Motion Picture Magazine, July 1914 (1914)

46 MOTION PICTURE MAGAZINE between his clenched fingers brought him, cursing, to leaden, unsure feet. Swaying and blinded by the pain, he crept along the damp hallway to a thread of light below a door, ajar. The desiccated matting complicated his steps; the wall, where in groping he brushed it, was stained sinisterly. In the doorway of his brother's room he paused. Was that crouching figure, terror-shaken, guilt-ridden in every craven line, his brother John, with a revolver in his hand? A quiet came over the wounded man, more evil and threatening than speech. "In ten years he will be a raving maniac—or sooner," he thought, with satisfaction. "He must stay here— he would not dare carry the gold away if he knows I am alive and watchful. He cannot spend it, nor hide it, nor enjoy it. And then " In the morning "Wilks, palsied with fright, brought to John a note smeared with bloody finger-prints, which he had found pinned to the gate. Before the lawyer could tear the paper into senseless bits, the butler had read the four words it con- tained and turned away with chilling veins. So the old house was to know more tragedy, then. For the note had read simply: "Beware. I shall return." "Poor little Miss Ruth!" groaned the old man, wretchedly. "Lord spare me for her sake till the end o' all this darkness has come." Perhaps the angels heard and heeded. For the days and months widened to years, and "Wilks grew more infirm and feeble, but he did not die. Ruth unfolded to a blossom-girl, all fragile pink-and-whiteness and soft curves and haloed hair. The village youths stared at her wistfully, but kept a distance, awed by the sinister tales of her ancestry and the contradiction of her lovely, innocent face. She was a regal, hot-house rose in a rank garden of leprous growth and rotting fungi, begging mutely for transplanting to a healthier soil. Philip Lane, a young doctor, on a visit to his aunt in the village, found his eyes upon the girl as she drooped above her hymn-book, on his first Sunday in church; a physician's eye at first, that noted the exquisite moulding of her, the pallor shading off from her cheek to the delicate temples and the timid wistfulness of the young, blue eyes. An aged man was with her who met the stranger's appraising stare resentfully, like a toothless, senile old watch-dog. The next day something more than medi- cal curiosity prompted him to ask the village fathers, gathered for conver- sational purposes in the village inn, something of the history of the girl. As he spoke her name, a bearded stranger, drinking off a glass of ale at the bar, turned, listening. "Yep, lives in that rotten, old, gray house on the hill," related the authorities, with relish. "It's a crazy old shack, just holding together like the folks in it, all 'cept th' gal. John Collins lives thar—uster be a lawyer here in th' town, but when ol' man Gresham died, he made him 'n' his brother guardeen o' th' gal, an' th' brother skipped out. Say, you'd orter see th' old fellow! Crazy as a loon! They say he's got a mint o' money hid som'ers " "Liars! You're a pack of liars!" shrilled a high voice behind them. A tottering, bowed, shrunken figure stood in the doorway, shaking a shriveled fist above his white head. The face was terrible to see, with its white, seamed glare of greed. He swayed, weak with senile rage. "I've not a cent there—not one—liars— thieves " Frothing at the mouth, he fell to the floor. Philip knelt at his side, probing skillfully. "He must be taken home," he said authoritatively. "Where does he live " "In the house o' darkness yender," was the awed reply. "That's John Collins, or the corpse o' him." Very near a corpse, indeed, he was as he lay in the hollow of the four- poster, an hour later. "I think," said Philip, when, finally, he left the sick-room and descended the stairs to the tattered gorgeousness of the drawing-room,