The Queen of Hearts

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I had half risen from my chair at her last words, and I felt that
my face must have flushed at the same moment. She had started an
idea in my mind--the very idea of which I had been in search when
I was pondering over the best means of amusing her in the long
autumn evenings.

I parried her questions by the best excuses I could offer;
changed the conversation for the next five minutes, and then,
making a sudden remembrance of business my apology for leaving
her, hastily withdrew to devote myself to the new idea in the
solitude of my own room.

A little quiet thinking convinced me that I had discovered a
means not only of occupying her idle time, but of decoying her
into staying on with us, evening by evening, until my son's
return. The new project which she had herself unconsciously
suggested involved nothing less than acting forthwith on her own
chance hint, and appealing to her interest and curiosity by the
recital of incidents and adventures drawn from my own personal
experience and (if I could get them to help me) from the
experience of my brothers as well. Strange people and startling
events had connected themselves with Owen's past life as a
clergyman, with Morgan's past life as a doctor, and with my past
life as a lawyer, which offered elements of interest of a strong
and striking kind ready to our hands. If these narratives were
written plainly and unpretendingly; if one of them was read every
evening, under circumstances that should pique the curiosity and
impress the imagination of our young guest, the very occupation
was found for her weary hours which would gratify her tastes,
appeal to her natural interest in the early lives of my brothers
and myself, and lure her insensibly into prolonging her visit by
ten days without exciting a suspicion of our real motive for
detaining her.

I sat down at my desk; I hid my face in my hands to keep out all
impressions of external and present things; and I searched back
through the mysterious labyrinth of the Past, through the dun,
ever-deepening twilight of the years that were gone.

Slowly, out of the awful shadows, the Ghosts of Memory rose about
me. The dead population of a vanished world came back to life
round me, a living man. Men and women whose earthly pilgrimage
had ended long since, returned upon me from the unknown spheres,
and fond, familiar voices burst their way back to my ears through
the heavy silence of the grave. Moving by me in the nameless
inner light, which no eye saw but mine, the dead procession of
immaterial scenes and beings unrolled its silent length. I saw
once more the pleading face of a friend of early days, with the
haunting vision that had tortured him through life by his side
again--with the long-forgotten despair in his eyes which had once
touched my heart, and bound me to him, till I had tracked his
destiny through its darkest windings to the end. I saw the figure
of an innocent woman passing to and fro in an ancient country
house, with the shadow of a strange suspicion stealing after her
wherever she went. I saw a man worn by hardship and old age,
stretched dreaming on the straw of a stable, and muttering in his
dream the terrible secret of his life.

Other scenes and persons followed these, less vivid in their
revival, but still always recognizable and distinct; a young girl
alone by night, and in peril of her life, in a cottage on a
dreary moor--an upper chamber of an inn, with two beds in it; the
curtains of one bed closed, and a man standing by them, waiting,
yet dreading to draw them back--a husband secretly following the
first traces of a mystery which his wife's anxious love had
fatally hidden from him since the day when they first met; these,
and other visions like them, shadowy reflections of the living
beings and the real events that had been once, peopled the
solitude and the emptiness around me. They haunted me still when
I tried to break the chain of thought which my own efforts had
wound about my mind; they followed me to and fro in the room; and
they came out with me when I left it. I had lifted the veil from
the Past for myself, and I was now to rest no more till I had
lifted it for others.

I went at once to my eldest brother and showed him my son's
letter, and told him all that I have written here. His kind heart
was touched as mine had been. He felt for my suspense; he shared
my anxiety; he laid aside his own occupation on the spot.

"Only tell me," he said, "how I can help, and I will give every h
our in the day to you and to George."

I had come to him with my mind almost as full of his past life as
of my own; I recalled to his memory events in his experience as a
working clergyman in London; I set him looking among papers which
he had preserved for half his lifetime, and the very existence of
which he had forgotten long since; I recalled to him the names of
persons to whose necessities he had ministered in his sacred
office, and whose stories he had heard from their own lips or
received under their own handwriting. When we parted he was
certain of what he was wanted to do, and was resolute on that
very day to begin the work.

I went to Morgan next, and appealed to him as I had already
appealed to Owen. It was only part of his odd character to start
all sorts of eccentric objections in reply; to affect a cynical
indifference, which he was far from really and truly feeling; and
to indulge in plenty of quaint sarcasm on the subject of Jessie
and his nephew George. I waited till these little
surface-ebullitions had all expended themselves, and then pressed
my point again with the earnestness and anxiety that I really
felt.

Evidently touched by the manner of my appeal to him even more
than by the language in which it was expressed, Morgan took
refuge in his customary abruptness, spread out his paper
violently on the table, seized his pen and ink, and told me quite
fiercely to give him his work and let him tackle it at once.

I set myself to recall to his memory some very remarkable
experiences of his own in his professional days, but he stopped
me before I had half done.

"I understand," he said, taking a savage dip at the ink, "I'm to
make her flesh creep, and to frighten her out of her wits. I'll
do it with a vengeance!"

Reserving to myself privately an editorial right of supervision
over Morgan's contributions, I returned to my own room to begin
my share--by far the largest one--of the task before us. The
stimulus applied to my mind by my son's letter must have been a
strong one indeed, for I had hardly been more than an hour at my
desk before I found the old literary facility of my youthful
days, when I was a writer for the magazines, returning to me as
if by magic. I worked on unremittingly till dinner-time, and then
resumed the pen after we had all separated for the night. At two
o'clock the next morning I found myself--God help
me!--masquerading, as it were, in my own long-lost character of a
hard-writing young man, with the old familiar cup of strong tea
by my side, and the old familiar wet towel tied round my head.

My review of the progress I had made, when I looked back at my
pages of manuscript, yielded all the encouragement I wanted to
drive me on. It is only just, however, to add to the record of
this first day's attempt, that the literary labor which it
involved was by no means of the most trying kind. The great
strain on the intellect--the strain of invention--was spared me
by my having real characters and events ready to my hand. If I
had been called on to create, I should, in all probability, have
suffered severely by contrast with the very worst of those
unfortunate novelists whom Jessie had so rashly and so
thoughtlessly condemned. It is not wonderful that the public
should rarely know how to estimate the vast service which is done
to them by the production of a good book, seeing that they are,
for the most part, utterly ignorant of the immense difficulty of
writing even a bad one.

The next day was fine, to my great relief; and our visitor, while
we were at work, enjoyed her customary scamper on the pony, and
her customary rambles afterward in the neighborhood of the house.
Although I had interruptions to contend with on the part of Owen
and Morgan, neither of whom possessed my experience in the
production of what heavy people call "light literature," and both
of whom consequently wanted assistance, still I made great
progress, and earned my hours of repose on the evening of the
second day.

On that evening I risked the worst, and opened my negotiations
for the future with "The Queen of Hearts."

About an hour after the tea had been removed, and when I happened
to be left alone in the room with her, I noticed that she rose
suddenly and went to the writing-table. My suspicions were
aroused directly, and I entered on the dangerous subject by
inquiring if she intended to write to her aunt.

"Yes," she said. "I promised to write when the last week came. If
you had paid me the compliment of asking me to stay a little
longer, I should have returned it by telling you I was sorry to
go. As it is, I mean to be sulky and say nothing."

With those words she took up her pen to begin the letter.

"Wait a minute," I remonstrated. "I was just on the point of
begging you to stay when I spoke."

"Were you, indeed?" she returned. "I never believed in
coincidences of that sort before, but now, of course, I put the
most unlimited faith in them!"

"Will you believe in plain proofs?" I asked, adopting her humor.
"How do you think I and my brothers have been employing ourselves
all day to-day and all day yesterday? Guess what we have been
about."

"Congratulating yourselves in secret on my approaching
departure," she answered, tapping her chin saucily with the
feather-end of her pen.

I seized the opportunity of astonishing her, and forthwith told
her the truth. She started up from the table, and approached me
with the eagerness of a child, her eyes sparkling, and her cheeks
flushed.

"Do you really mean it?" she said.

I assured her that I was in earnest. She thereupon not only
expressed an interest in our undertaking, which was evidently
sincere, but, with characteristic impatience, wanted to begin the
first evening's reading on that very night. I disappointed her
sadly by explaining that we required time to prepare ourselves,
and by assuring her that we should not be ready for the next five
days. On the sixth day, I added, we should be able to begin, and
to go on, without missing an evening, for probably ten days more.

"The next five days?" she replied. "Why, that will just bring us
to the end of my six weeks' visit. I suppose you are not setting
a trap to catch me? This is not a trick of you three cunning old
gentlemen to make me stay on, is it?"

I quailed inwardly as that dangerously close guess at the truth
passed her lips.

"You forget," I said, "that the idea only occurred to me after
what you said yesterday. If it had struck me earlier, we should
have been ready earlier, and then where would your suspicions
have been?"

"I am ashamed of having felt them," she said, in her frank,
hearty way. "I retract the word 'trap,' and I beg pardon for
calling you 'three cunning old gentlemen.' But what am I to say
to my aunt?"

She moved back to the writing-table as she spoke.

"Say nothing," I replied, "till you have heard the first story.
Shut up the paper-case till that time, and then decide when you
will open it again to write to your aunt."

She hesitated and smiled. That terribly close guess of hers was
not out of her mind yet.

"I rather fancy," she said, slyly, "that the story will turn out
to be the best of the whole series."

"Wrong again," I retorted. "I have a plan for letting chance
decide which of the stories the first one shall be. They shall be
all numbered as they are done; corresponding numbers shall be
written inside folded pieces of card and well mixed together; you
shall pick out any one card you like; you shall declare the
number written within; and, good or bad, the story that answers
to that number shall be the story that is read. Is that fair?"

"Fair!" she exclaimed; "it's better than fair; it makes _me_ of
some importance; and I must be more or less than woman not to
appreciate that."

"Then you consent to wait patiently for the next five days?"

"As patiently as I can."

"And you engage to decide nothing about writing to your aunt
until you have heard the first story?"

"I do," she said, returning to the writing-table. "Behold the
proof of it." She raised her hand with theatrical solemnity, and
closed the paper-case with an impressive bang.

I leaned back in my chair with my mind at ease for the first time
since the receipt of my son's letter.

"Only let George return by the first of November," I thought to
myself, "and all the aunts in Christendom shall not prevent
Jessie Yelverton from being here to meet him."

THE TEN DAYS.

THE FIRST DAY.

SHOWERY and unsettled. In spite of the weather, Jessie put on my
Mackintosh cloak and rode off over the hills to one of Owen's
outlying farms. She was already too impatient to wait quietly for
the evening's reading in the house, or to enjoy any amusement
less exhilarating than a gallop in the open air.

I was, on my side, as anxious and as uneasy as our guest. Now
that the six weeks of her stay had expired--now that the day had
really arrived, on the evening of which the first story was to be
read, I began to calculate the chances of failure as well as the
chances of success. What if my own estimate of the interest of
the stories turned out to be a false one? What if some unforeseen
accident occurred to delay my son's return beyond ten days?

The arrival of the newspaper had already become an event of the
deepest importance to me. Unreasonable as it was to expect any
tidings of George at so early a date, I began, nevertheless, on
this first of our days of suspense, to look for the name of his
ship in the columns of telegraphic news. The mere mechanical act
of looking was some relief to my overstrained feelings, although
I might have known, and did know, that the search, for the
present, could lead to no satisfactory result.

Toward noon I shut myself up with my collection of manuscripts to
revise them for the last time. Our exertions had thus far
produced but six of the necessary ten stories. As they were only,
however, to be read, one by one, on six successive evenings, and
as we could therefore count on plenty of leisure in the daytime,
I was in no fear of our failing to finish the little series.

Of the six completed stories I had written two, and had found a
third in the form of a collection of letters among my papers.
Morgan had only written one, and this solitary contribution of
his had given me more trouble than both my own put together, in
consequence of the perpetual intrusion of my brother's
eccentricities in every part of his narrative. The process of
removing these quaint turns and frisks of Morgan's humor--which,
however amusing they might have been in an essay, were utterly
out of place in a story appealing to suspended interest for its
effect--certainly tried my patience and my critical faculty (such
as it is) more severely than any other part of our literary
enterprise which had fallen my share.

Owen's investigations among his papers had supplied us with the
two remaining narratives. One was contained in a letter, and the
other in the form of a diary, and both had been received by him
directly from the writers. Besides these contributions, he had
undertaken to help us by some work of his own, and had been
engaged for the last four days in molding certain events which
had happened within his personal knowledge into the form of a
story. His extreme fastidiousness as a writer interfered,
however, so seriously with his progress that he was still sadly
behindhand, and was likely, though less heavily burdened than
Morgan or myself, to be the last to complete his allotted task.

Such was our position, and such the resources at our command,
when the first of the Ten Days dawned upon us. Shortly after four
in the afternoon I completed my work of revision, numbered the
manuscripts from one to six exactly as they happened to lie under
my hand, and inclosed them all in a portfolio, covered with
purple morocco, which became known from that time by the imposing
title of The Purple Volume.

Miss Jessie returned from her expedition just as I was tying the
strings of the portfolio, and, womanlike, instantly asked leave
to peep inside, which favor I, manlike, positively declined to
grant.

As soon as dinner was over our guest retired to array herself in
magnificent evening costume. It had been arranged that the
readings were to take place in her own sitting-room; and she was
so enthusiastically desirous to do honor to the occasion, that
she regretted not having brought with her from London the dress
in which she had been presented at court the year before, and not
having borrowed certain materials for additional splendor which
she briefly described as "aunt's diamonds."

Toward eight o'clock we assembled in the sitting-room, and a
strangely assorted company we were. At the head of the table,
radiant in silk and jewelry, flowers and furbelows, sat The Queen
of Hearts, looking so handsome and so happy that I secretly
congratulated my absent son on the excellent taste he had shown
in falling in love with her. Round this bright young creature
(Owen, at the foot of the table, and Morgan and I on either side)
sat her three wrinkled, gray-headed, dingily-attired hosts, and
just behind her, in still more inappropriate companionship,
towered the spectral figure of the man in armor, which had so
unaccountably attracted her on her arrival. This strange scene
was lighted up by candles in high and heavy brass sconces. Before
Jessie stood a mighty china punch-bowl of the olden time,
containing the folded pieces of card, inside which were written
the numbers to be drawn, and before Owen reposed the Purple
Volume from which one of us was to read. The walls of the room
were hung all round with faded tapestry; the clumsy furniture was
black with age; and, in spite of the light from the sconces, the
lofty ceiling was almost lost in gloom. If Rembrandt could have
painted our background, Reynolds our guest, and Hogarth
ourselves, the picture of the scene would have been complete.

When the old clock over the tower gateway had chimed eight, I
rose to inaugurate the proceedings by requesting Jessie to take
one of the pieces of card out of the punch-bowl, and to declare
the number.

She laughed; then suddenly became frightened and serious; then
looked at me, and said, "It was dreadfully like business;" and
then entreated Morgan not to stare at her, or, in the present
state of her nerves, she should upset the punch-bowl. At last she
summoned resolution enough to take out one of the pieces of card
and to unfold it.

"Declare the number, my dear," said Owen.

"Number Four," answered Jessie, making a magnificent courtesy,
and beginning to look like herself again.

Owen opened the Purple Volume, searched through the manuscripts,
and suddenly changed color. The cause of his discomposure was
soon explained. Malicious fate had assigned to the most diffident
individual in the company the trying responsibility of leading
the way. Number Four was one of the two narratives which Owen had
found among his own papers.

"I am almost sorry," began my eldest brother, confusedly, "that
it has fallen to my turn to read first. I hardly know which I
distrust most, myself or my story."

"Try and fancy you are in the pulpit again," said Morgan,
sarcastically. "Gentlemen of your cloth, Owen, seldom seem to
distrust themselves or their manuscripts when they get into that
position."

"The fact is," continued Owen, mildly impenetrable to his
brother's cynical remark, "that the little thing I am going to
try and read is hardly a story at all. I am afraid it is only an
anecdote. I became possessed of the letter which contains my
narrative under these circumstances. At the time when I was a
clergyman in London, my church was attended for some months by a
lady who was the wife of a large farmer in the country. She had
been obliged to come to town, and to remain there for the sake of
one of her children, a little boy, who required the best medical
advice."

At the words "medical advice" Morgan shook his head and growled
to himself contemptuously. Owen went on:

"While she was attending in this way to one child, his share in
her love was unexpectedly disputed by another, who came into the
world rather before his time. I baptized the baby, and was asked
to the little christening party afterward. This was my first
introduction to the lady, and I was very favorably impressed by
her; not so much on account of her personal appearance, for she
was but a little wo man and had no pretensions to beauty, as on
account of a certain simplicity, and hearty, downright kindness
in her manner, as well as of an excellent frankness and good
sense in her conversation. One of the guests present, who saw how
she had interested me, and who spoke of her in the highest terms,
surprised me by inquiring if I should ever have supposed that
quiet, good-humored little woman to be capable of performing an
act of courage which would have tried the nerves of the boldest
man in England? I naturally enough begged for an explanation; but
my neighbor at the table only smiled and said, 'If you can find
an opportunity, ask her what happened at The Black Cottage, and
you will hear something that will astonish you.' I acted on the
hint as soon as I had an opportunity of speaking to her
privately. The lady answered that it was too long a story to tell
then, and explained, on my suggesting that she should relate it
on some future day, that she was about to start for her country
home the next morning. 'But,' she was good enough to add, 'as I
have been under great obligations to you for many Sundays past,
and as you seem interested in this matter, I will employ my first
leisure time after my return in telling you by writing, instead
of by word of mouth, what really happened to me on one memorable
night of my life in The Black Cottage.'

"She faithfully performed her promise. In a fortnight afterward I
received from her the narrative which I am now about to read."

BROTHER OWEN'S STORY

OF

THE SIEGE OF THE BLACK COTTAGE.

To begin at the beginning, I must take you back to the time after
my mother's death, when my only brother had gone to sea, when my
sister was out at service, and when I lived alone with my father
in the midst of a moor in the west of England.

The moor was covered with great limestone rocks, and intersected
here and there by streamlets. The nearest habitation to ours was
situated about a mile and a half off, where a strip of the
fertile land stretched out into the waste like a tongue. Here the
outbuildings of the great Moor Farm, then in the possession of my
husband's father, began. The farm-lands stretched down gently
into a beautiful rich valley, lying nicely sheltered by the high
platform of the moor. When the ground began to rise again, miles
and miles away, it led up to a country house called Holme Manor,
belonging to a gentleman named Knifton. Mr. Knifton had lately
married a young lady whom my mother had nursed, and whose
kindness and friendship for me, her foster-sister, I shall
remember gratefully to the last day of my life. These and other
slight particulars it is necessary to my story that I should tell
you, and it is also necessary that you should be especially
careful to bear them well in mind.

My father was by trade a stone-mason. His cottage stood a mile
and a half from the nearest habitation. In all other directions
we were four or five times that distance from neighbors. Being
very poor people, this lonely situation had one great attraction
for us--we lived rent free on it. In addition to that advantage,
the stones, by shaping which my father gained his livelihood, lay
all about him at his very door, so that he thought his position,
solitary as it was, quite an enviable one. I can hardly say that
I agreed with him, though I never complained. I was very fond of
my father, and managed to make the best of my loneliness with the
thought of being useful to him. Mrs. Knifton wished to take me
into her service when she married, but I declined, unwillingly
enough, for my father's sake. If I had gone away, he would have
had nobody to live with him; and my mother made me promise on her
death-bed that he should never be left to pine away alone in the
midst of the bleak moor.

Our cottage, small as it was, was stoutly and snugly built, with
stone from the moor as a matter of course. The walls were lined
inside and fenced outside with wood, the gift of Mr. Knifton's
father to my father. This double covering of cracks and crevices,
which would have been superfluous in a sheltered position, was
absolutely necessary, in our exposed situation, to keep out the
cold winds which, excepting just the summer months, swept over us
continually all the year round. The outside boards, covering our
roughly-built stone walls, my father protected against the wet
with pitch and tar. This gave to our little abode a curiously
dark, dingy look, especially when it was seen from a distance;
and so it had come to be called in the neighborhood, even before
I was born, The Black Cottage.

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