My throat was paralyzed with terror and made no sound.
CHAPTER VIII
A MESSAGE FROM MATTIE
WITH my frantic demonstration of human antagonism, the pressure on the headboard was removed. Whatever had caused it ceased its malign exertion. The menace had withdrawn.
In the morning I woke up numb and cold at the foot of the bed, where I must have crawled for safety, although I could remember nothing about it.
Jasper said it was the best night’s sleep he ever had had.
I tried to tell him what had happened. “What I had dreamed,” he called it, and I could not make him take the matter seriously. He had awakened refreshed and full of enthusiasm, only complaining that there was no shower and seriously considering taking a plunge into the ocean, until I had to give up my megrims to enter into an argument about the chances there were for and against pneumonia for one who was not accustomed to swimming in October. I persuaded him to go around and examine the furniture while I found something to eat, and while I was trying to accomplish this I realized ruefully that I had succeeded too well in sparing my husband the psychic reaction that I had been subjected to during the night. He had not been prepared for it, and my fright had no significance to him. Consequently, I received no sympathy. This was what I had wanted, to guard against our both falling prey to hallucinations, but I had not foreseen in how defenceless a position it was going to place me. I determined that if anything like the night’s performance ever happened again, I would explain to Jasper every detail that had led up to the phenomenon and let him solve it as he would. Two heads would be immeasurably better than one, if we had to smoke out the ghost. I would sooner have found rats in that house, as the Winkle-Man had suggested, than a bending wall.
Jasper had discovered a Chippendale chair in the old lady’s bedroom, and a three-cornered cupboard in the room behind it, full of Canton china, and he would speak of nothing else.
“A regular gold mine!” he kept saying. “Gee! I wish Thompson could see this!” (Thompson was a collector he knew in New York.) And then, later, when the full force of the value of his possessions had come to him: “I wouldn’t let Thompson see this for anything.”
We had known that whatever was in the house went with it, but we had not expected much. No one had been inside the door for so many years that it had no reputation for containing antiques, as had so many of the old houses of Star Harbor, and it had escaped the weeding out and selling off that leaves to most of them in this generation only the mid-Victorian walnut and the modern white iron bed. The House of the Five Pines still held its original Colonial furniture—great horse-hair sofas and mahogany chests of drawers, hand-made chairs and rope-strung beds, and chests full of homespun linen and intricately patched quilts. It would take weeks to inventory all of it. As a before-breakfast sport, it had to be abandoned. We were so pleased with ourselves for our foresight, as we chose to term it, in acquiring a house with such unspoiled plunder that we almost forgot to eat. But finally our appetites could withstand the zest of the salt air no longer.
We laid out the breakfast on the clean red cloth of the kitchen-table, under the window next the shuttered door, and were babbling like happy children when our celebration was cut short by the arrival of a boy on a bicycle.