"He was the last of his family. When he was very young the conviction came to him that his duty was never to marry, so our race might cease to exist. He lived here and preached against evil. He studied the ancient learning that he might be fitted to wrestle with sin. But in the end horror of what was here gained upon him so that he closed the house and went abroad to work as a missionary. There was a girl; the daughter of the clergyman who was leaving the mission. My father--fell in love. He forgot all his convictions and married her. He knew it was a sin, but it was stronger than he was. She only lived one year. When I was born, she died. He prayed that I would die, too. But--I----"
Her voice died into silence. I ventured to lean nearer and take her hand into mine.
"Desire," I said, "why should you be a sufferer for the actions of a woman who died over two centuries ago? What is the long dead Desire Mich.e.l.l to you?"
A strange and solemn hush followed my question. The words seemed to take a significance and importance beyond their simple meaning. The hand I held trembled in my clasp. She answered at last, just audibly:
"You know. You said that you had read her book."
"But the book tells so little, Desire. Just such a chronicle of superst.i.tion as may be found in a hundred old records."
She shook her head slightly.
"Not that! Bring me the book."
The book was upstairs in the room from which I had carried her half an hour before in something very like a panic flight. Before I could release her hand and rise, before I comprehended his intention, Vere was out of the living room and upon the stairs. It was too late to overtake him. The man who had been a professional skater covered the stairs in a few easy, swinging strides. We heard his light tread on the floor overhead, heard him stop beside the table where the book lay. Then, he was returning. My door closed. His step sounded on the stairs again; in a moment he was back among us, and quietly offering the volume to our guest. His dark eyes met mine rea.s.suringly, deprecating the thoughts I am sure my face expressed.
"Lights burning and all serene up there," he announced.
Desire touched the book with a curious repugnance.
"I was looking for this, the first night I came here," she murmured.
"That is why I came to America after my father died. I had promised him to destroy this record. When I heard that the house was sold to a gentleman from New York, I came down from the convent on the hill to find the bookcase holding the old history. I did not know anyone was here, that night, until you touched my hair."
I remembered the bookcase near the bed, where I stood my candle and matches. Unaware, I had prevented her finding the thing she sought, and so forced her to return. Afterward, the house had been full of workmen making alterations and improvements, until later still Phillida had transferred the bookcase and its contents to her sewing room. If I had not taken the whim to sleep in the old house on the night of my purchase, or if I had chosen another room, the existence of Desire Mich.e.l.l might never have been known to me.
Would the creature from the Barrier have appeared to me, if I had not known her?
She was drawing something from behind the portrait of the first Desire Mich.e.l.l; a thin, small book that had lain concealed between the cover of the larger volume and the page bearing the woodcut, where a sort of pocket was formed that had escaped our notice. Laid upon the table, the little book rolled away from the girl"s fingers and lay curled upon itself in the lamplight. The limp morocco cover was spotted with mildew and half-revealed pages of close, fine writing blotched in places with rusty stains. It gave out an odor of mould and age in an atmosphere made sweet by Desire"s presence.
Phillida, who had been silent even when Vere left her to go upstairs, shrank away from the book on the table. She darted a glance over her shoulder at the curtained windows behind her.
"Drawls, I cannot help what everybody thinks of me," she said plaintively. "I am cold. The fire is ready laid in the grate. Will you put a match to it, please?"
No one smiled at the request. Her husband uttered some soothing phrase of compliance. We all looked on while the flame caught and began to creep up among the apple-logs. Bagheera rose and changed his position to one before the hearth. When Vere stood erect, Desire leaned toward him.
"Will you read, aloud, sir?" she asked of him, and made a gesture toward the morocco book.
She surprised us all by that choice. I was unreasoning enough to feel slighted, although the task was one for which I felt a strong dislike. I fancied Vere liked the idea no better, from his expression. However, he offered no demur, but sat down at the table and began to flatten the warped pages that perversely sprang back and clung about his fingers.
Desire slowly turned her lovely eyes to me, eyes that looked by gift of nature as if their long corners had been brushed with kohl. She said nothing, yet somehow conveyed her meaning and intent. I understood that she did not wish to hear me read those pages; that it was painful to her that they should be read at all.
Vere was ready. He glanced around our circle, then began with the simple directness that gave him a dignity peculiarly his own.
""Mistress Desire Mich.e.l.l, her booke, Beginning at the nineteenth year of her Age,"" he read, in his leisurely voice.
The living Desire Mich.e.l.l and I were regarding one another. I smiled at the quaint wording, but she shuddered, and put her hands across her eyes.
Yet there was nothing in those first pages except a girl"s chronicle of village life. This book evidently carried on a diary kept from early childhood; a diary written out of loneliness. Apparently the bare colonial life pressed heavily upon the writer; who, having no companions of the intellect, turned to this record of her own mind as a prisoner might talk to his reflection in a mirror rather than go mad from sheer silence. Discontent and restlessness beat through the lines like fluttering wings. She wrote of her own beauty with a cool appraisal oddly removed from vanity, almost with resentment of a possession she could not use.
"Like a man who finds treasure in a desert isle, I am rich in coin that I may not spend," she wrote. "I stand before my mirror and take a tress of my hair in either hand; I spread wide my arms full reach, yet I cannot touch the end of those tresses. Nor can my two hands clasp the bulk of them. There have been other women who had such hair, who were of body straight and white, and had the eyes--but I cannot read that they stayed poor and obscure."
There followed some quotations from the cla.s.sics of which I was able to give but vague translations when Vere pa.s.sed the book to me, both because my knowledge was scanty and because of their daring unconventionality. There were allusions, too, to ladies of later history who had found fairness a broad staircase for ambition to mount. Of the writer"s learning, there could be no question; a learning amazing in one so young and so situated. The source of this became apparent. Her father was consumed with the pa.s.sion of scholarship, and the girl"s hungry mind fed in the pastures where he led the way.
Here crept into view an anomaly of character. The austere Puritan divine, whose life was open and blank, bare and cold as a winter field, cherished a secret dissipation of the mind. He labored upon a book on the errors of magic. So laboring, he became snared by the thing he denounced. He believed in the hidden lore while he condemned it. Deeper and deeper into forbidden knowledge his eagerness for research led him.
Unsanctioned by any church were the books Dr. Mich.e.l.l starved his body to buy from Jews or other furtive dealers in unusual wares. The t.i.tles in his library comprehended the names of more charlatans than bishops.
He could define the distinctions between necromancy, sorcery, and magic.
The marvelous calculations of the Pythagoreans engaged him, and the lost mysteries of the Cabiri.
From such studies he would arise on the Sabbath to preach sermons that held his dull flock agape. Bitter draughts of salvation he poured for their spiritual drinking. He scarcely saw how any man might escape h.e.l.l-fire, all being so vile. Against witchcraft and tampering with Satan"s agents he was eloquent. He rode sixty miles in midwinter to see a Quaker whipped and a woman hung who had been convicted as a witch.
Of all this, his daughter wrote with an elfin mockery. Her brilliant eye of youth saw through the inconsistency of the beliefs he strove to reconcile. She learned his lore, read his books, and discarded his doctrine.
"I study with him, but I think alone," she set down her independence.
Without his knowledge, she proceeded to actual experiment with rude crucible and alembic in her own chamber. She essayed some age-old recipes of blended herbs and ingredients within her reach, handled at certain hours of the night and phases of the moon. All were innocent enough, it seemed. She cured a beloved old dog of rheumatism and partial blindness. She discovered an exquisite perfume which she named Rose of Jerusalem.
But the experiments were not fortunate, she made obscure complaint. The dog, cured, lived only a few weeks. The perfume, in which she revelled with a fierce, long-denied appet.i.te, steeping her rich hair in it and her severely dull garments, awoke many whispers in a community where sweet odors were unknown and disapproved. She alluded, with a mingling of freezing scorn and triumph, to the young men who followed after her--"seeking a wife who would be at their hearth as fatal a guest as that fair woman sent by an enemy to Alexander the Great, whose honey breath was deadly poison to who so kissed there."
Into this situation rode the fine gentleman from the colonial world of fashion who was to fix the fate of Desire Mich.e.l.l and his own.
From this point on, the diary was a record of the same story as the "History of Ye foule Witch, Desire Mich.e.l.l."
The love affair that followed Sir Austin"s visit to the clergyman"s house leaped hot and instant as flame from oil and fire brought together. The girl was parched with thirst for life, yet despised all around her. The man was dazzled by a beauty and mentality foreign as a bird of paradise found nested in Connecticut snow. A mad, wild pa.s.sion linked them that was more than half a duel. For Sir Austin was already betrothed. Honor might not have chained him for long, but his need of his betrothed"s fortune proved more enduring. He was a man bred to wealth, who did not possess it. He offered Desire Mich.e.l.l his left hand.
He was turned out of her father"s house with a red weal struck across his face like a brand.
Of course he returned. The arrow was firmly fixed. He asked her to marry him, and was refused with savage contempt. He would not take the refusal. Her heart and ambition were hidden traitors to his cause. In the end she surrendered and the marriage day was set.
Sir Austin rode away to set his house in order, while Desire turned from alchemy to make her wedding garments.
The entries during this interval were sweetly gentle and feminine. Her Rose of Jerusalem fragrance was all her own, and was kept so, but she made less-rare essences and sold them through a pedlar in order to buy fine linen and brocade for a trousseau not designed to be worn in a Puritan village. She was happy and at rest in expectation.
On her wedding day the destroying news fell. Sir Austin hid a weak spirit within a strong and handsome body. Away from Desire"s glamour, back in New York, he had not broken his engagement to the heiress.
Instead, he had married her on the day arranged before he met the clergyman"s daughter.
There was never again a connected record in the diary. Pages were torn out in places, entries were broken off, half-made. But the story Vere"s slow, steady voice conveyed to us was the one we knew; the one my Desire had told to me the first night I slept in this house. The half-mad girl turned to her father"s deadly books. Sir Austin died as his waxen image dissolved before the fire, where the girl sat watching with merciless hate. He died, raving and frothing, on her door-sill. She never saw him after the day he rode away to prepare for their marriage. She set open her window that she might hear his progress to that hard death, but never deigned to turn her glance upon him.
The clergyman was dead, now; of shame, or perhaps of terror at the child he had reared. The girl was alone.
The diary grew wilder, with gaps of weeks where there were no entries.
More frequently, pages were missing and paragraphs obliterated by the reddish blotches like rust or blood. There were accounts of weird, half-told experiments ranging through the three degrees of magic set forth by Talmud and Cabala. She wrote of legions of kingdoms between earth and heaven, and the twelve unearthly worlds of Plato. She alluded to a Barrier between men and other orders of beings, beyond which dwelt Those whom the magicians of old glimpsed after long toil and incantation.
"Those of whom Vertabied, the Armenian, says: "_Their orders differ from one another in situation and degree of glory, just as there are different ranks among men, though they are all of one nature._" They cannot cross nor overthrow this Wall, nor can man alone; but if they and man join together----One there beyond whispers to me of power, splendor, victory----"
Days later, there was entered a pa.s.sage of mad triumph and terror. The Barrier was broken through. Out of the breach issued the One whom she had invited to her silver lamps; colossal, formless, whose approach froze blood and spirit. Eyes of unspeakable meaning glared across the dark, whispers unbearable to humanity beat upon her intelligence and named her comrade.
Now as Vere read this, I felt again that quiver of the house or air he had likened to an earth shock and held responsible for the fall of the willow tree that had destroyed our hope of escape by automobile. I looked at my companions and saw no evidence of anyone having noticed what I had seemed to feel. Vere indeed was pale; while Phillida, who sat beside him, was highly flushed with excitement and wonder as she listened. Desire had not stirred in her chair, except to bend her head so her face was shaded by the loosened richness of her hair. Seeing them so undisturbed, I kept silence. A storm might be approaching, but I made no pretense to myself of believing that shock either thunder or earthquake.