The House in the Mist

by Anna Katharine Green

I should have kept my eyes for the many brilliant and interesting sights constantly offered me. I might have done so, had I been ever eighteen, or had I not come from the country.

I was visiting in a house where fashionable people made life a perpetual holiday. Yet of all the pleasures which followed so rapidly, one upon another, the greatest was the hour I spent in my window after the day's dissipations were all over, watching a man's face, bending night after night over a study-table in the lower room of the great house in our rear.

Why did it affect me so? It was not a young face, but it was very handsome, and it was enigmatic.

The day following my arrival in the city I had noticed the large house in our rear, and had asked some questions about it. It had a peculiarly secluded and secretive look. The windows were all shuttered and closed, with the exception of the three on the lower floor and two others directly over these. On the top story they were even boarded up, giving to that portion of the house a blank and desolate air.

The grounds were separated from the street by a brick wall in our direction; the line of separation was marked by a high iron fence, in which I saw a gate.

The Vandykes, whom I had questioned on the matter, were very short in their replies. But I learned this much. That the house belonged to one of New York's oldest families. That its present owner was a widow of great eccentricity of character, who, with her one child, a daughter, unfortunately blind from birth, had taken up her abode in some foreign country, where she thought her child's affliction would attract less attention than in her native city.

The house had been closed to the extent I have mentioned, immediately upon her departure, but had not been left entirely empty. Mr. Allison, her man of business, had moved into it, and, being fully as eccentric as herself, had contented himself for five years with a solitary life in this dismal mansion, without friends, almost without acquaintances, though he might have had unlimited society and any amount of attention, his personal attractions being of a very uncommon order, and his talent for business so pronounced, that he was already recognized at thirty-five as one of the men to be afraid of in Wall Street. Of his birth and connections little was known; he was called the Hermit of —— Street.

I was not very well one day, and I had been left alone in the house.

At seven o'clock—how well I remember the hour!—I was sitting in my window, waiting for the return of the Vandykes, and watching the face which had now appeared at its usual place in the study. Suddenly my attention was drawn from him to a window in the story over his head, by the rapid blowing in and out of a curtain. As there was a lighted gas-jet near by, I watched the gyrating muslin with apprehension, and was shocked when, in another moment, I saw the flimsy folds give one wild flap and flare up into a dangerous flame.

I dashed out of my room down-stairs, calling for the servants. But Lucy was in the front area and Ellen above, and I was on the back porch and in the garden before either of them responded.