Eleanor M. Ingram

"In vain I called on Rest to come and stay.
We were but seated at the festival
Of many covers, when One cried: 'Away!'"
—Rose Garden of Sa'adi.

Now I entered a time of experiences differing at every point, yet interwoven closely, so that my days might compare to a rope whose strands are of violently contrasted colors. The rope would be inharmonious, startling to the eye, but strong to bind and hold. As I was bound and held!

All day I lived in the wholesome household atmosphere evoked by Vere and Phillida. It is impossible to describe the sunny charm they created about the commonplace. Our gay, simple breakfasts where Phillida presided in crisp middy blouse or flowered smock; where the gray cat sat on the arm of Vere's chair, speculative yellow eye observant of his master's carving, while the Swedish Cristina served us her good food with the spice of an occasional comment on farm or neighborhood events—how perfect a beginning for the day! How stale beside our breeze-swept table was any board at which I had ever sat! I do declare that I have never seen a more winning face than the bright one of my little cousin whom her world had pronounced "plain." Vere and I basked in her sunbeams gratefully.

Afterward, we each had our work. Of the three, Vere was the most industrious; slow, steady and unsparing of himself to a degree that accomplished surprising results. Phillida flitted over the place indoors and out, managing the house, following Vere about, driving to village or town with me on purchasing trips for our supplies. I did rather more of my own work than usual, that summer, and consequently had more of the commercial side to employ me.

A healthy, normal life? Yes—until the hours between midnight and dawn.

I never knew when I laid down at night whether I should sleep until sun and morning overlay the countryside; whether the whispering call of Desire Michell would summon me to an hour more exquisite than reality, less satisfying than a dream, or whether I should leap into consciousness of the Loathsome Eyes fixed coldly malignant upon me while my enemy's inhuman hate groped toward me across the darkness Its presence fouled.

For my two guests kept their promises.

If I speak briefly of the coming of the Thing during this time, I do so because the mind shrinks from past pain. It came again, and again. It craftily used the torture of irregularity in Its coming. For days there might be a respite, then It would haunt me nights in succession until my physical endurance was almost spent.

I have stood before the breach in that Barrier, fighting that nightmare duel, until the place of colossal desolation, last frontier the human race might hope to keep, became as well known to me as a landscape on earth. Yet the effect of the Thing's assaults upon me never lessened. On the contrary, the horror gained in strength. A dreadful familiarity grew between It and me. Communication flowed more readily between us with use. I will not set down, perhaps I dare not set down the intolerable wickedness of Its alternate menaces and offered bribes. Contact with Its intelligence poisoned.

There were nights when It was dumb, when all Its monstrous power concentrated and bore upon me, Its will to destroy locked with my will. My victory was that I lived.

In the shadow, Desire Michell and I drew closer to one another.

How can I tell of a love that grew without sight? So much of the love of romance and history is a matter of flower-petal complexions, heart-consuming eyes, satin lips, and all the form and color that make beauty. How can I make clear a love that grew strong and passionately demanding, knew delicate coquetries of advance and evasion, intimacy of minds like the meeting of eyes in understanding—all in the dark? The blind might comprehend. But the blind have a physical communication we had not; touch has enchantments of its own.

Every night, near midnight, I switched off the lights and waited in the chair at my writing-table, where I was accustomed to work. If she had not come by two o'clock, I learned to know she would not visit me that night. I might sleep in that certainty. A strange tryst I kept there in the dark; listening to the flow of the waterfall from the lake, loud in that dead hour's stillness, or hearing the soft, incessant sounds of insect life awake in trees and fields. If she came—a drift of perfume, a movement slight as a curtain stirred by the wind, then an hour with such a companion as the ancient magician might have drawn out of the air to his nine mystic lamps.

Strange, fantastic tales she told me, spun of fancies luminous and frail as threads of glass. She could not speak without betraying her deep learning in sciences rejected and forgotten by the modern world. Alchemy, astrology, geomancy furnished her speech with allusions blank to my ignorance; which she most gently and politely enlightened when I confessed. I learned that the Green Lion of Paracelsus was not a beast, but a recipe for making gold; that Salamandar's Feather was better known today as asbestos; and that the Emerald Table was by no means an article of furniture. I give these examples merely by way of illustration.

On the other side of the shield held between us, I soon discovered that she knew no more of modern city life than a well-taught child who has never left home. She listened eagerly to accounts of theatres and restaurants. The history of Phillida and Ethan Vere seemed to her more moving and wonderful than any story she could tell me. I was amazed and humbled to find that she rated my ability to make music as a lofty art among the occult sciences.

Of the evil Thing that haunted me, we came to say little. To press her with questions meant to end her visit, I found by experience. When I spoke of that strand between the Barrier and the gray mist-hidden sea, her passion of distress closed all intercourse with the plea that I go away at once, while escape was possible, while life remained mine. So for the most part I curbed my tongue and my consuming curiosity; not from consideration, but of necessity.

One night I asked her how the dark Thing spoke to me, by what medium of communication.

"Spirits of all orders can speak to man in every language, so long as they are face to face," she answered, with a faint surprise at my lack of knowledge. "'When they turn to man, they come into use of his language and no longer remember their own, but as soon as they turn from man they resume their own language, and forget his.'

"But they themselves are unaware of this fact, for they utter thought to thought by direct intelligence. So if angel or demon turns his back to you, Roger, you may not make him hear you though you call with great force."

"How do you know that, Desire?"

"But by simple reading! Do not Ennemoser and many writers record it?"

"Have you spoken to such beings, Desire?"

The question was rash, but it escaped me before I could check the impulse. To my relief, she answered without resentment:

"No."

"No? The Thing—the enemy that comes to me has never spoken to you?"

"No."

I was silent in amazement and incredulity. The dark creature claimed her, she declared herself helpless to escape from that dominion into normal life, and yet It never had spoken to her? It spoke to me, a stranger most ignorant, and not to the seeress who was familiar with Its existence and the lore which linked humanity to Its fearful kind?"You do not believe me," her voice came quietly across my thoughts.

"I believe you, of course," I stammered. "I was only—astonished. You have described It, and the Barrier, so often; from the first night——! I supposed you had seen all I have, and more."

"All you have seen? Now tell me with what eyes you have seen the Barrier and the Far Frontier? The eyes of the body, or that vision by which man sees in a dream and which is to the sight as the speech of spirits is to the hearing?"

"I suppose—with the inner sight."

"Then understand me when I say that I have seen with the eyes of another, by a sight not mine and yet my own."

"You mean," I floundered in vague doubts and jealousy of her human associations of which I knew nothing. "You mean—hypnotism?"

She laughed with half-sad raillery.

"How shall I answer you, Roger? Once upon a time, the jewel called beryl was thought unrivaled as a mirror into which a magician might look to see reflected events taking place at a distance, or reflections of the future. But by and by magicians grew wiser. They found any crystal would serve as well as a beryl. Later still, they found a little water poured in a basin or held in the hollow of the hand showed as true a fantasm. So one wrote: 'There is neither crystallomancy nor hydromancy, but the magick is in the Seer himself.'"

"Well, Desire?"

"Well, Roger—if to see with the sight of another is hypnotism, then every man who writes a book or tells a good tale is a hypnotist; every historian who makes us see the past is a necromancer."

"You read of the Thing——?"

"No," she replied, after a long pause. "I knew It through sympathy with one who died as I would not have you to die, my friend Roger, of whom I shall think long in that place to which I go presently. Question me no more. When the time comes for you to throw a certain braid of hair and a pomander into the fire——"

"I will never do that!"

"No? Well, you might keep the pomander, which is pure gold engraved with ancient signs and the name of the Shining Dawn, Dahana, in Sanskrit characters. Also the perfume it contains is precious, being blent with the herb vervain which is powerful against evil spirits.""It is not the pomander that I should keep, nor the pomander that holds the powerful spell."

"You—value the braid so much?"

"I value only one other beauty as highly."

"Yes, Roger?"

"Yes, Desire. And that beauty is she who wore the braid."

Now the darkness in the room was dense. Yet I thought I sensed a movement toward me as airy as the flutter of a bird's wing. The fragrance in the atmosphere eddied as if stirred by her passing. But when I spoke to her again, after a moment's waiting, she had gone.

I am sure no housekeeper was ever more nice in her ideas of neatness than my little Cousin Phillida, and no maid more exact in carrying out orders than Cristina. Nevertheless, automobiles pass on the quietest roads, and my windows are always wide open. There is the fireplace, too, with possibilities of soot. Anyhow, there was a light gray dust overlaying the writing-table on the following morning. And in the dust was a print as if a small hand had rested there, a yard from my chair.

A slim hand it must have been. I judged the palm had been daintily cupped, the fingers slender, smooth and long in proportion to the absurd size of the whole affair. My hand covered it without brushing an outline.

I could not put this souvenir away with the braid and the pomander. But I could put its evidence with their witness of Desire Michell's reality.