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Page 14
"I talk the way it is. Well, I'm going to-morrow morning, and I
want you, just as soon as Agnes Dent comes home, to send her out to
me. Don't you wait for anything. You pack what clothes she's got,
and don't wait even to mend them, and you buy her ticket. I'll
leave the money, and you send her along. She don't have to change
cars. You start her off, when she gets home, on the next train!"
"Very well," replied the other woman. She had an expression of
covert amusement.
"Mind you do it."
"Very well, Rebecca."
Rebecca started on her journey the next morning. When she arrived,
two days later, she found her cousin in perfect health. She found,
moreover, that the friend had not written the postscript in the
cousin's letter. Rebecca would have returned to Ford Village the
next morning, but the fatigue and nervous strain had been too much
for her. She was not able to move from her bed. She had a species
of low fever induced by anxiety and fatigue. But she could write,
and she did, to the Slocums, and she received no answer. She also
wrote to Mrs. Dent; she even sent numerous telegrams, with no
response. Finally she wrote to the postmaster, and an answer
arrived by the first possible mail. The letter was short, curt,
and to the purpose. Mr. Amblecrom, the postmaster, was a man of
few words, and especially wary as to his expressions in a letter.
"Dear madam," he wrote, "your favour rec'ed. No Slocums in Ford's
Village. All dead. Addie ten years ago, her mother two years
later, her father five. House vacant. Mrs. John Dent said to have
neglected stepdaughter. Girl was sick. Medicine not given. Talk
of taking action. Not enough evidence. House said to be haunted.
Strange sights and sounds. Your niece, Agnes Dent, died a year
ago, about this time.
"Yours truly,
"THOMAS AMBLECROM."
THE SHADOWS ON THE WALL
"Henry had words with Edward in the study the night before Edward
died," said Caroline Glynn.
She was elderly, tall, and harshly thin, with a hard colourlessness
of face. She spoke not with acrimony, but with grave severity.
Rebecca Ann Glynn, younger, stouter and rosy of face between her
crinkling puffs of gray hair, gasped, by way of assent. She sat in
a wide flounce of black silk in the corner of the sofa, and rolled
terrified eyes from her sister Caroline to her sister Mrs. Stephen
Brigham, who had been Emma Glynn, the one beauty of the family.
She was beautiful still, with a large, splendid, full-blown beauty;
she filled a great rocking-chair with her superb bulk of
femininity, and swayed gently back and forth, her black silks
whispering and her black frills fluttering. Even the shock of
death (for her brother Edward lay dead in the house,) could not
disturb her outward serenity of demeanour. She was grieved over
the loss of her brother: he had been the youngest, and she had been
fond of him, but never had Emma Brigham lost sight of her own
importance amidst the waters of tribulation. She was always awake
to the consciousness of her own stability in the midst of
vicissitudes and the splendour of her permanent bearing.
But even her expression of masterly placidity changed before her
sister Caroline's announcement and her sister Rebecca Ann's gasp of
terror and distress in response.
"I think Henry might have controlled his temper, when poor Edward
was so near his end," said she with an asperity which disturbed
slightly the roseate curves of her beautiful mouth.
"Of course he did not KNOW," murmured Rebecca Ann in a faint tone
strangely out of keeping with her appearance.
One involuntarily looked again to be sure that such a feeble pipe
came from that full-swelling chest.
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