This figure wore my dress of gray with its Quaker collar and cuffs, its long, slender face was framed in fiery hair, its green-blue eyes, narrow and long-lashed, were fixed on mine. There was no mirror outside of that door; besides, no mirror could have reflected the look of white damnation that possessed this face. Haggard and hard and vile, with a wicked, stony leer in the eyes, with a wicked, tight smile on the lips, with a blasted, devastated look too dreadful to describe, it faced me. And it was myself, as I might have been after a lifetime of crime and cruelty.
I stood and looked at it till a black cloud seemed to roll up over it, from which for a second its evil countenance smiled imperturbably at me. Then the face, too, was blotted out and I fell down on the floor.
CHAPTER VIII. A DANGEROUS GAME
I CAME to my senses. I looked up slowly.
The thing was gone. I put out the light and fled like a hunted creature to my room. There I locked myself in and dropped down on my knees beside my bed.
At first it was entirely a battle with fear that kept me, rigid and silent, on my knees. I knew that unless I overcame the extremity of my nervous terror, I should lose my mind. If I went out of my room at all, it would be to go raving and shrieking down the hall and to alarm the house. Self-control was possible only if I should stay here and conquer the evil spirit of “The Pines”—conquer its effect upon my own steadiness and self-respect. I would not repeat the grotesque tragi-comedy of Jane and Delia and Annie, and present myself, gasping and wild-eyed, to Mrs. Brane demanding my dismissal on the spot. Neither would I be like the other three housekeepers. Even in that moment of prostration I am glad to say that I was not utterly a victim; the demon that had possessed the house had to a certain extent already met its match in me.
Of course, during those first hours, I did entertain the belief that I was possessed by a denizen from another world who had come to this house to terrify and to kill and had borrowed my astral body for its clothing—a horrid idea enough and not unnatural under the circumstances. If I remember rightly I decided that if the awful figure came again or if any other tragedy should happen at “The Pines” I should kill myself. Fortunately my reason, though badly shaken, did at least reassert itself. After all, I am not a natural believer in ghosts. The supernatural has never greatly interested or impressed me. It is not so much-that I am skeptical as that I am pragmatic—that is, I have to discern some use or meaning in spiritual experiences. It is this turn of mind, inherited, I think, from my French father, that saved me now. Very gradually, as I knelt there in that God-given attitude of prayer, an attitude whose subjective benefit to the human race no one will ever be able to measure, an attitude which, in its humility, in its resignation, in its shutting out of this world's light, so opens the inner eyes of the soul—as I knelt there, my mood began to change from one of insane superstition and fear to one of quiet and most determined thought.
In fact, my reason reasserted itself and powerfully. One by one, all the alarming incidents began to link themselves together, to suggest a plan, a logical whole. It was as though, with my eyes shut and hidden in my hands, I saw for the first time.