The House of the Whispering Pines

by Anna Katharine Green

“I am the resurrection and the life.”

Never had these consoling words sounded more solemn than when they rang above the remains of Adelaide Cumberland, in this home where she had reigned as mistress ever since her seventeenth year. The nature of the tragedy which had robbed the town of one of its most useful young women; the awful fate impending over its supposed author,—a man who had come and gone in these rooms with a spell of fascination to which many of those present had themselves succumbed—the brooding sense of illness, if not of impending death, in the room above; gave to these services a peculiar poignancy which in some breasts of greater susceptibility than the rest, took the form of a vague expectancy bordering on terror.

Sweetwater felt the poignancy, but did not suffer from the terror. His attention had been attracted in a new direction, and he found himself watching, with anxious curiosity, the attitude and absorbed expression of a good-looking young man whom he was far from suspecting to be the secret representative of the present suspect, whom nobody could forget, yet whom nobody wished to remember at this hallowed hour.

Had this attitude and this absorption been directed towards the casket over which the clergyman’s words rose and fell with ever increasing impressiveness, he might have noted the man but would scarcely have been held by him. But this interest, sincere and strong as it undoubtedly was, centred not so much in the services, careful as he was to maintain a decorous attitude towards the same, but in the faint murmurs which now and then came down from above where unconsciousness reigned and the stricken brother watched over the delirious sister, with a concentration and abandonment to fear which made him oblivious of all other duties, and almost as unconscious of the rites then being held below over one who had been as a mother to him, as the sick girl herself with her ceaseless and importunate “Lila! Lila!” The detective, watching this preoccupied stranger, shared in some measure his secret emotions, and thus was prepared for the unexpected occurrence of a few minutes later.

No one else had the least forewarning of any break in the services. There had been nothing in the subdued but impressive rendering of the prayers to foreshadow a dramatic episode; yet it came, and in this manner:

The final words had been said, and the friends present invited to look their last on the calm face which, to many there, had never worn so sweet a smile in life. Some had hesitated; but most had obeyed the summons, among them Sweetwater. But he had not much time in which to fix those features in his mind; for the little girls, who had been waiting patiently for this moment, now came forward; and he stepped aside to watch them as they filed by, dropping as they did so, a tribute of fragrant flowers upon the quiet breast. They were followed by the servants, among whom Zadok had divided his roses. As the last cluster fell from the coachman’s trembling hand, the undertaker advanced with the lid, and, pausing a moment to be sure that all were satisfied, began to screw it on.

Suddenly there was a cry, and the crowd about the door leading into the main hall started back, as wild steps were heard on the stairs and a young man rushed into the room where the casket stood, and advanced upon the officiating clergyman and the astonished undertaker with a fierceness which was not without its suggestion of authority.

“Take it off!” he cried, pointing at the lid which had just been fastened down. “I have not seen her—I must see her. Take it off!”

It was the brother, awake at last to the significance of the hour!

The clergyman, aghast at the sacrilegious look and tone of the intruder, stepped back, raising one arm in remonstrance, and instinctively shielding the casket with the other. But the undertaker saw in the frenzied eye fixed upon his own, that which warned him to comply with the request thus harshly and peremptorily uttered. Unscrewing the lid, he made way for the intruder, who, drawing near, pushed aside the roses which had fallen on the upturned face, and, laying his hand on the brow, muttered a few low words to himself. Then he withdrew his hand, and without glancing to right or left, staggered back to the door amid a hush as unbroken as that which reigned behind him in that open casket. Another moment and his white, haggard face and disordered figure would be blotted from sight by the door-jamb.