She smiled and they hastened on, presently finding themselves in the village streets. Suddenly she paused. “Small towns have their mysteries as well as great cities,” said she; “we are not without ours, look.”
He turned, followed with a glance the direction of her pointing finger and started in his sudden surprise. She had indicated to him the house whose ghostly and frowning front bore written across its grim gray boards, such an inscription of painful remembrance. “It is a solitary looking place, isn’t it?” she went on, innocent of the pain she was inflicting. “No one lives there or ever will, I imagine. Do you see that board nailed across the front door?”
He forced himself to look. He did more, he fixed his eyes upon the desolate structure before him until the aspect of its huge unpainted walls with their long rows of sealed-up windows and high smokeless chimneys was impressed indelibly upon his mind. The large front door with its weird and solemn barrier was the last thing upon which his eye rested.
“Yes,” said he, and involuntarily asked what it meant.
“We do not know exactly,” she responded. “It was nailed across there by the men who followed Colonel Japha to the grave. Colonel Japha was the owner of the house,” she proceeded, too interested to observe the shadow which the utterance of that name had invoked upon his brow. “He was a peculiar man I judge, and had suffered great wrongs they say; at all events his life was very solitary and sad, and on his deathbed he made his neighbors promise him that they would carry out his body through that door and then seal it up against any further ingress or egress forever. His wishes were respected, and from that day to this no one has ever entered that door.”
“But the house!” stammered Mr. Sylvester in anything but his usual tone, “surely it has not been deserted all these years!”
“Ah,” said she, “now we come to the greatest mystery of all.” And laying her hand timidly on his arm, she drew his attention to the form of a decrepit old lady just then advancing towards them down the street “Do you see that aged figure?” she asked. “Every evening at this hour, winter and summer, stormy weather or clear, she is seen to leave her home up the street and come down to this forsaken dwelling, open the worm-eaten gate before you, cross the otherwise untrodden garden and enter the house by a side door which she opens with a huge key she carries in her pocket. For just one hour by the clock she remains there, and then she is seen to issue in the falling dusk, with a countenance whose heavy dejection is in striking contrast to the expression of hope with which she invariably enters. Why she makes this pilgrimage and for what purpose she secludes herself for a stated time each day in this otherwise deserted mansion, no man knows nor is it possible to determine, for though she is a worthy woman and approachable enough on all other topics, on this she is absolutely mute.”
Mr. Sylvester started and surveyed the woman as she passed with an anxious gaze. “I know her,” he muttered; “she was a connection of—of the family, who inhabited this house.” He could not speak the name.
“Yes, so they say, and the owner of this house, though she does not live here. Did you notice how she looked at me? She often does that, just as if she wanted to speak. But she always goes by and opens the gate as you see her now and takes out the big key and—”
“Come away,” cried Mr. Sylvester with sudden impulse, seizing Paula by the hand and hurrying her down the street. “She is a walking goblin; you must have nothing to do with such uncanny folk.” And endeavoring to turn off this irresistible display of feeling by a show of pleasantry he laughed aloud, but in a strained and unnatural way that made her eyes lift in unconscious amazement.
“You are infected by the atmosphere of unreality that pervades the spot,” said she, “I do not wonder.” And with the gentle perversity that sometimes affects the most thoughtful amongst us, she went on talking upon the unwelcome subject. “I know of some folks who invariably cross to the other side of the street at night, rather than go through the shadows of the two gaunt poplars which guard that house. Yet there has been no murder committed there or any great crime that I know of, unless the disobedience of a daughter who ran away with a man her father detested, could be denominated by so fearful a word.”
The set gaze with which Mr. Sylvester surveyed the landscape before him quavered a trifle and then grew hard and cold. “And so,” said he in a tone meant more for himself than her, “even your innocent ears have been assailed by the gossip about Miss Japha.”
“Gossip! I have never thought of it as gossip,” returned she, struck for the first time by the change in his appearance. “It all happened so long ago it seems more like some quaint and ancient tale than a story of one of our neighbors. Besides, the fact that a wilful girl ran away from the house of her father, with the man of her choice, is not such a dreadful one is it, though she never returned to its walls with her husband, and her father was so overwhelmed by the shock, he was never seen to smile again.”
“No,” said he, giving her a hurried glance of relief, “I only wondered at the tenacity of old stories to engage the popular ear. I had supposed even the remembrance of Jacqueline Japha would have been lost in the long silence that has followed that one disobedient act.”
“And so it might, were it not for that
