May Agnes Fleming

A Mad Marriage

A Novel

Warsaw 2019

Contents

A MAD MARRIAGE

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

PART SECOND

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

CHAPTER XVIII

CHAPTER XIX

PART THIRD

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

CHAPTER XVIII

CHAPTER XIX

A MAD MARRIAGE

CHAPTER I

Joan Kennedy’s Story–”The House that Wouldn’t Let”

It lay down in a sort of hollow, the hillside sloping up behind, crowned with dark pine woods, shut in by four grim wooden walls, two dark windows, like scowling eyes, to be seen from the path, and was known to all as “the house that wouldn’t let.”

It stood neither on street nor high road. You left the town behind you–the queer, fortified, Frenchified town of Quebec; you passed through St. John’s Gate, through St. John’s street-outside-the-gate, to the open country, and, a mile on, you came upon a narrow, winding path, that seemed straggling out of sight, and trying to hide itself among the dwarf cedars and spruces. Following this for a quarter of a mile, passing one or two small stone cabins, you came full upon Saltmarsh–this house that wouldn’t let.

It was an ugly place–a ramshackle place, the lonesomest place you could see, but still why it wouldn’t let was not so clear.

The rent was merely nominal. Mr. Barteaux, its owner, kept it in very good repair. There was a large vegetable garden attached, where, if you were of an agricultural turn, you might have made your rent twice over. There was game in the woods; trout in the ice-cold brooks; but noventurous sportsman took up his abode at Saltmarsh. It wasn’t even haunted; it looked rather like that sort of thing, but nobody ever went exactly so far as to affirm that it was. No ghastly corpse-lights ever glimmered from those dull upper windows, no piercing shrieks ever rent the midnight silence, no spectre lady, white and tall, ever flitted through the desolate rooms of Saltmarsh. No murder had ever been done there; no legend of any kind was connected with the place, its history was prosy and commonplace to a degree. Yet still, year in, year out, the inscription remained up over the dingy wooden gateway, this house to be let; and no tenant ever came.

“Tom Grimshaw must have been mad when he built the beastly old barn,” the present proprietor would growl; “what with taxes, and repairs, and insurance, there it stands, eating its own head off, and there it may stand, for what I see, to the crack of doom. One would think the very trees that surround it say, in their warning dreariness, as the sentinels of Helheim used in Northern mythology:

“‘Who passes here is damned.’”

If this strong language rouses your curiosity, and you asked the proprietor the history of the house, you got it terse and lucid, thus:

“Old Tom Grimshaw built it, sir. Old Tom Grimshaw was my maternal uncle, rest his soul; it is to be hoped he has more sense in the other world than he ever had in this. He was a misogynist, sir, of the rabidest sort, hating a petticoat as you and I hate the devil. Don’t know what infernal mischief the women had ever done him–plenty, no doubt; it is what they were created for. The fact remains–the sight of one had much the same effect upon him as a red scarf on a mad bull. He bought this marshy spot for a song, built that disgustingly ugly house, barricaded himself with that timber wall, and lived and died there, like Diogenes, or Robinson Crusoe, or any other old bloke you like. As heir-at-law, the old rattle-trap fell to me, and a precious legacy it has been, I can tell you. It won’t rent, and it has to be kept in repair, and I wish to Heaven old Tom Grimshaw had taken it with him, wherever he is!"

That was the history of Saltmarsh. For eight years it was to be let, and hadn’t let, and that is where the matter began and ended.

Gray, lonely, weather-beaten, so I had seen the forlorn house any time these twenty years; so this evening of which I am to write I saw it again, with the mysterious shadow of desolation brooding over it, those two upper windows frowning down–sullen eyes set in its sullen, silent face. From childhood it had had its fascination for me–it had been my Bluebeard’s castle, my dread, my delight. As I grew older, this fascinating horror grew with my growth, and at seven-and-twenty it held me with as powerful a spell as it had done at seven.

It was a cold and overcast February afternoon. An icy blast swept up from the great frozen gulf, over the heights of Quebec, over the bleak, treeless road, along which I hurried in the teeth of the wind. In the west a stormy and lurid sunset was fading out–fierce reds and brazen yellows paling into sullen gray. One long fiery lance of that wrathful sunset, slanting down the pines, struck those upper windows of Saltmarsh, and lit them into sheets of copper gold.

I was in a hurry–I was the bearer of ill news–and ill news travels apace. It was bitterly cold, as I have said, and snow was falling. I had still half a mile of lonesome high road to travel, and night was at hand; but the spell of Saltmarsh, that had never failed to hold me yet, held me again. I stood still and looked at it; at those two red cyclopean eyes, those black stacks of chimneys, its whole forbidding, scowling front.

“It is like a house under a curse,” I thought; “a dozen murders might be done inside those wooden walls, and no one be the wiser. Will any human being ever call Saltmarsh home again, I wonder?”

“This house is to let?”

I am not nervous as a rule, but as a soft voice spoke these words at my elbow, I jumped. I had heard no sound, yet now a woman stood at my side, on the snow-beaten path.

“I beg your pardon; I have startled you, I am afraid.I have been here for some time looking at this house. I see it is to let.”

I stepped back and looked at her, too much surprised for a moment to speak. To meet a stranger at Saltmarsh, in the twilight of a bitter February day, was a marvel indeed.

I stood and looked at her; and I thought then, as I think now, as I will think to the last day of my life, that I saw one of the most beautiful faces on which the sun ever shone.

I have said she was a woman–a girl would have been the fitter word; whatever her age might have been, she did not look a day over seventeen. She was not tall, and she was very slender; that may have given her that peculiarly childish look–I am a tall young woman, and she would not have reached my shoulder. A dress of black silk trailed the ground, a short jacket of finest seal wrapped her, a muff of seal held her hands. A hood of black velvet was on her head, and out of this rich hood her richer beauty shone upon me, a new revelation of how lovely it is possible for a woman to be. Years have come and gone since that evening, but the wonderful face that looked at me that February twilight, for the first time, is before me at this moment, as vividly as then. Two great, tawny eyes, with a certain wildness in their light, a skin of pearl, a red mouth like a child’s, a low forehead, a straight nose, a cleft chin, the gleam of small, white teeth, rise before me like a vision, and I understand how men, from the days of Samson the Strong, have lain down life and honor, and their soul’s salvation, for just such women as this. Surely a strange visitant to the house that wouldn’t let, and in the last hour of the day.

All this in a moment of time, while we stand and face each other. Then the soft voice speaks again, with a touch of impatient annoyance in its tone:

“I beg your pardon. You heard me? This house is to let?”

I point to the sign, to the legend and inscription affixed to the gate, and read it stoically aloud: “This house to be let.”

“Evidently my lady is not used to being kept waiting,” I think, “whoever she is."

“Yes, yes, I see that,” she says, still impatiently; “there is no one living in it at present, is there?”

“Madame,” I say, briefly, “no one has lived there for eight years.”

The wonderful tawny black eyes, almost orange in some lights, and whose like I have never seen but in one other face, dilate a little as they turn from me to the dead, silent house.

“Why?” she asks.

I shrugged my shoulders.

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