The Lake Mystery

The Dresden clock on the mantel struck twelve in soft, slow, golden notes. As the gentle echoes died away, Horace Abernethey, sitting huddled in a morris chair before the fire of logs, stirred feebly. Presently, he sat erect, moving clumsily, with the laboriousness of senility. But there was nothing of the aged in the glances of his keen, dark eyes, which shone forth brightly from out the pallid parchment of his face. His intent gaze darted first toward the clock, to verify the hour of which the gong had given warning; it went next to the closed window on the right of the fireplace, over which the shades had not been drawn. The unsheltered panes were spangled with raindrops, and, as he watched, a new gust beat its tattoo on the glass. The old man drew down the tip of his thin, beaklike nose in a curious movement of disgust, then stroked petulantly the white cascade of beard that flowed to his bosom.

“Curse such weather!” He snarled, in a voice querulous and shrill with years. He stood up with sudden alertness, surprising after his first awkward slowness; a brisk gesture of the head threw back from his face the luxuriant white curls of hair. “But, in spite of it, I must go again, and so make an end of the job--else--death might take me unawares.”

Abernethey glanced aimlessly about the long, low-ceiled room, now lighted only by the glow from the fire. After a little, he advanced to the center, where a concert-grand piano dominated the scene. In a moment more, he had lighted the tall lamp that stood at hand. A sheet of music in manuscript was lying on the rack. He seized this, and scanned it eagerly, muttering the while.

“Curious it should work out so,” he exclaimed, at last; “curious, and infernally clever, too!” He seated himself before the instrument, still holding communion with his thoughts. “Yes, it will do--capitally--and it has the spirit of the thing. It chants the curse.”

Suddenly, as he ceased speaking, the old man lifted his arms in a quick, graceful movement. The long, clawlike fingers, supple still, fell vehemently on the keys, in a clamor of melancholy music. There was only a single strain of melody--that written on the page before him; but he played it again and again, as if obsessed by its weird rhythm, played it blatantly, tenderly, with reluctant slowness, with masterful swiftness. And, as he went on and on, he abandoned the simplicity of the written score. In its stead, he multiplied harmonies, superimposed innumerable variations. The musical rapture revealed the decrepit old man as a virtuoso. The treatment of the theme showed him to be at once the scholar and the creature of vivid emotional imagination, while the physical interpretation of the dreaming that drove him on displayed a technique astonishing in one so burdened with years.

But ever, throughout the wildest extravagances of his fancy’s flight, there was no failure of that first morbid rhythm, of that first monotonous melody in minor set on the sheet before him.

This was the score on which he built the ordered sequence of his improvisations:

[Music]

The player ended with a harsh clangor from the keys, and whirled about on the stool to stare intently toward the wall opposite the fireplace. Now, his pallid face in the glimpse that showed above the beard, was faintly flushed from the bodily strain of playing. But the fire burning in the dark eyes proved that the emotion within still maintained its vigor undiminished. Springing up, he drew his tall, thin form to its full height, and stood thus motionless for a long minute, gazing fixedly at the wall before him. Then, again with the swift movement of the head by which the white curls were thrown back from his brow, he strode forward, and came to a stand facing the naked wainscoting of the wall.

In the long, barren room, devoid of other ornament, this paneling was of itself sufficient to command attention. Beyond a few scattered chairs, a solitary table with its lamp, the irons of the fireplace, a cabinet for music, the piano and the high lamp standing beside it, there was nothing in the place, not even so much as draperies to mask the ugliness of the window-shades. Such scarcity of furnishing was emphasized by the size of the apartment, which was fifty feet in length and half as wide. Doubtless, the occupant had preferred the space thus free from aught that might in any wise hamper the resonance of the music. Be that as it may, the ornateness of the wainscoting was made conspicuous, since only the piano offered another interest. Of black walnut, it ran to a height of at least seven feet out of the ten that measured the wall, and, extending around the four sides of the room, gave to the aspect of the place a quality of melancholy so extreme as to be almost funereal--an effect in no way lessened on closer observation, since the deep carving was merely a conventional labyrinth of scrolls.