The House of the Whispering Pines | Page 4

upon what? My lips
refused to ask, my limbs refused to move, and if I breathed at all, I did
so with such fierceness of restraint that her eyes never turned my way,
not even when she had reached the lowest step and paused for a
moment there, oscillating in pain or uncertainty. Her face was turned
more fully towards me now, and I had just begun to discern something
in it besides its tragic beauty, when she made a quick move and blew
out the candle she held. One moment that magical picture of
superhuman loveliness, then darkness, I might say silence, for I do not
think either of us so much as stirred for several instants. Then there
came a crash, followed by the sound of flying feet. She had flung the
candlestick out of her hand and was hurriedly crossing the hail. I
thought she was coming my way, and instinctively drew back against
the wall. But she stopped far short of me, and I heard her groping about,
then give a sudden spring towards the front door. It opened and the
wind soughed in. I felt the chill of snow upon my face, and realised the
tempest. Then all was quiet and dark again. She had slid quickly out
and the door had swung to behind her. Another instant and I heard the
click of the key as it turned in the lock, heard it and made no outcry,
such the spell, such the bewilderment of my faculties! But once the act
was accomplished and egress made difficult, nay, for the moment,
impossible, I felt all lesser emotions give way to an anxiety which
demanded immediate action, for the girl had gone out without wraps or
covering for her head, and my experience of the evening had told me
how cold it was. I must follow and find her and rescue her if possible
from the snow. The distance was long to town, the cold would seize
and perhaps prostrate her, after which, the wind and snow would do the
rest.
Throwing myself against the door, I shook it violently. It was
immovable. Then I flew to the windows. Their fastenings yielded
readily enough, but not the windows themselves; one had a broken cord,
another seemed glued to its frame, and I was still struggling with the

latter when I heard a sound which lifted the hair on my head and turned
my whole attention back to what lay behind and above me. There was
still some one in the house. I had forgotten everything in this apparition
of the woman I have described in a place so disassociated with any
conception I could possibly have of her whereabouts on this especial
evening. But this noise, short, sharp, but too distant to be altogether
recognisable, roused doubts which once awakened changed the whole
tenor of my thoughts and would not let me rest till I had probed the
house from top to bottom. To find Carmel Cumberland alone in this
desolation was a mystifying discovery to which I had found it hard
enough to reconcile myself. But Carmel here in company with another
at the very moment when I had expected the fruition of my own
joy,--ah, that was to open hell's door in my breast; a possibility too
intolerable to remain unsettled for an instant. Though she had passed
out before my eyes in a drooping, almost agonised condition, not she,
dear as she was, and great as were my fears in her regard, was to be
sought out first, but the man! The man who was back of all this,
possibly back of my disappointment; the man whose work I may have
witnessed, but at whose identity I could not even guess.
Leaving the window, I groped my way along the wall until I reached
the rack where the man's coat and hat hung. Whether it was my
intention to carry them away and hide them, in my anxiety to secure
this intruder and hold him to a bitter account for the misery he was
causing me, or whether I only meant to satisfy myself that they were
the habiliments of a stranger and not those of some sneaking member
of the club, is of little importance in the light of the fact which
presently burst upon me. The hat and coat were gone. Nothing hung
from the rack. The wall was free from end to end. She had taken these
articles of male apparel with her; she had not gone forth into the
driving snow, unprotected, but--
I did not know what to think. No acquaintanceship with her girlish
impulses, nothing that had occurred between us before or during this
night, had prepared me for a freak of this nature. I felt backward along