THE FACE IN THE MIRROR
The letter was gone. In vain I shook out my satin gown, and blamed the folly that had made me take this, the only love letter that had ever been dear to me, downstairs to dinner in that vast house, where even human beings were liable to get lost, how much more so, then, a scrap of paper!
My thoughts threw back – it was safe at dinner, for occasionally I touched it in my pocket, and thus bore with a dull neighbour gladly; and afterwards I had not moved from a deep ottoman where different persons had come and talked to me till bedtime. If I drew my treasure out with my handkerchief, it might still be there perhaps, crushed out of sight – or if visible, the men probably found it when turning out the lights, and it was furnishing rich food for merriment in the servants’ quarters at that very moment!
But there was a bare chance that I had left it in the drawing-room – that they had overlooked it – and I was resolved that as soon as the house was perfectly quiet, I would steal down, and make a search.
It was not yet twelve – but the women kept early hours, and the men would be in Lord William’s smoking-room, an immense distance away, and the servants’ wing was yet farther – so I thought I was pretty safe, and at five minutes to twelve I took my candle, and stole softly down the corridors and staircase, crossed the wide hall, and, turning the handle of the drawing-room door, went in.
How ghostly it looked – how strange! At night, familiar things wear unfamiliar faces – the very colours of the flowers are different, and one has a feeling of intrusion, as if inanimate things had also their hours of rest, and resented disturbance from outside humans. At a distance, the deep orange-pink brocade of the ottoman I sought looked almost black, but what was my joy, on reaching it, to behold, sticking up between the cushion and the padded side, a tiny gleam of white, that proved to be the corner of my letter!
I pounced upon, and pressed it to my lips. All thought of fear, of isolation in the vast sleeping place forgotten, I almost danced to the door, the pictured faces on the wall seeming to advance upon me, as in passing, the light in my hand struck them, though they looked, I thought, as if they, too, were angry at my unseasonable visit. As I closed the door behind me, something stole on my ear, and ravished it; so enthrallingly sweet was it, so enticing, that with eager ear bent towards it, and neck outstretched, I instantly followed that exquisite music – not knowing whence it came, not knowing whither it would lead me – just because it drew my feet, my spirit, and would have drawn me over a precipice, I truly believe, had it passed beyond it, so little control had I over my own body at that moment.
Swiftly I went, scarce heeding through what doors I passed, which way I turned – only presently I became aware that I was in the deserted corridors of a disused portion of the house, and still, now far, now near, that haunting melody drew me on, such melody as surely human hands never drew out of earthly instrument, yet, such melody as while thrilling me with the most exquisite pleasure, also brought tears to my eyes, for anguish there was in it, and love, and deep despair!
On every side were closed doors that looked as if they had never been opened; on the ground was dust – dust that might have lain there a century – damp and chill was the air, but I felt neither cold nor fear, as, dying away in a lingering cadence of mournful beauty, the music crossed the threshold of an open door beyond me, and I stood alone with thumping heart in the midst of an apartment hung with mouldering velvet draperies that in colour, methought, had once been green.
The candle light in my hand but made the gloom, the desuetude of the room, deeper; the charm, the power that had irresistibly brought my feet hither, had ceased with the music; I was no longer a creature subjugated through my ears, entranced into ecstacy by sweet sounds that realised my dreams of heaven – I was just a lonely, shivering girl, lost in a remote part of a castle the size of a village, and almost certainly unable to find the way back by which I came.
Have you ever known what it is to feel murder in the air – to feel it all about you – to know that by stretching out your hand you can actually touch the murderer; has no telepathic message ever passed to you from some mere stranger, warning you that he has committed, or will commit, an awful crime? Such a feeling came overpoweringly upon me when, looking down, I saw on the dusty boards at my feet a great discoloured splash, as if a ewer of blood had been spilt violently, and no one had washed the pool away . . . Suddenly an unreasoning terror laid hold of me, ungovernable, as when in panic men strike women down – and I turned to escape headlong. But even in turning, my body froze – my eyes were drawn to a mirror (the only one the room contained) on my right, and across which there passed slowly the face of a girl no older than I . . . lovely indeed was it, with a loveliness haunting and penetrating as the melody that had drawn me hither, but what horror, what agony were there – and on it the look that few have seen, and none in all its intensity save the murderer . . . for this girl was in the act of being murdered, and was looking at me as if I – I were actually committing the crime! This was her spirit – so she may have looked in the flesh when her blood gushed out, and left that stain showing dim at my feet . . . all the hatred of death, the passion for life, summed up in the flashing moment that seemed an eternity to murdered and murderer alike, aye, and to me as the mirror showed clear – and the only thing that moved in that accursed room was I!
I know not to this day how I got myself away from the stain, the mirror – or how I found my way through those passages and corridors back to the inhabited part of the castle . . . perhaps the letter, which I had never once let go, gave me courage, perhaps I knew that I must not, dared not stumble or fall, with that behind me . . . but when at last I reached my room, and sank down before an almost burnt out fire, I cried like a child, cried for that murdered girl who had once been young, and perhaps loved even as I – and I wondered if that enchanting melody had been used to draw her to her death, even as it had drawn me to behold her spirit, revisiting the scene of the crime.
At breakfast next morning a servant entered, carrying a salver, upon which was a shoe buckle of brilliants that I knew, and he asked to which lady present it belonged, as it had been found that morning in a passage of the disused portion of the castle.
I claimed it for mine, and as I took it, met Lady William’s eyes full – then she looked at her husband, who was looking at her, then both went on talking as if the incident were quite natural, though some of the women smiled, others regarded me curiously, then turned inquiring glances on the men, as if asking with which of them I had held a tryst. But the men’s faces expressed nothing save surprise, and though afterwards I got chaffed about my nocturnal wanderings, no one present seemed to know what Lord and Lady William and I knew – if the look I had seen them exchange meant anything at all.
Only when I told my hostess later, she laughed my story away – ‘You had been dreaming,’ she said; ‘was not the fire out when you woke up?’
I asked her, then, ‘What of the buckle?’
‘You lost it in some other part of the house – and a servant picked it up, and meaning either to restore it, or not, dropped or deliberately placed it in the disused wing, which, nevertheless, is often used by the servants when up to nefarious practices,’ she said.
‘And my dress?’ I answered. ‘Come and see it’ – and she came.
The ivory satin train was half a yard deep in dust and dirt – the front was disfigured by the candle grease that had fallen on it as my hand trembled. I could never wear the gown again.
‘Clearly you walk in your sleep,’ Lady William said with perfect sang-froid; ‘Kenneth must cure you of such tricks – if what I hear is true?’
I said that it might be true – and my hand stole to my bosom, where, for greater safety, the letter whose loss had brought about such a striking experience lay, and to which I had not yet written an answer – though long ago, had not my heart and eyes given it?
‘I have asked him for Christmas,’ she said, ‘and he comes on Saturday.’ She smiled, and came and kissed me, but was resolute not to discuss what had happened to me overnight.
‘And you must let me give you a new frock,’ she said, ‘as a punishment for living in an old castle with miles of dirty passages!’
And she sent for her maid, and would not go away until the woman had got my measurements, and she promised me that my frock should arrive before Kenneth, and so it did.
But before that, and this is a true and strange thing, each night, close on twelve, I would be seized with an intense longing to hear that melody again, and my feet would begin to move of their own accord towards the door, and there would be so fierce a struggle between my will and their intention, that I would have to sit down, and hold fast to the arms of the chair, and wish that Kenneth were here to hold me in his, and keep my feet from itching to follow the music, that I knew was ravishing the silence, and which I was at too great a distance to hear. And I longed to see once more that face in the mirror – to question it – to ask if the murderer had escaped, or if he had walked free among his fellow-men with the blood stain on his hand hidden – and for that awful injustice done to her, she must come back for ever and ever to her death chamber, luring with the spell of ensnaring music, strangers to the spot where, helpless, she met her death, unavenged to this day!
Night by night, the longing grew – taking such fierce hold upon me, that the sweat would pour off my brow, and by main force I would hold myself still till half-past twelve, when the fierce struggle relaxed, and, exhausted, I would fall into deep slumber.
And even in the day time the ebullient gaiety that used to distinguish me was gone, and I could not lose myself in thoughts of Kenneth and his coming; I could not even feel that I loved him very much; I was as one in a thrall, and even when I read his love-letters, I wondered if that murdered girl had been loved as Kenneth loved me – if it were because love had made her life so sweet, and she so loath to leave it, that the horror of her fate had made such imprint on her face as life departed . . . and the desire burned and burned in me to find out the real truth of the apparition and the ghostly melody, and which my hostess knew, but would not tell me.
I found the gown that she had ordered for me laid out on my bed when I came home from driving, on the day before I expected Kenneth, and I gazed upon it with no pleasure – I would so much rather have had the secret of the melody, and the face in the mirror, that she would not give me.
I had brought no maid, and as the woman lent to me by Lady William laced my frock for dinner, I looked idly at her face – reflected behind mine in the glass, and then I looked again, struck by something faintly familiar in it – not the features, which were very pretty, but the expression – where had I seen one like it, and when?
Her trained fingers did their work deftly, but there was no spring in them, and no life in her aspect; looking closely at her, I could see that she was completely absorbed in one idea – and that one of fear – and the fear in her face was the faint shadow of the vivid, overmastering one that I had seen in the face of the murdered girl in the mirror.
I know little of magnetism, of the power of the physical touch, or I might argue that her fingers carried a nerve message to my brain, but somehow I realised that the girl was in trouble, that a man was at the bottom of it, that if ever one woman stood in need of another woman’s help, this one did now.
She arranged the flowers on the bodice of my dress, gave me my gloves, fan, and handkerchief, all without the least relaxing of that strained, waiting look on her face, and it was on my lips to ask what her trouble was, though I knew how frankly the lower orders resent such sympathy from their betters, and seldom forgive those who offer it.
But the dinner bell was ringing, and I went downstairs, and at dinner I contrived to study each one of the men-servants present, and before dessert had arrived at a conclusion – the man who had brought me my buckle was at the bottom of the trouble. Also, by the perfectly infallible rule that makes the prettiest and brightest women choose the very worst possible men, this one was as sorry a knave, for all his powder and smart livery, as ever I saw.
He, too, seemed in a dream, and made several small mistakes in waiting at table – and it was an ugly dream too, judging by his expression, an expression that became a direct menace to some person unknown, when, watching him closely, I saw him, alone for a moment at the sideboard, slip into his coat-tail pocket a sharp knife, that the butler had used for carving game. I could see the dent it made in his coat as he moved to and fro, and I knew that he had hidden it there for no good purpose, yet how was I to hinder him from carrying that purpose out?
A deaf old man, greedily intent on his plate, had taken me in, and a man desperately enamoured of the girl next to him, was on my left, so I had plenty of time in which to think the matter out, and in which to put two and two together, the maid’s looks upstairs, the man’s below, and yet I was too dense to do so – then.
At dessert a telegram was handed to Lady William, and she left the table at once, after sending round the message to her husband, and within an hour had left the castle to go to her mother who was dangerously ill.
I could not worry her with the matter of a footman’s vagaries at such a time, and having begged us all to stay on, and insisted that I should not put off Kenneth, she departed, and after a dull evening in the drawing-room among women, half of whom meditated flight on the morrow, I went upstairs to bed.
The maid, Esther, was usually in waiting to unlace me, but tonight she was not there, and, expecting her every minute, and unable to unfasten my frock for myself, I took up a book, and read on for quite half an hour. I can never quite account to myself for not ringing, but I did not; and only when I looked at the clock, and saw that it wanted five minutes to twelve, did I realise that I had felt no overpowering desire to explore the haunted room, as at this hour I usually did.
But I could not sleep in an evening gown, and I was about to ring the bell, possibly to get no response, when suddenly there came over me an entirely different sensation to any I had felt before; this was one of overwhelming horror, something that froze my marrow, palsied the tongue with which I tried to cry out, engulfed me as in a billow of icy water that knocked breath and sight out of me as it passed . . . through that sense of disaster, of peril, flashed the thought, ‘Why is not Esther here – and why did that man hide the knife? He knows of the haunted chamber, or he could not have found my buckle there . . .’
I snatched one of the lighted candles from the toilette table, and the matches that lay beside it, and sped down the staircase, across the hall, along those corridors and passages through which a haunting melody had beckoned me; but there was no strain of music now – not even the far-off cry of a woman lured to her fate by the lover who had betrayed her; but was not that a light athwart the dark passage, and did it not come from the haunted room? I was yet some fifty yards from it, when a stifled moan, stifled in the uttering, spurred me on, and I dashed in at the door to find Esther gagged and on her knees, while the man, who had secreted the knife at dinner, stood over her, about to strike.
He breathed hard, and glared at me as I struck the weapon out of his hand, then set my foot upon it, and I have since thought it strange that he did not regain possession of it, for we were but two weak women against six feet of ruffian manhood, and he could easily have killed the pair of us if he had had the pluck, and the presence of mind.
But my unforeseen entry, the hour, the situation, unmanned him; and also he had been drinking, and looked a mere loutish brute as he backed away from me, and so through the door, and out of sight.
Then I kneeled down, and took the gag out of the poor girl’s mouth, and the look of the murdered that had been on her face when I burst in (involuntarily my eyes sought the mirror, but it was vacant) gradually faded. She kissed my hand, and burst into tears over it, and, as we kneeled together on the dusty floor, she told me her story. How this man had courted only to deceive her, and now was paying his addresses to one of the ladies’ maids staying in the house, to whom she had threatened to tell the truth, if he persisted in his attentions to her.
They had been wont to meet here, in the haunted chamber, and Esther had kept the tryst William had made with her, when he had suddenly set upon, and gagged her, and but for my appearance would have killed and hidden her away in one of the old cellars, where her bones might have remained undiscovered to all time.
‘He found your buckle, miss,’ said Esther, ‘and only brought it back for fear you should come by daylight to look for it – and bring others with you who might find their way here again. But ’twas God Himself sent you here tonight’ – then suddenly she screamed out ‘Look!’ and pointed to the mirror, across which a face flitted that seemed to be looking directly at us, a face that smiled at me, and looked a blessing at me, if ever a spirit face did.
And I knew then, that she had called me, first by that haunting melody, to show me the way, then by spiritual means to save another loving woman from the tragedy that had been her own, and now having prevented it, she would ‘walk’ no more, since she had accomplished what was better than revenge.
Esther has been in our service many years; her child is at school, and she is fairly happy. The man Rufus was never heard of again, and it is thought that he lost his life in the floods that were out that night. And sometimes I sit down to the piano and try to put into notes the melody that still sounds so plain in my ears, and the children laugh, and say, ‘mother is picking out a tune,’ but Kenneth knows better.