Dreeme’s pipe had gone out and he made no attempt to relight it. He felt a strange pity welling up inside of him for Martha Westcott and yet a faint voice within the dark convolutions of his brain told him not to pity too much. His mind, at the same time, was setting scattered facts together and he began to realize the situation in the valley. He felt now that there was only one thing left to discover—the placed called Dagon. After that, everything would be made clear.
“My life here,” she said, “has been a waiting. The seasons have passed by and I have wandered like a ghost about that lonely house waiting for somebody to come, waiting for a rescuer. All these years Jeffrey Westcott has sat immersed in his books or conducting his strange experiments and his will has made me a part of those experiments. I will not tell you what they are because I desire to forget them. They must not be a part of my life in the future.”
She paused again and glanced at him curiously.
“Yes,” she said then, “I will tell you one thing so that you may understand how he has dominated my mind. I will tell you this because it concerns you indirectly, because it was the thing that brought you into my life. One day he came out of his library and said to me, ‘I can make you shoot me in the leg.’ He sat across from me at the table and kept repeating it to himself. ‘I can make you shoot me in the leg.’ I set my will against his and laughed. ‘There will be no pain,’ he said, half to himself. ‘I shall will that there be no pain.’ He sat across the table from me. He kept saying that. I thought I should go mad. I rose up from the table to clear away the dishes and then I found myself in front of him with the rifle in my hand and smoke curling from the muzzle. ‘I will not,’ I said. ‘I will not shoot you in the leg but some day I will shoot you through the brain.’ He laughed at that and said, ‘You have shot me in the leg and there is no pain. Send for the doctor. Send Miles for the doctor.’ I looked down and there was blood running along his leg. It was running into his shoe. Then you came.”
Dreeme believed every word she said. He put the cold pipe on the table and pushed back his chair. Far away he heard a clock strike midnight. Mrs. Slater’s window must be open, he thought. Perhaps Deborah was lying awake listening to that chime that marked the end of a day. He felt restive and stood up from his chair. Martha Westcott felt his unrest and spoke rapidly.
“Then you came. We looked at one another and I knew that I might be saved from this living grave by you. You were the first young man I had seen to talk to since I left Germany. You were not like these bent-backed farmers who scrape at the soil and bow beneath the old horror that Jeffrey Westcott conjures up before them. You are different, a man from the outer world. You knew that I was different, too, for you trembled all over when I walked to the door with you that night. I thought of you all the time. I thought so fiercely that my thoughts brought you back to me the next day and you hid behind the stone wall and watched me draw water from the well. Something began to laugh inside me then. That was why I sent Wagner to you. That is why you met me at the burned mill. That is why I am here now.”
The yellow lamp-flare was burning dimly but Dreeme felt as though the little study was filled with a strange incandescence, a milky glow that lighted up both of their faces. He who had been so sure of himself was frightened again for he felt his pulses quickening in their beat and that trembling that had assailed him before in her presence was upon him like a palsy. He should not have listened to her. He should not have permitted her to creep into his mind, to envelop him with the warm mantle of her personality. He walked jerkily around the table toward her and she stood up as he came. Her eyes became luminous pools as he neared her and she half-raised her hands.
“I won’t have it,” he said in a grating voice. “I won’t have you say these things to me.”
She dropped her hands but remained standing in front of him, very near, her eyes studying his face.
“Are you entirely a stranger to passion?” she asked him. “Is there no pulse of life in you?”
He tried to talk rationally, to shake his anger from him. He said:
“I’ve heard what you have to say about yourself and I’m sorry. You have been the victim of a hard life and I pity you. But I do not feel toward you in the way that you seem to imagine. I am not in love with you and I shall never be in love with you. You surprised me, took me off my guard, so to speak, when I first saw you
