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Page 24
Presently Mrs. Brigham rose--she could not have told why; something
seemed to impel her, some will outside her own. She went out of
the room, again wrapping her rustling skirts around that she might
pass noiselessly, and began pushing at the swollen door of the
study.
"She has not got any lamp," said Rebecca in a shaking voice.
Caroline, who was writing letters, rose again, took a lamp (there
were two in the room) and followed her sister. Rebecca had risen,
but she stood trembling, not venturing to follow.
The doorbell rang, but the others did not hear it; it was on the
south door on the other side of the house from the study. Rebecca,
after hesitating until the bell rang the second time, went to the
door; she remembered that the servant was out.
Caroline and her sister Emma entered the study. Caroline set the
lamp on the table. They looked at the wall. "Oh, my God," gasped
Mrs. Brigham, "there are--there are TWO--shadows." The sisters
stood clutching each other, staring at the awful things on the
wall. Then Rebecca came in, staggering, with a telegram in her
hand. "Here is--a telegram," she gasped. "Henry is--dead."
LUELLA MILLER
Close to the village street stood the one-story house in which
Luella Miller, who had an evil name in the village, had dwelt. She
had been dead for years, yet there were those in the village who,
in spite of the clearer light which comes on a vantage-point from a
long-past danger, half believed in the tale which they had heard
from their childhood. In their hearts, although they scarcely
would have owned it, was a survival of the wild horror and frenzied
fear of their ancestors who had dwelt in the same age with Luella
Miller. Young people even would stare with a shudder at the old
house as they passed, and children never played around it as was
their wont around an untenanted building. Not a window in the old
Miller house was broken: the panes reflected the morning sunlight
in patches of emerald and blue, and the latch of the sagging front
door was never lifted, although no bolt secured it. Since Luella
Miller had been carried out of it, the house had had no tenant
except one friendless old soul who had no choice between that and
the far-off shelter of the open sky. This old woman, who had
survived her kindred and friends, lived in the house one week, then
one morning no smoke came out of the chimney, and a body of
neighbours, a score strong, entered and found her dead in her bed.
There were dark whispers as to the cause of her death, and there
were those who testified to an expression of fear so exalted that
it showed forth the state of the departing soul upon the dead face.
The old woman had been hale and hearty when she entered the house,
and in seven days she was dead; it seemed that she had fallen a
victim to some uncanny power. The minister talked in the pulpit
with covert severity against the sin of superstition; still the
belief prevailed. Not a soul in the village but would have chosen
the almshouse rather than that dwelling. No vagrant, if he heard
the tale, would seek shelter beneath that old roof, unhallowed by
nearly half a century of superstitious fear.
There was only one person in the village who had actually known
Luella Miller. That person was a woman well over eighty, but a
marvel of vitality and unextinct youth. Straight as an arrow, with
the spring of one recently let loose from the bow of life, she
moved about the streets, and she always went to church, rain or
shine. She had never married, and had lived alone for years in a
house across the road from Luella Miller's.
This woman had none of the garrulousness of age, but never in all
her life had she ever held her tongue for any will save her own,
and she never spared the truth when she essayed to present it. She
it was who bore testimony to the life, evil, though possibly
wittingly or designedly so, of Luella Miller, and to her personal
appearance. When this old woman spoke--and she had the gift of
description, although her thoughts were clothed in the rude
vernacular of her native village--one could seem to see Luella
Miller as she had really looked. According to this woman, Lydia
Anderson by name, Luella Miller had been a beauty of a type rather
unusual in New England. She had been a slight, pliant sort of
creature, as ready with a strong yielding to fate and as
unbreakable as a willow. She had glimmering lengths of straight,
fair hair, which she wore softly looped round a long, lovely face.
She had blue eyes full of soft pleading, little slender, clinging
hands, and a wonderful grace of motion and attitude.
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