A BROAD, square window, with small frames and dark sashes; dreary yellow light, glimmering through the dirt of half a century crusted on the glass; purer rays striking across the dimness through the fissures of the broken panes; dust floating upward, pouring downward, rolling smoothly round and round in the still atmospheric; lofty, bare, faded red walls; chairs in confusion, tables placed awry; a tall black bookcase, with an open door half dropping from its hinges; a pedestal, with a broken bust lying in fragments at its feet; a ceiling darkened by stains, a floor whitened by dust — such was the aspect of the Myrtle Room when Rosamond first entered it, leading her husband by the hand.
After passing the doorway, she slowly advanced a few steps, and then stopped, waiting with every sense on the watch, with every faculty strung up to the highest pitch of expectation — waiting in the ominous stillness, in the forlorn solitude, for the vague Something which the room might contain, which might rise visibly before her, which might sound audibly behind her, which might touch her on a sudden from above, from below, from either side. A minute or more she breathlessly waited; and nothing appeared, nothing sounded, nothing touched her. The silence and the solitude had their secret to keep, and kept it.
She looked round at her husband. His face, so quiet and composed at other times, expressed doubt and uneasiness now. His disengaged hand was outstretched, and moving backward and forward and up and down, in the vain attempt to touch something which might enable him to guess at the position in which he was placed. His look and action, as he stood in that new and strange sphere, the mute appeal which he made so sadly and so unconsciously to his wife’s loving help, restored Rosamond’s self-possession by recalling her heart to the dearest of all its interests, to the holiest of all its cares. Her eyes, fixed so distrustfully but the moment before on the dreary spectacle of neglect and ruin which spread around them, turned fondly to her husband’s face, radiant with the unfathomable brightness of pity and love. She bent quickly across him, caught his outstretched arm, and pressed it to his side.
“Don’t do that, darling,” she said, gently; “I don’t like to see it. It looks as if you had forgotten that I was with you — as if you were left alone and helpless. What need have you of your sense of touch, when you have got me? Did you hear me open the door, Lenny? Do you know that we are the Myrtle Room?”
“What did you see, Rosamond, when you opened the door? What do you see now?” he asked those questions rapidly and eagerly, in a whisper.
“Nothing but dust and dirt and desolation. The loneliest moor in Cornwall is not so lonely looking as this room; but there is nothing to alarm us, nothing (except one’s own fancy) that suggests an idea of danger of any kind.”
“What made you so long before you spoke to me, Rosamond?”
“I was frightened, love, on first entering the door — not at what I saw, but at my own fanciful ideas of what I might see. I was child enough to be afraid of something starting out of the walls, or of something rising through the floor; in short, of I hardly know what. I have got over those fears, Lenny, but a certain distrust of the room still clings to me. Do you feel it?”
“I feel something like it,” he replied, uneasily. “I feel as if the night that is always before my eyes was darker to me in this place than in any other. Where are we standing now?”
“Just inside the door.”
“Does the floor look safe to walk on?” He tried it suspiciously with his foot as he put the question.
“Quite safe,” replied Rosamond. “It would never support the furniture that is on it if it was so rotten as to be dangerous. Come across the room with me, and try it.” With these words she led him slowly to the window.
“The air seems as if it was nearer to me,” he said, bending his face forward toward the lowest of the broken panes. “What is before us now?”
She told him, describing minutely the size and appearance of the window. He turned from it carelessly, as if that part of the room had no interest for him. Rosamond still lingered near the window, to try if she could feel a breath of the outer atmosphere. There was a momentary silence, which was broken by her husband.
“What are you doing now?” he asked anxiously.
“I am looking out at one of the broken panes of glass, and trying to get some air,” answered Rosamond. “The shadow of the house is below me, resting on the lonely garden; but there is no coolness breathing up from it. I see the tall weeds rising straight and still, and the tangled wild-flowers interlacing themselves heavily. There is a tree near me, and the leaves look as if they were all struck motionless. Away to the left, there is a peep of white sea and tawny sand quivering in the yellow heat. There are no clouds; there is no blue sky. The mist quenches the brightness of the sunlight, and lets nothing but the fire of it through. There is something threatening in the sky, and the earth seems to know it!”
“But the room! the room!” said Leonard, drawing her aside from the window. “Never mind the view; tell me what the room is like — exactly what it is like. I shall not feel easy about you, Rosamond, if you don’t describe everything to me just as it is.”
“My darling! You know you can depend on my describing everything. I am only doubting where to begin, and how to make sure of seeing for you what you are likely to think most worth looking at. Here is an old ottoman against the wall — the wall where the window is. I will take off my apron and dust the seat for you; and then you can sit down and listen comfortably while I tell you, before we think of anything else, what the room is like, to begin with. First of all, I suppose, I must make you understand how large it is?”
“Yes, that is the first thing. Try if you can compare it with any room that I was familiar with before I lost my sight.”
Rosamond looked backward and forward, from wall to wall — then went to the fireplace, and walked slowly down the length of the room, counting her steps. Pacing over the dusty floor with a dainty regularity and a childish satisfaction in looking down at the gay pink rosettes on her morning shoes; holding up her crisp, bright muslin dress out of the dirt, and showing the fanciful embroidery of her petticoat, and the glossy stockings that fitted her little feet and ankles like a second skin, she moved through the dreariness, the desolation, the dingy ruin of the scene around her, the most charming living contrast to its dead gloom that youth, health, and beauty could present.
Arrived at the bottom of the room, she reflected a little, and said to her husband —
“Do you remember the blue drawing-room, Lenny, in your father’s house at Long Beckley? I think this room is quite as large, if not larger.”
“What are the walls like?” asked Leonard, placing his hand on the wall behind him while he spoke. “They are covered with paper, are they not?”
“Yes; with faded red paper, except on one side, where strips have been torn off and thrown on the floor. There is wainscoting round the walls. It is cracked in many places, and has ragged holes in it, which seem to have been made by the rats and mice.”
“Are there any pictures on the walls?”
“No. There is an empty frame over the fireplace. And opposite — I mean just above where I am standing now — there is a small mirror, cracked in the centre, with broken branches for candlesticks projecting on either side of it. Above that, again, there is a stag’s head and antlers; some of the face has dropped away, and a perfect maze of cobwebs is stretched between the horns. On the other walls there are large nails, with more cobwebs hanging down from them heavy with dirt — but no pictures anywhere. Now you know everything about the walls. What is the next thing? The floor?”
“I think, Rosamond, my feet have told me already what the floor is like?”
“They may have told you that it is bare, dear; but I can tell you more than that. It slopes down from every side toward the middle of the room. It is covered thick with dust, which is swept about — I suppose by the wind blowing through the broken panes — into strange, wavy, feathery shapes that quite hide the floor beneath. Lenny! suppose these boards should be made to take up anywhere! If we discover nothing to-day, we will have them swept to-morrow. In the meantime, I must go on telling you about the room, must I not? You know already what the size of it is, what the window is like, what the walls are like, what the floor is like. Is there anything else before we come to the furniture? Oh, yes! the ceiling — for that completes the shell of the room. I can’t see much of it, it is so high. There are great cracks and stains from one end to the other, and the plaster has come away in patches in some places. The centre ornament seems to be made of alternate rows of small plaster cabbages and large plaster lozenges. Two bits of chain hang down from the middle, which, I suppose, once held a chandelier. The cornice is so dingy that I can hardly tell what pattern it represents. It is very broad and heavy, and it looks in some places as if it had once been colored, and that is all I can say about it. Do you feel as if you thoroughly understood the whole room now, Lenny?”
“Thoroughly, my love; I have the same clear picture of it in my mind which you always give me of everything you see. You need waste no more time on me. We may now devote ourselves to the purpose for which we came here.”
At those last words, the smile which had been dawning on Rosamond’s face when her husband addressed her, vanished from it in a moment. She stole close to his side, and, bending down over him, with her arm on his shoulder, said, in low, whispering tones — “When we had the other room opened, opposite the landing, we began by examining the furniture. We thought — if you remember — that the mystery of the Myrtle Room might be connected with hidden valuables that had been stolen, or hidden papers that ought to have been destroyed, or hidden stains and traces of some crime, which even a chair or a table might betray. Shall we examine the furniture here?”
“Is there much of it, Rosamond?”
“More than there was in the other room,” she answered.
“More than you can examine in one morning?”
“No; I think not.”
“Then begin with the furniture, if you have no better plan to propose. I am but a helpless adviser at such a crisis as this. I must leave the responsibilities of decision, after all, to rest on your shoulders. Yours are the eyes that look and the hands that search; and if the secret of Mrs. Jazeph’s reason for warning you against entering this room is to be found by seeking in the room, you will find it — ”
“And you will know it, Lenny, as soon as it is found. I won’t hear you talk, love, as if there was any difference between us, or any superiority in my position over yours. Now, let me see. What shall I begin with? The tall book-case opposite the window? or the dingy old writing-table, in the recess behind the fireplace? Those are the two largest pieces of furniture that I can see in the room.”
“Begin with the book-case, my dear, as you seem to have noticed that first.”
Rosamond advanced a few steps toward the book-case — stopped, and looked aside suddenly to the lower end of the room.
“Lenny! I forgot one thing, when I was telling you about the walls,” she said. “There are two doors in the room besides the door we came in at. They are both in the wall to the right, as I stand now with my back to the window. Each is at the same distance from the corner, and each is of the same size and appearance. Don’t you think we ought to open them and see where they lead to?”
“Certainly. But are the keys in the locks?”
Rosamond approached more closely to the doors, and answered in the affirmative.
“Open them, then,” said Leonard. “Stop! not by yourself. Take me with you. I don’t like the idea of sitting here, and leaving you to open those doors by yourself.”
Rosamond retraced her steps to the place where he was sitting, and then led him with her to the door that was farthest from the window. “Suppose there should be some dreadful sight behind it!” she said, trembling a little, as she stretched out her hand toward the key.
“Try to suppose (what is much more probable) that it only leads into another room,” suggested Leonard.
Rosamond threw the door wide open, suddenly. Her husband was right. It merely led into the next room.
They passed on to the second door. “Can this one serve the same purpose as the other?” said Rosamond, slowly and distrustfully turning the key.
She opened it as she had opened the first door, put her head inside it for an instant, drew back, shuddering, and closed it again violently, with a faint exclamation of disgust.
“Don’t be alarmed, Lenny,” she said, leading him away abruptly. “The door only opens on a large, empty cupboard. But there are quantities of horrible, crawling brown creatures about the wall inside. I have shut them in again in their darkness and their secrecy; and now I am going to take you back to your seat, before we find out, next, what the book-case contains.”
The door of the upper part of the book-case, banging open and half dropping from its hinges, showed the emptiness of the shelves on one side at a glance. The corresponding door, when Rosamond pulled it open, disclosed exactly the same spectacle of barrenness on the other side. Over every shelf there spread the same dreary accumulation of dust and dirt, without a vestige of a book, without even a stray scrap of paper lying anywhere in a corner to attract the eye, from top to bottom.
The lower portion of the book-case was divided into three cupboards. In the door of one of the three, the musty key remained in the lock. Rosamond turned it with some difficulty, and looked into the cupboard. At the back of it were scattered a pack of playing-cards, brown with dirt. A morsel of torn, tangled muslin lay among them, which, when Rosamond spread it out, proved to be the remains of a clergyman’s band. In one corner she found a broken corkscrew and the winch of a fishing-rod; in another, some stumps of tobacco-pipes, a few old medicine bottles, and a dog’s -eared peddler’s song-book. These were all the objects that the cupboard contained. After Rosamond had scrupulously described each one of them to her husband, just as she found it, she went on to the second cupboard. On trying the door, it turned out not to be locked. On looking inside, she discovered nothing but some pieces of blackened cotton wool, and the remains of a jeweler’s packing-case.
The third door was locked, but the rusty key from the first cupboard opened it. Inside, there was but one object — a small wooden box, banded round with a piece of tape, the two edges of which were fastened together by a seal. Rosamond’s flagging interest rallied instantly at this discovery. She described the box to her husband, and asked if he thought she was justified in breaking the seal.
“Can you see anything written on the cover?” he inquired.
Rosamond carried the box to the window, blew the dust off the top of it, and read, on a parchment label nailed to the cover: “Papers. John Arthur Treverton. 1760.”
“I think you may take the responsibility of breaking the seal,” said Leonard. “If those papers had been of any family importance, they could scarcely have being left forgotten in an old book-case by your father and his executors.”
Rosamond broke the seal, then looked up doubtfully at her husband before she opened the box. “It seems a mere waste of time to look into this,” she said. “How can a box that has not been opened since seventeen hundred and sixty help us to discover the mystery of Mrs. Jazeph and the Myrtle room?”
“But do we know that it has not been opened since then?” said Leonard. “Might not the tape and seal have been put round it by anybody at some more recent period of time? You can judge best, because you can see if there is any inscription on the tape, or any signs to form an opinion by upon the seal.”
“The seal is a blank, Lenny, except that it has a flower like a forget-me-not in the middle. I can see no mark of a pen on either side of the tape. Anybody in the world might have opened the box before me,” she continued, forcing up the lid easily with her hands, “for the lock is no protection to it. The wood of the cover is so rotten that I have pulled the staple out, and left it sticking by itself in the lock below.”
On examination the box proved to be full of papers. At the top of the uppermost packet were written these words: “Election expenses. I won by four votes. Price fifty pounds each. J. A. Treverton.” The next layer of papers had no inscription. Rosamond opened them, and read on the first leaf — “Birthday Ode. Respectfully addressed to the M?cenas of modern times in his poetic retirement at Porthgenna.” Below this production appeared a collection of old bills, old notes of invitation, old doctors prescriptions, ............