XIX
Since my last letter, we have passed through such a terrible experience that I scarcely know how to describe it. I shudder as I write. Think of it!—in this quiet out-of-the-way place, where we felt so safe, so secure! Though this awful tragedy occurred three nights ago, my nerves are still quivering. I feel so weak and unstrung that I fear I cannot write calmly or coherently about it.
The wretched affair happened in the ball-room,—most incongruous of places! We find that entrance to the room was effected by way of the roof, which the intruder must have reached by climbing a large alder tree standing near the corner of the house. We now believe him to have been secreted there when we went to our beds. My blood runs cold when I think of it— But it dawns upon me that I am not telling this story in the right way. How do the reporters manage these things? I believe the tragedy should have come later,—that I should have led up to it more gradually, describing the events preceding it, the scene of the conflict, with a diagram of the room showing the position of each piece of furniture, the hole in the roof, and all that sort of thing. Now I’ll have to begin again, I fear, and do it all over.
Soon after coming here, believing that our dancing days were over, we decided to reform the ball-room by making a bedroom of it. By doing this we could reserve the only one below for a possible guest, and could ourselves have the pleasure of sleeping upstairs, where we could hear the rain falling upon the roof. “Much too good a thing to miss,” Tom said, “in this land where the rain it raineth every day—and night, too—for six months at a stretch!”
How to get our furniture up that narrow perpendicular stairway was a problem. Fortunately, it was still crated, just as it had come from the far East. Bert and Mary volunteered their assistance; and finally, through much pushing, shoving, groaning, and some maledictions, the deed was done. Our ball-room was transformed. Then Thomas had some dark hours there, removing tacks, nails, screws, boards, drugget, and excelsior, and putting the various pieces together, after which Katharine—she who has lived to tell the tale—brought her mighty talents to bear upon the situation, toiling for days trying to bring order out of chaos.
I once gave you a description of the ball-room, but perhaps you have forgotten it. The room is twenty feet wide and about a quarter of a mile long; side walls, rough, unplaned boards running up and down; no ceiling overhead, just the rafters and shingles,—its spaciousness and beautiful smooth floor its only redeeming features. With two full chamber-sets, and some extra furniture for which there was no room below, there was still left a vacant space of sufficient size for a couple of cotillions.
At one end of the apartment was a platform about a foot high for the use of the musicians in “the brave days of old.” Upon this dais, feeling like one of royal birth, I placed my bedstead. Tom, upon beholding it, immediately dubbed my part of the room “Mrs. Boffin’s Bower.”
Suspecting spiders in the roof, we tacked large sheets to the rafters above each bed,—canopies that added to the general effect; the one above the dais looked so grand that I felt a sort of awe of it myself. As a finishing touch, a few rugs were scattered over the floor. The decorative artist, turning to leave, paused in the doorway for a critical examination of the “altogether,” and was forced to the conclusion that a bedroom in a barn would have been quite as attractive.
Up to this time it had been raining steadily, though gently, for days; but the morning my great work was completed it began pouring in torrents, growing worse toward evening, with a strong wind blowing straight from the ocean, something very unusual here.
When Tom had finished his evening work and was standing on the porch, shaking the rain from his storm-coat, he called out, “A fine night for the Abbey, Katharine!”
“Yes, won’t it be glorious?” I responded with enthusiasm. We were in high glee,—couldn’t wait for our regular bedtime, but put our books aside early, covered the embers in the old stone fireplace, lighted a hand-lamp, and were ready for the ascension soon after eight o’clock.
Do you remember my telling you that one of the chief architectural oddities of this place was the lack of an entrance to the second floor from the inside of the house,—the only door to the stairway being an outside one at the end of a long narrow porch? Tom, in advance of me, lamp in hand, opened the door of the dining-room, gave a whistle of surprise, and began to sing,—
“Come ferry me o’er, come ferry me o’er,
Over the river to Charlie.”
“What’s the matter, Tom?”
“Look and see!”
I looked, and beheld the darkness of a tomb. There was a torrent of rain and wind rushing through the wet fir trees, driving the flame of the lamp out of the chimney, smoking it black; the floor of the porch was all bumps and hollows,—mostly hollows, each filled with water, gleaming in the lamplight.
“It’s hideous, Tom; we can’t make it!”
“We’ve got to make it! Faint heart ne’er won the second floor of anything. I’ll hold my hat over the light, you lock the door, then we’ll dash for our lives!”
It was no dash, I can tell you. We went tiptoeing and teetering across the sloppy links like a couple of prize cakewalkers. When at last the goal was reached, we looked at each other in speechless amazement. Such an uproar was never heard outside of bedlam. Accustomed to a plastered ceiling, with a garret above, this pounding of the rain upon a roof directly over our heads was positively deafening. It was not at all like rain,—more like a downpour of rattling bullets or cobblestones. Through the open windows came the tumult from outside. Deer Leap, out of its banks, was roaring like Niagara; the wind was writhing and swishing through the fir boughs; the spring at the kitchen was a mighty cataract, throwing a big stream of water halfway across the porch.
Avoiding the eye of my fellow-sufferer, I remarked indifferently, “Sort of boisterous, isn’t it?”
“It does seem a little so,—just at first.”
“Yes, I meant just at first.”
Truly, we could scarcely hear each other’s voices. After the lights were out, the turmoil and bluster were even more terrifying. The dampness of the room was something awful. After a while Tom shouted through the darkness, “Isn’t it sweet, this gentle patter of the rain upon the roof?”
“Fine!” I shrieked; “so soothing,—like a lullaby!”
“Oh, yes! And this Cataract of Lodore, too, just under a fellow’s head, is a mighty nice thing! To-morrow let’s make us some megaphones.”
As there was no hope of sleep, I fell a-thinking of the palmy days of this ball-room, when, as we are told, the devotees of the dance came from twenty miles around to tread a gay measure here. I thought of the nail-keg we found upon the dais, which had probably been used as a seat by one of the musicians, as an empty violin case was leaning against it.
It seemed a most fitting time for ghosts to walk. What if that long-ago violinist should come back to night, and, perching himself on the chair that had ousted his keg, suddenly begin “to plonk and plunk and plink, and to rosin up his bow,” and should start up all the phantom belles and beaux of the shadowy past, and I should hear slippered and pumped feet sliding up and down the long room,—should catch the scent of bergamot and patchouli and other old-time flavors?
Just here I heard above the roar of the tempest: “Honors to your partners! Join hands and circle to the left! Balance all! Swing on the corners!”
“Goodness, Tom! are you crazy?”
“No, ma’am; it’s just water on the brain, I think. But didn’t you hear him,—that old fiddler at the head of your bed, jerking off ‘Old Dan Tucker,’ and all the fellows skating across the room to secure their partners? Just to be friendly, I thought I’d call off for the spooks.”
After a time the deluge ceased, and then the ball-room became an ideal place for sleep. It was delightful to lie there, listening to softly falling rain, night winds soughing through the forest, owls hooting in the orchard,—nature music as deliciously lulling to the senses as the “drowsy wine of poppies.”
But the midnight adventure can no longer be postponed.
During the night I woke suddenly without any apparent cause, but with the sure consciousness of something being wrong, soon verified by the strangest of sounds, as if tiny soft hands were very gently patting time for unseen dancers,—an awfully creepy sound in the dark. A little later came stealthy footsteps, nearer and nearer, seeming to approach the dais. Soon there was a rustling among some clothes hanging on the wall, quite near, as if they were being fumbled over. Flesh and blood could endure no more.
“Tom! Tom! There’s somebody in this room! Get a light, quick!”
“How foolish you are, Katharine! If you hear anything at all,—which I doubt,—it’s only the squirrels running over the roof.”
“Don’t stop now to talk! Do hurry with the light!”
Reluctantly and with great deliberation he arose, muttering something about “idiocy” and “spells,” and just as he struck a match, a horrible hairy creature bounded out of those clothes, leaped to the wall, and ran along a rafter to the comb of the roof.
“For heaven’s sake, what was it, Tom?”
I secretly believed it to be a wildcat; it was such a monster, with the face of a fiend, eyes of fire, and waving the big bushy tail of a squirrel.
“I’d shoot him,” Tom said, rather indifferently, “but my shotgun is in the barn, and just to-day I fired the last cartridge from my revolver.”
“Get my rifle,” I cried, swelling with pride. A friend visited us a year ago, a fine sportsman, who came with four guns, and when he left he gave me a lovely little rifle.
“Where is it?”
“Downstairs in the dining-room.”
“All right!” and off he started with the lamp.
“No, you don’t and leave me here in the dark with this hideous thing!”
“Such a coward!” but he gave up the lamp, and went blundering off in the darkness. After what seemed an age, he returned, remarking with some bravado, as he loaded up: “Now, my bold outlaw, your hour has come!”
I held the lamp; he fired. There was no effect whatever.
“I thought you said his hour had come!”
”It has, if he’ll stay there long enough and the ammunition holds out.”
Twice again he shot, and then the “thing” ran down a rafter and was hidden from us by the canopy above the dais.
At this the brave lady was encouraged to mount to the top of her bureau and try to locate him. With lamp in hand, she peered into the shadows.
“Wait! I’ll fix him!”
Going into the next room, Tom came back armed with one of the parts of the quilting-frame we found here when we came.
“Now then, just about where is he?”
“Close against the side wall.”
The quilting-frame cut a wide swath of air, and struck—solid wood. Running straight up the rafter just over my head came the “thing,”—a poor frightened rat!
“Now, Tom, you hold the light and I’ll show you some Buffalo Bill marksmanship.” Drawing my trusty rifle to my shoulder, I shut both eyes, and fired.
“That was a hot shot, Katharine!—he must have winked his other eye at that!” He snatched the smoking weapon from my hand and fired again. The rat humped his back, waved his tail lazily, and looked down upon us so dreamily that I really thought he would be asleep in another minute.
“I guess we’ll lay aside our firearms,” Tom said, “as we have already shot five holes through the roof. He is too much in the shadows; we can never hit him. I’ll see if I can’t punch him out of there with this.” Mounting my bed with that frame, he threw it like a harpoon; it went flying through the room, and down at my feet, with a dull, heavy thud, fell the rat. Suddenly he left the open, ran under the bed and up the wall just back of me. Tom struck at him, knocked a brass knob from the top of the bedstead, and the rat ran down the wall near the corner of the room.
“Pull the bed away, Katharine, and I’ll give him a side-wipe across the floor that’ll fetch him!”
I sent the bed spinning to the middle of the room, followed it up, and climbed to a chair. The “side-wipe” was made; it didn’t fetch him, but it did fetch down an easel and a picture.
“For pity’s sake, Tom, don’t break all the furniture in the house! Let’s go downstairs; don’t let’s kill him to-night!”
“A lot of killing you’re doing!” Tom persisted, prodding under the washstand.
“If you’re punching for that rat, he isn’t there, he’s under that couch.”
“Did you suppose I was down on all fours poking under that thing for fun? If you’d get off your perch and set that lamp down and come and pull this thing out, I’d get him here.”
“Honestly, Tom, I can’t. He might run across my feet.”
“Well, do you think I want to chase this rat all night?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Well, then—”
Here the creature under discussion, taking advantage of the family jar, dashed from his lair, ran across the room, hid behind a pile of magazines, and there met—death.
As the curtain fell upon the last act, the clock struck one. The pursuit began at twelve. It was an hour to be remembered.