I gave a start, and wondered what fresh mystery this portended, then asked my informant if he had overlooked the large ruined plantation house whose ancient gate bordered the road not far back.
"Funny ye sh'd recolleck that, stranger! Musta ben here afore sometime. But that house ain't there now. Burnt down five or six years ago—and they did tell some queer stories about it."
I shuddered.
"You mean Riverside—ol' man de Russy's place. Queer goin's on there fifteen or twenty years ago. Ol' man's boy married a gal from abroad, and some folks thought she was a mighty odd sort. Didn't like the looks of her. Then she and the boy went off sudden, and later on the ol' man said he was kilt in the war. But some o' the niggers hinted queer things. Got around at last that the ol' fellow fell in love with the gal himself and kilt her and the boy. That place was sure enough ha'nted by a black snake, mean that what it may.
"Then five or six years ago the ol' man disappeared and the house burned down. Some do say he was burnt up in it. It was a mornin' after a rainy night just like this, when lots o' folks heard an awful yellin' acrost the fields in ol' de Russy's voice. When they stopped and looked, they see the house goin' up in smoke quick as a wink—that place was all like tinder anyhow, rain or no rain. Nobody never seen the ol' man agin, but onct in a while they tell of the ghost of that big black snake glidin' aroun'.
"What d'you make of it, anyhow? You seem to hev knowed the place. Didn't ye ever hear tell of the de Russys? What d'ye reckon was the trouble with that gal young Denis married? She kinder made everybody shiver and feel hateful, though ye couldn't never tell why."
I was trying to think, but that process was almost beyond me now. The house burned years ago? Then where, and under what conditions, had I passed the night? And why did I know what I knew of these things? Even as I pondered I saw a hair on my coat sleeve—the short, gray hair of an old man.
In the end I drove on without telling anything. But I did hint that gossip was wronging the poor old planter who had suffered so much. I made it clear—as if from distant but authentic reports wafted among friends—that if anyone was to blame for the trouble at Riverside it was the woman, Marceline. She was not suited to Missouri ways, I said, and it was too bad that Denis had ever married her.
More I did not intimate, for I felt that the de Russys, with their proudly cherished honor and high, sensitive spirits, would not wish me to say more. They had borne enough, God knows, without the countryside guessing what a demon of the pit, what a gorgon of the Elder blasphemies, had come to flaunt their ancient and stainless name.
Nor was it right that the neighbors should know that other horror which my strange host of the night could not bring himself to tell me—that horror which he must have learned as I learned it, from details in the lost masterpiece of poor Frank Marsh.