Shunned House | Page 4

the following June. Eli Lideason, the other servant, constantly
complained of weakness; and would have returned to his father's farm
in Rehoboth but for a sudden attachment for Mehitabel Pierce, who was
hired to succeed Hannah. He died the next year--a sad year in deed,
since it marked the death of William Harris himself, enfeebled as he
was by the climate of Martinique, where his occupation had kept him
for considerable periods during the preceding decade.
The widowed Rhoby Harris never recovered from the shock of her
husband's death, and the passing of her firstborn Elkanah two years
later was the final blow to her reason. In 1768 she fell victim to a mild
form of insanity, and was thereafter confined to the upper part of the
house, her elder maiden sister, Mercy Dexter, having moved in to take
charge of the family. Mercy was a plain, raw-boned woman of great
strength, but her health visibly declined from the time of her advent.
She was greatly devoted to her unfortunate sister, and had an especial
affection for her only surviving nephew William, who from a sturdy
infant had become a sickly, spindling lad. In this year the servant
Mehitabel died, and the other servant, Pre served Smith, left without
coherent explanation--or at least, with only some wild tales and a

complaint that he disliked the smell of the place. For a time Mercy
could secure no more help, since the seven deaths and case of madness,
all occurring within five years' space, had begun to set in motion the
body of fireside rumour which later became so bizarre. Ultimately,
however, she obtained new servants from out of town; Ann White, a
morose woman from that part of North Kingstown now set off as the
township of Exeter, and a capable Boston man named Zenas Low.
It was Ann White who first gave definite shape to the sinister idle talk.
Mercy should have known better than to hire anyone from the
Nooseneck Hill country, for that remote bit of backwoods was then, as
now, a seat of the most uncomfortable superstitions. As lately as 1892
an Exeter community exhumed a dead body and ceremoniously burnt
its heart in order to prevent certain alleged visitations injurious to the
public health and peace, and one may imagine the point of view of the
same section in 1768. Ann's tongue was perniciously active, and within
a few months Mercy discharged her, filling her place with a faithful and
amiable Amazon from Newport, Maria Robbins.
Meanwhile poor Rhoby Harris, in her madness, gave voice to dreams
and imaginings of the most hideous sort. At times her screams became
insupportable, and for long periods she would utter shrieking horrors
which necessitated her son's temporary residence with his cousin, Peleg
Harris, in Presbyterian Lane near the new college building. The boy
would seem to improve after these visits, and had Mercy been as wise
as she was well-meaning, she would have let him live permanently with
Peleg. Just what Mrs. Harris cried out in her fits of violence, tradition
hesitates to say; or rather, presents such extravagant accounts that they
nullify themselves through sheer absurdity. Certainly it sounds absurd
to hear that a woman educated only in the rudiments of French often
shouted for hours in a coarse and idiomatic form of that language, or
that the same per son, alone and guarded, complained wildly of a
staring thing which bit and chewed at her. In 1772 the servant Zenas
died, and when Mrs. Harris heard of it she laughed with a shocking
delight utterly foreign to her. The next year she herself died, and was
laid to rest in the North Burial Ground beside her husband.

Upon the outbreak of trouble with Great Britain in 1775, William
Harris, despite his scant sixteen years and feeble constitution, man aged
to enlist in the Army of Observation under General Greene; and from
that time on enjoyed a steady rise in health and prestige.
In 1780, as a Captain in Rhode Island forces in New Jersey under
Colonel Angell, he met and married Phebe Hetfield of Elizabethtown,
whom he brought to Providence upon his honourable discharge in the
following year.
The young soldier's return was not a thing of unmitigated happiness.
The house, it is true, was still in good condition; and the street had been
widened and changed in name from Back Street to Benefit Street. But
Mercy Dexter's once robust frame had undergone a sag and curious
decay, so that she was now a stooped and pathetic figure with hollow
voice and disconcerting pallor--qualities shared to a singular degree by
the one remaining servant Maria. In the autumn of 1782 Phebe Harris
gave birth to a still-born daughter, and on the fifteenth of the next May
Mercy Dexter took