The House of the Whispering Pines | Page 3

I should come to the kitchen door.
I began to move that way, and presently came creeping back, with a
match-box half full of matches in my hand. But I did not strike one
then. I had just made a move to do so, when the unmistakable sound of
a door opening somewhere in the house made me draw back into as
quiet and dark a place as I could find. This lay in the rear and at the
right of the staircase, and as the sound had appeared to come from
above, it was the most natural retreat that offered. And a good one I
found it.
I had hardly taken up my stand when the darkness above gave way to a
faint glimmer, and a step became audible coming from some one of the
many small rooms in the second story, but so slowly and with such
evident hesitation that my imagination had ample time to work and fill
my mind with varying anticipations, each more disconcerting than the
last. Now I seemed to be listening to the movements of an intoxicated
man seeking an issue out of strange quarters, then to the wary approach
of one who had his own reasons for dread and was as conscious of my
presence as I was of his.
But the light, steadily increasing with each lagging but surely
advancing step, soon gave the lie to this latter supposition, since no
sane man, afraid of an ambush, would be likely to offer such odds to
the one lying in wait for him, as his own face illumined by a flaming
candle, and I was yielding to the bewilderment of the moment when the
uncertain step paused and a sob came faintly to my ears, wrung from
lips so stiff with human anguish that my fears took on new shape and
the event a significance which in my present mood of personal

suffering and preoccupation was anything but welcome. Indeed, I was
coward enough to contemplate flight and might in another moment
have yielded to the unworthy impulse if the sound of a second sigh had
not struck shudderingly on my ear, followed by the renewal of the step
and the almost immediate appearance on the stairs of a young girl
holding a candle in one hand and shielding her left cheek with the
other.
Life offers few such shocks to any man, whatever his story or whatever
his temperament. I had been prepared by the sob I had heard to see a
woman, but not this woman. Nothing could have prepared me for an
encounter with this woman anywhere that night, after what had passed
between us and the wreck she had made of my life. But here! in a place
so remote and desolate I had hesitated to enter it myself! What was I to
think? How was I to reconcile so inconceivable a fact with what I knew
of her in the past, with what I hoped from her in the future.
To steady my thoughts and bring my whirling brain again under control,
I fixed my eyes on her well-known form and features as upon a
stranger's whom I would understand and judge. I have called her a
woman and certainly I had loved her as such, but as, in this moment of
strange detachment, I watched her descend, swaying foot following
swaying foot falteringly down the stairs, I was able to see that only the
emotions which denaturalised her expression were a woman's; that her
features, her pose, and the peculiar childlike contour of the one cheek
open to view were those of one whose yesterday was in the playroom.
But beautiful! You do not often see such beauty. Under all the
disfigurement of an agitation so great as to daunt me and make me
question if I were its sole cause, her face shone with an individual
charm which marked her out as one of the few who are the making or
marring of men, sometimes of nations. This is the heritage she was
born to, this her lot, not to be shirked, not to be evaded even now at her
early age of seventeen. So much any one could see even in a
momentary scrutiny of her face and figure. But what was not so clear,
not even to myself with the consciousness of what had passed between
us during the last few hours, was why her heart should have so outrun

her years, and the emotion I beheld betray such shuddering depths.
Some grisly fear, some staring horror had met her in this strange retreat.
Simple grief speaks with a different language from that which I read in
her distorted features and tottering, slowly creeping form. What had
happened above? She had escaped me to run