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Page 45
For a half hour John Dunn, doubting, raging, overwhelmed with
spiritual agony as to the state of his own soul rather than fear,
strove to enter that southwest chamber. He was simply powerless
against this uncanny obstacle. Finally a great horror as of evil
itself came over him. He was a nervous man and very young. He
fairly fled to his own chamber and locked himself in like a terror-
stricken girl.
The next morning he went to Miss Gill and told her frankly what had
happened, and begged her to say nothing about it lest he should
have injured the cause by the betrayal of such weakness, for he
actually had come to believe that there was something wrong with
the room.
"What it is I know not, Miss Sophia," said he, "but I firmly
believe, against my will, that there is in that room some accursed
evil power at work, of which modern faith and modern science know
nothing."
Miss Sophia Gill listened with grimly lowering face. She had an
inborn respect for the clergy, but she was bound to hold that
southwest chamber in the dearly beloved old house of her fathers
free of blame.
"I think I will sleep in that room myself to-night," she said, when
the minister had finished.
He looked at her in doubt and dismay.
"I have great admiration for your faith and courage, Miss Sophia,"
he said, "but are you wise?"
"I am fully resolved to sleep in that room to-night," said she
conclusively. There were occasions when Miss Sophia Gill could put
on a manner of majesty, and she did now.
It was ten o'clock that night when Sophia Gill entered the
southwest chamber. She had told her sister what she intended doing
and had been proof against her tearful entreaties. Amanda was
charged not to tell the young girl, Flora.
"There is no use in frightening that child over nothing," said
Sophia.
Sophia, when she entered the southwest chamber, set the lamp which
she carried on the bureau, and began moving about the rooms pulling
down the curtains, taking off the nice white counterpane of the
bed, and preparing generally for the night.
As she did so, moving with great coolness and deliberation, she
became conscious that she was thinking some thoughts that were
foreign to her. She began remembering what she could not have
remembered, since she was not then born: the trouble over her
mother's marriage, the bitter opposition, the shutting the door
upon her, the ostracizing her from heart and home. She became
aware of a most singular sensation as of bitter resentment herself,
and not against the mother and sister who had so treated her own
mother, but against her own mother, and then she became aware of a
like bitterness extended to her own self. She felt malignant
toward her mother as a young girl whom she remembered, though she
could not have remembered, and she felt malignant toward her own
self, and her sister Amanda, and Flora. Evil suggestions surged in
her brain--suggestions which turned her heart to stone and which
still fascinated her. And all the time by a sort of double
consciousness she knew that what she thought was strange and not
due to her own volition. She knew that she was thinking the
thoughts of some other person, and she knew who. She felt herself
possessed.
But there was tremendous strength in the woman's nature. She had
inherited strength for good and righteous self-assertion, from the
evil strength of her ancestors. They had turned their own weapons
against themselves. She made an effort which seemed almost mortal,
but was conscious that the hideous thing was gone from her. She
thought her own thoughts. Then she scouted to herself the idea of
anything supernatural about the terrific experience. "I am
imagining everything," she told herself. She went on with her
preparations; she went to the bureau to take down her hair. She
looked in the glass and saw, instead of her softly parted waves of
hair, harsh lines of iron-gray under the black borders of an old-
fashioned head-dress. She saw instead of her smooth, broad
forehead, a high one wrinkled with the intensest concentration of
selfish reflections of a long life; she saw instead of her steady
blue eyes, black ones with depths of malignant reserve, behind a
broad meaning of ill will; she saw instead of her firm, benevolent
mouth one with a hard, thin line, a network of melancholic
wrinkles. She saw instead of her own face, middle-aged and good to
see, the expression of a life of honesty and good will to others
and patience under trials, the face of a very old woman scowling
forever with unceasing hatred and misery at herself and all others,
at life, and death, at that which had been and that which was to
come. She saw instead of her own face in the glass, the face of
her dead Aunt Harriet, topping her own shoulders in her own well-
known dress!
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