The Skeleton in My Closet

IN the summer of 1861 I was obliged to ask the society over which I was settled to give me an extended leave of absence. My health was impaired; my wife, who had already begun to exhibit signs of lunacy, had been taken, by the positive command of our family physician, to the Asylum in Lenox; and with my three children and my housekeeper I retired to the quiet inland village of Harkshire. Here we remained till the later autumn. We saw the apples grow ripe and fall, the leaves put on their glory of red and orange; and in early October we woke one morning to see the delicate snowflakes, half timid in their coming, sifting through the air, and weaving their slight traces on the bared limbs and on the tops of the stiffening furrows.

The kind-hearted farmer and his wife, who sacrificed for us the best part of their roomy house, had assigned to me, for a sort of study, the large parlor on the lower floor, which had windows in front, a long French window at the end leading directly upon the piazza, and on the interior side a huge fireplace, in which, as the days grew more chilly, the great rockmaple back-log was set ablaze, — the very soul of cheer, — and round which the whole household gathered at nightfall, to the great delight of the children, and sang and read and talked the evening through. I slept in the room above; in the adjoining chamber were my two boys, and in the little apartment across the hall were the housekeeper and my little girl, then only a year old.

I recall with a curious minuteness the details of one night. At sundown a heavy wind had come, laden with rain, beating violently against the windows and making the house tremble with its gusts. We had retired early, and I had stayed for a while with my little boys after they had gone to bed, quieting the nervousness which the storm occasioned them by sitting on their bedside and telling them cheery stories. Then, when they had said their prayers, which began eagerly but grew drowsy towards the close, I kissed them at parting, and as I left them heard their sweet childish “ Good-night, papa.”

I am not a nervous man, but the moment I entered my room I became conscious of a feeling, not so much of fear or of apprehension, as of annoying uneasiness. It was not the storm that howled outside and tore at my window and shrieked at every crevice but it came from within, from the infusion into the atmosphere of my chamber of something foreign, something weird and unnatural. Ashamed of my weakness, I yet could not help opening the door of the closet, though nothing rewarded my gaze but an innocent linen duster; and I even instinctively looked over my shoulder as if I expected to meet the face or hand of some one stealing cautiously upon me.

It is a usual, though anything but a laudable, habit of mine after getting into bed to read for a time. I put my candle on the table at the head-board and choose some light and easily digestible work. I fancy that in that way I am sooner disposed to sleep; that the quiet concentration of my thoughts and eyes upon the page withdraws my mind from the cares of the day, allays whatever of nervous friction its labors have created, and induces slumber so that anon, the lids growing heavy, I have just consciousness enough left to blow out my light and go off like a child to unbroken sleep.

On the night in question I retired and began to read as usual. But the feeling of uneasiness did not pass away. It was almost impossible to fix my mind upon the page before me. I became conscious that there were sounds other than those arising from the storm, which came from the parlor underneath my room and from that part of it where the French windows opened upon the piazza. And yet these sounds were so indistinct, so vague, that my better reason told me they were the freaks of an excited fancy. Again I sought to concentrate my attention on my book. I resolutely fixed my eyes upon the printed page. I exerted my will, my common sense, and every sound faculty of my mind, to throw off the delusions of an imagination, distorted perhaps by nothing more than a cup of tea a little stronger than usual, and to induce that composure which precedes slumber. My efforts were not entirely in vain. Gradually I found the lines before me losing their steadiness and beginning to waver and grow confused, and then, as my eyes closed, fade out altogether. Taught by long experience, I knew that sleep had come and was already hovering over me with its blessed wings, and I laid down my book and blew out the candle. Then came that half minute which always seems indefinitely long, in which there glide over the senses those exquisite and delicious pictures of lovely landscapes, of beautiful groups, like the sweetest panorama of an opium-eater’s dream, and I slept.

I know I slept, for I awoke — awoke, I know, beyond all question — before I had reached the profounder deeps of sleep; and awoke because I felt, as distinctly as I now feel the pen in my fingers, the pressure of a hand upon my forehead. There was no illusion. It was not a freak of the imagination; it is the vivid, accurate, simple fact, which I do not fancy indistinctly, but recall with the nicety of actual observation and perception. I recall not the vague idea of something touching me, but the very feel and quality of the hand, of the soft, delicate hand of a woman, its fingers small but full, the ring upon one of them distinguishing it from the rest. I recall the very degree of tenderness with which it first was laid on nay left temple, and then slowly and soothingly drawn, as a mother soothes her child, across my forehead. So natural and so pleasant was it that at waking I was not startled, and not till I was fully roused did I rise from my pillow and ask aloud, “ Who is it! ” Nor was it till I had spoken and no answer came back to me save the blessed breathing of my children in the next room, that I saw that my candle was burning. I had blown it out. There can be no mistake. I had not gone asleep while reading, for there was my book, on the table where I had laid it; and the candlestick, instead of being within arm’s length of my pillow where I had read by it, was now removed to a corner of the table so remote that I could not reach it.

I was up in a moment, but I was alone. Hastily dressing myself, I passed into the next apartment, and there lay the two boys fast asleep and undisturbed. As I held the light above them, it fell on their cheeks, and on their heavy lids which trembled under the glare. The warmth of their sleep made their faces rosy, and moistened their curling tangles of hair, and they stirred and murmured in their dreams. Going out and closing the door behind me, I softly tried that of the chamber in which the babe was sleeping with the nurse, but as it yielded to my touch, the sonorous nasal music of the good woman’s slumber made it certain that it was not from that direction that my visitation had come.

For the first time a feeling of terror crept over me, — that animal instinct of fear which is a part of the brutal side of our nature, and which comes upon the bravest of us when, in darkness or in solitude, some phenomenon occurs, unaccountable, arising from no known cause, as if the supernatural had projected the dark shadow of its eclipse over the ordinary orbit of our lives, and we are at a loss where to look or what to apprehend. We know, but how rarely do we realize, what creatures of habit and routine we are, and that the slightest disturbance of the usual order, the first approach of that for which the common range of circumstance does not account, terrifies us like the unreasoning brutes that tremble at the roar of the harmless thunder!

I fluttered so that the light shook in my hand. The sweat stood in cold drops on my forehead. I would have given the world to shout aloud, to awake the inmates of the house, to see the face or hear the voice of a human being; and yet, in the midst of my fear, a sense of shame restrained me. To what could I point? What could I tell but the seeming idle dream of a sleeper ?

Thank God, the storm at least was abroad. Had it been utterly silent as I stood in that entry at the head of the stairway, scarce daring to turn my head, I believe I should have fallen or gone insane; but the very rage of the elements gave me courage; and with its wild and boisterous sympathy linked me with the world of life and motion. As I listened, I again heard the same indistinct sounds that had struck me when I first retired.

Waiting no longer, I hastily descended the stairs and opened the study door. It seems to me now that I had by that time nerved myself into a state of forced composure, and that I acted with the coolness that comes from perfect possession of all the faculties. I sincerely believe that such was the fact. Terror, alarm, surprise, operate on the mind only like all other great and sudden emotions. They stun it for a moment, but the reaction, in a well-balanced and disciplined nature, is always to the best capabilities of the soul; and the danger or the occasion is then met with the very concentration of human might, and the man is stirred with the strength of a thousand heroes.

There was probably in my very touch the nervous spring of the intensity that possessed me, for I threw back the door, not merely sufficiently far to enable me to enter, but wide ajar, so that it swung violently on its hinges; but I did not recall till afterwards that, instead of remaining back against the wall, it rebounded from it and swung to again, till it stood at right angles with the threshold and hid from view, as I passed in, any object that might have been concealed behind it.

When we retired, the front of the great back-log had already crumbled into coals, and these again faded into ashes; little jets of flame had shot up fitfully from its unburned ends to bid us their dying good-night, and the farmer had raked the cinders over it to keep it smouldering till daybreak. It was now all ablaze; the flames curled in licking spirals round it and lighted the room with a weird brilliancy, gleaming on the polish of the furniture and on the face of the mirror, and throwing upon the walls and ceiling fantastic shadows that danced and leaped at me as I came in. Of the chairs which had been, according to invariable rule, moved far back from reach of any possible spark, one was drawn forward and stood close to the hearth, suggesting beyond all doubt that its occupant had sought the warmth of the fireplace and re-aroused its blaze. How keen and minute is every observation in such a state of the faculties as I have just described! God only knows what I felt or feared at that moment; and yet, as if there had been nothing else in the universe, I remember that I noted a neglected apple lying between the andirons, and measured with my eye just the richness of the shining black into which one side of it had been roasted by the fire.

Of course, I saw no one, but you might as well have told me that I do not live as that I was alone. Alone! Why, the room was full of the consciousness of the presence of a human soul, and I felt its touch upon mine, its approach and communication tingling in every sense, more keenly than if the subtle sympathy had been broken by any means of converse so discordant and gross as the utterance of a voice or the contact of a hand.

I lifted my candle. Its feeble light, overpowered by the glare of the fire, only cast faint shadows of the chairs and table into the corners of the parlor. Another moment, and in the surge of the storm, a sudden draft from the French window blew it out, and sent the blaze of the back-log roaring up the chimney. Remembering the sounds I had heard, I approached the window I have named. As I neared it I saw that it was unbolted and that, though closed, it was not entirely so, nor latched. I was reaching towards it with my hand, when again, with redoubled force, came the very demon of the tempest dashing its volley of rain and hail against the panes like grape-shot from the cannon’s mouth, and then with one irresistible assault forcing the folded sashes in against my face, staggering me with the blast and drenching me with the storm. At the same moment, whether by force of the draft or from whatever other cause, the parlor door, at which I had entered and to which I had turned my back, closed with a sharp concussion.

In the lull that followed it was only the work of a moment to close the French window and secure the bolt. It was evident that some one had entered the house, and that my senses had not deceived me.

I became a ware, too, that the consciousness of human presence had left me since the shutting of the parlor door, and now I remembered that I had not looked behind it. From that moment all feeling of personal danger fled, and there came in its place a sense of sudden anxiety for the dear ones in the room overhead. Stooping, I lighted my candle at the fire, and, even in the half second of time that then elapsed, my mind ran accurately through the process of reasoning which told me that neither robbery, nor desire of plunder, nor personal harm to me, was the motive of the intruder, who had had every opportunity to accomplish any such purpose, but that something more terrible impended, and that my babes were in danger. And yet I had not even heard a footfall or a breath.

I ran upstairs. On the landing, the housekeeper’s door, which I had carefully closed, was wide open. The rays of ray lifted candle fell on her face. She was still fast asleep. Bud the babe was gone.

What was it that even in that moment of agony told me how idle it was to rouse her and ask what had become of the child ? I ran from the room. I leaped across the landing. The door of the chamber in which the little boys slept, and which I had left open, was shut. I lightly and swiftly opened it and entered the room.

Not a moment too soon. Let me not indulge in any words of dramatic coloring to heighten the effect of the terrible scene that burst upon me. Let me tell it as simply as I can.

The babe lay asleep at the foot of the bed. In it lay my darling boys just as when I had last bent over them such a little while before. But beside the pillow stood my wife, their mother, her hair falling down her shoulders, her face as soft and tender and motherful as ever God made, one hand with its palm laid on the forehead of the oldest child, in exactly the same position in which I had felt the hand on mine, and in the very act of being drawn soothingly along; while in the other, grasped and swayed in an uncertain and purposeless tremor, was uplifted, not the delicate, glittering poniard of the assassin (strange I should have noted such distinctions at such a crisis), but a horrid, coarse, brutal knife, stolen from the butcher’s block, and dull and muddy with its homely use. At the same time, as if the accompaniments of an incantation scene had by some demoniac spirit been added to heighten the horror, the air was full of the bitter pungency of burning; and wreaths of smoke were beginning to rise and curl around that awful group. The light valance of the bed was on fire, and in its glare I saw the half-burnt match that had lighted it, lying on the floor.

All this and more I saw, but I must have seen it in a moment no longer than the lightning’s flash, for in the next the eyes that looked softly on the child flamed at me with a look so wild, so fierce, so brutal, so fiendish, that I shrieked at the top of my voice, in the very ecstasy of agony. The hand that lay so gently on the boy’s forehead was twisted in his curls with the rapidity with which the serpent darts its venom, and with a violence that tore the cheruby head from the pillow bolt upright. The arm that held the knife grew rigid as a bar of steel.

I knew that the safety of my children depended on diverting the attention of my crazy wife upon myself. Perhaps it was with this motive that I had repeated the shriek and now shouted her name aloud. Still uttering her name, and, with all the mesmeric power I could exert, fixing her gaze on mine, though I almost quailed beneath it, I moved cautiously towards her. Not a muscle moved in her whole frame. But for the cruel gaze and stony murderous ferocity that had hardened her face into something more brutal than that of the most abandoned criminal, she seemed like some sculptor’s dream of statuesque and majestic grace and beauty.

I had outstretched my hand. I had given it the disguise of kindly greeting. It was now just in reach of her wrist, which I hoped to grasp with an iron wrench. I might as well have attempted to deceive the arch fiend himself. Quicker than lightning the arm flew up; for the first time her lips opened, and with a yell of rage she fairly leaped upon me. I caught the dull gleam of the blade parting the air, I felt the blunt, painful thud and sting of the stroke, and saw her terrible face, as it flamed at me, sprinkled with the blood that spouted from my veins.

I remember the struggle, as if I was torn by the violence of a tiger, the deadly grasp, the stifling smoke, the startled faces of the little ones, their shrill cries, the feeling of swoon, in which all things swam, though through it all I never lost the desperate purpose to save my children, though I died. I remember the sense of falling, the sound of footsteps on the stairs, of voices entering the room, the terrible glare, always over me, of those implacable eyes, stony with hate and murder, and I remember nothing more.