The House of the Whispering Pines | Page 6

again and I found myself looking back over my
shoulder at the fireplace from which rose a fading streak of smoke
which some passing gust, perhaps, had blown out into the room.
I felt sick. Was it the smell? It was not that of burning wood, hardly of
burning paper, I--but here my second match went out.
Thoroughly roused now (you will say, by what?) I felt my way out of
the room and to the head of the staircase. I remembered the candle and
candlestick I had heard thrown down on the lower floor by Carmel
Cumberland. I would secure them and come back and settle these
uncanny doubts. It might be the veriest fool business, but my mind was
disturbed and must be set at ease. Nothing else seemed so important,
yet I was not without anxiety for the lovely and delicate woman
wandering the snow-covered roads in the teeth of a furious gale, any
more than I was dead to the fact that I should never forgive myself if I
allowed the man to escape whom I believed to be hiding somewhere in
the rear of this house.
I had a hunt for the candlestick and a still longer one for the candle, but
finally I recovered both, and, lighting the latter, felt myself, for the first
time, more or less master of the situation.
Rapidly regaining the room in which my interest was now centred, I set
the candlestick down on the dresser, and approached the lounge. Hardly
knowing what I feared, or what I expected to find, I tore off one of the
cushions and flung it behind me. More cushions were revealed--but that
was not all.
Escaping from the edge of one of them I saw a shiny tress of woman's
hair. I gave a gasp and pulled off more cushions, then I fell on my
knees, struck down by the greatest horror which a man can feel. Death
lay before me--violent, uncalled-for death--and the victim was a
woman. But it was not that. Though the head was not yet revealed, I
thought I knew the woman and that she--Did seconds pass or many
minutes before I lifted that last cushion? I shall never know. It was an
eternity to me and I am not of a sentimental cast, but I have some sort
of a conscience and during that interval it awoke. It has never quite

slept since.
The cushion had not concealed the hands, but I did not look at them--I
did not dare. I must first see the face. But I did not twitch this pillow
off; I drew it aside slowly, as though held by the restraining clutch of
some one behind me. And I was so held, but not by what was
visible--rather by the terrors which gather in the soul at the summons of
some dreadful doom. I could not meet the certainty without some
preparation. I released another strand of hair; then the side of a cheek,
half buried out of sight in the loosened locks and bulging pillows; then,
with prayers to God for mercy, an icy brow; two staring eyes--which
having seen I let the cushion drop, for mercy was not to be mine.
It was she, she, indeed! and judgment was glassed in the look I
met--judgment and nothing more kindly, however I might appeal to
Heaven for mercy or whatever the need of my fiercely startled and
repentant soul.
Dead! Adelaide! the woman I had planned to wrong that very night,
and who had thus wronged me! For a moment I could take in nothing
but this one astounding fact, then the how and the why woke in
maddening curiosity within me, and seizing the cushion, I dragged it
aside and stared down into the pitiful and accusing features thus
revealed, as though to tear from them the story of the crime which had
released me as I would not have been released, no, not to have had my
heart's desire in all the fulness with which I had contemplated it a few
short hours before.
But beyond the ever accusing, protuberant stare, those features told
nothing; and steeling myself to the situation, I made what observation I
could of her condition and the surrounding circumstances. For this was
my betrothed wife. Whatever my intentions, however far my love had
strayed under the spell cast over me by her sister,--the young girl who
had just passed out,--Adelaide and I had been engaged for many
months; our wedding day was even set.
But that was all over now--ended as her life was ended: suddenly,
incomprehensibly, and by no stroke of God. Even the jewel on her

finger was gone, the token of our betrothal. This was to be expected.
She would be apt to take it