The Case of Charles Dexter Ward | Page 5

look he would grow almost dizzy with a poet's love for the sight, and then he would scale
the slope homeward in the dusk past the old white church and up the narrow precipitous
ways where yellow gleams would begin to peep out in small-paned windows and through
fanlights set high over double flights of steps with curious wrought-iron railings.
At other times, and in later years, he would seek for vivid contrasts; spending half a walk
in the crumbling colonial regions northwest of his home, where the hill drops to the lower
eminence of Stampers' Hill with its ghetto and negro quarter clustering round the place
where the Boston stage coach used to start before the Revolution, and the other half in the
gracious southerly realm about George, Benevolent, Power, and Williams Streets, where
the old slope holds unchanged the fine estates and bits of walled garden and steep green
lane in which so many fragrant memories linger. These rambles, together with the
diligent studies which accompanied them, certainly account for a large amount of the
antiquarian lore which at last crowded the modern world from Charles Ward's mind; and
illustrate the mental soil upon which fell, in that fateful winter of 1919-20, the seeds that
came to such strange and terrible fruition.
Dr. Willett is certain that, up to this ill-omened winter of first change, Charles Ward's
antiquarianism was free from every trace of the morbid. Graveyards held for him no
particular attraction beyond their quaintness and historic value, and of anything like
violence or savage instinct he was utterly devoid. Then, by insidious degrees, there
appeared to develop a curious sequel to one of his genealogical triumphs of the year
before; when he had discovered among his maternal ancestors a certain very long-lived
man named Joseph Curwen, who had come from Salem in March of 1692, and about
whom a whispered series of highly peculiar and disquieting stories clustered.

Ward's great-great-grandfather Welcome Potter had in 1785 married a certain 'Ann
Tillinghast, daughter of Mrs. Eliza, daughter to Capt. James Tillinghast,' of whose
paternity the family had preserved no trace. Late in 1918, whilst examining a volume of
original town records in manuscript, the young genealogist encountered an entry
describing a legal change of name, by which in 1772 a Mrs. Eliza Curwen, widow of
Joseph Curwen, resumed, along with her seven-year-old daughter Ann, her maiden name
of Tillinghast; on the ground 'that her Husband's name was become a public Reproach by
Reason of what was knowne after his Decease; the which confirming an antient common
Rumour, tho' not to be credited by a loyall Wife till so proven as to be wholely past
Doubting.'
This entry came to light upon the accidental separation of two leaves which had been
carefully pasted together and treated as one by a laboured revision of the page numbers.
It was at once clear to Charles Ward that he had indeed discovered a hitherto unknown
great-great-great-grandfather. The discovery doubly excited him because he had already
heard vague reports and seen scattered allusions relating to this person; about whom there
remained so few publicly available records, aside from those becoming public only in
modern times, that it almost seemed as if a conspiracy had existed to blot him from
memory. What did appear, moreover, was of such a singular and provocative nature that
one could not fail to imagine curiously what it was that the colonial recorders were so
anxious to conceal and forget; or to suspect that the deletion had reasons all too valid.
Before this, Ward had been content to let his romancing about old Joseph Curwen remain
in the idle stage; but having discovered his own relationship to this apparently
"hushed-up" character, he proceeded to hunt out as systematically as possible whatever
he might find concerning him. In this excited quest he eventually succeeded beyond his
highest expectations; for old letters, diaries, and sheaves of unpublished memoirs in
cobwebbed Providence garrets and elsewhere yielded many illuminating passages which
their writers had not thought it worth their while to destroy. One important sidelight came
from a point as remote as New York, where some Rhode Island colonial correspondence
was stored in the Museum at Fraunces' Tavern. The really crucial thing, though, and what
in Dr, Willett's opinion formed the definite source of Ward's undoing, was the matter
found in August 1919 behind the panelling of the crumbling house in Olney Court. It was
that, beyond a doubt, which opened up those black vistas whose end was deeper than the
pit.
II. An Antecedent and a Horror
1
Joseph Curwen, as revealed by the rambling legends embodied in what Ward heard and
unearthed, was a very astonishing, enigmatic, and obscurely horrible individual. He had
fled from Salem to Providence - that universal haven