The Dark House

The Dark House, by I. A. R.
Wylie

The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Dark House, by I. A. R. Wylie
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

Title: The Dark House
Author: I. A. R. Wylie
Release Date: September 27, 2004 [eBook #13546]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DARK
HOUSE***
E-text prepared by Al Haines

THE DARK HOUSE
by

I. A. R. WYLIE
Author of "The Daughter of Brahma," "The Shining Heights," etc.
1922


PART I
I
1
The cigar was a large one and Robert Stonehouse was small. At the
precise moment, in fact, when he leant out of the upstairs bedroom
window, instinctively seeking fresh air, he became eight years old. He
did not know this, though he did know that it was his birthday and that
a birthday was a great and presumably auspicious occasion. His
conception of what a birthday ought to be was based primarily on one
particular event when he had danced on his mother's bed, shouting, "I'm
five--I'm five!" in unreasonable triumph. His mother had greeted him
gravely, one might say respectfully, and his father, who when he did
anything at all did it in style, had given him a toy fort fully garrisoned
with resplendent Highland soldiers. And there had been a party of
children whom, as a single child, he disliked and despised and whom
he had ordered about unreproved. From start to finish the day had been
his very own.
Soon afterwards his mother disappeared. They said she was dead. He
knew that people died, but death conveyed nothing to him, and when
his father and Christine went down to Kensal Green to choose the grave,
he picked flowers from the other graves and sent them to his mother
with Robert's love. Christine had turned away her face, crying, and
James Stonehouse, whose sense of drama never quite failed him, had
smiled tragically; but Robert never even missed her. His only

manifestation of feeling was a savage hatred of Christine, who tried to
take her place. For a time indeed his mother went completely out of his
consciousness. But after a little she came back to him by a secret path.
In the interval she had ceased to be connected with his evening prayer
and his morning bath and all the other tiresome realities and become a
creature of dreams. She grew tall and beautiful. He liked to be
alone--best of all at night when Christine had put the light out--so that
he could make up stories about her and himself and their new mystical
intimacy. He knew that she was dead but he did not believe it. It was
just one of those mysterious tricks which grown-up people played on
children to pretend that death was so enormously conclusive. Though
he had buried the black kitten with his own hands in the back garden,
and had felt the stiffness of its pitiful body and the dank chill of its
once glossy fur, he was calmly sure that somewhere or other, out of
sight, it still pursued its own tail with all the solemnity of kittenhood.
One of these nights the door would open and his mother would be there.
In this dream of her she appeared to him much as she had done once in
Kensington High Street when he had wilfully strayed from her side and
lost himself, and, being overwhelmed with the sense of his smallness
and forlornness, had burst into a howl of grief. Then suddenly she had
stood out from the midst of the sympathetic crowd--remote, stern and
wonderful--and he had flung himself on her, knowing that whatever she
might do to him, she loved him and that they belonged to one another,
inextricably and for all time.
So she stood on the threshold of his darkened room, and at that vision
his adoration became an agony and he lay with his face hidden in his
arms, waiting for the touch of her hand that never came, until he slept.
Christine became his mother. Every morning at nine o'clock she turned
the key of the pretentious mansion where James Stonehouse had set up
practice for the twentieth time in his career, and called out, "Hallo,
Robert!" in her clear, cool voice, and Robert, standing at the top of the
stairs in his night-shirt, called back, "Hallo, Christine!" very joyously
because he knew it annoyed Edith, his father's new wife, listening
jealously from behind her bedroom door.

And then Christine scrubbed his ears, and sometimes, when there were