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THE first locality of which I have any recollection was my father's library a tall, melancholy room devoted to books and illusions. Three sides were of books, somberly bound, reaching from the floor to within three feet of the ceiling. Along the shelf, which was erroneously supposed to protect the tops of the top row of books from the dust with which our house abounded, were stationed, at precise intervals, busts done in plaster after the antique and death masks. Beginning on the left was the fury-haunted face of Orestes; next to him the lachrymose features of Niobe; following her Medusa, crowned with serpents The rest were death masks — Napoleon, Washington, Voltaire, and my father's father. The prevailing dust, settled thick upon the heads of these grim images, lent them the venerable illusion of gray hair. The three walls of books were each pierced by a long, narrow window, for the room was an extension from the main block of the house, but over two of these the shutters were opaquely closed in winter and summer. The third window, however, was allowed to extend whatever beneficence of light it could to the dismal and musty interior. A person of sharp sight, sitting at the black oak table in the middle of the room, might, on a fine day, have seen clearly enough to write on very white paper with very black ink, or to read out of a large-typed book. Through the fourth wall a door, nearly always closed, led into the main hall, which, like the library itself, was a tall and melancholy place of twilight and illusions. When my poor mother died, in giving me birth, she was laid out in the library and buried from the hall. Consequently, according to old-fashioned custom, these apartments were held sacred to her memory rather than other portions of the house in which she had enjoyed the more fortunate phases of life and happiness. The room in which my mother had actually died was never entered by any one save my father. Its door was double locked, like that of our family vault in the damp hollow among the sycamores.

  The first thing that I remember was that I had had a mother who had died and been buried. The second, that I had a father with a white face and black clothes and noiseless feet, whose duty in life was to shut doors, pull down window shades, and mourn for my mother. The third was a carved wooden box, situated in the exact center of the oak table in the library, which contained a scroll of stained paper covered with curious characters, and a small but miraculously preserved crocodile. I was never allowed to touch the scroll or the crocodile, but in his lenient moods, which were few and touched with heartrending melancholy, my father would set the box open upon a convenient chair and allow me to peer my heart out at its mysterious contents. The crocodile, my father sometimes told me, was an Egyptian charm which was supposed to bring misfortune upon its possessor. "But I let it stay on my table," he would say, "because in the first place I am without superstition, and in the second because I am far distant from the longest and wildest reach of misfortune. When I lost your mother I lost all. Ay! but 't she was bonny, my boy — bonny!" It was very sad to hear him run on about the bonniness of my mother, and old Ann, my quondam nurse, has told me how at the funeral he stood for a long time by the casket, saying over and over, "Wasn't she bonny? Wasn't she bonny?" and followed her to the vault among the sycamores with the same iteration upon his lips.

  It was not until I was near eight years old that my father could bear the sight of me, so much had we been divided by the innocent share which I had had in my mother's death. But I was not allowed to pass those eight years in ignorance of the results of my being, or of the constant mourning to which my father had devoted the balance of his days. I was brought up, so to speak, on my mother's death and burial. Another child might have been nurtured thus into a vivid contrast, but I ran fluidly into the mold sober, and came very near to solidifying. Death and its ancientry have a horrible fascination for children. And for me, wherever I turned, there was a plenitude of morbid suggestion. Indeed, our plantation — held by the family from the earliest colonization of Georgia, spread along the low shore by mismanagement and partly by the nonsuccess of the rebellion, into a sad fulfillment of its bright colonial promise — was itself moribund. In the swamps, still showing traces of the dikes, which had once divided it into quadrilaterals, the rice which had been our chief source of income no longer flourished. The slave quarters, a long double row of diminutive brick cubes, each with one chimney, one door, and one window at the side of the door such dwellings as children draw painfully on slates — still standing, for the most part, damp and silent, showed that the labor which had made the rice profitable was also a thing of other days. The house itself, a vastly tall block of burned bricks, laid side by side instead of end to end, as in modern building, stood on a slight rise of ground with its back to the river, among lofty and rugged red oaks, rotten throughout their tops with mistletoe. An avenue, roughened by disuse into a going worse than that of a lumber road, nearly a mile long, straight as justice, shaded by a double row of enormous live oaks, choked and strangled with plumes and beards of gray moss, led from the county road through the scant cotton fields and strawberry fields to the circle in front of the house. I used to fancy, and I think Bluebeard's closet lent me the notion, that the moss in the live oaks was the hair of unfortunate princesses turned gray by suffering and hung among the trees in wanton and cruel ostentation by their enemies.

  Nothing but a happy and cheerful woman, a good housewife, ready-tongued and loving, could have lent a touch of home to our melancholy disestablishment. Women we had in the house, two black and ancient Negresses, rheumatic and complaining, one to cook and one to make the beds, and old Ann, my mother's Scots nurse, a hard, rickety female, whose mind, voice, and memory were pitched in the minor key. We had a horse, no mean animal, for my father had known and loved horses before his misfortune, but ugly and unkempt, and it was the duty of an old Negro named Ecclesiastes, the one lively influence about the place, to look after the interests of this little-used creature. My father and myself completed the disquieting group of living things. Concerning things inanimate, we had enough to eat, enough to wear, and enough to read. And the clothes of all of us were black. Until I was twelve years old I believed fervently that to mourn all his life long for dead wives and mothers was the whole end and destiny of man. In my twelfth year, however, my Uncle Richard, a florid, affectionate, and testy sportsman, paid us a visit on matters connected with the mismanagement of the estate. He stayed three days. On the first he shot duck, on the second quail; on the morning of the third he talked with my father in the library; in the afternoon he took me for a walk. In the evening he went away and I never saw him again.

  "Richard," he had said, for I had been given his name, "I want to see the vault before I go. I haven't seen it since your mother was buried."

  It was a warm, bright, still December day, the day before Christmas, and my uncle seated himself nonchalantly on the low wall which surrounded the vault, his knees crossed, his mouth closed on a big cigar, and his eyes fixed on the "legended door."

  "People who go into that place in boxes," he said, "never come out. Has that ever occurred to you, Richard?"

  I said that it had.

  "You never saw your mother, my boy," he went on, "but you wear mourning for her."

  "It seems to me almost as if I had known her," I said, "because ——"

  "Yes," cut in my uncle, "your father has kept her memory alive. He has neglected everything else in order to do that. Now tell what was your mother like?"

  I hesitated, and said finally, "She was very tall and beautiful."

  My uncle smiled grimly.

  "You would know her then," he said, "if you saw her? Answer me truthfully, and remember that other women are sometimes tall and beautiful."

  I admitted a little ruefully, that I should not know my mother if I saw her.

  "No, you wouldn't," said my uncle, "and for this reason, too: your mother had an amusing little face, but she was neither beautiful nor tall."

  "But ——" I began.

  "Your father," my uncle interrupted, "has come to believe that his wife was tall and beautiful because he thinks that the idea of lifelong devotion to a memory is tall and beautiful. He is a little hipped about himself, my boy, and it makes me rather sick. I will tell you an anecdote. Once there was a man. He met a girl. For three weeks they talked foolishly about foolish things.

  "Then they were married. Nine months later a son was born to them, and the girl died. The man mourned for her. At first he mourned because he missed her. Then because he respected her memory. Then because he liked to pose as one everlastingly unhappy and faithful till death. He made everybody about him mourn, including the little child, his son, and finally he died and was put in the vault with the girl, and no one in the world was the better by one jot for any act of the man's life . . . Let me hear you laugh...."

  I looked up at him, much puzzled.

  "Not at the anecdote," he said, "which isn't funny — but just laugh."

  I delivered myself of a soulless and conventional ha-ha. My uncle put back his head and roared. At first I thought he must be sick, for until that moment I had never heard anyone laugh. I had read of it in books. And as a dog must have a first lesson in digging, so a child must have a first lesson in laughing. My uncle never stopped. He roared harder and louder. Tears ran down his cheeks. Something shook me, I did not know what. I heard a sound like that which my uncle was making, but nearer me and more shrill. I felt pain in my sides. My eyes became blurred and stinging wet. With these new sounds and symptoms came strange mental changes a sudden knowledge that blue was the best color for the sky, heat the best attribute of the sun, and the act of living delightful. We roared with laughter, my uncle and I, and the legended door of the tomb gave us back hearty echoes. In the desert of my childhood I look back upon that oasis of laughter as the only spot in which I really lived. When my uncle went away he said: "For God's sake, Dickie, try to be cheerful from now on. I wish I could take you with me. But your father says no. Remember that the business of living is with Life. And let Death mind his own business."

  The door closed behind that ruddy, cheerful man, and left us mourners facing each other across the supper table.

  "Papa," said I presently, "haven't we a picture of Mama?"

  "I had them all destroyed," said my father. "They were not like her. The last picture of her —" here he tapped his forehead "will perish when I am gone. Ay, but laddie," he said, "she is vivid to me."

  "Tell me about her, please, Papa," I said.

  "She was a tall, stately woman, laddie," he said, "and bonny — ay, bonny. Life without her has neither breadth nor thickness only length."

  "What color was her hair?" I asked.

  "Boy," he said, "you will choke me with your questions. Her hair was black like the wing of a raven. Her eyes were black. She moved in beauty like the night."

  Here my father buried his white face in his white hands, and remained so, his supper untasted, for a long time. Presently he looked up and said with pitiful effort:

  "And what did you with your Uncle Richard?"

  "We sat on the wall of the vault," I answered, "and laughed."

  It was a part of my father's melancholy pose to renounce anger together with all the other passions, but at the close of my thoughtless words he sprang to his feet, livid.

  "For that word," he cried, "ye shall suffer hellish."

  And he dragged me, more dead than alive, to the library. But what form of punishment he would have inflicted me with I do not know. For a circumstance met with in the library, a circumstance trivial in itself and, to my mind, sufficiently explicable shook my father into a new mood. The circumstance was this: that one of the servants (doubtless) had opened the carved box in the center of the table, taken out the crocodile, probably to gratify curiosity by a close inspection, and forgotten to put it back. But I must admit that at first sight it looked as if the inanimate and horrible little creature had of its own locomotion thrust open the box and crawled to the edge of the table. To instant and searching inquiry the servants denied all knowledge of the matter, and it remained a mystery. My father dismissed the servants from the library, returned the crocodile to its box, and remained for some moments in thought. Then he said, very gravely and earnestly;

  "The possession of this dead reptile is supposed to bring misfortune upon a man. For me that is impossible, for I am beyond its longest and wildest reach. But with you it is different. Life has in store for you the possibility of many misfortunes. Take care that you do not bring them upon yourself. Pray that you have not already done so by giving vent to ghoulish laughter in the presence of your dead mother. Now take yourself off and leave me with my memories."

  That night there was an avenue of moss-shrouded live oaks in dreamland, down which I fled before the onrush of a mighty and ominous crocodile.

  The next day was Christmas, and we resumed the monotony of our stolid and gloomy lives.

  At eighteen I was a very serious and colorless youth. It may be that I contained the seeds of a rational outlook upon life, but so far they had not sprouted. My father's pervading melancholy was more strong in me than red blood and ambition. With him I looked forward to an indefinite extension of the past, enlivened, if I may use the paradox, by two demises, his and my own. I had much sober literature at my tongue tips, a condescending fondness for the great poets, a normal appetite, two suits of black, and a mouth stiff from never having learned to smile. I stood in stark ignorance of life, and had but the vaguest notion as to how babies are made. My father, preserved in melancholy as a bitter pickle in vinegar, had not aged or changed an iota from my earliest memory of him a very white man dressed in very black cloth.

  One morning my father sent from the library for me, and when I had presented myself said shortly:

  "Your Uncle Richard is dead. He has left nothing. He was guardian, as you may know, of Virginia Richmond, the daughter of his intimate friend. She is coming to live with us. Let us hope that she is sedate and reasonable. You have never seen anything of women. It may be that you will fall in love with her. You may consult with me if you do, though I am no longer in touch with youth. She is to have the south spare room. You may tell Ann. She will be here this evening (my father always spoke of the afternoon as the evening). You may tell her our ways, and our hatred of noise and frivolity. If she is a lady that will be sufficient. I think that is all."

  My father sighed and turned away his face.

  "To a large extent," he said, "she has been educated abroad. I hope that she will not bore you. But even if she should, try to be kind to her. I know you will be civil."

  "Shall you be here to welcome her?" I asked.

  "I shall hope to be," said my father. "But I have proposed to myself to gather some of the early jasmine to —— If I am urgently needed for anything I shall be in the immediate vicinity of the vault."

  Virginia Richmond arrived in an express wagon, together with her three trunks and two portmanteaus. She sat by the driver, a young Negro, with whom she had evidently established the most talkative terms, and did not wait for me to help her deferentially to the ground, but put a slender a foot on the wheel, and jumped.

  "It's good to get here," she said. "Are you Richard?"

  "Yes, Virginia," I said, and felt that I was smiling.

  "Where's Uncle John?" she said. "I call him Uncle John because his brother was my adopted Uncle Richard always. And you're my Cousin Richard. And I'm your Cousin Virginia, going on seventeen, very talkative, affectionate, and hungry. How old are you?"

  "I shall be nineteen in April," I said, "and my father is somewhere about the grounds" — I did not like to say vault — "and will try to find you something edible. Are you tired?"

  "Do I look tired?"

  "No," I said.

  "How do I look?"

  "Why," I said, "I think you look very well. I — I like your look."

  A better judge than I might have liked it. She had a rosy face of curves and dimples, unruly hair of many browns, eyes that were deep wonders of blue, a mouth of pearl and pomegranate.

  "You," she said, "look very grave — and yes, hungry. But you have nice eyes and a good skin, though it ought to be browner in this climate, and if you don't smile this minute I shall scream."

  So I smiled, and we went into the house.

  "My God! Cousin," she cried, to my mind most irreverently, "can't you open something and let in the light?"

   "My father," I said, "prefers the house dark."

  "Then let it be dark when he's in it," she cried, "and bright when he's out of it."

  And she ran to a window and struggled with the shutter. When she had flung that open she braced herself for an attack upon the next; but I bowed to the inevitable and saved her from the trouble of consummating it. The floods of light let thus into the hall and dining room seemed to my mind, sophisticated only in dark things, a kind of orgy. But Virginia was the more cheered.

  "Now a body can eat," she said. "Ham-hoe-cake-Sally Lunn, is that Sally Lunn? Oh, Richard! I have heard of these things and now ——" wherewith she assaulted the viands.

  "Don't you have ham in Europe, Virginia?" I asked.

  "Ham!" she cried. "No, Richard, we have quarters of pig cut in thick slices but meat like this was never grown on a pig. This," and she rapped the ham with her fork, and laughed to hear the solid thump, "was once part of an angel, a very fat angel."

  "And you are a cannibal," I said. It was my first gallantry.

  She gave me a grateful look.

  "I had not hoped for it," she said. And for twenty minutes she ate like a hungry man and talked like a running brook.

  "And now," she said, "for the house. First the library. Uncle Richard told me about all the death heads with dusty brows."

  "Did he tell you about the crocodile?" I asked.

  "Which crocodile?" said Virginia gravely.

  "We have one only," I answered. "And I'm afraid it won't interest you very much. This is the library."

  She was for having the shutters open.

  "My father wouldn't like it," I said.

  "This once," said she, and I served the whim.

  "Yes," she said, after examination, "it is dreadful. Show me the crocodile, and then let's go."

  But she was more interested in the scroll.

  "It's Arabic," she said. "I can read it."

  "You can read Arabic?"

  "Indeed, yes. When Papa's lungs went bad we lived in Cairo. He died in Egypt, you know. Listen . . . It says: 'That man who holds me (it's the crocodile talking) in both hands, and cries thrice the name of Allah, shall see the face of his beloved though she were dead."

  "That's not our version," I said. "We believe that the possession of that beast invites misfortune."

  "But you don't read Arabic," said Virginia. "Quick, Richard, take this thing in your two hands and call 'Allah' three times aloud, because it's a long way to Egypt — why, the man doesn't want to play?"

  I had taken the crocodile in my hands, but balked, and I believe blushed, at the idea of raising my voice above the conversational pitch to further so absurd an experiment.

  "Don't you want to see the face of your beloved?"

  "I have none," said I.

  "Then I'd cry 'Allah' till I had," said she. "Please — only three times."

  So I held the crocodile, looking very foolish, and called three times upon the prophet. Then I turned to Virginia and met her eyes. The same thought occurred to us both, for we looked away. It was then that my father entered.

  "Richard," he said, "the shutters ——"

  I made haste to close them, for I was blushing.

  "This is Virginia!" said my father. "Welcome to our sad and lonely house. I thought just now that I heard some one calling aloud."

  "It was Richard," said Virginia. "This scroll ——" and she translated to my father.

  "Oh, for faith to believe," said he.

  He took the crocodile in his hands and examined it with sad interest.

  "I have just come from her tomb, Virginia," he said. "I have been laying jasmine about it."

  "Oh, the dear jasmine!" cried Virginia. "It's splendidly out, and tomorrow I shall fill the house with it."

  "The house ——" said my father hazily.

  "Don't you like flowers, Uncle John?"

  "I neither like nor dislike them," said my father.

  "Then why, for heaven's sake ——" but she stopped herself. "And you, Richard, don't you like them?"

  "I have grown to think of them," said I, "if at all, as something odorous and sad, vaguely connected with funerals."

  "Oh, no!" cried Virginia. "They are beautiful and gay, and they are connected with weddings ——"

  "Don't," said my father quickly. He was still holding the crocodile. "But I do not blame you, child. You will soon learn our ways. Since our great loss we have kept very quiet.... Ay, my dear, but you should have seen Richard's mother was she not bonny, Richard?"

  I bowed.

  "I could fain look upon her again," he said. "And the scroll — does it not say 'even though she were dead?' . . . Who was it called 'Allah'? . . . You Richard? . . . And what face did you see?"

  "Tell him," said Virginia.

  "Ay, tell me," said my father.

  "I saw Virginia's face," said I.

  Then we left him. But in the hall Virginia laid her hand on my shoulder.

  "Haven't you noticed?" said she.

  "What?" said I.

  "Your father," said she.

  "No," said I. "What ails him?"

  Virginia tapped her forehead.

  "Mildewed here," said she.

  "I don't understand," said I.

  "Never mind then, Richard," said she. "I'll take care of you."

  That night I dreamed that I heard my father calling the name of Allah. But in the morning I rose early, and, going to the woods, gathered an armful of jasmine for Virginia.

  She received it cheerfully.

  "Is this in memory of any one?" she asked.

  "Yes," I said boldly, "it's in memory of me."

  "Then I will keep it, Richard," she said. "Flowers are for the living."

  "Yes," I said.

  "And crocodiles," said she, "are for the dead."

  For a long time I looked upon the innocent gayness and frivolity of Virginia with blinking eyes, as a person blinks at the sudden match lighted in the middle of the night. I had been pledged to darkness from my earliest years, and now, while my character, still happily plastic, was receiving its definite stamps, I blinked hankeringly at the light that I might have loved, and at the same time steeled myself to go through with the prearranged marriage. As in the Yankee states children are brought up to believe that it is wicked to be joyous on Sunday so I had been taught to believe of every twenty-four hours in the week.

  I cannot think peacefully of that unhappy period in Virginia's life forced on her by us two moribunds. She was the sun, soaring in bright, beneficent career, brought suddenly to impotence by a London fog. And I take it that to be bright and happy, and to fail in making others so, is the most grievous chapter in life. But Virginia's glowing nature had its effect on mine, and in the end she set my spirits dancing. With my father, however, the effect of a madcap sunbeam in the house was altogether different. For it served only to plunge him deeper into gloom and regret. If we came to dinner with him fresh from the joyous morning and in love with laughter, the misery into which he was too palpably thrown reacted so that for all three of us the afternoon became clouded. Sometimes his sorrow would take the form of mocking at all things peaceful and pleasant. In particular the institution of marriage aroused in him hostility.

  "Ay, marry," he would say, "Richard, and beget death. It may be hereditary in our family. Exchange your wife, who is your soul, for a red and puling inconsequence, that shall serve down the tiresome years to remind you day and night of the sunshine which has been extinguished for you."

  And I remember once retorting on him sharply to the effect that if he threw me so constantly in my own face I would leave his roof, and in the intemperance of the moment I fully purposed to do so. "I will do no worse among strangers," I said, "or in hell, for that matter."

  My father fairly shriveled before the unfilial words and retreated so pathetically from his foolish position that my attack melted clean away.

  "But why," I said afterward to Virginia, "wouldn't he let me go? Why did he say that he could not live without me? And why, in God's name, when it was all over, did he cry?"

  And Virginia thought for a few moments, which was unusual with her, and said presently: "Richard, either your father is the greatest lover that ever lived, or else he is a tiresome egomaniac. Frankly, I believe the latter. You are an accessory, a dismal carving on the moldy frame in which he pictures himself. When I first came I used to tell him how terribly sorry I was that he had lost his wife. But I've given that up. Between you and me, it made him a little peevish. Now I say to him, 'Uncle Richard, you're the unhappiest man I ever saw,' and that comforts him tremendously. Sometimes he asks me if I really think so, and when I say that I do he almost smiles. And I have caught him, immediately after a scene like that, looking at himself in the mirror and pulling his face even longer than usual.... There, I've shocked you."

  "No, Virginia," I said, "but I should hate to believe of any man what you believe of my father. His grief must be sincere."

  "It may be," said Virginia, "or it may have been once. I believe it isn't now. I believe that if your mother came to life your father would ——"

  Virginia did not finish. We were seated in the cool hall, for the porch was piping hot, and our conversation was interrupted by a loud cry emanating from the library.

  "Allah — Allah — Allah!"

  "If I weren't charitable, which I am," said Virginia, "I would say that that was done for effect. He knows we're here. Bet you, he's looking at himself in the glass."

  "Virginia," I began angrily, and I was for telling her that she was ill-natured, when the library door opened and my father came out.

  "Oh!" said he, with a fine start, "I did not know you were there.... "

  Virginia gave me one look, at once hurt and amused. Then she turned to my father and said gravely: "Did anything happen, Uncle Richard, when you called? Did you see the — the face — of ——"

  "No, child," said my father sadly. "I was so foolish, I may say undignified, as to try a childish and foolish experiment. It is unnecessary to say that the tall and stately form and classic face of Richard's dear mother did not appear to me. But I caught a glimpse of another face, Virginia —— a face white and broken by sorrow and regret, a face that it was not pleasant to see . . .How it all comes back to me," he went on. "Here I stood by her casket, ignorant of time and place — ignorant of all earthly things but loss — and for the last time looked upon her beauty. No, not for the last time,

  "Ay, child, but she was bonny! Was she not bonny, Richard?"

  I do not know what prompted Virginia to ask the sudden question which turned my father's face for a moment into a painful blank and placed him in a position from which he extricated himself, I am forced to believe, only by a real and searching act of memory.

  "What was her name?" said Virginia quickly.

  It was a full half minute before my father managed to stammer my mother's name. But during the ensuing days it was constantly on his lips, as if he wished to make up to it for the oblivion into which it had been allowed to drop.

  That afternoon it rained violently, and Virginia persuaded me to explore with her the mysteries of the ancient and cobwebby attic that occupied the whole upper floor of our house. It was a place in whose slatted window blinds sparrows built their nests, and in which a period, that of my mother's brief mistressship, had been perfectly preserved. It was the most cheerful part of the house.

  Among other things we found in a trunk of old fashion my mother's wedding regalia. A dress of apple-green silk embroidered about the neck and wrists with tiny forget-me-nots, faded to the palest shade of lilac; a pair of tiny shoes of the same apple-green silk, with square toes and dark jade buttons; a veil of venetian point, from which a large square had been cut, and the brittle remnants of a wreath my mother's wedding wreath, which old Ann had often told me was combined of apple and orange flowers. When Virginia stood up and held the neck of my mother's dress level with the neck of her own, it did not reach to her ankles, and she smiled at me.

  "Richard," she said, "I could not get into this dress. Your tall and stately mother was no bigger than I."

  "And no sweeter, I fancy," said I. For the being together with Virginia over my mother's things had suddenly opened my heart to her.

  "Oh, Virginia," I went on, "it makes me sick to think of your living on in this dead house. I want you to be happy. I want to make you happy. You are the only good thing that was ever in my life. I know it now. And I — I want to be happy, too...."

  We explored the attic no more that day, and after supper we told my father.

  From the very announcement to him of our engagement a marked change came over my father. Hitherto his influence had been for darkness, but of a silent and quiet character, like that which clouds spread through a wood at noon; but now he had become baleful and pointed in his efforts to make us unhappy.

  To set in motion any machinery of escape was too impracticable and tedious to be thought of. Had I been for myself alone, I would have left him at this period and endeavored to support myself. But with Virginia to care for — and I could not leave her while I made my own way the impulse was empty. He made attacks on our happiness with tongue and contrivance. He descended to raillery and sneers, even to coarseness. Yet when the confines of endurance had been approached too closely, and I threatened to cross them, he clung to me with such a seeming of feeling and patheticness that I was forced to hold back. Through these harsh times Virginia was all sweetness and patience, but her cheeks lost their color and her body the delicious fullness of its lines.

  My father was at times so eccentric in his behavior that I had it often in mind to ask the investigations of a physician. But as often the horror of a son prying after madness in his father withheld me. As always, his actions centered around the observance of his private grief. And to that great mental structure which he had made of my mother's beauties and virtues, he added incessantly wings and superstructures, until we had portrayed for us a woman in no way human or possible. To draw odious comparisons between Virginia and my mother, between his capacity for loving and my own, were his constant and indelicate exercises.

  "Do you think you love, Richard?" he would say. "If she were to die this night, where would your love be at the end of the year? Is she bonny enough to hold a man's heart till death shall seek him out too? She's well enough in her way, your Virginia, I'll not deny that But does a man remember what was only well enough? Does a man remember the first peach he ate? Nay, he will not remember that. But will he forget the first time that he heard Beethoven? Your mother, she was that rich, strong music, she was — the bonny one — the unforgettable. Ah, the majesty of her, Richard, that was only for me to approach!"

  And such like, till the heart sickened in you. Often he made us go with him to the vault and listen to his speeches, and kneel with him in the wet. Finally he played on us a trick that had in it something of the truly devilish, and was the beginning of the end. He began by insisting that we should be married and appointing a day. There was to be a minister, ourselves, and the servants. We were glad enough to be married, even on such scanty terms, and I well remember with what eagerness I arose on the glad morning, and slipped into my better suit of black, for I had no gayer clothes. Virginia did not come down to breakfast, but toward the close of that meal, at which my father was the nearest he ever came to being cheerful, I heard her calling to me from the upper story. When I knocked at her door she opened it a little and showed me a teary face.

  "Richard," she said, "they've taken away my clothes and left only a black dress. I won't be married in black."

  "Does it matter, dear?" I said. "Put it on and we will ransack the attic for something gayer."

  But we found the attic locked. My father had provided against resistance.

  "Does it matter, dear?" I said. "It's not your clothes I'm marrying — it's my darling herself"

  So she smiled bravely and we went downstairs. The ceremony was appointed for eleven in the morning. But at that hour neither the minister, nor my father, nor the servants were to be found. We waited until twelve. Then I went out to look for my father. I went first to the vault and there found him. He was kneeling in the wet, facing the door, and holding in his hands the stuffed crocodile. He had, I suppose, been calling the name of Allah in the wild hope of seeing my mother's face.

  "Have you forgotten that we are to be married today?" I said.

  He rose, hiding the crocodile beneath his coat.

  "No," he said. "I had not forgotten that. Why should I be forgetting that? But the minister, he could not come, at the last minute he could not come."

  "Then you should have told us," I said sternly.

  "Would you be angry with me, Richard, my son?" he answered gently.

  "Why couldn't the minister come?" I said, giving no heed to his question.

  The gentleness, which must have been play-acting, went out of my father's voice.

  "The minister," he said sneeringly, "faith, the minister, he had a more important funeral to attend."

  My gorge rose and fell.

  "What have you done with Virginia's trunk?" I said.

  "It will be back in her room by now," said my father.

  "Thank you," said I, "and good-day to you."

  "Good-day, Richard? Good-day?"

  "Yes," said I. "I am going to take her away."

  "You'll not go far without money," said he.

  "With heart," said I, "we shall go to the ends of the earth."

  My father turned to the vault and addressed the shade of my mother. "Hear him," cried he, "hear him that took you from me. He's going to the ends of the earth. He turns his back upon your hallowed bones . . ." His words became unintelligible.

  During the packing of my trunk I left off again and again to go to Virginia's door to ask if all were well with her. For there had been a look in my father's face which haunted me like a hint of coming evil. And although nothing but good came of that afternoon, still its events were so strange as to make me believe that men are often forewarned of the unusual. It was about three o'clock that suddenly I heard my father shrieking aloud in his library. Thinking that sickness must have seized him, I bounded down the stairs to offer assistance or search for it if necessary. But except for a pallor unusual even with him, he was not apparently sick. The crocodile lay belly up on the table, as if it had been hastily laid down.

  "What's the matter?" I asked.

  "Richard," said my father, in great excitement, "the door of the vault is open. But now I heard it creaking upon its hinges "

  Virginia, who had heard the shrieks, now joined us, her face white with alarm.

  "What is it?" she cried.

  "The resurrection of the dead!" cried my father, and, thrusting my detaining arm suddenly aside, he literally burst out of the house. I followed at my best speed, and Virginia brought up the rear. In this order we raced through the woods, brightly mottled with sunshine and shadows, in the direction of the vault. Run as I would, I could not gain on my father, who seemed to possess the speed of a pestilence. As he ran he kept crying: "God is merciful! I shall see the face of my beloved."

  I cannot account for what happened. A lithe lady, dressed in apple-green silk, with a wreath of flowers upon her head, appeared suddenly in the path, ahead of and facing my father. She held out her arms as if to detain him. But he bore down upon her at full speed, and I cried out to warn her. Then they met. But there was no visible or audible sign of collision. My father literally seemed to pass through her. He ran on, always at top speed, and the lithe lady in the apple-green silk was no longer to be seen in any direction. Yet she seemed to have left an influence in the bright forest, gentle and serene, and I could swear that there lingered in the air a faint smell of apple blossoms and orange blossoms. And it may be the echo of a cry of pain the ghost of a cry.

  When I came to the vault, its door was wide open, and I found my father within, breaking with his thin hands the lid from my mother's coffin. I was not in time to prevent him from completing his mad outrage. The lid came clean away with a ripping noise, and my father gazed eagerly at the face thus rudely revealed to the light of day. But what horrible alchemy of the grave had brought into shape the face upon which my father looked so eagerly is not for mortal man to know. For the face was not my mother's, but his own.

  Gently he laid his hand on the forehead, and gently he said: "Was she not bonny, Richard? . . . Was she not bonny?"

  Our honeymoon was nearly a week old, when one morning Virginia and I were taking breakfast in the glass dining room of the old Hygeia Hotel. The waiters, the other guests, the cups, saucers, knives, and spoons all made eyes at us, but we were wonderfully happy. An old gentleman approached our table with a kind of a sad tiptoe gait. Tears were in his eyes.

  "My dear boy," he said, "I have not the heart to congratulate you on your happiness, for I cannot help remembering what a good father you have so recently lost. I was present at his wedding, and I have not seen him since. But as you see ——" and the old gentleman drew attention to the tears in his eyes.

  "Aren't you mistaken, sir?" said I. "Aren't you thinking of somebody else's father?"

  "Why, no," said he, "your father was ———! Don't tell me that he wasn't."

  "I shall have to," I said, "for he wasn't. My father was a crocodile."

(End.)

  prepared by Deborah McMillion
deborah@alice.gloaming.com
http://www.gloaming.com/deborah.html