Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 19.djvu/654

 among the skeleton rafters, or in a forgotten drawer, or in a heap of rubbish, she could not tell; but somewhere there was something which she was to find, and which, once found, was to be her talisman. She was in the midst of this eager search when she awoke.

The impression was left so strongly on her mind that, with all her fears, she could not resist the desire to make an effort to find what meaning there was in this frightfully real dream. Her courage came back as her senses assured her that all around her was natural, as when she left it. She determined to follow the lead of the strange hint her nightmare had given her.

In one of the upper chambers of the old mansion there stood a tall, upright desk of the ancient pattern, with folding doors above and large drawers below. "That desk is yours, Myrtle," her uncle Malachi had once said to her; "and there is a trick or two about it that it will pay you to study." Many a time Myrtle had puzzled herself about the mystery of the old desk. All the little drawers, of which there were a considerable number, she had pulled out, and every crevice, as she thought, she had carefully examined. She determined to make one more trial. It was the dead of the night, and a fearful old place to be wandering about; but she was possessed with an urgent feeling which would not let her wait until daylight.

She stole like a ghost from her chamber. She glided along the narrow entries as she had seemed to move in her dream. She opened the folding doors of the great upright desk. She had always before examined it by daylight, and though she had so often pulled all the little drawers out, she had never thoroughly explored the recesses which received them. But in her new-born passion of search, she held her light so as to illuminate all these deeper spaces. At once she thought she saw the marks of pressure with a finger. She pressed her own finger on this place, and, as it yielded with a slight click, a small mahogany pilaster sprang forward, revealing its well-kept secret that it was the mask of a tall, deep, very narrow drawer. There was something heavy in it, and, as Myrtle turned it over, a golden bracelet fell into her hand. She recognized it at once as that which had been long ago the ornament of the fair woman whose portrait hung in her chamber. She clasped it upon her wrist, and from that moment she felt as if she were the captive of the lovely phantom who had been with her in her dream.

"The old man walked last night, God save us!" said Kitty Fagan to Biddy Finnegan, the day after Myrtle's nightmare and her curious discovery.

CHAPTER XVI.

It seems probable enough that Myrtle's whole spiritual adventure was an unconscious dramatization of a few simple facts which her imagination tangled together into a kind of vital coherence. The philosopher who goes to the bottom of things will remark that all the elements of her fantastic melodrama had been furnished her while waking. Master Byles Gridley's penetrating and stinging caution was the text, and the grotesque carvings and the portraits furnished the "properties" with which her own mind had wrought up this scenic show.

The philosopher who goes to the bottom of things might not find it so easy to account for the change which came over Myrtle Hazard from the hour when she clasped the bracelet of Judith Pride upon her wrist. She felt a sudden loathing of the man whom she had idealized as a saint. A young girl's caprice? Possibly. A return of the natural instincts of girlhood with returning health? Perhaps so. An impression produced by her dream? An effect of an influx from another sphere of being? The working of Master Byles Gridley's emphatic warning? The magic of her new talisman?

We may safely leave these questions