# The Lost Valley and Other Stories/Old Clothes

The Lost Valley and Other Stories, pg 133

### I

Imaginative children with their odd questionings of life and their delicate nervous systems must be often a source of greater anxiety than delight to their parents, and Aileen, the child of my widowed cousin, impressed me from the beginning as being a strangely vivid specimen of her class. Moreover, the way she took to me from the first placed quasi-avuncular responsibilities upon my shoulders (in her mother’s eyes), that I had no right, even as I had no inclination, to shirk. Indeed, I loved the queer, wayward, mysterious little being. Only it was not always easy to advise; and her somewhat marked peculiarities certainly called for advice of a skilled and special order.
It was not merely that her make-believe was unusually sincere and haunting, and that she would talk by the hour with invisible playmates (touching them, putting up her lips to be kissed, opening doors for them to pass in and out, and setting chairs, footstools and even flowers for them), for many children in my experience have done as much and done it with a vast sincerity; but that she also accepted what they told her with so steady a degree of conviction that their words influenced her life and, accordingly, her health.
They told her stories, apparently, in which she herself played a central part, stories, moreover, that were neither comforting nor wise. She would sit in a corner of the room, as both her mother and myself can vouch, face to face with some make-believe Occupant of the chair so carefully arranged; the footstool had been placed with precision, and sometimes she would move it a little this way or that; the table whereon rested the invisible elbows was beside her with a jar of flowers that changed according to the particular visitor. And there she would wait motionless, perhaps an hour at a time, staring up into the viewless features of the person who was talking with her⁠—who was telling her a story in which she played an exceedingly poignant part. Her face altered with the run of emotions, her eyes grew large and moist, and sometimes frightened; rarely she laughed, and rarely asked a whispered question, but more often sat there, tense and eager, uncannily absorbed in the inaudible tale falling from invisible lips⁠—the tale of her own adventures.
But it was the terror inspired by these singular recitals that affected her delicate health as early as the age of eight, and when, owing to her mother’s well-meant but ill-advised ridicule, she indulged them with more secrecy, the effect upon her nerves and character became so acute that I was summoned down upon a special advisory visit I scarcely appreciated.
“Now, George, what do you think I had better do? Dr. Hale insists upon more exercise and more companionship, sea air and all the rest of it, but none of these things seem to do any good.”
“Have you taken her into your confidence, or rather has she taken you into hers?” I ventured mildly.
The question seemed to give offence a little.
“Of course,” was the emphatic answer. “The child has no secrets from her mother. She is perfectly devoted to me.”
“But you have tried to laugh her out of it, haven’t you now?”
“Yes. But with such success that she holds these conversations far less than she used to⁠—”
“Or more secretly?” was my comment, that was met with a superior shrug of the shoulders.
Then, after a further pause, in which my cousin’s distress and my own affectionate interest in the whimsical imagination of my little niece combined to move me, I tried again⁠—
“Make-believe,” I observed, “is always a bit puzzling to us older folk, because, though we indulge in it all our lives. We no longer believe in it; whereas children like Aileen⁠—”
She interrupted me quickly⁠—
“You know what I feel anxious about,” she said, lowering her voice. “I think there may be cause for serious alarm.” Then she added frankly, looking up with grave eyes into my face, “George, I want your help⁠—your best help, please. You’ve always been a true friend.”
I gave it to her in calculated words.
“Theresa,” I said with grave emphasis, “there is no trace of insanity on either side of the family, and my own opinion is that Aileen is perfectly well-balanced in spite of this too highly developed imagination. But, above all things, you must not drive it inwards by making fun of it. Lead it out. Educate it. Guide it by intelligent sympathy. Get her to tell you all about it, and so on. I think Aileen wants careful observing, perhaps⁠—but nothing more.”
For some minutes she watched my face in silence, her eyes intent, her features slightly twitching. I knew at once from her manner what she was driving at. She approached the subject with awkwardness and circumlocution, for it was something she dreaded, not feeling sure whether it was of heaven or of hell.
“You are very wonderful, George,” she said at length, “and you have theories about almost everything⁠—”
“Speculations,” I admitted.
“And your hypnotic power is helpful, you know. Now⁠—if⁠—if you thought it safe, and that Providence would not be offended⁠—”
“Theresa,” I stopped her firmly before she had committed herself to the point where she would feel hurt by a refusal, “let me say at once that I do not consider a child a fit subject for hypnotic experiment, and I feel quite sure that an intelligent person like yourself will agree with me that it’s unpermissible.”
“I was only thinking of a little ‘suggestion,’ ” she murmured.
“Which would come far better from the mother.”
“If the mother had not already lost her power by using ridicule,” she confessed meekly.
“Yes, you never should have laughed. Why did you, I wonder?”
An expression came into her eyes that I knew to be invariably with hysterical temperaments the precursor of tears. She looked round to make sure no one was listening.
“George,” she whispered, and into the dusk of that September evening passed some shadow between us that left behind an atmosphere of sudden and inexplicable chill, “George, I wish⁠—I wish it was quite clear to me that it really is all make-believe, I mean⁠—”
“What do you mean?” I said, with a severity that was assumed to hide my own uneasiness. But the tears came the same instant in a flood that made any intelligent explanation out of the question. The terror of the mother for her own blood burst forth.
“I’m frightened⁠—horribly frightened,” she said between the sobs.
“I’ll go up and see the child myself,” I said comfortingly at length when the storm had subsided. “I’ll run up to the nursery. You mustn’t be alarmed. Aileen’s all right. I think I can help you in the matter a good deal.”

### II

In the nursery as usual Aileen was alone. I found her sitting by the open window, an empty chair opposite to her. She was staring at it⁠—into it, but it is not easy to describe the certainty she managed to convey that there was someone sitting in that chair, talking with her. It was her manner that did it. She rose quickly, with a start as I came in, and made a half gesture in the direction of the empty chair as though to shake hands, then corrected herself quickly, and gave a friendly little nod of farewell or dismissal⁠—then turned towards me. Incredible as it must sound, that chair looked at once slightly other wise. It was empty.
“Aileen, what in the world are you up to?”
“You know, uncle,” she replied, without hesitation.
“Oh, rather! I know!” I said, trying to get into her mood so as later to get her out of it, “because I do the same thing with the people in my own stories. I talk to them too⁠—”
She came up to my side, as though it were a matter of life and death.
“But do they answer?”
I realized the overwhelming sincerity, even the seriousness, of the question to her mind. The shadow evoked downstairs by my cousin had followed me up here. It touched me on the shoulder.
“Unless they answer,” I told her, “they are not really alive, and the story hangs fire when people read it.”
She watched me very closely a moment as we leaned out of the open window where the rich perfume of the Portuguese laurels came up from the lawns below. The proximity of the child brought a distinct atmosphere of its own, an atmosphere charged with suggestions, almost with faint pictures, as of things I had once known. I had often felt this before, and did not altogether welcome it, for the pictures seemed framed in some emotional setting that invariably escaped my analysis. I understood in a vague way what it was about the child that made her mother afraid. There flashed across me a fugitive sensation, utterly elusive yet painfully real, that she knew moments of suffering by rights she ought not to have known. Bizarre and unreasonable as the conception was, it was convincing. And it touched a profound sympathy in me.
Aileen undoubtedly was aware of this sympathy.
“It’s Philip that talks to me most of the time,” she volunteered, “and he’s always, always explaining⁠—but never quite finishes.”
“Explaining what, dear little Child of the Moon?” I urged gently, giving her a name she used to love when she was smaller.
“Why he couldn’t come in time to save me, of course,” she said. “You see, they cut off both his hands.”
I shall never forget the sensation these words of a child’s mental adventure caused me, nor the kind of bitter reality they forced into me that they were true, and not merely a detail of some attempted rescue of a “Princess in a Tower.” A vivid rush of thought seemed to focus my consciousness upon my own two wrists, as though I felt the pain of the operation she mentioned, and with a swift instinct that slipped into action before I could control it, I had hidden both hands from her sight in my coat pockets.
“And what else does ‘Philip’ tell you?” I asked gently.
Her face flushed. Tears came into her eyes, then fled away again lest they should fall from their softly-coloured nests.
“That he loved me so awfully,” she replied; “and that he loved me to the very end, and that all his life after I was gone, and after they cut his hands off, he did nothing but pray for me⁠—from the end of the world where he went to hide⁠—”
I shook myself free with an effort from the enveloping atmosphere of tragedy, realizing that her imagination must be driven along brighter channels and that my duty must precede my interest.
“But you must get Philip to tell you all his funny and jolly adventures, too,” I said, “the ones he had, you know, when his hands grew again⁠—”
The expression that came into her face literally froze my blood.
“That’s only making-up stories,” she said icily. “They never did grow again. There were no happy or funny adventures.”
I cast about in my mind for an inspiration how to help her mind into more wholesome ways of invention. I realized more than ever before the profundity of my affection for this strange, fatherless child, and how I would give my whole soul if I could help her and teach her joy. It was a real love that swept me, rooted in things deeper than I realized.
But, before the right word was given me to speak, I felt her nestle up against my side, and heard her utter the very phrase that for some time I had been dreading in the secret places of my soul she would utter. The sentence seemed to shake me within. I knew a hurried, passing moment of unspeakable pain that is utterly beyond me to reason about.
“You know,” was what she said, “because it’s you who are Philip!”
And the way she said it⁠—so quietly, the words touched somehow with a gentle though compassionate scorn, yet made golden by a burning love that filled her little person to the brim⁠—robbed me momentarily of all power of speech. I could only bend down and put my arm about her and kiss her head that came up barely to the level of my chin. I swear I loved that child as I never loved any other human being.
“Then Philip is going to teach you all sorts of jolly adventures with his new hands,” I remember saying, with blundering good intention, “because he’s no longer sad, and is full of fun, and loves you twice as much as ever!”
And I caught her up and carried her down the long stairs of the house out into the garden, where we joined the dogs and romped together until the face of the motherly Kempster at an upper window shouted down something stupid about bedtime, supper, or the rest of it, and Aileen, flushed yet with brighter eyes, ran into the house and, turning at the door, showed me her odd little face wreathed in smiles and laughter.
For a long time I paced to and fro with a cigar between the box hedges of the old-time garden, thinking of the child and her queer imaginings, and of the profoundly moving and disquieting sensations she stirred in me at the same time. Her face flitted by my side through the shadows. She was not pretty, properly speaking, but her appearance possessed an original charm that appealed to me strongly. Her head was big and in some way old-fashioned; her eyes, dark but not large, were placed close together, and she had a wide mouth that was certainly not beautiful. But the look of distressed and yearning passion that sometimes swept over these features, not otherwise prepossessing, changed her look into sudden beauty, a beauty of the soul, a soul that knew suffering and was acquainted with grief. This, at least, is the way my own mind saw the child, and therefore the only way I can hope to make others see her. Were I a painter I might put her upon canvas in some imaginary portrait and call it, perhaps, “Reincarnation”⁠—for I have never seen anything in child-life that impressed me so vividly with that odd idea of an old soul come back to the world in a new young body⁠—a new Suit of Clothes.
But when I talked with my cousin after dinner, and consoled her with the assurance that Aileen was gifted with an unusually vivid imagination which time and ourselves must train to some more practical end⁠—while I said all this, and more besides, two sentences the child had made use of kept ringing in my head. One⁠—when she told me with merciless perception that I was only “making-up” stories; and the other, when she had informed me with that quiet rush of certainty and conviction that “Philip” was⁠—myself.

### III

A big-game expedition of some months put an end temporarily to my avuncular responsibilities; at least so far as action was concerned, for there were certain memories that held curiously vivid among all the absorbing turmoil of our camp life. Often, lying awake in my tent at night, or even following the tracks of our prey through the jungle, these pictures would jump out upon me and claim attention. Aileen’s little face of suffering would come between me and the sight of my rifle; or her assurance that I was the “Philip” of her imagination would attack me with an accent of reality that seemed queer enough until I analyzed it away. And more than once I found myself thinking of her dark and serious countenance when she told how “Philip” had loved her to the end, and would have saved her if they had not cut off his hands. My own Imagination, it seemed, was weaving the details of her child’ s invention into a story, for I never could think of this latter detail without positively experiencing a sensation of smarting pain in my wrists⁠ ⁠… !
When I returned to England in the spring they had moved, I found, into a house by the sea, a tumbled-down old rookery of a building my cousin s father had rarely occupied during his lifetime, nor she been able to let since it had passed into her possession. An urgent letter summoned me thither, and I travelled down the very day after my arrival to the bleak Norfolk coast with a sense of foreboding in my heart that increased almost to a presentiment when the cab entered the long drive and I recognized the grey and gloomy walls of the old mansion. The sea air swept the gardens with its salt wash, and the moan of the surf was audible even up to the windows.
“I wonder what possessed her to come here?” was the first thought in my mind. “Surely the last place in the world to bring a morbid or too-sensitive child to!” My further dread that something had happened to the little child I loved so tenderly was partly dispelled, however, when my cousin met me at the door with open arms and smiling face, though the welcome I soon found, was chiefly due to the relief she gained from my presence. Something had happened to little Aileen, though not the final disaster that I dreaded. She had suffered from nervous attacks of so serious a character during my absence that the doctor had insisted upon sea air, and my cousin, not with the best judgment, had seized upon the idea of making the old house serve the purpose. She had made a wing habitable for a few weeks; she hoped the entire change of scene would fill the little girl’s mind with new and happier ideas. Instead⁠—the result had been exactly the reverse. The child had wept copiously and hysterically the moment she set eyes on the old walls and smelt the odour of the sea.
But before we had been talking ten minutes there was a cry and a sound of rushing footsteps, and a scampering figure, with dark, flying hair, had dived headlong into my arms, and Aileen was sobbing⁠—
“Oh, you’ve come, you’ve come at last! I am so awfully glad. I thought it would be the same as before, and you’d get caught.” She ran from me next and kissed her mother, laughing with pleasure through her tears, and was gone from the room as quickly as she had come.
I caught my cousin’s glance of frightened amazement.
“Now isn’t that odd?” she exclaimed in a hushed voice. “Isn’t that odd? Those are the tears of happiness⁠—the first time I’ve seen her smile since we came here last week.”
But it rather nettled me, I think. “Why odd?” I asked. “Aileen loves me, it’s delightful to⁠—”
“Not that, not that!” she said quickly. “It’s odd, I meant, she should have found you out so soon. She didn’t even know you were back in England, and I’d sent her off to play on the sands with Kempster and the dogs so as to be sure of an opportunity of telling you everything before you saw her.”
Our eyes met squarely, yet not with complete sympathy or comprehension.
“You see, she knew perfectly well you were here⁠—the instant you came.”
“But there’s nothing in that,” I asserted. “Children know things just as animals do. She scented her favourite uncle from the shore like a dog!” And I laughed in her face.
That laugh perhaps was a mistake on my part. Its well-meant cheerfulness was possibly overdone. Even to myself it did not ring quite true.
“I do believe you are in league with her⁠—against me,” was the remark that greeted it, accompanied by an increase of that expression of fear in the eyes I had divined the moment we met upon the doorstep. Finding nothing genuine to say in reply, I kissed the top of her head.
In due course, after the tea things had been removed, I learned the exact state of affairs, and even making due allowance for my cousin’s excited exaggerations, there were things that seemed to me inexplicable enough on any ground of normal explanation. Slight as the details may seem when set down seriatim, their cumulative effect upon my own mind touched an impressive and disagreeable climax that I did my best to conceal from outward betrayal. As I sat in the great shadowy room, listening to my cousin’s jerky description of “childish” things, it was borne in upon me that they might well have the profoundest possible significance. I watched her eager, frightened face, lit only by the flickering flames the sharp spring evening made necessary, and thought of the subject of our conversation flitting about the dreary halls and corridors of the huge old building, a little figure of tragedy, laughing, crying and dreaming in a world entirely her own⁠—and there stirred in me an unwelcome recognition of those mutinous and dishevelled forces that lie but thinly screened behind the commonplace details of life and that now seemed ready to burst forth and play their mysterious role before our very eyes.
“Tell me exactly what has happened,” I urged, with decision but sympathy.
“There’s so little, when it’s put into words, George; but⁠—well, the thing that first upset me was that she⁠—knew the whole place, though she’s never been here before. She knew every passage and staircase, many of them that I did not know myself; she showed us an underground passage to the sea, that father himself didn’t know; and she actually drew a scrawl of the house as it used to be three hundred years ago when the other wing was standing where the copper beeches grow now. It’s accurate, too.”
It seemed impossible to explain to a person of my cousin’s temperament the theories of prenatal memory and the like, or the possibility of her own knowledge being communicated telepathically to the brain of her own daughter. I said therefore very little, but listened with an uneasiness that grew horribly.
“She found her way about the gardens instantly, as if she had played in them all her life; and she keeps drawing figures of people⁠—men and women⁠—in old costumes, the sort of thing our ancestors wore, you know⁠—”
“Well, well, well!” I interrupted impatiently; “what can be more natural? She is old enough to have seen pictures she can remember enough to copy⁠—?”
“Of course,” she resumed calmly, but with a calmness due to the terror that ate her very soul and swallowed up all minor emotions; “of course, but one of the faces she gets is⁠—a portrait.”
She rose suddenly and came closer to me across the big stone hearth, lowering her voice to a whisper, “George,” she whispered, “it’s the very image of that awful⁠—de Lorne!”
The announcement, I admit, gave me a thrill, for that particular ancestor on my father’s side had largely influenced my boyhood imagination by the accounts of his cruelty and wickedness in days gone by. But I think now the shiver that ran down my back was due to the thought of my little Aileen practising her memory and pencil upon so vile an object. That, and my cousin’s pale visage of alarm, combined to shake me. I said, however, what seemed wise and reasonable at the moment.
“You’ll be claiming next, Theresa, that the house is haunted,” I suggested.
She shrugged her shoulders with an indifference that was very eloquent of the strength of this other more substantial terror.
“That would be so easy to deal with,” she said, without even looking up. “A ghost stays in one place. Aileen could hardly take it about with her.”
I think we both enjoyed the pause that followed. It gave me time to collect my forces for what I knew was coming. It gave her time to get her further facts into some pretence of coherence.
“I told you about the belt?” she asked at length, weakly, and as though unutterable things she longed to disown forced the question to her unwilling lips.
The sentence shot into me like the thrust of a naked sword.⁠ ⁠… I shook my head.
“Well, even a year or two ago she had that strange dislike of wearing a belt with her frocks. We thought it was a whim, and did not humour her. Belts are necessary, you know, George,” she tried to smile feebly. “But now it has come to such a point that I’ve had to give in.”
“She dislikes a belt round her waist, you mean?” I asked, fighting a sudden inexplicable spasm in my heart.
“It makes her scream. The moment anything encloses her waist she sets up such a hubbub, and struggles so, and hides away, and I’ve been obliged to yield.”
“But really, Theresa⁠—!”
“She declares it fastens her in, and she will never get free again, and all kinds of other things. Oh, her fear is dreadful, poor child. Her face gets that sort of awful grey, don’t you know? Even Kempster, who if anything is too firm, had to give in.”
“And what else, pray?” I disliked hearing these details intensely. It made me ache with a kind of anger that I could not at once relieve the child’s pain.
“The way she spoke to me after Dr. Hale had left⁠—you know how awfully kind and gentle he is, and how Aileen likes him and even plays with him and sits on his knee? Well, he was talking about her diet, regulating it and so forth, teasing her that she mustn’t eat this and that, and the rest of it, when she turned that horrid grey again and jumped off his knee with her scream⁠—that thin wailing scream she has that goes through me like a knife, George⁠—and flew to the nursery and locked herself in with⁠—what do you think?⁠—with all the bread, apples, cold meat and other eatables she could find!”
“Eatables!” I exclaimed, aware of another spasm of vivid pain.
“When I coaxed her out, hours later, she was trembling like a leaf and fell into my arms utterly exhausted, and all I could get her to tell me was this⁠—which she repeated again and again with a sort of beseeching, appealing tone that made my heart bleed⁠—”
She hesitated an instant.
“Tell me at once.”
“ ‘I shall starve again, I shall starve again,’ were the words she used. She kept repeating it over and over between her sobs. ‘I shall be without anything to eat. I shall starve!’ And, would you believe it, while she hid in that nursery cupboard she had crammed so much cake and stuff into her little self that she was violently sick for a couple of days. Moreover, she now hates the sight of Dr. Hale so much, poor man, that it’s useless for him to see her. It does more harm than good.”
I had risen and begun to walk up and down the hall while she told me this. I said very little. In my mind strange thoughts tore and raced, standing erect before me out of unbelievably immense depths of shadow. There was nothing very pregnant I found to say, however, for theories and speculations are of small avail as practical help⁠—unless two minds see eye to eye in them.
“And the rest?” I asked gently, coming behind the chair and resting both hands upon her shoulders. She got up at once and faced me. I was afraid to show too much sympathy lest the tears should come.
“Oh, George,” she exclaimed, “I am relieved you have come. You are really strong and comforting. To feel your great hands on my shoulders gives me courage. But, you know, truly and honestly I am frightened out of my very wits by the child⁠—”
“You won’t stay here, of course?”
“We leave at the end of this week,” she replied. “You will not desert me till then, I know. And Aileen will be all right as long as you are here, for you have the most extraordinary effect on her for good.”
“Bless her little suffering imagination,” I said. “You can count on me. I’ll send to town tonight for my things.”
And then she told me about the room. It was simple enough, but it conveyed a more horrible certainty of something true than all the other details put together. For there was a room on the ground floor, intended to be used on wet days when the nursery was too far for muddy boots⁠—and into this room Aileen could not go. Why? No one could tell. The facts were that the first moment the child ran in, her mother close behind, she stopped, swayed, and nearly fell. Then, with shrieks that were even heard outside by the gardeners sweeping the gravel path, she flung herself headlong against the wall, against a particular corner of it that is to say, and beat it with her little fists until the skin broke and left stains upon the paper. It all happened in less than a minute. The words she cried so frantically her mother was too shocked and flabbergasted to remember, or even to hear properly. Aileen nearly upset her in her bewildered efforts next to find the door and escape. And the first thing she did when escape was accomplished, was to drop in a dead faint upon the stone floor of the passage outside.
“Now, is that all make-believe?” whispered Theresa, unable to keep the shudder from her lips. “Is that all merely part of a story she has make up and plays a part in?”
We looked one another straight in the eyes for a space of some seconds. The dread in the mother’s heart leaped out to swell a terror in my own⁠—a terror of another kind, but greater.
“It is too late tonight,” I said at length, “for it would only excite her unnecessarily; but tomorrow I will talk with Aileen. And⁠—if it seems wise⁠—I might⁠—I might be able to help in other ways too,” I added.
So I did talk to her⁠—next day.

### IV

I always had her confidence, this little dark-eyed maid, and there was an intimacy between us that made play and talk very delightful. Yet as a rule, without giving myself a satisfactory reason, I preferred talking with her in the sunlight. She was not eerie, bless her little heart of queerness and mystery, but she had a way of suggesting other ways of life and existence shouldering about us that made me look round in the dark and wonder what the shadows concealed or what waited round the next corner.
We were on the lawn, where the bushy yews drop thick shade, the soft air making tea possible out of doors, my cousin out driving to distant calls; and Aileen had invited herself and was messing about with my manuscripts in a way that vexed me, for I had been reading my fairy tales to her and she kept asking me questions that shamed my limited powers. I remember, too, that I was glad the collie ran to and fro past us, scampering and barking after the swallows on the lawn.
“Only some of your stories are true, aren’t they?” she asked abruptly.
“How do you know that, young critic?” I had been waiting for an opening supplied by herself. Anything forced on my part she would have suspected.
“Oh, I can tell.”
Then she came up and whispered without any hint of invitation on my part, “Uncle, it is true, isn’t it, that I’ve been in other places with you? And isn’t it only the things we did there that make the true stories?”
The opening was delivered all perfect and complete into my hands. I cannot conceive how it was I availed myself of it so queerly⁠—I mean, how it was that the words and the name slipped out of their own accord as though I was saying something in a dream.
“Of course, my little Lady Aileen, because in imagination, you see, we⁠—”
But before I had time to finish the sentence with which I hoped to coax out the true inwardness of her own distress, she was upon me in a heap.
“Oh,” she cried, with a sudden passionate outburst, “then you do know my name? You know all the story⁠—our story!”
She was very excited, face flushed, eyes dancing, all the emotions of a life charged to the brim with experience playing through her little person.
“Of course, Miss Inventor, I know your name,” I said quickly, puzzled, and with a sudden dismay that was hideous, clutching at my throat.
“And all that we did in this place?” she went on, pointing with increased excitement to the thick, ivy-grown walls of the old house.
My own emotion grew extraordinarily, a swift, rushing uneasiness upsetting all my calculations. For it suddenly came back to me that in calling her “Lady Aileen” I had not pronounced the name quite as usual. My tongue had played a trick with the consonants and vowels, though at the moment of utterance I had somehow failed to notice the change. “Aileen” and “Helen” are almost interchangeable sounds.⁠ ⁠… ! And it was “Lady Helen” that I had actually said.
The discovery took my breath away for an instant⁠—and the way she had leaped upon the name to claim it.
“No one else, you see, knows me as ‘Lady Helen,’ ” she continued whispering, “because that’s only in our story, isn’t it? And now I’m just Aileen Langton. But as long as you know, it’s all right. Oh, I am so awf’ly glad you knew, most awf ’ly, awf’ly glad.”
I was momentarily at a loss for words. Keenly desirous to guide the child’s “pain-stories” into wiser channels, and thus help her to relief, I hesitated a moment for the right clue. I murmured something soothing about “our story,” while in my mind I searched vigorously for the best way of leading her on to explain all her terror of the belt, the fear of starvation, the room that made her scream, and all the rest. All that I was most anxious to get out of her little tortured mind and then replace it by some brighter dream.
But the insidious experience had shaken my confidence a little, and these explicable emotions destroyed my elder wisdom. The little Inventor had caught me away into the reality of her own “story” with a sense of conviction that was even beyond witchery. And the next sentence she almost instantly let loose upon me completed my discomfiture⁠—
“With you,” she said, still half whispering, “with you I could even go into the room. I never could⁠—alone⁠—!”
The spring wind whispering in the yews behind us brought in that moment something upon me from vanished childhood days that made me tremble. Some wave of lost passion⁠—lost because I guessed not its origin or nature⁠—surged through the depths of me, sending faint messages to the surface of my consciousness. Aileen, little mischief-maker, changed before my very eyes as she stood there close⁠—changed into a tall sad figure that beckoned to me across seas of time and distance, with the haze of ages in her eyes and gestures, I was obliged to focus my gaze upon her with a deliberate effort to see her again as the tumble-haired girl I was accustomed to.⁠ ⁠…
Then, sitting in the creaky garden chair, I drew her down upon my knee, determined to win the whole story from her mind. My back was to the house; she was perched at an angle, however, that enabled her to command the doors and windows. I mention this because, scarcely had I begun my attack, when I saw that her attention wandered, and that she seemed curiously uneasy. Once or twice, as she shifted her position to get a view of something that was going on over my shoulder, I was aware that a slight shiver passed from her small person down to my knees. She seemed to be expecting something⁠—with dread.
“We’ll make a special expedition, armed to the teeth,” I said, with a laugh, referring to her singular words about the room. “We’ll send Pat in first to bark at the cobwebs, and we’ll take lots of provisions and⁠—and water in case of a siege⁠—and a file⁠—”
I cannot pretend to understand why I chose those precise words⁠—or why it was as though other thoughts than those I had intended rose up, clamouring for expression. It seemed all I could manage not to say a lot of other things about the room that could only have frightened instead of relieving her.
“Will you talk into the wall too?” she asked, turning her eyes down suddenly upon me with a little rush and flame of passion. And though I had not the faintest conception what she meant, the question sent an agony of yearning pain through me. “Talking into the wall,” I instantly grasped, referred to the core of her trouble, the very central idea that frightened her and provided the suffering and terror of all her imaginings.
But I had no time to follow up the clue thus mysteriously offered to me, for almost at the same moment her eyes fixed themselves upon something behind me with an expression of tense horror, as though she saw the approach of a danger that might⁠—kill.
“Oh, oh!” she cried under her breath, “he’s coming! He’s coming to take me! Uncle George⁠—Philip⁠—!”
The same impulse operated upon us simultaneously, it seems, for I sprang up with my fists clenched at the very instant she shot off my knee and stood with all her muscles rigid as though to resist attack. She was shaking dreadfully. Her face went the colour of linen.
“Who’s coming⁠—?” I began sharply, then stopped as I saw the figure of a man moving towards us from the house. It was the butler⁠—the new butler who had arrived only that very afternoon. It is impossible to say what there was in his swift and silent approach that was⁠—abominable. The man was upon us, it seemed, almost as soon as I caught sight of him, and the same moment Aileen, with a bursting cry, looking wildly about her for a place to hide in, plunged headlong into my arms and buried her face in my coat.
Horribly perplexed, yet mortified that the servant should see my little friend in such a state, I did my best to pretend that it was all part of some mad game or other, and catching her up in my arms, I ran, calling the collie to follow with, “Come on, Pat! She’s our prisoner!”⁠—and only set her down when we were under the limes at the far end of the lawn. She was all white and ghostly from her terror, still looking frantically about her, trembling in such a way that I thought any minute she must collapse in a dead faint. She clung to me with very tight fingers. How I hated that man. Judging by the sudden violence of my loathing he might have been some monster who wanted to torture her.
“Let’s go away, oh, much farther, ever so far away!” she whispered, and I took her by the hand, comforting her as best I could with words, while realizing that the thing she wanted was my big arm about her to protect. My heart ached, oh, so fiercely, for her, but the odd thing about it was that I could not find anything of real comfort to say that I felt would be true. If I “made up” soothing rubbish, it would not deceive either of us and would only shake her confidence in me, so that I should lose any power I had to help. Had a tiger come upon her out of the wood I might as well have assured her it would not bite!
I did stammer something, however⁠—
“It’s only the new butler. He startled me, too; he came so softly, didn’t he?” Oh! How eagerly I searched for a word that might make the thing seem as ordinary as possible⁠—yet how vainly.
“But you know who he is⁠—really!” she said in a crying whisper, running down the path and dragging me after her; “and if he gets me again⁠ ⁠… oh! Oh!” and she shrieked aloud in the anguish of her fear.
That fear chased both of us down the winding path between the bushes.
“Aileen, darling,” I cried, surrounding her with both arms and holding her very tight, “you need not be afraid. I’ll always save you. I’ll always be with you, dear child.”
“Keep me in your big arms, always, always, won’t you, Uncle⁠—Philip?” She mixed both names. The choking stress of her voice wrung me dreadfully. “Always, always, like in our story,” she pleaded, hiding her little face again in my coat.
I really was at a complete loss to know what best to do; I hardly dared to bring her back to the house; the sight of the man, I felt, might be fatal to her already too delicately balanced reason, for I dreaded a fit or seizure if she chanced to run across him when I was not with her. My mind was easily made up on one point, however.
“I’ll send him away at once, Aileen,” I told her. “When you wake up tomorrow he’ll be gone. Of course mother won’t keep him.”
This assurance seemed to bring her some measure of comfort, and at last, without having dared to win the whole story from her as I had first hoped, I got her back to the house by covert ways, and saw her myself upstairs to her own quarters. Also I took it upon myself to give the necessary orders. She must set no eye upon the man. Only, why was it that in my heart of hearts I longed for him to do something outrageous that should make it possible for me to break his very life at its source and kill him⁠ ⁠… ?
But my cousin, alarmed to the point of taking even frantic measures, finally had a sound suggestion to offer, namely that I should take the afflicted little child away with me the very next day, run down to Harwich and carry her off for a week of absolute change across the North Sea. And I, meanwhile, had reached the point where I had persuaded myself that the experiment I had hitherto felt unable to consent to had now become a permissible, even a necessary one. Hypnotism should win the story from that haunted mind without her being aware of it, and provided I could drive her deep enough into the trance state, I could then further wipe the memory from her outer consciousness so completely that she might know at last some happiness of childhood.

### V

It was after ten o’clock, and I was still sitting in the big hail before the fire of logs, talking with lowered voice. My cousin sat opposite to me in a deep arm chair. We had discussed the matter pretty fully, and the deep uneasiness we felt clothed not alone our minds but the very building with gloom. The fact that, instinctively, neither of us referred to the possible assistance of doctors is eloquent, I think, of the emotion that troubled us both so profoundly, the emotion, I mean, that sprang from the vivid sense of the reality of it all. No child’s make-believe merely could have thus caught us away, or spread a net that entangled our minds to such a point of confusion and dismay. It was perfectly comprehensible to me now that my cousin should have cried in very helplessness before the convincing effects of the little girl’s calamitous distress. Aileen was living through a Reality, not an Invention. This was the fact that haunted the shadowy halls and corridors behind us. Already I hated the very building. It seemed charged to the roof with the memories of melancholy and ancient pain that swept my heart with shivering, cold winds.
Purposely, however, I affected some degree of cheerfulness, and concealed from my cousin any mention of the attacks that certain emotions and alarms had made upon myself: I said nothing of my replacing “Lady Aileen” with “Lady Helen,” nothing of my passing for “Philip,” or of my sudden dashes of quasi-memory arising from the child’s inclusion of myself in her “story,” and my own singular acceptance of the role. I did not consider it wise to mention all that the sight of the new servant with his sinister dark face and his method of stealthy approach had awakened in my thoughts. None the less these things started constantly to the surface of my mind and doubtless betrayed themselves somewhere in my “atmosphere,” sufficiently at least for a woman’s intuition to divine them. I spoke passingly of the “room,” and of Aileen’s singular aversion for it, and of her remark about “talking to the wall.” Yet strange thoughts pricked their way horribly into both our minds. In the hall the stuffed heads of deer and fox and badger stared upon us like masks of things still alive beneath their fur and dead skin.
“But what disturbs me more than all the rest of her delusions put together,” said my cousin, peering at me with eyes that made no pretence of hiding dark things, “is her extraordinary knowledge of this place. I assure you, George, it was the most uncanny thing I’ve ever known when she showed me over and asked questions as if she had actually lived here.” Her voice sank to a whisper, and she looked up startled. It seemed to me for a moment that someone was coming near to listen, moving stealthily upon us along the dark approaches to the hall.
“I can understand you found it strange,” I began quickly. But she interrupted me at once. Clearly it gave her a certain relief to say the things and get them out of her mind where they hid, breeding new growths of abhorrence.
“George,” she cried aloud, “there’s a limit to imagination. Aileen knows. That’s the awful thing⁠—.”
Something sprang into my throat. My eyes moistened.
“The horror of the belt⁠—” she whispered, loathing her own words.
“Leave that thought alone,” I said with decision. The detail pained me inexpressibly⁠—beyond belief.
“I wish I could,” she answered, “but if you had seen the look on her face when she struggled⁠—and the⁠—the frenzy she got into about the food and starving⁠—I mean when Dr. Hale spoke⁠—oh, if you had seen all that, you would understand that I⁠—”
She broke off with a start. Someone had entered the hall behind us and was standing in the doorway at the far end. The listener had moved upon us from the dark. Theresa, though her back was turned, had felt the presence and was instantly upon her feet.
“You need not sit up, Porter,” she said, in a tone that only thinly veiled the fever of apprehension behind, “we will put the lights out,” and the man withdrew like a shadow. She exchanged a quick glance with me. A sensation of darkness that seemed to have come with the servant’s presence was gone. It is wholly beyond me to explain why neither myself nor my cousin found anything to say for some minutes. But it was still more a mystery, I think, why the muscles of my two hands should have contracted involuntarily with a force that drove the nails into my palms, and why the violent impulse should have leaped into my blood to fling myself upon the man and strangle the life out of his neck before he could take another breath. I have never before or since experienced this apparently causeless desire to throttle anybody. I hope I never may again.
“He hangs about rather,” was all my cousin said presently. “He’s always watching us⁠—” But my own thoughts were horribly busy, and I was marvelling how it was this ugly and sinister creature had ever come to be accepted in the story that Aileen lived, and that I was slowly coming to believe in.
It was a relief to me when, towards midnight. Theresa rose to go to bed. We had skirted through the horrors of the child’s possessing misery without ever quite facing it, and as we stood there lighting the candles, our voices whispering, our minds charged with the strain of thoughts neither of us had felt it wise to utter, my cousin started back against the wall and stared up into the darkness above where the staircase climbed the well of the house. She uttered a cry. At first I thought she was going to collapse. I was only just in time to catch the candle.
All the emotions of fearfulness she had repressed during our long talk came out in that brief cry, and when I looked up to discover the cause I saw a small white figure come slowly down the wide staircase and just about to step into the hall. It was Aileen, with bare feet, her dark hair tumbling down over her nightgown, her eyes wide open, an expression in them of anguished expectancy that her tender years could never possibly have known. She was walking steadily, yet somehow not quite as a child walks.
“Stop!” I whispered peremptorily to my cousin, putting my hand quickly over her mouth, and holding her back from the first movement of rescue, “don’t wake her. She’s walking in her sleep.”
Aileen passed us like a white shadow, scarcely audible, and went straight across the hall. She was utterly unaware of our presence. Avoiding all obstructions of chairs and tables, moving with decision and purpose, the little figure dipped into the shadows at the far end and disappeared from view in the mouth of the corridor that had once⁠—three hundred years ago⁠—led into the wing where now the copper beeches grew upon open lawns. It was clearly a way familiar to her. And the instant I recovered from my surprise and moved after her to act, Theresa found her voice and cried aloud⁠—a voice that broke the midnight silence with shrill discordance⁠—
“George, oh, George! She’s going to that awful room⁠ ⁠… !”
“Bring the candle and come after me,” I replied from halfway down the hall, “but do not interrupt unless I call for you,” and was after the child at a pace to which the most singular medley of emotions I have ever known urged me imperiously. A sense of tragic disaster gripped my very vitals. All that I did seemed to rise out of some subconscious region of the mind where the haunting passions of a deeply buried past stirred in their sleep and woke.
“Helen!” I cried, “Lady Helen!” I was close upon the gliding figure. Aileen turned and for the first time saw me with eyes that seemed to waver between sleep and waking. They gazed straight at me over the flickering candle flame, then hesitated. In similar fashion the gesture of her little hands towards me was arrested before it had completed itself. She saw me, knew my presence, yet was uncertain who I was. It was astonishing the way I actually surprised this momentary indecision between the two personalities in her⁠—caught the two phases of her consciousness at grips⁠—discerned the Aileen of Today in the act of waking to know me as her “Uncle George,” and that other Aileen of her great dark story, the “Helen” of some far Yesterday, that drew her in this condition of somnambulism to the scene in the past where our two lives were linked in her imagination. For it was quite clear to me that the child was dreaming in her sleep the action of the story she lived through in the vivid moments of her waking terror.
But the choice was swift. I just had time to signal Theresa to set the candle upon a shelf and wait, when she came up, stretched her hands out in completion of the original gesture, and fell into my arms with a smothered cry of love and anguish that, coming from those childish lips, I think is the most thrilling human sound I have ever known. She knew and saw me, but not as “Uncle” George of this present life.
“Oh, Philip!” she cried, “then you have come after all⁠—”
“Of course, dear heart,” I whispered. “Of course I have come. Did I not give my promise that I would?”
Her eyes searched my face, and then settled upon my hands that held her little cold wrists so tightly.
“But⁠—but,” she stammered in comment, “they are not cut! They have made you whole again! You will save me and get me out, and we⁠—we⁠—”
The expressions of her face ran together into a queer confusion of perplexity, and she seemed to totter on her feet. In another instant she would probably have wakened; again she felt the touch of uncertainty and doubt as to my identity. Her hands resisted the pressure of my own; she drew back half a step; into her eyes rose the shallower consciousness of the present. Once awake it would drive out the profoundly strange passion and mystery that haunted the corridors of thought and memory and plunged so obscurely into the inmost recesses of her being. For, once awake, I realized that I should lose her, lose the opportunity of getting the complete story. The chance was unique. I heard my cousin’s footsteps approaching behind us down the passage on tiptoe⁠—and I came to an immediate decision.
In the state of deep sleep, of course, the trance condition is very close, and many experiments had taught me that the human spirit can be subjected to the influence of hypnotism far more speedily when asleep than when a wake; for if hypnotism means chiefly⁠—as I then held it to mean⁠—the merging of the little ineffectual surface-consciousness with the deep sea of the greater subliminal consciousness below, then the process has already been partially begun in normal slumber and its completion need be no very long or difficult matter. It was Aileen’s very active subconsciousness that “invented” or “remembered” the dark story which haunted her life, her subconscious region too readily within tap.⁠ ⁠… By deepening her sleep state I could learn the whole story.
Stopping her mother’s approach with a sign that I intended she should clearly understand, and which accordingly she did understand, I took immediate steps to plunge the spirit of this little sleepwalking child down again into the subconscious region that had driven her thus far, and wherein lay the potentialities of all her powers, of memory, knowledge and belief. Only the simplest passes were necessary, for she yielded quickly and easily; that first look came back into her eyes; she no longer wavered or hesitated, but drew close against me, with the name of “Philip” upon her lips, and together we moved down the long passage till we reached the door of her horrid room of terror.
And there, whether it was that Theresa’s following with the candle disturbed the child⁠—for the subconscious tie with the mother is of such unalterable power⁠—or whether anxiety weakened my authority over her fluctuating mental state, I noticed that she again wavered and hesitated, looking up with eyes that saw partly “Uncle George,” partly the “Philip” she remembered.
“We’ll go in,” I said firmly, “and you shall see that there is nothing to be afraid of.” I opened the door, and the candle from behind threw a triangle of light into the darkness. It fell upon a bare floor, pictureless walls, and just tipped the high white ceiling overhead. I pushed the door still wider open and we went in hand in hand, Aileen shaking like a leaf in the wind.
How the scene lives in my mind, even as I write it today so many years after it took place: the little child in her nightgown facing me in that empty room of the ancient building, all the passionate emotions of a tragic history in the small young eyes, her mother like a ghost in the passage, afraid to come in, the tossing shadows thrown by the candle and the soft moan of the night wind against the outside walls.
I made further passes over the small flushed face and pressed my thumbs gently along the temples. “Sleep!” I commanded; “sleep⁠—and remember!” My will poured over her being to control and protect. She passed still deeper into the trance condition in which the somnambulistic lucidity manifests itself and the deeper self gives up its dead. Her eyes grew wider, rounder, charged with memories as they fastened themselves upon my own. The present, which a few minutes before had threatened to claim her consciousness by waking her, faded. She saw me no longer as her familiar Uncle George, but as the faithful friend and lover of her great story, Philip, the man who had come to save her. There she stood in the atmosphere of bygone days, in the very room where she had known great suffering⁠—this room that three centuries ago had led by a corridor into the wing of the house where now the beeches grew upon the lawns.
She came up close and put her thin bare arms about my neck and stared with peering, searching eyes into mine.
“Remember what happened here,” I said resolutely. “Remember, and tell me.”
Her brows contracted slightly as with the effort, and she whispered, glancing over her shoulder towards the farther end where the corridor once began, “It hurts a little, but I⁠—I’m in your arms, Philip dear, and you will get me out, I know⁠—”
“I hold you safe and you are in no danger, little one,” I answered. “You can remember and speak without it hurting you. Tell me.”
The suggestion, of course, operated instantly, for her face cleared, and she dropped a great sigh of relief. From time to time I continued the passes that held the trance condition firm.
Then she spoke in a low, silvery little tone that cut into me like a sword and searched my inmost parts. I seemed to bleed internally. I could have sworn that she spoke of things I knew as though I had lived through them.
“This was when I last saw you,” she said, “this was the room where you were to fetch me and carry me away into happiness and safety from⁠—him,” and it was the voice and words of no mere child that said it; “and this was where you did come on that night of snow and wind. Through that window you entered;” she pointed to the deep, embrasured window behind us. “Can’t you hear the storm? How it howls and screams! And the boom of the surf on the beach below.⁠ ⁠… You left the horses outside, the swift horses that were to carry us to the sea and away from all his cruelties, and then⁠—”
She hesitated and searched for words or memories; her face darkened with pain and loathing.
“Tell me the rest,” I ordered, “but forget all your own pain.” And she smiled up at me with an expression of unbelievable tenderness and confidence while I drew the frail form closer.
“You remember, Philip,” she went on, “you know just what it was, and how he and his men seized you the moment you stepped inside, and how you struggled and called for me, and heard me answer⁠—”
“Far away⁠—outside⁠—” I interrupted quickly, helping her out of some flashing memory in my own deep heart that seemed to burn and leave a scar. “You answered from the lawn!”
“You thought it was the lawn, but really, you see, it was there⁠—in there,” and she point ed to the side of the room on my right. She shook dreadfully, and her voice dwindled most oddly in volume, as though coming from a distance⁠—almost muffled.
“In there?” I asked it with a shudder that put ice and fire mingled in my blood.
“In the wall,” she whispered. “You see, someone had betrayed us, and he knew you were coming. He walled me up alive in there, and only left two little holes for my eyes so that I could see. You heard my voice calling through those holes, but you never knew where I was. And then⁠—”
Her knees gave way, and I had to hold her. She looked suddenly with torture in her eyes down the length of the room⁠—towards the old wing of the house.
“You won’t let him come,” she pleaded beseechingly, and in her voice was the agony of death. “I thought I heard him. Isn’t that his footsteps in the corridor?” She listened fearfully, her eyes trying to pierce the wall and see out on to the lawn.
“No one is coming, dear heart,” I said, with conviction and authority. “Tell it all. Tell me everything.”
“I saw the whole of it because I could not close my eyes,” she continued. “There was an iron band round my waist fastening me in⁠—an iron belt I never could escape from. The dust got into my mouth⁠—I bit the bricks. My tongue was scraped and bleeding, but before they put in the last stones to smother me I saw them⁠—cut both your hands off so that you could never save me⁠—never let me out.”
She dashed without warning from my side and flew up to the wall, beating it with her hands and crying aloud⁠—
“Oh, you poor, poor thing. I know how awful it was. I remember⁠—when I was in you and you wore and carried me, poor, poor body! That thunder of the last brick as they drove it in against the mouth, and the iron clamp that cut into the waist, and the suffocation and hunger and thirst!”
“What are you talking to in there?” I asked sternly, crushing down the tears.
“The body I was in⁠—the one he walled up⁠—my body⁠—my own body!”
She flew back to my side. But even before my cousin had uttered that “mother-cry” that broke in upon the child’s deeper consciousness, disturbing the memories, I had given the command with all the force of my being to “forget” the pain. And only those few who are familiar with the instantaneous changes of emotion that can be produced by suggestion under hypnosis will understand that Aileen came back to me from that moment of “talking to the wall” with laughter on her lips and in her eyes.
The small white figure with the cascade of dark hair tumbling over the nightgown ran up and jumped into my arms.
“But I saved you,” I cried, “you were never properly walled-up; I got you out and took you away from him over the sea, and we were happy ever afterwards, like the people in the fairy tales.” I drove the words into her with my utmost force, and inevitably she accepted them as the truth, for she clung to me with love and laughter all over her child’s face of mystery, the horror fading out, the pain swept clean away. With kaleidoscopic suddenness the change came.
“So they never really cut your poor dead hands off at all,” she said hesitatingly.
“Look! How could they? There they are!” And I first showed them to her and then pressed them against her little cheeks, drawing her mouth up to be kissed. “They’re big enough still and strong enough to carry you off to bed and stroke you into so deep a sleep that when you wake in the morning you will have forgotten everything about your dark story, about Philip, Lady Helen, the iron belt, the starvation, your cruel old husband, and all the rest of it. You’ll wake up happy and jolly just like any other child⁠—”
“If you say so, of course I shall,” she answered, smiling into my eyes.
And it was just then there came in that touch of abomination that so nearly made my experiment a failure, for it came with a black force that threatened at first to discount all my “suggestion” and make it of no account. My new command that she should forget had apparently not yet fully registered itself in her being; the tract of deeper consciousness that constructed the “Story” had not sunk quite below the threshold. Thus she was still open to any detail of her former suffering that might obtrude itself with sufficient force. And such a detail did obtrude itself. This touch of abomination was calculated with a really superhuman ingenuity.
“Hark!” she cried⁠—and it was that scream in a whisper that only utter terror can produce⁠—“Hark! I hear his steps! He’s coming! Oh, I told you he was coming! He’s in that passage!” pointing down the room. And she first sprang from my arms as though something burned her, and then almost instantly again flew back to my protection. In that interval of a few seconds she tore into the middle of the room, put her hand to her ear to listen, and then shaded her eyes in the act of peering down through the wall at the far end. She stared at the very place where in olden days the corridor had led into the vanished wing. The window my great-uncle had built into the wall now occupied the exact spot where the opening had been.
Theresa then for the first time came forward with a rush into the room, dropping the candle-grease over the floor. She clutched me by the arm. The three of us stood there⁠—listening⁠—listening apparently to nought but the sighing of the sea-wind about the walls, Aileen with her eyes buried in my coat. I was standing erect trying in vain to catch the new sound. I remember my cousin’s face of chalk with the fluttering eyes and the candle held aslant.
Then suddenly she raised her hand and pointed over my shoulder. I thought her jaw would drop from her face. And she and the child both spoke in the same breath the two sharp phrases that brought the climax of the vile adventure upon us in that silent room of night.
They were like two pistol-shots.
“My God! There’s a face watching us⁠ ⁠… !” I heard her voice, all choked and dry.
And at the same second, Aileen⁠—
“Oh, oh! He’s seen us!⁠ ⁠… He’s here! Look.⁠ ⁠… He’ll get me⁠ ⁠… hide your hands, hide your poor hands!”
And, turning to the place my cousin stared at, I saw sure enough that a face⁠—apparently a living human face⁠—was pressed against the windowpane, framed between two hands as it tried to peer upon us into the semi-obscurity of the room. I saw the swift momentary rolling of the two eyes as the candle glare fell upon them, and caught a glimpse even of the hunched-up shoulders behind, as their owner, standing outside upon the lawn, stooped down a little to see better. And though the apparition instantly withdrew, I recognized it beyond question as the dark and evil countenance of the butler. His breath still stained the window.
Yet the strange thing was that Aileen, struggling violently to bury herself amid the scanty folds of my coat, could not possibly have seen what we saw, for her face was turned from the window the entire time, and from the way I held her she could never for a single instant have been in a position to know. It all took place behind her back.⁠ ⁠… A moment later, with her eyes still hidden against me, I was carrying her swiftly in my arms across the hall and up the main staircase to the night nursery.
My difficulty with her was, of course, while she hovered between the two states of sleep and waking, for once I got her into bed and plunged her deeply again into the trance condition, I was easily able to control her slightest thought or emotion. Within ten minutes she was sleeping peacefully, her little face smoothed of all anxiety or terror, and my imperious command ringing from end to end of her consciousness that when she woke next morning all should be forgotten. She was finally to forget⁠ ⁠… utterly and completely.
And, meanwhile, of course, the man, when I went with loathing and anger in my heart to his room in the servants’ quarters, had a perfectly plausible explanation. He was in the act of getting ready for bed, he declared, when the noise had aroused his suspicions, and, as in duty bound, he had made a tour of the house outside, thinking to discover burglars.⁠ ⁠…
With a month’s wages in his pocket, and a considerable degree of wonder in his soul, probably⁠—for the man was guilty of nothing worse than innocently terrifying a child’s imagination!⁠—he went back to London the following day; and a few hours later I myself was travelling with Aileen and old Kempster over the blue waves of the North Sea, carrying her off, curiously enough, to freedom and happiness in the very way her “imagination” had pictured her escape in the “story” of long ago, when she was Lady Helen, held in bondage by a cruel husband, and I was Philip, her devoted lover.
Only this time her happiness was lasting and complete. Hypnotic suggestion had wiped from her mind the last vestige of her dreadful memories; her face was wreathed in jolly smiles; her enjoyment of the journey and our week in Antwerp was absolutely unclouded; she played and laughed with all the radiance of an unhaunted childhood, and her imagination was purged and healed.
And when we got back her mother had again moved her household gods to the original family mansion where she had first lived. Thither it was I took the restored child, and there it was my cousin and I looked up the old family records and verified certain details of the history of De Lorne, that wicked and semi-fabulous ancestor whose portrait hung in the dark corner of the stairs. That his life was evil to the brim I had always understood, but neither myself nor Theresa had known⁠—at least had not consciously remembered⁠—that he had married twice, and that his first wife, Lady Helen, had mysteriously disappeared, and Sir Philip Lansing, a neighbouring knight, supposed to be her lover, had soon afterwards emigrated to France and left his lands and property to go to ruin.
But another discovery I made, and kept to myself, had to do with that “room of terror” in the old Norfolk house where, on the plea of necessary renovation, I had the stones removed, and in the very spot where Aileen used to beat her hands against the bricks and “talk to the wall,” the workmen under my own eyes laid bare the skeleton of a woman, fastened to the granite by means of a narrow iron band that encircled the waist⁠—the skeleton of some unfortunate who had been walled-up alive and had come to her dreadful death by the pangs of hunger, thirst and suffocation centuries ago.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1951, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 72 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
Public domainPublic domainfalsefalse