I only know
that the first baize doors had swung to behind me, and the second ones
were close at hand, when the great dim thunder caught me, pouring up
with prodigious volume so that it, seemed to roll out from another
world. It shook the very bowels of the building. I was closer to it than
that other time, when it had followed me from the goblin garden. There
was strength and hardness in it, as of metal reverberation. Some touch
of numbness, almost of paralysis, must surely have been upon me that I
felt no actual terror, for I remember even turning and standing still to
hear it better. "That is the Noise," my thought ran stupidly, and I
think I whispered it aloud; "the Doors are closing." The wind outside
against the windows was audible, so it cannot have been really loud, yet
to me it was the biggest, deepest sound I have ever heard, but so far
away, with such awful remoteness in it, that I had to doubt my own ears
at the same time. It seemed underground--the rumbling of earthquake
gates that shut remorselessly within the rocky Earth--stupendous
ultimate thunder. They were shut off from help again. The doors had
closed. I felt a storm of pity, an agony of bitter, futile hate sweep through
me. My memory of the figure changed then. The Woman with the glass of
cooling water had stepped down from Heaven; but the Man--or was it Men? --who smeared this terrible layer of belief and Thought upon the
world!... I crossed the dining room--it was fancy, of course, that held my eyes
from glancing at the portrait for fear I should see it smiling approval
--and so finally reached the hall, where the light from the floor above
seemed now quite bright in comparison. All the doors I closed carefully
behind me; but first I had to open them. The woman had closed every one. Up the stairs, then, I actually ran, two steps at a time. My sister was
standing outside Mabel's door. By her face I knew that she had also
heard. There was no need to ask. I quickly made my mind up. "There's nothing," I said, and detailed briefly my tour of search. "All
is quiet and undisturbed downstairs." May God forgive me! She beckoned to me, closing the door softly behind her. My heart beat
violently a moment, then stood still. "Mabel," she said aloud. It was like the sentence of a judge, that one short word. I tried to push past her and go in, but she stopped me with her arm. She
was wholly mistress of herself, I saw. "Hush!" she said in a lower voice. "I've got her round again with
brandy. She's sleeping quietly now. We won't disturb her." She drew me farther out into the landing, and as she did so, the clock
in the hall below struck half-past three. I had stood, then, thirty
minutes in the corridor below. "You've been such a long time." she said
simply. "I feared for you," and she took my hand in her own that was
cold and clammy. Chapter VIII


And then, while that dreadful house stood listening about us in the
early hours of this chill morning upon the edge of winter, she told me,
with laconic brevity, things about Mabel that I heard as from a
distance. There was nothing so unusual or tremendous in the short
recital, nothing indeed I might not have already guessed for myself. It
was the time and scene, the inference, too, that made it so afflicting:
the idea that Mabel believed herself so utterly and hopelessly lost--
beyond recovery damned. That she had loved him with so passionate a devotion that she had given
her soul into his keeping, this certainly I had not divined--probably
because I had never thought about it one way or the other. He had
"converted" her, I knew, but that she had subscribed whole-heartedly to
that most cruel and ugly of his dogmas--this was new to me, and came
with a certain shock as I heard it. In love, of course, the weaker
nature is receptive to all manner of suggestion. This man had
"suggested" his pet brimstone lake so vividly that she had listened and
believed. He had frightened her into heaven; and his heaven, a definite
locality in the skies, had its foretaste here on earth in miniature--The
Towers, house, and garden. Into his dolorous scheme of a handful saved
and millions damned, his enclosure, as it were, of sheep and goats, he
had swept her before she was aware of it. Her mind no longer was her
own. And it was Mrs. Marsh who kept the thought-stream open, though
tempered, as she deemed, with that touch of craven, superstitious mercy. But what I found it difficult to understand, and still more difficult to
accept, was that, during her year abroad, she had been so haunted with a
secret dread of that hideous after-death that she had finally revolted
and tried to recover that clearer state of mind she had enjoyed before
the religious bully had stunned her--yet had tried in vain. She had
returned to The Towers to find her soul again, only to realize that it
was lost eternally. The cleaner state of mind lay then beyond recovery. In the reaction that followed the removal of his terrible "suggestion,"
she felt the crumbling of all that he had taught her, but searched in
vain for the peace and beauty his teachings had destroyed. Nothing came
to replace these. She was empty, desolate, hopeless; craving her former
joy and carelessness, she found only hate and diabolical calculation. This man, whom she had loved to the point of losing her soul for him,
had bequeathed to her one black and fiery thing--the terror of the
damned. His thinking wrapped her in this iron garment that held her
fast. All this Frances told me, far more briefly than I have here repeated it. In her eyes and gestures and laconic sentences lay the conviction of
great beating issues and of menacing drama my own description fails to
recapture. It was all so incongruous and remote from the world I lived
in that more than once a smile, though a smile of pity, fluttered to my
lips; but a glimpse of my face in the mirror showed rather the leer of a
grimace. There was no real laughter anywhere that night. The entire adventure seemed so incredible, here, in this twentieth
century--but yet delusion, that feeble word, did not occur once in the
comments my mind suggested though did not utter. I remembered that
forbidding Shadow too; my sister's watercolors; the vanished personality
of our hostess; the inexplicable, thundering Noise, and the figure of
Mrs. Marsh in her midnight ritual that was so childish yet so horrible. I shivered in spite of my own "emancipated" cast of mind. "There is no Mabel," were the words with which my sister sent another
shower of ice down my spine. "He has killed her in his lake of fire and
brimstone." I stared at her blankly, as in a nightmare where nothing true or
possible ever happened. "He killed her in his lake of fire and brimstone," she repeated more
faintly.