Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 2 (1925-02).djvu/84



IRST let me verbally paint the picture, create mentally, if I may, the atmosphere of the room in Edwin Salen's home.

It was large—surprizingly large for a bedroom—so large that there was almost a hint of the feudal about it—so large that the corners were shrouded in the velvet of shadows, slinking along its walls in impalpable nebulæ of gloom.

Not that it was gloomy—it was ordinarily light, airy, a work of interior decorative art, as exquisite in its settings as the chamber of some magnificent, rosily lined casket constructed for the keeping of a rare and priceless gem—as indeed one may presume it was in Salen's mind.

That Salen had married late in life was due to the vague wanderlust that had kept him a virtual expatriate for years, had sent him prowling into the strange places of the earth, foot-loose and alone.

Yet, when he returned at length to his native shores and met the major passion of his life, he knew it, and he had prepared his house for her reception, making the heart of all its many beauties this room.

There was a touch of his other years about it, a subtle blending of oriental and occidental things. It showed in the long, many-paned French windows, in effect not unlike the native houses of Nippon, with their smoothly sliding screens; in the paneling of the walls with silken fabrics in softly harmonious tones, many of them indeed works of oriental artistry, such as may be found in the shoji of some shozoku—the dwelling of some patrician of Japan—things exquisitely painted or embroidered, with sprays of plum and cherry blossom, gorgeous in their glowing beauty, yet as delicate as the impress left on the tissue of a brain by some half-remembered dream.

It was furnished in a gray wood, as soothing to the eye, as soft in its clear grain, as the silk of the decorative panels: bed, dressing table, chairs, a chest of drawers. And the rug on the floor was rose—a thing the color of morning, or the heart of a delicate sea shell.

Such is the background of the picture, to be washed over by a half veil of shadow, before the foreground is drawn.

Those shadows must lurk in the corners deeply, must creep out toward the rays of a single half-screened light, close by the bed, in which is a woman's form. She is a blond, with a certain beauty that, as one can feel at a glance, is in harmony with the appointments of the room.

Two other figures now, and the picture is done.

First, that of a second woman, white-clad, with a hint of crisp stiff-