark in the woods. After a short time I could send a bullet through the thorax without taking more than a hasty glance at the figure. As prepared I started for Paris. But you will feel for me when you learn that my hungry heart was baffled of its vengeance and baffled forever. A gala had been carried off by scarlet fever. Kerinsky had left Paris, and I felt no strong promptings to follow him and wreak on him a futile vengeance. It was on her my wrath had been concentrated, and I gnashed my teeth at the thought that she had escaped me. My story has ended. The months of gloomy depression which succeeded now that I was no longer sustained by the hope of vengeance I need not speak of. My existence was desolate, and even now the desolation continues over the whole region of the emotions. I carry a dead heart within me. Borgenev's story has been narrated with some fullness, though in less detail than he told it in order that the reader may understand its real bearings on my story. Without it the motives which impelled the strange pertinacity of my pursuit would have been unintelligible. I have said that a very disagreeable impression remained on my mind respecting certain aspects of his character, and I felt somewhat ashamed of my imperfect sagacity in having up to this period been entirely blind to those aspects. The truth is every human being is a mystery, and remains so to the last. We fancy we know a character. We form a distinct conception of it. For years that conception remains unmodified, and suddenly the strain of some emergency, of the incidental stimulus of new circumstances, reveals qualities not simply unexpected, but flatly contradictory of our previous conception. We judge of a man by the angle he subtends to our eye. Only thus can we judge of him. And this angle depends on the relation his qualities and circumstances bear to our interests and sympathies. Borgenev had charmed me intellectually. Morally I had never come closer to him than in the sympathies of public questions and abstract theories. His story had disclosed hidden depths. My old suspicions reappeared, and a conversation we had two days afterwards helped to strengthen them. We had gone on a visit to Svanthala, the sculptor, at his tiny little castle of Svanic, a few miles from Munich. The artist was out for a walk, but we were invited to come in and await his return, which would be shortly. And meanwhile Borgenev undertook to show me over the castle, interesting as a bit of modern Gothic, realizing on a diminutive scale a youthful dream of the sculptors. When our survey was completed, and it did not take long, we sat at one of the windows and enjoyed a magnificent prospect. It is curious, said Borgenev, to be shut up here in this imitation of medieval masonry, where every detail speaks of the dead past, and to think of the events now going on in Paris which must find imitators all over Europe, and which open to the mind such vistas of the future. What a grotesque anachronism is this Gothic castle, built in the same age as that which sees reforming pope. Yes, but is not the reforming pope himself an anachronism? As a Catholic, here he smiled, intimating that his orthodoxy was not very stringent. I cannot admit that. As a Protestant, you must admit that if there must be a pope, he must in these days be a reformer, or give up his temporal power. Not that I look on Pio Nono as more than a precursor. He may break ground and point the way, but he is not the man to lead Europe out of its present slew of despond, and under the headship of the church found a new and lasting republic. We want a Hildebrandt, one who will be to the 19th century as Gregory was to the 11th. Do you believe in such a possibility? Do you think the Roman pontiff can ever again sway the destinies of Europe? I can hardly say I believe it, yet I see the possibility of such an opening if the right man were to arise. But I fear he will not arise, or if he should, the conclave will stifle him. Yet there is but one alternative. Either Europe must once more join in a crusade with a pope at the head, or it must hoist the red flag. There is no other issue. Men preserve us from both, and I think we shall be preserved from the pope by the rottenness of the church, and from the drapeau rouge by the indignation and horror of all honest men. You see how the provisional government has resisted the insane attempt of the fanatics to make the red flag accepted as the national banner. Yes, and it is the one thing which dashes my pleasure in the new revolution. It is the one act of weakness which the government has exhibited, a concession which will be fatal unless it be happily set aside by the energetic party of action. An act of weakness say rather an act of strength, a concession say rather the repudiation of anarchy, the assertion of law and justice. Not a bit. It was in concession to the fears of the timid and to the vanity of the French people. The tricolor is a French flag, not the banner of humanity. It is because the tricolor has been identified with the victories of France that it appeals to the vanity of the vanist of people. They forget that it is the flag of a revolution which failed and of an empire which was one perpetual outrage to humanity, whereas the red is new. It is the symbol of an energetic, thoroughgoing creed. If it carries terror with it, so much the better. The tyrants and the timid should be made to tremble. I had no idea you were so bloodthirsty, said I, laughing at his vehemence. I am not bloodthirsty at all. I am only logical and consistent. There is a mass of sophistry current in the world which sickens me. People talk of Robespierre and Saint-Jus, two of the most virtuous men that ever lived, and of Dominic and Torquemada, two of the most single-minded, as if they were cruel and bloodthirsty, whereas they were only convinced. Is it from love of paradox that you defend these tigers? Tigers, again! How those beasts are columniated! He said this with a seriousness which was irresistibly comic. I shouted with laughter, but he continued gravely. You think I am joking. But let me ask you why you consider the tiger more bloodthirsty than yourself. He springs upon his food. You buy yours from the butcher. He cannot live without animal food, it is a primal necessity, and he obeys the ordained instinct. You can live on vegetables, yet you slaughter beasts of the field and birds of the air, or buy them when slaughtered, and consider yourself a model of virtue. The tiger only kills his food or his enemies. You not only kill both, but you kill one animal to make gravy for another. The tiger is less bloodthirsty than the Christian. I don't know how much of that tirade is meant to be serious, but to waive the question of the tiger's morality. Do you really, I will not say sympathize, but justify Robespierre, Dominic, Sanjoust, and the rest of the fanatics who have waited to their ends through blood? He who wills the end wills the means. A devil's maxim, but a truth. What the foolish world shrinks at as bloodthirstiness and cruelty is very often mere force and constancy of intellect. It is not that fanatics thirst for blood, far from it, but they thirst for the triumph of their cause. Whatever obstacle lies on their path must be removed if a torrent of blood is the only thing that will sweep it away. The torrent must sweep. And sweep with it all the sentiments of pity, mercy, charity, love. No, these sentiments may give a sadness to the necessity. They make the deed a sacrifice, but they cannot prevent the soul from seeing the aim to which it tends. This is a detestable doctrine. It is the Sophism which has destroyed families, devastated cities, and retarded the moral progress of the world more than anything else. No single act of injustice is ever done on this earth, but it tends to perpetuate the reign of iniquity. By the feelings it calls forth, it keeps up the native savagery of the heart. It breeds injustice partly by hardening the minds of those who assent and partly by exciting the passion of revenge and those who resist. You are wrong. The great drag chain on the car of progress is the faltering inconsistency of man. Weakness is more cruel than sternness. Sentiment is more destructive than logic. The arrival of Shranthaler was timely, for my indignation was rising. The sculptor received us with great cordiality, and in the pleasure of the subsequent hour I got over to some extent the irritation Burganev's talk had excited. The next day I left Munich for the Tyrol. My parting with Burganev was many degrees less friendly than it would have been a week before. I had no wish to see him again, and therefore gave him no address or invitation in case he should come to England. As I rolled away in the malpost, my busy thoughts reviewed all the details of our acquaintance, and the farther I was carried from his presence, the more obtrusive became the suspicions which connected him with the murder of Lysian Leifelt. How, or upon what motive, was indeed an utter mystery? He had not mentioned the name of Leifelt. He had not mentioned having before been at Nuremberg. At Heidelberg the tragedy occurred, or was Heidelberg only a mask? It occurred to me that he had first ascertained that I had never been at Heidelberg before he placed the scene of his story there. Thoughts such as these tormented me. Imagine then the horror with which I heard, soon after my arrival at Salzburg, that a murder had been committed at Grossesler, one of the pretty environs of Munich much resorted to by holiday folk, corresponding in all essential features with the murder at Nuremberg. In both cases the victim was young and pretty. In both cases she was found quietly lying on the ground, stabbed to the heart without any other traces of violence. In both cases she was a betrothed bride and the motive of the unknown assassin a mystery. Such a correspondence in the essential features inevitably suggested an appalling mystery of unity in these crimes, either as the crimes of one man committed under some impulse of motiveless malignity and thirst for innocent blood, or as the equally appalling effect of imitation acting contagiously upon a criminal imagination, of which contagion there have been, unfortunately, too many examples. Horrible crimes prompting certain weak and feverish imaginations by the very horror they inspire first to dwell on and finally to realize their imitations. It was this latter hypothesis which found general acceptance. Indeed it was the only one which rested upon any ground of experience. The disastrous influence of imitation, especially under the fascination of horror, was well known. The idea of any diabolical malice moving one man to pass from city to city and there quietly single out his victims, both of them by the very hypothesis unrelated to him, both of them at the epoch of their lives when the bosom's lord sits lightly on its throne. When the peace of the heart is assured and the future is radiantly beckoning to them that any man should choose such victims for such crimes was too preposterous an idea long to be entertained. Unless the man were mad, the idea was inconceivable and even a monomaniac must betray himself in such a course because he would necessarily conceive himself to be accomplishing some supreme act of justice. It was thus I argued and indeed I should have much preferred to believe that one maniac were involved rather than the contagion of crime since one maniac must inevitably be soon detected whereas there were no assignable limits to the contagion of imitation. And this it was which so profoundly agitated German society. In every family in which there happened to be a bride, vague tremors could not be allayed and the absolute powerlessness which resulted from the utter uncertainty as to the quarter in which this dreaded phantom might next appear justified and intensified those tremors. Against such an apparition there was no conceivable safeguard. From a city stricken with the plague, from a district so stricken, flight is possible and there are the resources of medical aid but from a moral plague like this, what escape was possible. So passionate and profound came the terror that I began to share the opinion which I heard expressed regretting the widespread publicity of the modern press since with many undeniable benefits it carried also the fatal curse of distributing through households and keeping constantly under the excitement of discussion images of crime and horror which would tend to perpetuate and extend the excesses of individual passion. The mere dwelling long on such a topic as this was fraught with evil. This and more I heard discussed as I hurried back to Munich. Yes, thither I was posting with all speed. Not a shadow of doubt now remained in my mind. I knew the assassin and was resolved to track and convict him. Do not suppose that this time I was led away by the vagrant activity of my constructive imagination. I had something like positive proof. No sooner had I learned that the murder had been committed at Grosshessler than my thoughts at once carried me to a now memorable visit I had made there in company with Burgenev and two young Bavarians. At the hotel where we dined we were waited on by the niece of the landlord, a girl of remarkable beauty who naturally excited the attention of four young men and furnished them with a topic of conversation. One of the Bavarians had told us that she would one day be perhaps one of the wealthiest women in the country for she was engaged to be married to a young farmer who had recently found himself by a rapid succession of deaths, sole heir to a great brewer whose wealth was known to be enormous. At this moment Sophie entered bringing wine and I saw Burgenev slowly turn his eyes upon her with a look which then was mysterious to me but which now spoke too plainly its dreadful meaning. What is there in a look you will say? Perhaps nothing or it may be everything. To my unsuspecting, unenlightened perception Burgenev's gaze was simply the melancholy and half-curious gaze which such a man might be supposed to cast upon a young woman who had been made the topic of an interesting discourse. But to my mind enlightened as to his character and instructed as to his peculiar feelings arising from his own story the gaze was charged with horror. It marked a victim. The whole succession of events rose before me in vivid distinctness. The separate details of suspicion gathered into unity. Great as was Burgenev's command over his features he could not conceal uneasiness as well as surprise at my appearance at the Tabledot in Munich. I shook hands with him putting on as friendly a mask as I could and replied to his question about my sudden return by attributing it to unexpected intelligence received at Salzburg. Nothing serious, I hope? Well, I'm afraid it will prove very serious, I said. But we shall see. Meanwhile my visit to the Tyrol must be given up or postponed. Do you remain here then? I don't know what my movements will be. Thus I had prepared him for any reserve or strangeness in my manner and I had concealed from him the course of my movements for at whatever cost I was resolved to follow him and bring him to justice. But how? Evidence I had none that could satisfy anyone else however convincing it might be to my own mind. Nor did there seem any evidence forthcoming from Großheslö. Sophie's body had been found in the afternoon lying as if asleep in one of the bypass of the wood. No marks of a struggle, no traces of the murderer. Her affianced lover, who was at Augsburg, on hearing of her fate hurried to Großheslö but could throw no light on the murder could give no hint as to a possible motive for the deed. But this entire absence of evidence or even ground of suspicion only made my case the stronger. It was the motiveless malignity of the deed which fastened it on Burgeneuve or rather it was the absence of any known motive elsewhere which assured me that I had detected the motive in him. Should I communicate my conviction to the police? It was possible that I might impress them with at least sufficient suspicion to warrant his examination and in that case the truth might be elicited, for among the many barbarities and iniquities of the criminal procedure in the Continental States which often press heavily on the innocent, there is this compensating advantage that the pressure on the guilty is tenfold heavier. If the innocent are often unjustly punished, imprisoned and maltreated before their innocence can be established, the guilty seldom escape. In England we give the criminal not only every chance of escape but many advantages. The love of fair play is carried to excess. It seems at times if the whole arrangements of our procedure were established with the view to giving a criminal not only the benefit of every doubt but of every loophole through which he can slip. Instead of this the Continental procedure goes on the principle of closing up every loophole and of inventing endless traps into which the accused may fall. We warn the accused not to say anything that may be prejudicial to him. They entangle him in contradictions and confessions which disclose his guilt. Knowing this I thought it very likely that, however artful Burgeneuve might be, a severe examination might extort from him sufficient confirmation of my suspicion to warrant further procedure. But knowing also that this resort was open to me when all others had failed, I resolved to wait and watch. CHAPTER IX Finale Two days passed and nothing occurred. My watching seemed hopeless and I resolved to try the effect of a disguised interrogatory. It might help to confirm my already settled conviction if it did not elicit any new evidence. Seated in Burgeneuve's room in the old place, each with a cigar and chatting as of old on public affairs, I gradually approached the subject of the recent murder. Is it not strange, I said, that both these crimes should have happened while we were casually staying in both places? Perhaps we are the criminals, he replied, laughing. I shivered slightly at this audacity. He laughed as he spoke, but there was a hard metallic and almost defiant tone in his voice which exasperated me. Perhaps we are, I answered quietly. He looked full at me, but I was prepared and my face told nothing. I added as in explanation. The crime being apparently contagious we may have brought the infection from Nuremberg. Do you believe in that hypothesis of imitation? I don't know what to believe. Do you believe in there being only one murderer? It seems such a preposterous idea. We must suppose him at any rate to be a maniac. Not necessarily. Indeed there seems to have been too much artful contrivance in both affairs, not only in the selection of the victims but in the execution of the schemes. Being as maniacs often are they are still maniacs and betray themselves. If not a maniac, I said, hoping to pique him, he must be a man of stupendous and pitiable vanity, perhaps one of your constant-minded friends whom you refuse to call bloodthirsty. Constant-minded, perhaps, but why pitiably vain? Why? Only a diseased atrocity of imagination, stimulating a nature essentially base and weak in its desire to make itself conspicuous, would or could suggest such things. The silly youth who fired the Ephesian dome, the vain idiot who set fire to Yorkminster, the miserable Frenchmen who have committed murder and suicide with a view of making their exits striking from a world in which their appearance had been contemptible, would all sink into insignificance beside the towering infamy of baseness which, for the mere love of producing an effect on the minds of men, and thus drawing their attention upon him, would otherwise would never have marked him at all, would scheme and execute crimes so horrible and inexcusable. In common charity to human nature let us suppose the wretch is mad, because otherwise his miserable vanity would be too loathsome. I spoke with warmth and bitterness which increased as I perceived him wincing under the degradation of my contempt. If his motive were vanity, he said, no doubt it would be horrible, but may not it have been revenge? Revenge, I exclaimed, what, on innocent women? You assume their innocence. Good God, do you know anything to the contrary? Not I, but as we are conjecturing, I may as well conjecture it to have been the desire to produce a startling effect. How do you justify your conjecture? Simply enough. We have to suppose a motive. Let us say it was revenge, and see whether that will furnish a clue. But it can't. The two victims were wholly unconnected with each other by any intermediate acquaintances. Consequently there can have been no common wrong or common enmity in existence to furnish food for vengeance. That may be so. It may also be that the Avenger made them vicarious victims. How so? It is human nature. Did you ever observe a thwarted child striking in its anger the unoffending nurse, destroying its toys to discharge its wrath? Did you ever see a schoolboy unable to wreak his anger on the bigger boy who has just struck him, turn against the nearest smaller boy and beat him? Did you ever know a schoolmaster, angered by one of the boy's parents, vent his pent-up spleen upon the unoffending class? Did you ever see a subaltern punished because an officer had been reprimanded? These are familiar examples of vicarious vengeance. When the soul is stung to fury, it must solace itself by the discharge of that fury. It must relieve its pain by the sight of pain and others. We are so constituted. We need sympathy above all things. In joy we cannot bear to see others in distress. In distress we see the joy of others with dismal envy which sharpens our pain. That is human nature. And, I exclaimed, carried away by my indignation, you suppose that the sight of these two happy girls, beaming with a quiet joy of brides, was tortured to some miserable wretch who had lost his bride. I had gone too far. His eyes looked into mine. I read in his that he divined the whole drift of my suspicion, the illusion made to himself. There often passes into a look more than words can venture to express. In that look he read that he was discovered, and I read that he had recognized it. With perfect calmness, but with a metallic ring in his voice which was like the clash of swords, he said, I did not say that I supposed this, but as we were on the wide field of conjecture, utterly without evidence one way or the other, having no clue either to the man or his motives, I drew from the general principles of human nature a conclusion which was just as plausible, or absurd, if you like, as the conclusion that the motive must have been vanity. As you say, we are utterly without evidence, and conjecture drifts aimlessly from one thing to another. After all, the most plausible explanation is that of a contagion of imitation. I said this in order to cover my previous imprudence. He was not deceived, though for a few moments I fancied he was, but replied, I am not persuaded of that either. The whole thing is a mystery, and I shall stay here some time in the hope of seeing it cleared up. Meanwhile, for a subject of conjecture, let me show you something on which your ingenuity may profitably be employed. He rose and passed into his bedroom. I heard him unlocking and rummaging the drawers, and was silently reproaching myself for my want of caution and having spoken as I had done, though it was now beyond all doubt that he was the murderer, and that his motive had been rightly guessed, but with this self-reproach there was mingled a self-gradulation at the way I had got out of the difficulty as I fancied. He returned, and as he sat down I noticed that the lower part of his sertu was open. He always wore a long frog and braided coat reaching to the knees, as I know now for the purpose of concealing the arm which hung, as he said, withered at his side. The two last fascinings were now undone. He held in his hand a tiny chain made of very delicate wire. This he gave me, saying, Now, what would you conjecture that to be? Had it come into my hands without any remark, I should have said it was simply a very exquisite bit of ironwork, but your question points to something more out of the way. It is ironwork, he said. Could I be deceived? A third fastening of his sertu was undone. I had seen but two a moment ago. And what am I to conjecture, I asked. Where that iron came from? It was not from a mine. I looked at it again, and examined it attentively, on raising my eyes in inquiry, fortunately with an expression of surprise, since what met my eyes would have startled a cooler man, I saw the fourth fastening undone. You look surprised, he continued, and will be more surprised when I tell you that the iron in your hands once floated in the circulation of a man. It is made from human blood. Human blood, I murmured. He went on expounding the physiological wonders of the blood, how it carried, dissolved in its currents, a proportion of iron and earths, how this iron was extracted by chemists and exhibited as a curiosity, and how this chain had been manufactured from such extracts. I heard every word, but my thoughts were hurrying to and fro in the agitation of a supreme moment, that there was a dagger underneath that coat, that in a few moments it would flash forth, that a death struggle was at hand, I knew well. My safety depended on presence of mind. That incalculable rapidity with which, in critical moments, the mind surveys all the openings and resources of an emergency, had assured me that there was no weapon within reach, that before I could give an alarm the tiger would be at my throat, and that my only chance was to keep my eyes fixed upon him, ready to spring on him the moment the next fastening was undone, and before he could use his arm. At last the idea occurred to me that as, with a wild beast, safety lies in attacking him just before he attacks you. So with this beast my best chance was audacity. Looking steadily into his face I said slowly, and you would like to have such a chain made from my blood. I rose as I spoke. He remained sitting, but was evidently taken aback. What do you mean, he said? I mean, said I sternly, that your coat is unfastened, and that if another fastening is loosened in my presence I fell you to the earth. You're a fool, he exclaimed. I moved towards the door, keeping my eye fixed upon him as he sat pale and glaring at me. You are a fool, I said, and worse if you stir. At this moment I know not by what sense as if I had eyes at the back of my head I was aware of someone moving behind me, yet I dared not look aside. Suddenly two mighty folds of darkness seemed to envelop me like arms. A powerful scent ascended my nostrils. There was a ringing in my ears, a beating at my heart. Darkness came on, deeper and deeper, like huge waves. I seemed growing to gigantic stature. The waves rolled on faster and faster. The ringing became a roaring. The beating became a throbbing. Lights flashed across the darkness. Forms moved before me. On came the waves hurrying like a tide, and I sank deeper and deeper into this mighty sea of darkness. Then all was silent. Consciousness was still. How long I remained unconscious I cannot tell. But it must have been some considerable time. When consciousness once more began to dawn within me I found myself lying on a bed surrounded by a group of eager, watching faces and became aware of a confused murmur of whispering going on around me. Erlept, he lives, were the words which greeted my opening eyes, words which I recognized as coming from my landlord. I had had a very narrow escape. Another moment, and I should not have lived to tell the tale. The dagger that had already emulated two of Burgonev's objects of vengeance would have been in my breast. As it was, at the very moment when the terrible Ivan had thrown his arms around me and was stifling me with chloroform, one of the servants of the hotel, alarmed or attracted by curiosity at the sound of high words within the room, had ventured to open the door to see what was going on. The alarm had been given, and Burgonev had been arrested and handed over to the police. Ivan, however, had disappeared, nor were the police ever able to find him. This mattered comparatively little. Ivan, without his master, was no more redoubtable than any other noxious animal. As an accomplice, as an instrument to execute the will of a man like Burgonev, he was a danger to society. The directing intelligence withdrawn, he sank to the level of the brute. I was not uneasy, therefore, at his having escaped. Sufficient for me that the real criminal, the mind that had conceived and directed those fearful murders, was at last in the hands of justice. I felt that my task had been fully accomplished when Burgonev's head fell on the scaffold. The Closed Cabinet, Part 1, in the Lock and Key Library. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Mary Schneider. The Lock and Key Library, edited by Julian Hawthorne. The Closed Cabinet by Anonymous, Part 1. It was with a little alarm and a good deal of pleasurable excitement that I looked forward to my first grown-up visit to Mervyn Grange. I had been there several times as a child, but never since I was twelve years old, and now I was over eighteen. We were all of us very proud of our cousins, the Mervyns. It is not everybody that can claim kinship with a family who are in full and admitted possession of a secret, a curse, and a mysterious cabinet, in addition to the usual surplissage of horrors supplied in such cases by popular imagination. Some declared that a Mervyn of the days of Henry VIII had been cursed by an injured abbot from the foot of the gallows. Others affirmed that a dissipated Mervyn of the Georgian era was still playing cards for his soul in some remote region of the Grange. There were stories of white ladies in black imps, of bloodstained passages, and magic stones. We proud of our more intimate acquaintance with the family naturally gave no credence to these wild inventions. The Mervyns indeed followed the accepted precedent in such cases, and greatly disliked any reference to the reputed mystery being made of their presence, with the inevitable result that there was no subject so pertinaciously discussed by their friends in their absence. My father's sister had married the late Baronet, Sir Henry Mervyn, and we always felt that she ought to have been the means of imparting to us a very complete knowledge of the family's secret, but in this connection she undoubtedly failed of her duty. We knew that there had been a terrible tragedy in the family some two or three hundred years ago that a peculiarly wicked owner of Mervyn who flourished in the latter part of the 16th century had been murdered by his wife, who subsequently committed suicide. We knew that the mysterious curse had some connection with this crime, but what the curse exactly was we had never been able to discover. The history of the family since that time had indeed in one sense been full of misfortune, not in every sense. A coal mine had been discovered in one part of the estate, and a populous city had grown over the corner of another part, and the Mervyns of today, in spite of the usual percentage of extravagant errors and political mistakes, were three times as rich as their ancestors had been. But still their story was full of bloodshed and shame, of tales of duels and suicides, broken hearts and broken honor. Only these calamities seemed to have little or no relation to each other, and what the precise curse was that was supposed to connect or account for them we could not learn. When she first married, my aunt was told nothing about it. Later on in life, when my father asked her for the story, she begged him to talk upon a pleasanter subject, and being unluckily a man of much courtesy and of little curiosity, he complied with her request. This however was the only part of the ghostly traditions of her husband's home upon which she was so reticent. The haunted chamber, for instance, which of course existed at the Grange, she treated with the greatest contempt. Various friends and relations had slept in it at different times, and no approach to any kind of authenticated ghost story, even the most trivial description, had they been able to supply. Its only claim to respect, indeed, was that it contained the famous Mervyn cabinet, a fascinating puzzle of which I will speak later, but which certainly had nothing haunting or horrible about its appearance. My uncle's family consisted of three sons, the eldest, George, the present baronet, was now in his thirties married and with children of his own. The second, Jack, was the black sheep of the family. He had been in the guards, but about five years back had got into some very disgraceful scrape, and had been obliged to leave the country. The sorrow and the shame of this had killed his unhappy mother, and her husband had not long afterwards followed her to the grave. Alan, the youngest son, probably because he was the nearest to us in age, had been our special favorite in earlier years. George was grown up before I had well left the nursery, and his hot quick temper had always kept us youngsters somewhat in awe of him. Jack was four years older than Alan, and besides his profession had, in a way, cut his boyhood short. When my uncle and aunt were abroad, as they frequently were, for months together on account of her health, it was Alan, chiefly, who had to spend his holidays with us, both as schoolboy and as undergraduate. And a brighter, sweeter-tempered comrade, or one possessed of more diversified talents for the invention of games or the telling of stories, it would have been difficult to find. For five years together now our ancient custom of an annual visit to Mervyn had been broken. First there had been the seclusion of mourning for my aunt, and a year later for my uncle. Then George and his wife Lucy, she was a connection of our own on our mother's side, and very intimate with us all, had been away for nearly two years on a voyage round the world, and since then sickness in our own family had cupped us in our turn a good deal abroad. So that I had not seen my cousins since all the calamities which had befallen them in the interval, and as I steamed northwards I wondered a good deal as to the changes I should find. I was to have come out that year in London, but ill health had prevented me, and as a sort of consolation Lucy had kindly asked me to spend a fortnight at Mervyn, and be present at a shooting party, which was to assemble there the first week of October. I had started early, and there was still an hour of the short autumn day left when I descended at the little wayside station, from which a six mile drive brought me to the Grange. A dreary drive I found at the round gray, treeless outline of the fells, stretching around me on every side beneath the leaden, changeless sky. The night had nearly fallen as we drove along the narrow valley in which the Grange stood. It was too dark to see the autumn tints of the woods which clothed and brightened its sides, almost too dark to distinguish the old tower, Dame Alice's tower, as it was called, which stood some half a mile farther on at its head. But the light shone brightly from the Grange windows, and all feeling of durianess departed as I drove up to the door. Leaving maid and boxes to their fate I ran up the steps into the old well-remembered hall, and was informed by the dignified manservant that her ladyship and the tea were waiting me in the morning room. I found that there was nobody staying in the house except Allen, who was finishing a long vacation there. He had been called to the bar a couple of years before. The guests were not to arrive for another week so that I had plenty of opportunity in the interval to make up for lost time with my cousins. I began my observations that evening as we sat down to dinner a cozy party of four. Lucy was quite unchanged, pretty, foolish, and gentle as ever. George showed the full five years increase of age, and seemed to have acquired a somewhat painful control of his temper. Instead of the old petulant outbursts, there was, at times, an air of nervous, irritable self-restraint, which I found the less pleasant of the two. But it was in Allen that the most striking alteration appeared. I felt it the moment I shook hands with him, and the impression deepened that evening with every hour. I told myself that it was only the natural difference between boy and man, between 20 and 25. But I don't think that I believed it. Superficially, the change was not great. The slight, built, graceful figure, the deep gray eyes, too small for beauty. The clear cut features the delicate, sensitive lips, close shaven now, as they had been hairless then. All were as I remembered them. But the face was paler and thinner than it had been, and there were lines round the eyes and at the corners of the mouth, which were no more natural to 25 than they would have been to 20. The old charm indeed, the sweet friendliness of Manor, which was his own peculiar possession, was still there. He talked and laughed almost as much as formerly, but the talk was manufactured for our entertainment, and the laughter came from his head, not from his heart. And it was when he was taking no part in the conversation that the change showed most. Then the face, on which in the old time every passing emotion had expressed itself in a constant living current, became cold and impassive, without interest and without desire. It was at such times that I knew most certainly that there was something which had been living and was dead. Was it only his boyhood? His question I was unable to answer. Still, in spite of all, that week was one of the happiest in my life. The brothers were both men of enough ability and cultivation to be pleasant talkers, and Lucy could perform adequately the part of conversational accompanist, which, socially speaking, is all that is required of a woman. The meals and evenings passed quickly and agreeably. The mornings I spent in unending gossips with Lucy, or in games with the children, two bright boys of five and six years old. But the afternoons were the best part of the day. George was a thorough squire in all his tastes and habits, and every afternoon his wife dutifully accompanied him round farms and covarts, inspecting new buildings, trudging along half-made roads, or marking unoffending trees for destruction. Then Allen and I would ride by the hour together over moor and meadowland, often picking our way homewards down the glenside long after the autumn evenings had closed in. During these rides I had glimpses many a time into depths of Allen's nature, of which I doubt whether in the old days he had himself been aware. To me certainly they were as a revelation. A prevailing sadness, occasionally a painful tone of bitterness, characterized these more serious moods of his. But I do not think that at the end of that week I would, if I could, have changed the man whom I was learning to revere into pity, for the light-hearted playmate whom I felt was lost to me forever. The only feature of the family life which jarred on me was the attitude of the two brothers towards the children. I did not notice this much at first, and at all times it was a thing to be felt rather than to be seen. George himself never seemed quite at ease with them. The boys were strong and well grown, healthy in mind and body, and one would have thought that the existence of two such representatives to carry on his name and inherit his fortune would have been the very crown of pride and happiness to their father. But it was not so. Lucy indeed was devoted to them, and in all practical matters no one could have been kinder to them than was George. They were free at the whole house, and every indulgence that money could buy for them they had. I never heard him give them a harsh word. But there was something wrong, a constraint in their presence, a relief in their absence, an evident dislike of discussing them in their affairs, a total want of that enjoyment of love and possession, which in such a case one might have expected to find. Alan's state of mind was even more marked. Never did I hear him willingly address his nephews, or in any way allude to their existence. I should have said that he simply ignored it. But for the heavy gloom which always overspread his spirits in their company, and for the glances which he would now and again cast in their direction, glances full of some hidden painful emotion, though of what nature it would have been hard to define. Indeed, Alan's attitude towards her children I soon found to be the only source of friction between Lucy and this otherwise much-loved member of her husband's family. I asked her one day why the boys never appeared at luncheon. Oh, they come when Alan is away, she answered, but they seem to annoy him so much that George thinks it is better to keep them out of sight when he is here. It is very tiresome. I know that it is the fashion to say the George has got the temper of the family, but I assure you that Alan's nervous moods and fancies are much more difficult to live with. That was on the morning, a Friday it was, of the last day which we were to spend alone. The guests were to arrive soon after tea, and I think that with the knowledge of their approach, Alan and I prolonged our ride that afternoon beyond its usual limits. We were on our way home and it was already dusk when a turn of the path brought us face-to-face with the old ruined tower, of which I have already spoken as standing at the head of the valley. I had not been close up to it yet during this visit at Mervin. It had been a very favorite haunt of ours as children, and partly on that account, partly perhaps in order to defer the dreaded close of our ride to the last possible moment, I proposed an inspection of it. The only portion of the old building left standing in any kind of entirety was two rooms, one above the other. The tower room, level with the bottom of the moat, was dark and damp, and it was the upper one, reached by a little outside staircase, which had been our rendezvous of old. Alan showed no disposition to enter and said that he would stay outside and hold my horse, so I dismounted and ran up alone. The room seemed in no way changed, a mere stone shell littered with fragments of wood and mortar. There was the rough wooden block on which Alan used to sit while he first frightened us with boogie stories, and then calmed our excited nerves by rapid sallies of wild nonsense. There was the plank from behind which erected as a barrier across the doorway. He would defend the castle against our united assaults, pelting us with fur cones and sods of earth. This and many a bygone scene thronged on me as I stood there, and the room filled again with the memories of childish mirth. And following close came those of childish terrors, horrors which had oppressed me then, wholly imagined or dimly apprehended from half-herd traditions, and never thought of since flitted around me in the gathering dusk. And with them it seemed to me as if there came other memories too, memories which had never been my own, of scenes whose actors had long been with the dead, but which immortalized the spirit before whose eyes they had dwelt, still lingered in the spot where their victim had first learnt to shudder at their presence. Once the ghastly notion came to me, it seized on my imagination with irresistible force. It seemed as if from the darkened corners of the room, vague, ill-defined shapes were actually peering out at me. When night came, they would show themselves in that form, livid and terrible, in which they had been burnt into the brain and heart of the long ago dead. I turned and glanced towards where I had left Alan. I could see his figure framed in by the window, a black shadow against the gray twilight of the sky behind. A wrecked and perfectly motionless, he sat, so motionless as to look almost lifeless, gazing before him down the valley into the illimitable distance beyond. There was something in that stern immobility of look and attitude which struck me with a curious sense of congruity. It was right that he should be thus, right that he should be no longer the laughing boy who a moment before had been in my memory. The haunting horrors of that place seemed to demand it, and for the first time I felt that I understood the change. With an effort, I shook myself free from these fancies and turned to go. As I did so, my eye fell upon a queer-shaped painted board leaning up against the wall, which I well recollected in old times. Many a discussion had we had about the legend inscribed upon it, which in our wisdom we had finally pronounced to be German, chiefly because it was illegible. Though I had loudly professed my faith in this theory at the time, I had always had uneasy doubts on the subject and now half-smiling I bent down to verify or remove them. The language was English, not German, but the badly-painted, faded Gothic letters in which it was written made the mistake excusable. In the dim light I had difficulty even now in deciphering the words, and felt when I had done so, that neither the information conveyed nor the style of the composition was sufficient reward for the trouble I had taken. This is what I read. Where the woman sinned, the maid shall win, but God help the maid that sleeps within. What the lines could refer to, I neither had any notion, nor did I pause then, even in my own mind, to inquire. I only remember vaguely wondering whether they were intended for a tombstone or for a doorway. Then, continuing my way, I rapidly descended the steps and remounted my horse. Glad to find myself once again in the open air and by my cousin's side. The train of thought into which he had sunk during my absence was apparently an absorbing one. For to my first question, as to the painted board, he could hardly rouse himself to answer. A board with a legend written on it? Yes, he remembered something of the kind there. It had always been there, he thought. He knew nothing about it, and so the subject was not continued. The weird feeling which had haunted me in the tower still oppressed me, and I proceeded to ask Allen about that old dame, Allen, assume the traditions of my childhood, represented as the last occupant of the ruined building. Allen roused himself now, but did not seem anxious to impart information on the subject. She had lived there he admitted, and no one had lived there since. Had she not, I inquired, something to do with the mysterious cabinet at the house, I remember hearing it spoken of as Dame Alice's cabinet. So they say, he assented, she and an Italian artificer who was in her service, and who chiefly I imagine, on account of his skill, shared with her the honor of reputed witchcraft. She was the mother of Hugh Mervin, the man who was murdered by his wife. Was she not? I asked. Yes, said Allen briefly. And had she not something to do with the curse? I inquired after a short pause, and nervously I remembered my father's experience on that subject, and I had never before dared to allude to it in the presence of any member of the family. My nervousness was fully warranted. The glum on Allen's brow deepened, and after a very short, they say so, he turned full upon me and inquired with some asperity why on earth I had developed this sudden curiosity about his ancestors. I hesitated a moment for I was a little ashamed of my fancies, but the darkness gave me courage, and besides I was not afraid of telling Allen he would understand. I told him of the strange sensations I had had while in the tower, sensations which had struck me with all that force and clearness which we usually associate with the direct experience of fact. Of course it was a trick of imagination, I commented, but I could not get rid of the feeling that the person who had dwelt there last must have had terrible thoughts for the companions of her life. Allen listened in silence, and the silence continued for some time after I had ceased speaking. It is strange, he said at last. Instincts which we do not understand form the motive power of most of our life's actions, and yet we refuse to admit them as evidence of any external truth. I suppose it is because we must act somehow rightly or wrongly, and that there are a great many things which we need not believe unless we choose. As for this old lady she lived long, long enough like most of us to do evil, unlike most of us long enough to witness some of the results of that evil. To say that is to say that the last years of her life must have been weighed heavily enough with tragic thought. I gave a little shudder of repulsion. That is a depressing view of life, Allen, I said. Does our peace of mind depend only upon death coming early enough to hide us from the truth? And after all, can it? Our spirits do not die. From another world they may witness the fruits of our lives in this one. If they do, he answered with sudden violence, it is absurd to doubt the existence of a purgatory. There must in such a case be a terrible one in store for the best among us. I was silent. The shadow that lay on his soul did not penetrate to mine, but it hung round me nevertheless, a cloud which I felt powerless to disperse. After a moment he went on, provided that they are distant enough how little after all do we think of the results of our actions. There are few men who would deliberately instill into a child a love of drink or willfully deprive him of his reason. And yet a man with drunkenness or madness in his blood thinks nothing of bringing children into the world tainted as deeply with the curse as if he had inoculated them with it directly. There is no responsibility so completely ignored as this one of marriage and fatherhood, and yet how heavy it is and far reaching. Well, I said smiling, let us console ourselves with the thought that we are not all lunatics and druggards. No, he answered, but there are other evils besides these, moral taints as well as physical, curses which have their roots in worlds beyond our own, sins of the fathers which are visited upon their children. He had lost all violence and bitterness of tone now, but the weary dejection which had taken their place communicated itself to my spirit with more subtle power than his previous mood had owned. That is why he went on and his manner seemed to give more purpose to his speech than hitherto. That is why, so far as I am concerned, I mean to shirk the responsibility and remain unmarried. I was hardly surprised at his words. I felt that I had expected them, but their utterance seemed to intensify the gloom which rested upon us. Alan was the first to arouse himself from its influence. After all, he said, turning round to me, in speaking lightly, without looking so far and so deep, I think my resolve is a prudent one. Above all things, let us take life easily, and you know what St. Paul says about trouble in the flesh, a remark which I am sure is especially applicable to briefless barristers, even though possessed of a modest competence of their own. Perhaps one of these days, when I am a fat old judge, I shall give my cook a chance if she is satisfactory in her clear soups. But till then, I shall expect you, Evie, to work me one pair of carpet slippers per annum, as tribute due to a bachelor cousin. I don't quite know what I answered, my heart was heavy and aching, but I tried with true feminine docility to follow the lead he had set me. He continued for some time in the same vein, but as we approached the house, the effort seemed to become too much for him, and we relapsed again into silence. This time I was the first to break it. I suppose, I said rarely, all those horrid people will have come by now. Horrid people, he repeated, with rather an uncertain laugh, and through the darkness I saw his figure bend forward as he stretched out his hand to caress my horse's neck. Why, Evie, I thought you were pining for deity, and that it was, in fact, for the purpose of meeting these horrid people that you came here. Yes, I know, I said wistfully, but somehow the last week has been so pleasant that I cannot believe that anything will ever be quite so nice again. We had arrived at the house as I spoke, and the groom was standing at our horse's heads. Alan got off and came round to help me to dismount. But instead of putting up his arm as usual as the support for me to spring from, he laid his hand in mine. Yes, Evie, he said, it has been indeed a pleasant time. God bless you for it. For an instant he stood there looking at me, his face full in the light which streamed from the open door, his gray eyes shining with radiance, which was not holy from thence. Then he straightened his arm. I sprang to the ground, and as if to preclude the possibility of any answer on my part, he turned sharply on his heels and began giving some orders to the groom. I went on alone into the house, feeling I knew not and cared not why, that the gloom had fled from my spirit, and that the last ride had not, after all, been as melancholy a failure as it had bid fair at one time to become. In the hall I was met by the housekeeper, who informed me that owing to a misunderstanding about dates a gentleman had arrived whom Lucy had not expected at that time, and that in consequence my room had been changed. My things had been put into the east room, the haunted room, the room with the closed cabinet, as I remembered with a certain sense of pleasing importance, though without any surprise. It stood apart from the other guest rooms at the end of the passage from which opened George and Lucy's private apartment, and as it was consequently disagreeable to have a stranger there, it was always used when the house was full for a member of the family. My father and mother had often slept there. There was a little room next to it, though not communicating with it, which served for a dressing room. Though I had never passed the night there myself, I knew it as well as any room in the house. I went there at once and found Lucy superintending the last arrangements of my comfort. She was full of apologies for the trouble she was giving me. I told her that the apologies were due to my maid and to her own servants rather than to me, and besides, I added, glancing round, I am distinctly a gainer by the change. You know, of course, she said lightly, that this is the haunted room of the house, and that you have no right to be here. I know it is the haunted room, I answered, but why have I no right to be here? Oh, I don't know, she said. There is one of those tiresome mervin traditions about allowing unmarried women to sleep in this room. I believe two girls died in it 150 years ago, or something of that sort. But I should think that people married or unmarried must have died in nearly every room in this house. I objected. Oh, yes, of course they have, said Lucy. But once you come across a bit of superstition in this family, it is of no use to ask for reasons. However, this particular bit is too ridiculous, even for George. Owing to Mr. Leslie having come today, we must use every room in the house. It is intolerable having a stranger here, and you are the only relation staying with us. I pointed all that out to George, and he agreed that under the circumstances, it would be absurd not to put you here. I am quite agreeable, I answered, and indeed I think I am rather favored in having a room where the last recorded death appears to have taken place 150 years ago. Particularly as I should think that there can be scarcely anything now left in it, which was here then, except, of course, the cabinet. The room had in fact been entirely done up and refurnished by my uncle, and was as bright and modern looking an apartment as you could wish to see. It was large and the walls were covered with one of those white and gold papers which were so fashionable thirty years ago. Opposite us, as we stood warming our backs before the fire, was the bed. A large double one hung with a pretty shade of pale blue. Material of the same color covered the comfortable modern furniture, and hung from gilded cornices before the two windows which pierced the side of the room on our left. Between them stood the toilet table, all muslin blue ribbons and silver. The carpet was a gray and blue Brussels one. The whole effect was cheerful, though I fear inartistic, and sadly out of keeping with the character of the house. The exception to these remarks was, as I had observed, the famous closed cabinet, to which I have more than once alluded. It stood against the same wall of the room as that in which the fireplace was, and on our right, that is, on that side of the fireplace which was farthest from the windows. As I spoke, I turned to go and look at it, and Lucy followed me. Many an hour as a child had I passed in front of it, fingering the seven carved brass handles, or rather buttons, which were arranged down its center. They all slid, twisted, or screwed with the greatest ease, and apparently, like many another, ingeniously contrived, lock. But neither I nor anyone else had ever yet succeeded in sliding, twisting, or screwing them after such a fashion as to open the closed doors of the cabinet. No one yet had robbed them of their secret since first it was placed there three hundred years ago by the old lady and her faithful Italian. It was a beautiful piece of workmanship was this tantalizing cabinet, carved out of some dark foreign wood. The doors and panels were richly inlaid with lapis lazuli, ivory, and mother of pearl, among which were twisted delicately chased threads of gold and silver. Above the doors, between them and the cornice, lay another mystery, fully as tormenting as was the first. In a smooth strip of wood about an inch wide, and extending along the whole breadth of the cabinet, was inlaid a fine pattern of gold wire. This, at first sight, seemed to consist of a legend or motto. On looking closer, however, though the pattern still looked as if it was formed out of characters of the alphabet, curiously entwined together, you found yourself unable to fix upon any definite word or even letter. You looked again and again, and the longer that you looked the more certain became your belief that you were on the verge of discovery. If you could approach the mysterious legend from a slightly different point of view or look at it from another distance, the clue to the puzzle would be seized, and the words would stand forth clear and legible in your sight. But the clue never had been discovered, and the motto, if there was one, remained unread. For a few minutes we stood looking at the cabinet in silence, and then Lucy gave a discontented little sigh. There's another tiresome piece of superstition, she exclaimed. By far the handsomest piece of furniture in the house stuck away here in a bedroom, which is hardly ever used. Again and again have I asked George to let me have it move downstairs, but he won't hear of it. Was it not placed here by Dame Alice herself? I inquired a little reproachfully, for I felt that Alice was not treating the cabinet with the respect which it really deserved. Yes, so they say, she answered, and the tone of light contempt in which she spoke was now pierced by a not unnatural pride in the romantic mysteries of her husband's family. She placed it here, and it is said, you know, that when the closed cabinet is opened and the mysterious motto is read, the curse will depart from the Mervyn family. But why don't they break it open, I asked impatiently. I am sure that I would never have remained all my life in a house with a thing like that, and not found out in some way or another what was incited. Oh, but that would be quite fatal, answered she. The curse can only be removed when the cabinet is opened as Dame Alice intended it to be in an orthodox fashion. If you were to force it open, that could never happen, and the curse would therefore remain forever. And what is the curse, I asked, with very different feelings to those with which I had timidly approached the same subject with Alan. Lucy was not a Mervyn, and not a person to inspire awe under any circumstances. My instincts were right again, for she turned away with a slight shrug of her shoulders. I have no idea, she said. George and Alan always look portentiously solemn and gloomy whenever one mentions the subject, so I don't. If you ask me for the truth, I believe it to be a pure invention, devised by the Mervyns for the purpose of delicately accounting for some of the disreputable actions of their ancestors. For you know, Evie, she added with a little laugh, the less said about the character of the family into which your aunt and I have married the better. The remark made me angry, I don't know why, and I answered stiffly that as far as I was acquainted with them, I might at least saw nothing to complain of. O, as regards the present generation, know except for that poor wretched Jack, acquiesce Lucy, with her usual imperturbable good humor. And as regards the next, I suggested, smiling and already ashamed of my little temper. The next is perfect, of course, poor dear boys. She sighed as she spoke, and I wondered whether she was really as unconscious as she generally appeared to be of the strange disaffection with which her husband seemed to regard his children. Anyhow, the mention of them had evidently changed her mood, and almost directly afterwards, with the remark that she must go and look after her guests, who had all arrived by now, she left me to myself. For some minutes I sat by the bright fire lost in aimless wondering thought, which began with Dame Allison, her cabinet, and which ended somehow with Alan's face. As I had last seen it looking up at me in front of the hall door. When I had reached that point, I roused myself to decide that I had dropped long enough, and that it was quite time to go down to the guests and to tea. I accordingly donned my best tea gown, arranged my hair, and proceeded towards the drawing room. My way there lay through the great central hall. This apartment was approached from most of the bedrooms in the house through a large arched doorway at one end of it, which communicated directly with the great staircase. My bedroom, however, which, as I have said, lay among the private apartments of the house, opened into a passage which led into a broad gallery or upper chamber, stretching right across the end of the hall. From this you descended by means of a small staircase in oak, whose carved balustrade bending around the corner of the hall formed one of the prettiest features of the picturesque old room. The barrier which ran along the front of the gallery was a solid oak, and of such a height that unless standing close up to it, you could neither see nor be seen by the occupants of the room below. On approaching this gallery, I heard voices in the hall. There were Georges and Allens evidently in hot discussion. As I issued from the passage, George was speaking, and his voice had that exasperated tone in which an angry man tries to bring to a close an argument in which he has lost his temper. For heaven's sake, leave it alone, Alan. I neither can nor will interfere. We have enough to bear from these cursed traditions as it is, without adding one which has no foundation whatever to justify it, a mere contemptible piece of superstition. No member of our family has a right to call any tradition contemptible, which is connected with that place and you know it," answered Alan, and though he spoke low, his voice trembled with some strong emotion. A first impulse of hesitation which I had had, I checked, feeling that if I had heard so much it was fair to go on, and I advanced to the top of the stairs. Alan stood by the fireplace, facing me, but far too occupied to see me. His last speech had seemingly aroused George to fury, for the latter turned on him now with savage passion. Damn it all, Alan, he cried. Can't you be quiet? I will be master of my own house. Take care, I tell you, the curse may not be quite fulfilled yet after all. As George uttered these words, Alan lifted his eyes to him with a glance of awful horror. His face turned ghastly white, his lips trembled for a moment, and then he answered back with one half-whispered word of supreme appeal. George. There was a long-drawn, unutterable anguish in his tone, and his voice, though scarcely audible, penetrated every corner of the room and seemed to hang quivering in the air around one after the sound had ceased. Then there was a terrible stillness. Alan stood trembling in every limb, incapable, apparently, of speech or action, and George faced him as silent and motionless as he was. For an instant they remained thus while I looked breathlessly on. Then George, with a muttered imprecation, turned on his heel and left the room. Alan followed him as he went, with dull, lifeless eyes, and as the door closed he breathed deeply with the breath that was almost a-grown. Taking my courage in both hands I now descended the stairs, and at the sound of my footfall he glanced up, started, and then came rapidly to meet me. E.V., you here, he said, I did not notice you how long have you been here. He was still quite white, and I noticed that he panted for breath as he spoke. Not long, I answered timidly and rather spasmodically, I only heard a sentence or two. You wanted George to do something about some tradition or other, and he was angry, and he said something about the curse. While I spoke, Alan kept his eyes fixed on mine, reading through them as I knew into my mind. When I had finished, he turned his gaze away, satisfied, and answered very quietly, yes, that was it. Then he went back to the fireplace, rested his arm against the high mantelpiece above it, and leaning his forehead on his arm remained silently looking into the fire. I could see by his bent brow and compressed lips that he was engaged upon some earnest train of thought or reasoning, and I stood waiting, worried, puzzled, curious, but after all things pitiful, and oh, longing so intensely to help him if I could. Presently he straightened himself a little and addressed me more in his ordinary tone of voice, though without looking round. So I hear they have changed your room. Yes, I answered, and then flushing rather, is that what you and George have been quarreling about? I received no reply, and taking this silence for assent, I went on deprecatingly. Because you know if it was, I think you are rather foolish, Alan, as I understand two girls are said to have died in that room more than a hundred years ago, and for that reason there is prejudice against putting a girl to sleep there. That is all merely a vague, unreasonable tradition. Alan took a moment to answer. Yes, he said at length, speaking slowly, and as if replying to arguments in his own mind as much as to those which I had uttered. Yes, it is nothing but a tradition, after all, and that of the very vaguest and most unsupported kind. Is there even any proof that girls have not slept there since those two died? I asked. I think that the suggestion conveyed in this question was a relief to him, for after a moment's pause, as if to search his memory, he turned round. No, he answered, I don't think that there is any such proof, and I have no doubt that you are right, and that it is a mere prejudice that makes me dislike your sleeping there. Then I said, with a little assumption of sisterly superiority, I think George was right that you were wrong. Alan smiled, a smile which sat oddly on the still pale face, and on the wearied, worn-looking eyes. Very likely, he said, I dare say that I am superstitious. I've had things to make me so. Then coming nearer to me and laying his hand on my shoulders, he went on, smiling more brightly. We are a queer-tempered, bad-nerved race, we Mervins. And you must not take us too seriously, Evie. The best thing that you can do with our odd ways is to ignore them. Oh, I don't mind, I answered laughing, too glad to have one him back to even temporary brightness, as long as you and George don't come to blows over the question of where I am to sleep, which, after all, is chiefly my concern, and Lucy's. Well, perhaps it is, he replied, in the same tone, and now be off to the drawing room, where Lucy is defending the tea table single-handed all this time. I obeyed and should have gone more cheerfully had I not turned the door to look back at him, and caught one glimpse of his face as he sank heavily down to the large armchair by the fire. However, by dinnertime he appeared to have dismissed all painful reflections from his mind, or to have buried them too deep for discovery. The people staying in the house were, in spite of my sense of grievance at their arrival, individually pleasant, and after dinner I discovered them to be socially well assorted. For the first hour or two, indeed, after their arrival, each glared at the other across those triple lines of moral fortification behind which every well-bred Britain takes refuge in appearing at a friend's country house. But flags of truce were interchanged over the soup, and armistice was agreed upon during the roast, and the terms of a treaty of peace and amity were finally ratified under the sympathetic influence of George's best champagne. For the achievement of this happy result, Alan certainly worked hard, and received, therefore, many a grateful glance from his sister-in-law. He was more excited than I had ever seen him before and talked brilliantly and well, though perhaps not as exclusively to his neighbours as they may have wished. His eyes and his attention seemed everywhere at once. One moment he was throwing remarks across to some despairing couple opposite, and the next he was breaking an embarrassing pause in the conversation by some rapid sally of nonsense addressed to the table in general. He formed a great contrast to his brother, who sat gloomy and dejected, making little or no response to the advances of the two dowagers between whom he was placed. After dinner the younger members of the party spent the evening by Alan's initiative, and chiefly under his direction, in a series of lively and rather riotous games, such as my nursery days had delighted in and my schoolroom ones had disdained. It was a great and happy surprise to discover that grown up I might again enjoy them. I did so hugely, and when bedtime came, all memories more serious than those of musical chairs or follow my leader had vanished from my mind. I think from Alan's glance as he handed me my bed candle that the pleasure and excitement must have improved my looks. I hope you have enjoyed your first evening of gaiety, Evie, he said. I have, I answered, with happy conviction, and really I believe that it is chiefly owing to you, Alan. He met my smile by another, but I think that there must have been something in his look which recalled other thoughts. For as I started up the stairs, I threw mischievous glance back at him and whispered, now for the horrors of the haunted chamber. He laughed rather loudly and saying, Good night and good luck, turn to attend to the other ladies. His wishes were certainly fulfilled. I got to bed quickly, and as soon as my happy excitement was sufficiently calm to admit it, to sleep. The only thing which disturbed me was the wind, which blew fiercely and loudly all the earlier portion of the night, half arousing me more than once. I spoke of it at breakfast the next morning, but the rest of the world seemed to have slept too heavily to have been aware of it. The end of Part One of The Closed Cabinet