“We went up-stairs. When we came down again, we found Bernard Peixada waiting in the hall. Through the open door of the parlor, I could hear music, and see young men and women dancing. Oh, how I envied them! My mother and father kissed me. Bernard Peixada grasped my arm. We left my father’s house. We crossed the street. Bernard Peixada kept hold of my arm, as if afraid that I might make a dash for liberty—as, indeed, my impulse urged me to do. With his unoccupied hand, Bernard Peixada drew a key from his pocket, and opened the side door of his own dark abode—the door that bore the brass plate with the Old English letters.
“‘Well,’ he said, ’come in.’
“With a shudder, I crossed the threshold of that mysterious, sinister house—of that house which had been the terror of my childhood, and was to be—what? In the midst of my fear and my bewilderment, I could not suppress a certain eagerness to confront my fate and know the worst at once—a certain curiosity to learn the full ghastliness of my doom. In less time than I had bargained for, I had my wish.”
Thus far Hetzel had read consecutively. At this point he was interrupted by the entrance of Mrs. Hart.
“Are you busy?” she asked. “Because, if you’re not, I think you had better go up-stairs and sit with Arthur. The nurse wants to eat her breakfast and lie down for a while. And I, you know, am expected by Ruth.”
“Oh, to be sure,” Hetzel replied, with a somewhat abstracted manner. “Oh, yes—I’ll do as you wish at once. But it is a pity that you should have to go down-town alone—especially in this weather.”
“Oh, I don’t mind that. Good-by.”
Hetzel gained the sick-room. The nurse said, “You won’t have much to do, except sit down and keep quiet.”
Arthur lay motionless, for all the world as if asleep, save that his eyes were open. The room was darkened. Hetzel sat down near to the window, and returning to Ruth’s letter, read on by the light that stole in through the chinks in the blinds. The wind and rain played a dreary accompaniment.
“To detain you, Mr. Hetzel, with an account of my married life would be superfluous. It was as bad as I had expected it to be, and worse. It bore that relation to my anticipations which pain realized must always bear to pain conjectured. The imagination, in anticipating pleasure, generally goes beyond the reality and paints a too highly colored picture. But in anticipating suffering, it does not go half far enough. It is not powerful enough to foretell suffering in its complete intensity.