Robineau said nothing, but he drew his seat a little nearer to the circle formed by the others.
"Well! messieurs," said the old man, "it ain’t so very long that the White House has been such a scarecrow to all of us. I must tell you first that it ain’t very far from here, to the left, at the foot of the mountains. You go down into a pretty little valley, where there’s vines and lucern and some fine walnut trees, and the White House in the midst of it all."
"It doesn’t seem to have made the land sterile at all events.—To whom does the house belong?"
"Oh! that’s just what nobody don’t know, monsieur, for it ain’t ever been lived in, in the twenty years since it was built, unless the devil’s been living there lately. You see, messieurs, that there’s a pretty little cottage just about a hundred yards from the White House; it’s a kind of a little farm house that used to belong to a man named André Sarpiotte. André was pretty well off; he had some good-sized flocks and some cash; so he went to work and built this house that we call the White House, because when it was new, it was just as pretty and white, and finer than any house hereabout. So André Sarpiotte built the house, thinking he’d sell it to some one as might want it; but, bless me! it’s a big house, with a fine garden with walls all round it, and it was too high-priced for us poor folks!—So André, he couldn’t get rid of it; but he took comfort for his disappointment with his little wife, for he was married, André was, and his wife had just give him a little boy."
"But, my good man, I don’t see what connection all this has with the terror inspired by that spot?"
"Oh! yes, monsieur! Oh, yes! It’s all connected, and that’s what I’m coming to. One fine morning, we heard say in the village that André’s wife had took another child to nurse, with hers. It was a little girl. No one in this region had ever seen her parents, but André, he said that they was folks as lived some distance off and wasn’t rich; but still we took notice that André’s wife was better dressed and had lots of fine things to wear, and that André had a better time than ever. As he was in a lucky streak, he sold his White House six months after to a stranger who was travelling through here. The deeds was passed at the notary’s at Saint-Amand. The man’s name, they say, was Gervais, and that’s all anybody knows about him; for the most surprising thing is that this gentleman sent for furniture and everything he needed to run the house, but he didn’t never live in it. He went right off again, and he ain’t been seen again since; and that’s what makes folks think that the devil had got possession of the cursed house, and the poor man that bought it found it out and swore he wouldn’t never come back to it. Still, nobody didn’t notice nothing, only folks thought it was a strange thing that the owner of the house shouldn’t come to live in it. Time passed, and the little girl André and his wife had took in was still with ’em. After two years they said as how her parents was dead and that they’d adopted the child; but, my word! that good deed didn’t bring ’em luck. Their own child died, and about a year after, André, who had a way of drinking a little too much, fell into a hole on his way home from the fêtes at Saint-Gall, and he wa’n’t alive when they took him out. So then there wa’n’t nobody left at the farm but André’s widow and little Isaure—that’s the name of the little girl they adopted. That was when folks began to notice strange goings on in the White House. In the first place there wa’n’t nobody in the house, and yet there used to be lights going to and fro sometimes at night; then someone heard stamping in the garden—like horses’ feet!—You may be quite certain that that gave folks a bad fright. If it had been the owner of the house come back, somebody’d have seen him; he wouldn’t have kept out of sight and never come except at night. All these doings began to make people talk, to give ’em strange ideas; and then that house, with all the doors and windows shut and locked all the time, and yet noises and lights inside—you see that wa’n’t clear at all!"
"And André’s widow, who lived very near the White House, must have been more frightened than the others, I suppose?"
"Not a bit of it, monsieur; and that’s another thing that wa’n’t clear either; when anyone spoke to the widow Sarpiotte about them noises and lights, she’d just answer that we was all idiots, and that it wa’n’t none of our business anyway."
"It would seem that the widow Sarpiotte was strong-minded."
"My word, monsieur, I don’t know whether it was her mind, but it didn’t prevent her going to join her husband—twelve years afterward, to be sure!"