A STRANGE STORY FROM THE COAST.Best horror stories for adults. Read online

The incident of which you have asked me to give you an account occurred six years ago, but  the  details are still fresh  in my  memory.  The  matter impressed me at the time with peculiar force. I am quite sure that I cannot convey any of this impression to you. I can only give you the facts, and very probably your shrewd common sense will readily  nd a rational explanation of them. I confess honestly, however, that I have never been able to account for them to myself on any ordinary basis of reasoning.

In February of  1873 her physician ordered C—— to  the  seashore. Our medical men were then just beginning to   nd out that the tonic of a bath of salt air for lungs and body, even in winter, was a surer restorer of exhausted vitality than the usual prescriptions of interminable quinine and beef-tea.

We went down together to an old farmhouse on the New Jersey coast in which we had spent a summer years before. The  farmer, who was also, according to a common custom there, captain of a coast-schooner, was trading in the South that winter, and had taken his wife with him. We rented the house, opened it, built up   res and began housekeeping in a couple of hours. The older part of the house, built long before the Revolution, consisted of log huts  joined  one  to  another,  through  whose  vacant  rooms  and    reless chimneys the wind from the sea whistled drearily, but the living-room and chamber which we occupied, with their double doors, red rag-carpets and hearths heaped with blazing logs from the wrecks which strewed the beach, were snug and comfortable enough. Outside, the solitude and silence, even at noonday, were so profound that it was incredible to us that we were but a day’s journey from New York. This was surely some forgotten outskirt of the world which we had   rst discovered. The windows on one side of the living- room opened on the vast sweep of water, swelling and sinking that day gray and sullen under the low wintry sky; and on the other upon a plane of sand as interminable, broken at  intervals by swamps overgrown  with  black bare laurel-bushes, by pine woods and by a few lonely  shermen’s houses, the surf- boats set up on end against them, rows of crab-cars and seine-reels fronting the lea ess orchards.

When C—— and I had visited this coast before it had borrowed a certain gayety and lightness from the summer. The marshes were rich in color; artists were camping under their yellow umbrellas here and there, catching brilliant e  ects of sky or water; sportsmen from New York in irreproachable shooting- rig were popping at the snipe among the reeds; the sea and bay were full of white scudding sails. But in winter it lapsed back to its primitive condition: the land seemed to answer the sea out of depths of immeasurable age and silence. The only sign of life was the trail of smoke upward to the clouds from some

distant cabin, or a ghostly sail  itting along the far horizon. The sand heaped itself day by day in fantastic unbroken ridges along the beach. The very fences and  houses had  grown  hoary  with  lichen and  gray moss that  shivered unwholesomely in the wind. Some of these old log houses had been built two centuries ago by Quaker refugees from England under the Proprietary Barclay. They built the houses and settled down in them, so far barred out of the world on this lonely coast that they did not know when their old persecutor Charles was dead. We were almost persuaded that they had forgotten to die themselves when we saw the old graycoated, slow-moving folk going in and out of these houses, with the same names as those of the men who built them, the same features and inexorable habits of hard work and prosy gossip, the same formal tricks of speech and strange superstitions. Indeed, these people usually live to an old age so extreme that it seems as if Death himself forgot this out-of-the-way corner of the world on his rounds. In many of the houses there had been but two generations since the days of the Stuarts, son and father living far beyond the ninetieth year.

A wiry, withered youth of seventy-six, Captain Jeremiah Holdcomb (who is still living, by the way), whom we met one day on the beach, constituted himself our guide and protector: he took us from farmhouse to farmhouse by day to make friends with the “old people,” always coming in at night to tell us the histories of them and of their houses, and to chuckle boyishly over the “onaccountable notions of them as was gettin’ on in years,” and to sip a glass of toddy, unctuously smacking his withered lips and wagging his white poll.

One day, as a storm was rising, C—— and I led the old man across the garden at an earlier hour than usual to set him safely on his way homeward. A raw nor’easter blew heavily o   sea that evening; the sun had not been seen for two  days; the  fog  was banked up  to  landward in solid wet  masses; the

landscape was walled in by it until nothing was left in view but our house and the rotted leaves of the garden-beds, half buried now in drifted sand.

“You have never told us the history of this house, captain?” said C——, looking back at the dilapidated log building behind us.

Holdcomb, as I thought, evaded the question at   rst. The house, he said when C—— urged it, had been built by a family named Whynne, and still belonged to them, the young man from whom we rented it being himself only a tenant. The Whynnes were of the oldest Quaker stock; the men had always followed the water; they “took to brandy,” Holdcomb said, “as a lamb to its dam’s milk. Men and women was oneasy, wanderin’ folk.” But they all came home to this house at the last, which was the reason, he supposed, they were so longlived. He referred here to a belief which we had found current among these people, that a man’s hold upon life was stronger in the house in which he was born than in any other.

“Because thar,” explained the captain, “is where the yerth   rst got a grip on him, and thar’s the last place it’ll be loosened. Now, the Whynnes all lived in this house  to  an  oncommon  old age. Thar  was a  kind of  backbone of obstinacy in them all. I reckon Death himself had to have a tough   ght with them before he got them under. Old Abner Whynne lived to be a hunderd and four. He died—let me see—he died just sixty year ago, come January. Priscilla was his youngest da’ater. She’s livin’ yet: she’s got no notion of dyin’. She’s the only Whynne, though, that is livin’.”

On further inquiry it appeared that this said Priscilla had married a Perot, and, being now a childless widow, occupied the Perot house, another decayed old habitation on the other side of the marshes, to the north.

“She was ninety-two last June,” said Holdcomb. “It’s thirty years since she has been able to hear thunder. But she keeps a-watchin’ and a-watchin’ out of them black eyes of hern. God knows what fur. But whenever I see her I says to

myself, ‘It’ll come to you some day, Priscilla,’ says I, whatever it be. She’s got an awful holt on livin’, that ther woman. All the Whynnes had, as I told you. She’s a mere shackle of bones, and as deaf as that dead sherk yander, but she’s got a kind of life in her yet, sech as these pink-an’-white mishy young gells never knowed. I’ll  take you to  see her to-morrow. If  she gets a sight of anybody that’s come from out of the towns and the crowd, it kind of gives her a fresh start. Yes, we’ll  go and see her to-morrow,”  climbing over the bars. “Well,  I’ll be goin’ now. That’s all ther is to tell about this house.”

“No, no,” said C——. “One moment, captain. Those queer squares of brick at the end of the garden, what are they?”

The old man shu   ed uneasily: “I don’t see no brick. I don’t know nothin about ’em.”

“Surely, you can see them—close to the house, almost covered with the sand. They look like the entrance to a vault—or they might be graves.”

By this time Holdcomb had succeeded in ridding his startled face of every glimmer of meaning, “Oh, them?” staring at them with unconcern. “They were ther long before I was born. I wouldn’t worry myself about them if I was you. They’ve somethin’ to do, ’s likely, with them old Whynnes that’s dead an’ gone.  I’d  let  ’em  rest.  Never dig deep into  a  rotten  ma’ash,  ’s  we  say hereabouts.”

With that old Jeremiah hobbled quickly away, and C—— and I returned to the house, pausing to look curiously at the sunken squares of brick over which the sand had drifted deep. I remember that C—— remarked irritably that it was evident that the old man knew for what purpose they had been built there, and chose to conceal it from us.

“There is something evil about them,” she added, declaring that whenever she passed them  she was conscious of  some sudden unpleasant physical in  uence, as though she had breathed miasma. Her illness had made her

peculiarly susceptible to  outside in  uences, real or  imaginary. I thought nothing more at the time, therefore, of her assertion, though later circumstances reminded me of it.

The next day we crossed the marshes under Jeremiah’s guidance, and found Priscilla in the old Perot house. This woman di ered from any other human being I had ever seen in some indescribable way. The peculiar e  ect of it upon me returns whenever I remember her: I would rather see a ghost than think of that nightmare of a woman.

Age had ravaged and gnawed her away mercilessly: nothing was left of her in the world but a little quick-moving shadow. The delicate features, the restless, birdlike hands, the shrunken outline of shape, made but a silhouette of the actual woman that she once had been. The brown   annel gown and crossed white handkerchief which she wore after the Quaker fashion seemed to me like a load hung upon a ghost. For the rest, she was vivacious, keen, hard; she talked incessantly in a shrill, vehement pipe; our answers necessarily were written  or  by signs. She  welcomed us  with  a  kind of    erce eagerness, examined the cut and material of our clothes, and questioned us about the city and the news of the day with the delight of a prisoner to whose dungeon had come a glimmer of light from the world outside. She chattered in return the gossip of the neighborhood—gossip which from her lips obscurely hinted at malignant and foul  meanings—occasionally  rebu   ng old Holdcomb with savage contempt.

“But she’s  not  such  a  bad  un,”  he  said, turning  deprecatingly to  us. “Naterally, she’s a kind, decent soul, Priscilla is. But, you see, it’s excitement to her to talk that way: all them Whynnes must have excitement of one sort or another. The men took to liquor, and the women—Now, Priscilla—” suddenly checking himself: “it’s like bein’ shut up in jail, what with livin’ here alone and that dreadful deafness.”

The old creature had gone, moving with a quick, nervous step, to a corner cupboard, from  which she brought  out  a plate of  seed-cakes.  She  stood holding them out to me, poising herself on tiptoe, her dark luminous eyes xed on me from underneath the shaggy white brows.

“No, C——,” I said, “this is not a bad woman: she is not immodest nor malignant.” Yet  I drew back from  her. Now I was conscious wherein she di ered from other aged people. It was a young woman who looked out of those strange eyes at me. Old Priscilla Perot, in the isolation of her thirty years of deafness, had grown vulgar and bitter in her speech, but back of that was another creature, who was not vulgar, who never spoke. I fancied that it looked out with all the unsatis ed passion and longing of youth through these eyes before me. They seemed perpetually challenging the world to give back something that was lost with a silent, sad entreaty strangely at variance with the shrill, mean talk that came from the woman’s lips. I wondered idly when this creature in her had ever lived, and what had killed it, and whether it would ever, in all the ages to come, waken and live again. How many possible human beings, after all, die in each of us and are forgotten before the body gives up too and has to be hidden out of sight!

Old Priscilla went out into the kitchen and bustled aimlessly about. Our coming had made her restless; she laughed without cause; frequent nervous shudders passed over her lean body.

“It’s  always the way when any one from  the city comes near her,” said

Jeremiah. “She was main fond of the crowd and of town.”

“So I should have guessed,” said C——. “Do you notice the dainty dress and the high shoes and jaunty bit of ribbon in her cap?  Yet she impresses me strangely, as though she might have had once a much   ner, more delicate, nature than she shows to us.—She has not always lived here?  What is her history?” turning to Holdcomb.

The old fellow gave a scared look at the wan little  gure skipping in and out of the dark kitchen: “Lord! how should I know? She belongs to them as was dead and gone before my time.” To stop short all further inquiry he began talking to her by signs. She perched herself upon the high wooden chair at one side of the   replace, looking at C——, her head a little on one side.

“She  wants  to  know  what  changes I remember  in  this place?”  for  so Holdcomb had interpreted C——’s question. “Not many—not many: my time has been so short. Now, my father could remember when a good part of Ocean and Monmouth counties was under the sea. But he lived to a good age. Under this house where you are there’s been dug up sherks’ teeth and the backbones of whales. My grandfather,  ’s likely, could remember when they swam over this  eld,” pursing up her thin lips thoughtfully. “Thee wasn’t here in the war of 1812?” turning sharply on C——.

“No.”

“I was here: I had come home for the   rst time from New York then. I watched the English vessels come up the inlet: it was a gusty afternoon like this. They had come up to plunder the farms. The men that weren’t Friends took their guns and went down to   re on them from the shore.”

“And those that were Friends?” asked C——.

“Took their guns and went along,” with a shrill laugh and nod. “Oh, the young people in the house were terribly frightened. It was all I could do to keep their courage up, silly children.”

“Were you not afraid?”

“No. I wasn’t young, and I had nothing to lose.” She had turned her head, with her back to us, and was talking into the darkness. She hurled out the last words with a kind of de ance. “I had nothing to lose.”

“True enough!” said Jeremiah, with many wags of the head and senile blinks of sympathy; but, catching our inquiring looks, he recovered himself with a

sudden  deprecatory cough  and  leaned his chin  on  his cane,  silent and attentive.

“I set the children to barring up the windows,” continued Priscilla after a moment’s pause, “and then I took a ladder and climbed on to the roof. I put my back against the chimney and my feet on the top rung, and there I saw the ght. Our men hid among the salt grass of the ma’ash and picked ’em o   one by one. They was main good shots. I saw Ben Stover aim at a man up on the foremast, and then there was a whi   of smoke and down he went in a lump into the water. They said his dyin’ yell was terrible to hear,” she added with a chuckle.

“What became of Stover after that?” asked Jeremiah.

“He died when he was a young man—only sixty or thereabout. He used to go up and down the beach lookin’ for Kidd’s treasure, muttering to himself. They said he went mad because there was blood on his hands, him bein’ a Quaker. But I knew di erent from that: it was the money drove him mad— Kidd’s money—he was so sure of   nding it.”

She  fell back in her chair, breathless with her vehemence. But in a few minutes she sat upright again and thrust her bloodless, peaked face into mine. “Where did thee say thee came from?”

“New York, mother,” signed Jeremiah.

“New York—a-ah!” drawing in her breath. “I lived nigh New York—in a country-place three mile from town, but now they tell me it’s in the heart of the city, built over with huckster-shops. Does thee know it?”

I shook my head.

“No, nobody would remember it.” she said gently. “I would know it: nothing they could build on it would hide it from me.” Her eyes deepened in their sad quiet, the shrill tones softened. For the moment it was the voice of a young woman that we heard.

C—— was about to question her, but Jeremiah interposed: “Take care! Don’t ask her what she means. Never before sin’ I’ve known her has she spoken of the time she was in New York. God knows what’s drove them words out of her now!”

To change the current of her thoughts he leaned forward and told her by signs the story of our coming to the Whynne house. I was quite willing that she should be turned from any dangerous subjects: I had the uncomfortable feeling when with her that we were dealing with Death himself, or with some forgotten part of a past age more alien and incomprehensible than Death.

“Thee is living in my house?” turning sharply on us. “Yes, it’s mine: it will never belong to any but a Whynne. I know every board in it.”

Her head dropped on her breast and her eyes were   xed on vacancy. After waiting a few moments,   nding that she had apparently forgotten us, we rose to leave her. As C—— came up to bid her good-bye she said, “You will come to your house while we are there?”

“I ?” She started up, standing erect without her sta  : her voice was feebler than a whisper, her hands were clasped over her head. But it was the voice and gesture of a young, passionate woman. “Into that house? I’ll never cross the threshold while I’m  living. It’s  just a step across the ma’ash,  thee knows,” appealing to Jeremiah, “but it’s nigh sixty year since I put my foot in it. I’ve never forgot that I was Josiah Perot’s wife. There’s them waitin’ for me there as Josiah never could abide. But when I’m dead—” She threw out her arms with a sudden indescribable gesture of freedom. “I’ll have done with Josiah Perot when I’m dead.”

C—— drew me away, and we hurried homeward. Glancing back, we could see the woman standing in the doorway: her back was turned toward us, looking out to Sea.

It was a gusty, chilly afternoon.  Spectral whitish drifts of fog were blown inland across the marshes. The sun went down in an angry yellow glare which foreboded ill; and then the night fell suddenly, unusually dark, full of shrill whispers of the wind through the swamps and the threatening roar of the sea.

We had, however, I remember, a comfortable hot supper soon ready, and we closed the curtains and heaped up the   re in the living-room to shut out the darkness and strange noises without.

When supper was over and Captain Holdcomb was seated with his pipe in the chimney-corner, we urged him to tell us the history of Priscilla without reserve.

“There’s not much to tell,” he said. “She was born in this house, and she married Josiah Perot well on in life; and if Josiah was a bit stupid he was a steady, God-fearin’ fellow; and that’s more than could be said of any Whynne that ever lived.”

“But before she married Perot?”

“Well, nothin’ happened remarkable—onless,”  he added reluctantly, “that curious occurrence at Abner Whynne’s death. I kin tell you about that,” dropping into  the  singsong of  an oft-told  tale. “Abner Whynne  was this woman’s father. He lived to be a hunderd and four. He lived with his wife down to Sherk River, for the old people had give up this house to their da’ater Peggy, who married Sam Volk.”

“Where was Priscilla?”

“Well, I might as well tell the whole on’t. It was like this. She wa’n’t like the rest on ’em. She wa’n’t ez handsome as Peggy, but she was of a di erent sort, I’ve heard say— ner an’ harder to please. She went up to New York, and ther she fell in with a Captain John Salterre, commanding a brig that run to the Mediterranean. He war a handsome fellow, ’cordin’ to accounts, and of a high family—very  di erent from  the Whynnes. Word came back that  she war

married to him, and next (that al’ays was the queer part of it to me) that he had sent her to school. Oh, I’ve heard my father say when she came back in

1812 she could speak one of them foreign tongues quite   uent. Her father al’ays set great store by Priscilla, though she never come anigh him. Peggy grew to be a humble, hard-workin’ woman in middle age, and war a faithful da’ater. But, Lord! he cared not a copper cent for her. It was all ‘My da’ater Priscilla,’ because she had made the grand marriage in New York. When her mother died down to Sherk River, Peggy war ther. She said, ‘now, daddy, thee must come along home to me.’—‘I will not, Margaret, he says.—‘But thee must,’ says she: ‘thee cannot live here alone.’ For he was then ninety-eight.—‘I hev my lines to watch,’ says he. For he was a   sherman, thee knows. ‘Very well, daddy,’ says Peggy, ‘thee can set thee lines in the inlet jest as well as Sherk River.’ Then she ups and packs his clock and his wooden chair (it’s this one I’m sittin’ on, only it had a sheep-skin cover on then) and his tea-kettle and his  re- dogs, so’s he might feel at home, and she   xed them all up in this hyar room back of me.” Jeremiah, with his sta  , pushed open the door into the half- ruined chamber behind him. The log walls had fallen to decay half a century ago, but there was the   replace with rusted irons on the hearth—the very  re- dogs he had mentioned, perhaps.

“That was his room, and he could do as he pleased in it. He used to set by the door yander, his old deaf yaller dog Turk lyin’ atween his knees, both on

’em a-lookin’ out at the sea hour in an’ hour out. He lived on here with Peggy for six year. In that time no word came from Priscilla. He used to talk about her and her grandeur to the men a-  shin’, but we all knowed it was jest his notions, for she never sent him a letter or made a sign. I was a peart young lad then, rising sixteen. It’s jest sixty year ago, last October, when one mornin’ Peggy went in to get the old man’s co  ee for him. She al’ays made his bite of breakfast ready afore anything else. ‘I’ll have no co  ee, Peggy,’ says he.—‘Is

thee sick, daddy?’ says she. For it was the   rst time he had ever refused his breakfast. As for sickness, he had never been sick an hour since any living man could remember, though as to his boyhood nobody was left on this yerth that remembered that. So Peggy was sort of stunned. ‘Is thee sick?’ says she.—‘No: I never was better, he says; but I’ll eat naught, I tell thee.’ So he fell asleep, and Peggy went out. But she could not ’tend to her work, she was that dazed. She told me she was mendin’ Sam’s nets that mornin’ (Sam was her husband), and presently out comes daddy dressed and leanin’ on his sta   as usual. He sat down in this chair by the   re yander, and she brought him his breakfast, and he ate it. About an hour after Joshua Van Dorn came in, and he and Peggy talked of the blue mackerel, for there was a school of them in, and Sam hed made a good haul that mornin’. Joshua was but a boy about twenty, but a strong, rugged fellow. Abner said nothin’ to him until he was on his feet to go: then he says, ‘Joshua,  Sam’ll  be out eel-  shin’  to-night,  and I want thee to come an’ watch with me. I’ll  die to-night when the tide goes out.’ Joshua thought it was jest his notions. ‘All right, daddy’ says he, winkin’ at Peggy. ‘I’ll come and watch with thee, and eat breakfast with thee too in the mornin’. Who’ll I bring with me? Jeremiah Holdcomb?’—‘Jeremiah’ll do as well as another: it’s the same to me. It’ll not take a strong man to streak me,’ says the old man; and he laughed, looking down at himself. For he was lean like Priscilla. The Whynnes wear away with age. Peggy said he sot ’most all day by the door yander, lookin’ out to sea. Ther’s some think that old sea-farin’ men hes a warnin’ from the water when their time’s come. I dunno how that may be. But old Abner he sot lookin’ out all day. When Sam come in he talked about the blue-mackerel haul. Sam watched him keerful, but he couldn’t see as there was aught the matter with him.”

“Was no clergyman sent for ?” demanded C——. “Did nobody remind him of the God that he was going to meet?”

Jeremiah looked up startled, chuckled and grew suddenly grave: “Nobody’d go to a Whynne with that sort of talk. I doubt ef old Abner in all his hunderd year had ever thought of a God, any more than his dog Turk hed. Him and Priscilla war jest alike. They belonged to this yerth. But as to their turnin’ up agen in any other—I dunno: I reckon they won’t,” shaking his head decisively.

“Go on with the story,” said C——.

“Well, come evenin’,  Sam started out eel-  shin’.  Daddy nodded to him.

‘Good-bye, Sam Volk, says he: ‘I’ll be gone afore thee gets back. Sam humored him. ‘Good-bye, daddy,’ he says. ‘Is  there aught I ken do for thee afore I go?’—‘No,’ he says, ‘no.’ But he took Sam’s hand and kept looking up at him.

‘Onless,’ he says, ‘thee could fetch Priscilla hyar. I’d like to hev seen the girl afore I go. I hev it on my mind ther’s somethin’ she wants to say to me.’—I can’t do that, thee knows, daddy,’ says Sam. For we all thought she was in foreign parts. But she’d been livin’ in New York for four year, and that very night, as it turned out, she was on her way home in John Van Dorn’s schooner. “Well, Joshua and I come in to watch. We sent Peggy to bed at the usual time, eight o’clock, for neither she nor we thought aught ra’aly ailed the old man. He took no notice of her when she went, nor of the children: he never could abide children. ‘I’ll make you some toddy, boys, to keep you awake,’ he says; and we war willin’. Ther was not a man on the Jarsey coast could brew toddy like old Abner. It was prime toddy, that’s a fact. He drank a bit, and then he went to bed (he wouldn’t hev any help in ondressin’), and when he was stretched out he whistled for old Turk, and the brute lay down across his feet.

‘Good fellow! good fellow!’ he says, and he put his hand on the dog’s head and straightened himself, and so went to sleep. About ten o’clock Joshua called to me: he was standin’ by the bed. ‘Jerry,’ says he, ‘ther’s a queer settlin’ in the old man’s face, and his pulse is mighty low. Shouldn’t wonder ef he’d been in the right of it about himself, after all.’—‘Shell I call Peggy?’ I says— ‘no,’ says he:

‘wait a bit.’ But in a hour he says, ‘Jerry, go and call Peggy.’ So I called her. But what could we do? He was goin’ out with the tide. He didn’t move or speak, and his eyes were shet: he didn’t hear Peggy or the children when they was cryin’  about him. His breath got slowly thinner and thinner, and his   esh colder. When Peggy called to him he took no notice, but the dog raised himself after a while on his fore legs and looked in his face and gave a howl. I declar’ it skeert me, it was so like a human bein’. The old man stirred at that, and sort of smiled, and his lips moved as if to say ‘Good fellow!’ But he was too far gone to speak. Then it was all quiet. I opened the window yander” (pointing to the square opening in the ruined wall of the room outside), “and I stood by it watchin’ the tide go down, jest as you might be doin’ now. And he lay on the bed hyar jest by the door. It was a clear night, and I could see the line of white surf sinkin’ lower and lower. I knowed by Peggy’s face, leanin’ over him, that he was goin’ with it fast. At last the sea fell out of sight into the darkness. Then I shut the window: I knowed it was all over. When I come up to the bed he was dead: Joshua was closin’ his eyes. We folded his hands and straightened him. It seemed to me but a few minutes till he was stark and sti and dreadful cold. I remember Joshua said it was onusual, and was because there was so little blood in his body, but how that might be I dunno. We sot with him till mornin’. Now, here’s the cur’ous part of the story. You’ll likely not believe it, but I’ll tell you word for word, jest as it happened. An hour after Abner Whynne died his da’ater Priscilla come to the house. She had landed at the inlet, where the men war a-  shin’, and Sam brought her over. She war not a very young woman, but she was like a lady—very  ne appearing. She was greatly excited when she found her father dead, though she skercely spoke a word. ‘You come too late,’ says Peggy. ‘You might have given him a deal of comfort. But you’re too late.’ I didn’t know before that Peggy war so bitter agen her.—‘I must speak to him,’ she said; and she tore o   the sheet and put

her hand to his heart. I could see her start when she felt the cold. ‘Daddy!’ she cried, ‘daddy!’—‘Let the dead rest, Priscilla,’ says Peggy.—‘Go out, all of you,’ she says, motionin’ to the door. ‘Let me have him to myself.’

“I went out, an’ took Peggy. Priscilla kept a-cryin’ in a low voice, ‘Daddy! daddy!’ I went outside—I was that cur’ous—and looked in the window. Fur God! I tell you the truth. The dead man opened his eyes and sat up. ‘Why did you bring me back?’ he said. ‘Why did you not let me alone, Priscilla? I was at rest.’ She leaned over him, sobbin’. Presently he says, ‘Is your husband here?’ Then she whispered something. God knows what. But I reckon the whole truth was wrenched out of her. You can’t lie to the dead. He sat up in the bed, and I saw him point with one hand to the door. ‘Begone!’ says he: ‘you are no da’ater of mine.’ She stood a minute, and then came out, and ran a-past me, cryin’, into the dark.”

“Of  course you  only fancied  that  you  saw the  man  alive through  the window?” said C——.

“I dunno,” said Holdcomb doggedly. “I do know as she has never crossed the doorway from that night, and that’s sixty year gone. And,” lowering his voice, “when we come back into the room the old man was dead and stark as we had left him. But he was sitting bolt upright in the bed.”

“What do you suppose she had told him?”

“Oh, that soon come out. She never had been John Salterre’s wife. A sort of shame had seized her at last, and she had left him and come home. She’s lived hyar ever since. Four year later she married Josiah Perot, who was a heap better husband than she deserved. She married him for a home: she never could abide to work. But nobody ever thought she cared aught for him. The Whynnes never forget, and I believe she thinks of John Salterre at this minute, and keers for him jest the same as she did when she war a young girl.”

“What became of him? Did he ever  nd her?” I asked.

Jeremiah hesitated: “I didn’t mean to tell thee that. A year after her father died Salterre found out whar she was, and put o   straight from New York on a schooner for this inlet. The schooner—the Petrel it was—struck the bar out yander, and the crew was lost, Salterre and all. They war buried in the sand on the beach, jest where they come ashore, ’s the custom was.”

The old man rose and began to put on his coat. We were not sorry to have him go. His ghastly story made us quite willing to close the door on the dilapidated apartment outside and to turn our thoughts to cheerfuller matters.

For a week afterward the threatened nor’-east storm kept us in-doors. The captain did not come to pay his daily visit, and we heard from a neighbor that he “was attendin’ on Priscilla Perot, who was waitin’ her call.”

“Jerry’s a main good doctor,” she added. “But I doubt he’ll not keep old Priscilla. She’s bein’ took o   afore her time: the Whynnes live to a great old age. But they say she’s been restlesslike ever since she talked to thee about her young days in this house.”

The storm continued to rage so heavily that it shut us in to an absolute solitude. Even the hardiest  shermen did not venture out upon the beach. On the  second night it abated. C—— and I were sitting by the    re reading between ten and eleven o’clock, when,   nding that the beating of the rain upon the roof had ceased, I opened the door into the ruined room of which Holdcomb had told the story, and looked out. The wind had changed: the storm-clouds were driving to the east, and were banked on that horizon in a solid rampart; the moon shone out whitely on the surging sea and on the drenched marshes webbed with the swollen black lines of the creeks. The tide- water had risen to an unprecedented height, and was within three feet of our door.

I called C—— to look. “If the storm had lasted a few hours longer,” I said, “the Whynne house would have gone at last.”

We both stood in the doorway between the living-room, in which we had been sitting, and Abner Whynne’s old chamber. The latter was clearly lighted by the moon and by the   re and lamplight in the room behind us. As I looked down  through  the  broken  wall to  the  marsh,  C—— touched  my  arm, whispering, “Who is this?”

I turned. A small dark  gure was crossing the beach, coming up toward the house. It came with such rapidity that before I had time to speak it stood in the outer doorway, and was in the room beside us.

“Priscilla!” cried C——.

The woman had reached the spot where, as Jeremiah told us, her father had died. She halted there a moment. I saw her face as distinctly as that of C——, being about the same distance from both. It was Priscilla, and yet not Priscilla. The weight of age had dropped away. This was the creature which I had fancied still lived in the woman, young, passionate, it might be wicked, but in no sense Perot’s vulgar, malignant widow.

She hesitated but a moment, and then passed through the back door into the garden, where the sand lay heaped by the storm in deep wet drifts. C—— and I hurried after her, each with the same thought, that the dying woman had become deranged and had escaped from her attendants with the wild fancy of reaching her old home. She suddenly   ung out her arms with a vehement gesture of triumph, and passed around a projection of the wall. We reached the spot in an instant. It was the place where the mysterious heaps of brick were erected, one of which rose slightly above the sand. She was not there: sea and marsh and beach were utterly vacant.

We went into the house, and, I am bound to confess, we slept little that night.

Captain Holdcomb came early the next morning.

“The widow Perot is dead at last,” was his  rst greeting.

“What time did she die?” asked C——.

“Last night at half-past ten o’clock.” C—— rose, and going out beckoned the old man to follow her. “These are graves,” she said, pointing to the heap of bricks. “Who were buried here?”

“I didn’t keer to tell thee: I was afraid it might make thee oncomfortable. But

—as thee knows so much the crew of the Petrel was buried onder them. That one which is part oncovered by the wind is whar Captain John Salterre is laid.” The old man never knew our reason for asking. There is my ghost-story, the

only one for which I have never heard a rational explanation.