Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 4 (1925-04).djvu/74

Rh events of the year covered by her married life. I shall put it into a few words just at this point in my narrative.

Quite without the slightest attempt at concealment, she told me that she and Owen Edwardes had come close to having had an understanding, but that what she had learned of her employer's work had decided her that so long as Howard Differdale needed her, it would be her joy as well as her duty to work beside him. She had given Owen to understand this, delicately, as a woman can.

And then Mrs. Differdale had written her son a venomous note, quite as wicked as only so-called good, religious people could have made it. Mr. Differdale had quietly put the matter before my niece. As between his work and any personal inclinations, his work stood first, he told her. He needed her presence in his experiments; he felt the necessity of her aid in his work. But he would not take advantage of her interest, her good heart, at the expense of her reputation. When she indignantly declared that she would remain because she believed his work the most important thing that had come into her life, he asked her to permit him to give her his name.

"I married him, Auntie, but our marriage was nothing more than a wall of protection that we put up between our work and the malicious tongues of people in Meadowlawn. Mr. Differdale never made the slightest claim upon me as a husband. You see, Auntie, in order to be of assistance to him, I had to remain a maid; only a virgin can help in such experiments as he was carrying on."

As can well be imagined, I was interested by this simple statement of a rather astonishing situation. I inquired, tentatively, about the nature of this work to which Portia now referred as "ours" instead of "his". She tried to explain it, I could see, in some general fashion, but I found myself in such a daze after her explanation that I gave up trying to understand it, quite in despair.

I did glean, however, that Mr. Differdale was what she called "an initiate"; that he had gone deeply into occultism and the practise of magic; that he had actually performed incantations to call spirits into materialization, out in that great courtyard where I had seen mystical hieroglyphics cut into the stone. I learned, too, that he had come to his death because in over-excitement he had forgotten for a single moment that he must never overstep the limits of a circle within which he performed his spells. One night, my niece told me with perfect gravity, he had gone outside that circle, and Portia, standing beside him, had seen the results of the terrible blows which he must have received from invisible hands. (The newspapers had it that he had fallen from a window during a sudden attack of dizziness.)

The whole matter was so weird, so unbelievable, that my tired brain almost refused to accept it; I found myself wondering if my niece's brain had not been turned. But I was astonished at my own mental attitude when I discovered that in my new and strange surroundings I was deliberately trying to digest Portia's tale as gospel truth, taking it at her valuation. When I went with her after dinner into the great library and handled some of the curious old books, many in Latin and other foreign languages, and noted their queer titles, I began to swallow her story in great gulps, explaining away the difficult parts as things that I might not understand at the moment but should shortly be in a position to clear up for my logical, disbelieving mind.

following morning I suggested to Portia that she let me do the marketing, which she or Fu Sing had