Some of the words she used betrayed her
closeness to demonic and palesgean traditions. "'_Iä! Iä! Shub-Niggurath! Ya-R'lyeh! N'gagi n'bulu bwana n'lolo!_ Ya,
yo, pore Missy Tanit, pore Missy Isis! Marse Clooloo, come up outen
de water an' git yo' chile--she done daid! She done daid! De har ain'
got no missus no mo', Marse Clooloo. Ol' Sophy, she know! Ol' Sophy,
she done got de black stone outen Big Zimbabwe in ol' Affriky! Ol'
Sophy, she done dance in de moonshine roun' de crocodile-stone befo' de
N'bangus cotch her and sell her to de ship folks! No mo' Tanit! No mo'
Isis! No mo' witchwoman to keep de fire a-goin' in de big stone place! Ya, yo! _N'gagi 'bulu bwana m'lolo! Iä! Shub-Niggurath!_ She daid! Ol'
Sophy know!' "That wasn't the end of the wailing, but it was all I could pay
attention to. The expression on my boy's face showed that it had
reminded him of something frightful, and the tightening of his hand
on the machete boded no good. I knew he was desperate, and sprang to
disarm him if possible before he could do anything more. "But I was too late. An old man with a bad spine doesn't count for much
physically. There was a struggle, but he had done for himself before
many seconds were over. I'm not sure yet but that he tried to kill me,
too. His last panting words were something about the need of wiping out
everything that had ever been connected with Marceline, either by blood
or marriage. "I wonder to this day that I didn't go stark mad in that instant, or in
the moments and hours afterward. In front of me was the slain body of
my boy, the only human being I had to cherish, and ten feet away, in
front of that shrouded easel, was the body of his best friend, with a
nameless coil of horror wound around it. Below was the scalped corpse
of that she-monster, about whom I was half ready to believe anything. I
was too dazed to analyze the probability of the hair story, and even if
I had not been, that dismal howling from Aunt Sophy's cabin would have
been enough to quiet doubt. "If I'd been wise, I'd have done just what poor Denis told me
to--burned the picture and the body-grasping hair at once and without
curiosity--but I was too shaken to be wise. I suppose I muttered
foolish things over my boy--and then I remembered that the night was
wearing on and that the servants would be back in the morning. It was
plain that a matter like this could never be explained, and I knew that
I must cover things up and invent a story. "That coil of hair around Marsh was a monstrous thing. I didn't dare
touch it, and the longer I looked at it the more horrible things I
noticed about it. One thing gave me a start. I won't mention it, but
it partly explained the need for feeding the hair with queer oils as
Marceline had always done. "In the end I decided to bury all three bodies in the cellar, with
quicklime, which I knew we had in the storehouse. It was a night of
hellish work. I dug three graves--my boy's a long way from the other
two, for I didn't want him to be near either the woman's body or her
hair. I was sorry I couldn't get the coil from around poor Marsh. It
was terrible work getting them all down to the cellar. I used blankets
in carting the woman and the poor devil with the coil around him. Then
I had to get two barrels of lime from the storehouse. God must have
given me strength, for I not only moved them both but filled all three
graves without a hitch. "Some of the lime I made into white-wash. I had to take a stepladder
and fix over the parlor ceiling where the blood had oozed through. And
I burned nearly everything in Marceline's room, scrubbing the walls
and floor and heavy furniture. I washed up the attic studio, too, and
the trail and footprints that led there. And all the time I could hear
old Sophy's wailing in the distance. The devil must have been in that
creature to let her voice go on like that. But she always was howling
queer things. That's why the field niggers didn't get scared or curious
that night. I locked the studio door and took the key to my room. Then
I burned all my stained clothes in the fire-place. By dawn the whole
house looked quite normal, so far as any casual eye could tell. I
hadn't dared touch the covered easel, but meant to attend to that later. *       *       *       *       *

"Well, the servants came back next day, and I told them all the young
folks had gone to St. Louis. None of the field hands seemed to have
seen or heard anything, and old Sophonisba's wailing had stopped at the
instant of sunrise. She was like a sphinx after that, and never let out
a word of what had been on her brooding witch-brain the day and night
before. "Later on I pretended that Denis and Marsh and Marceline had gone
back to Paris and had a certain discreet agency mail me letters from
there--letters I had fixed up in forged handwriting. I had the deaths
of Marsh and Denis reported during the war, and later said Marceline
had entered a convent. Fortunately Marsh was an orphan whose eccentric
ways had alienated him from his people in Louisiana. Things might have
been patched up a good deal better for me if I had had the sense to
burn the picture, sell the plantation, and give up trying to manage
things with a shaken and overstrained mind. You see what my folly
has brought me to. Failing crops, hands discharged one by one, place
falling to ruin, and myself a hermit and a target for dozens of
queer countryside stories. Nobody will come around here after dark
nowadays--or any other time if it can be helped. That's why I knew you
must be a stranger. "And why do I stay here? I can't wholly tell you that. It's bound up
too closely with things at the very rim of sane reality. It wouldn't
have been so, perhaps, if I hadn't looked at the picture. I ought to
have done as poor Denis told me. I honestly meant to burn it when I
went up to that locked studio a week after the horror, but I looked
first--and that changed everything. "No--there's no use telling what I saw. You can, in a way, see for
yourself presently; though time and dampness have done their work. I
don't think it can hurt you if you want to take a look, but it was
different with me. I knew too much of what it all meant. "Denis had been right--it was the greatest triumph of human art since
Rembrandt, even though still unfinished. I grasped that at the start,
and knew that poor Marsh had justified his decadent philosophy. He was
to painting what Baudelaire was to poetry, and Marceline was the key
that had unlocked his inmost genius. "The thing almost stunned me when I pulled aside the hangings--stunned
me before I half knew what the whole thing was. You know, it's only
partly a portrait. Marsh had been pretty literal when he hinted that he
wasn't painting Marceline alone, but what he saw through her and beyond
her. "Of course she was in it--was the key to it, in a sense--but her figure
only formed one point in a vast composition.