'Hark! there's more abroad to-night than the storm! Something is happening or has happened which affects me. I have heard voices in the wind—Gretchen calling me from far away. Frank, Frank, did you hear that? It was a woman's cry; her voice—Gretchen's. Yes, Gretchen, I am coming!'
And with a bound he was at the window, which he opened wide, and leaning far out of it, listened to hear repeated a sound which Frank, too, had heard—a cry like the voice of one in mortal peril calling for help.
It might have been the wind, which on the instant swept round the corner in a great gust, driving the snow and sleet into Arthur's face, and making him draw in his body, nearly half of which was leaning from the window as he waited for the strange cry to be repeated. But it did not come again, though Frank, whose nerves were strung to almost as high a tension as his brother's, thought he heard it once above the roar of the tempest, and a vague feeling of disquiet took possession of him as he sat for an hour longer watching his brother and listening to the noise without.
Gradually the storm subsided, and when the clock struck one the wind had gone down, the snow had ceased to fall, and the moon was struggling feebly through a rift of dark clouds in the west. After persuading his brother to go to bed, Frank retired to his own room and was soon asleep, unmindful of the tragedy which was being enacted not very far away, where a little child was smiling in its dreams, while the woman beside it was praying for life until her mission should be accomplished.
CHAPTER XII.
THE TRAMP HOUSE.
About midway between the entrance to the park and the Collingwood grounds, and fifty rods or more from the cross-road which the strange woman had taken on the night of the storm, stood a small stone building, which had been used as a school-house until the Shannondale turnpike was built and the cross-road abandoned. After that it was occupied by one poor family after another, until the property of which it was a part came into the hands of the elder Mr. Tracy, who, with his English ideas, thought to make it a lodge and bring the gates of his park down to it. But this he did not do, and the house was left to the mercy of the winds, and the storms, and the boys, until Arthur became master there, and with his artistic taste thought to beautify it a little and turn it to some use.
'I would tear it down,' he said to his neighbor, Mr. St. Claire, who stood with him one day looking at it, 'I would tear it down, and have once or twice given orders to that effect, but as often countermanded them. I do not know that I am exactly superstitious, but I am subject to fancies, or presentiments, or whatever you choose to call those moods which take possession of you and which you cannot shake off, and, singularly enough, one of these fancies is connected with this old hut, and as often as I decide to remove it something tells me not to; and once I actually dreamed that a dead woman's hand clutched me by the arm and bade me leave it alone. A case of "Woodman spare that tree," you see.'
And Arthur laughed lightly at his own morbid fancies, but he left the house and planted around it quantities of woodbine, which soon crept up its sides to the chimney-top and made it look like the ivy-covered cottages so common in Ireland. It was the nicest kind of rendezvous for lovers, who frequently availed themselves of its seclusion to whisper their secrets to each other, and it was sometimes used as a dining-room by the people of Shannondale, where in summer they held picnics in the pretty pine grove not far away. But during Arthur's absence it had been suffered to go to decay, for Frank cared little for lovers or picnics, and less for the tramps who often slept there at night, and for whom it came at last to be called the Tramp House. So the winds, and the storms, and the boys did their work upon it unmolested, and when Arthur returned, the door hung upon one hinge, and there was scarcely a whole light of glass in the six windows.