“You know about it, of course, and maybe you don’t want to hear it again,” she said to him, as she settled herself more squarely in her chair.
Reginald bowed and said:
“I have heard of it, but don’t mind me if the rest would like it.”
“Oh, tell it, please!” Irene exclaimed, in the pretty way of a child asking for a story.
“Very well; but where is Charlotte Anne? She or’to be here to keep me straight. She knows the whole thing from A to Izzard, and I surmise has looked in the well. Most everybody in these parts has,” Mrs. Parks said, and going to the door she gave a shrill call for Charlotte Anne, who was down in the pine-grove with Sam, and did not answer.
Resuming her chair, Mrs. Parks began the story of Nannie’s tragic death and the superstition which had clung around the well ever since. She did not say who the deserted bridegroom was, omitting his name out of respect to Reginald and Irene, as his step-descendants. Without the slightest change in the expression of his face Reginald listened to the story which he had heard in substance from Colin McPherson, but not in detail as he heard it now, for Mrs. Parks gave full particulars and grew quite eloquent as she described the dead girl lying upon the pine-needles, with her long, wet hair clinging to her white face, and the man who was to have been her husband bending over her and saying, “Poor little Nannie! if I had known, you needn’t have drowned yourself.”
“Oh!” Irene said under her breath, “it makes one feel cold and creepy and afraid to be alone;” and she moved a little nearer to Mr. Travers, who must also have felt cold and creepy, for he, too, hitched a little nearer to Tom, who at once moved closer to Rena, shivering as if he were afraid.
In Rena’s wide open eyes there had been a look of horror as Mrs. Parks described the bringing of the body from the well to the pines, and the lover’s lamentations over it. But when Tom feigned nervousness and fear and clutched her arm as if for protection, the look changed and there was a laugh in her eyes which made Reginald start, it was so like a look in the eyes of the picture on the wall in the McPherson drawing-room. Colin McPherson had told him that his brother Sandy had seen the same look in the girl on the beach. That was Irene, of course, and he turned toward her to see if in her eyes he could recognize the look. They were not at all like Nannie’s nor like Rena’s. They were blue as the summer sky and never could have laughed like Rena’s or looked like Nannie’s. “Sandy was mistaken,” he thought, and then turned his attention to Mrs. Parks, and listened patiently while she finished her narrative, dwelling at some length upon the superstition which clung around the well, of the many young people who tried the charm, and of the mirror in the hollow tree, said to be the same which poor Nannie had used, when her disordered mind conjured up a face she did not wish to see.
“That’s jolly,” Tom said, when the story was ended; “not poor Nannie, of course, but the well, and the mirror, and the trick—is that what they call it? You wrote me something about it, Rex, don’t you remember? Have you ever tried it?”
“I!” Mr. Travis replied in a tone of surprise. “Do you think me crazy? I do not believe in such trash. Do you?”