CHAPTER I
Life is but a poor accountant when it leaves the Future to balance its entries long years after the parties to the transactions are but a handful of insolvent dust.When, in such wise, the chiefest item of one side of the sheet fails to explain itself to the other, the tragic is attained.
On the day following Maitland's departure On for New York, Mr.Darrow was buried.The Osborne theory seemed to be universally accepted, and many women who had never seen Mr.Darrow during his life attended his funeral, curious to see what sort of a person this suicide might be.Gwen bore the ordeal with a fortitude which spoke volumes for her strength of character, and I took good care, when it was all over, that she should not be left alone.In compliance with Maitland's request, whose will, since her promise to him, was law to her, she prepared to close the house and take up her abode with us.
It was on the night of the funeral, just after the lamps were lighted, that an event occurred which made a deep impression upon Gwen, though neither she nor I fully appreciated its significance till weeks afterward.
Gwen, who was to close the house on the morrow, was going from room to room collecting such little things as she wished to take with her.
The servants had been dismissed and she was entirely alone in the house.She had gathered the things she had collected in a little heap upon the sitting-room table, preparatory to doing them up.She could think of but one thing more which she must take - a cabinet photograph of her father.This was upon the top of the piano in the room where he had met his death.She knew its exact location and could have put her hand right upon it had it been perfectly dark, which it was not.She arose, therefore, and, without taking a light with her, went into the parlour.A faint afterglow illumined the windows and suffused the room with an uncertain, dim, ghostly light which lent to all its objects that vague flatness from which the imagination carves what shapes.it lists.As Gwen reached for the picture, a sudden conviction possessed her that her father stood just behind her in the exact spot where he had met his death, - that if she turned she would see him again with his hand clutching his throat and his eyes starting from their sockets with that never-to-be-forgotten look of frenzied helplessness.
It would be difficult to find a woman upon whom superstition has so slight a hold as it has upon Gwen Darrow, yet, for all that, it required an effort for her to turn and gaze toward the centre of the room.A dim, ill-defined stain of light fell momentarily upon the chair in which the dead man had sat, and then flickered unsteadily across the room and, as it seemed to her, out through its western side, the while a faint, rustling sound caught her ear.
She was plainly conscious, too, of a something swishing by her, as if a strong draught had just fallen upon her.She was not naturally superstitious, as I have said before, yet there was something in the gloom, the deserted house, and this fatal room with its untold story of death which, added to her weird perceptions and that indescribable conviction of an unseen presence, caused even Gwen to press her hand convulsively upon her throbbing heart.For the first time in her life the awful possibilities of darkness were fully borne in upon her and she knew just how her father had felt.
In a moment, however, she had recovered from her first shock and had begun to reason.Might not the sound she had heard, and the movement she had felt, both be explained by an open window? She knew she had closed and locked all the windows of the room when she had finished airing it after the funeral, and she was not aware that anyone had been there since, yet she said to herself that perhaps one of the servants had come in and opened a window without her knowledge.She turned and looked.The lower sash of the eastern window - the one through which she felt sure death had approached her father - was raised to its utmost.
"How=20fortunate," she murmured, "that I discovered this before leaving."She was all but fully reassured now, as she stepped to the window to close it.Remembering how the sash stuck in the casing she raised both hands to forcibly lower it.As she did so a strong arm caught the sash from the outer side, and a stalwart masculine form arose directly in front of her.His great height brought his head almost to a level with her own, despite the fact that he was standing upon the ground outside.He was so near that she could feel his breath upon her face.His eyes, like two great coals of fire, blazed into hers with a sinister and threatening light.His countenance seemed to utterly surpass any personal malignancy and to exhibit itself as a type of all the hatreds that ever poisoned human hearts.
Only a moment before Gwen had felt a creepy, sickening sensation stealing over her as the result of an ill-defined and apparently causeless dread.Now an actual, imminent, and fearful peril confronted her.Under such circumstances most women would have fainted, and, indeed, if Gwen had herself been asked how she would have acted under such a supreme test, she would have prophesied the same maidenly course as her own, yet, in the real exigency - how little do we know of ourselves, save what actual experience has taught us! - this is precisely what she did not do.When the horrible apparition first rose in her very face, as it were, a momentary weakness caught her and she clung to the sash for support.
Then the wonderful fire of the malignant eyes, green, serpentine, opalescent, with the wave-like flux of a glowworm's light seen under a glass, riveted her attention.She had ceased to tremble.
