The Beetle, Richard Marsh [general ebook reader .txt] 📗

couldn’t, and I knew that I couldn’t⁠—I knew that I couldn’t move as much as a finger to help him.⁠—Stop⁠—let me finish!⁠—I told myself that it was absurd, but it wouldn’t do; absurd or not, there was the terror with me in the room. I knelt down, and I prayed, but the words wouldn’t come. I tried to ask God to remove this burden from my brain, but my longings wouldn’t shape themselves into words, and my tongue was palsied. I don’t know how long I struggled, but, at last, I came to understand that, for some cause, God had chosen to leave me to fight the fight alone. So I got up, and undressed, and went to bed⁠—and that was the worst of all. I had sent my maid away in the first rush of my terror, afraid, and, I think, ashamed, to let her see my fear. Now I would have given anything to summon her back again, but I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t even ring the bell. So, as I say, I got into bed.”

She paused, as if to collect her thoughts. To listen to her words, and to think of the suffering which they meant to her, was almost more than I could endure. I would have thrown away the world to have been able to take her in my arms, and soothe her fears. I knew her to be, in general, the least hysterical of young women; little wont to become the prey of mere delusions; and, incredible though it sounded, I had an innate conviction that, even in its wildest periods, her story had some sort of basis in solid fact. What that basis amounted to, it would be my business, at any and every cost, quickly to determine.

“You know how you have always laughed at me because of my objection to⁠—cockroaches, and how, in spring, the neighbourhood of May-bugs has always made me uneasy. As soon as I got into bed I felt that something of the kind was in the room.”

“Something of what kind?”

“Some kind of⁠—beetle. I could hear the whirring of its wings; I could hear its droning in the air; I knew that it was hovering above my head; that it was coming lower and lower, nearer and nearer. I hid myself; I covered myself all over with the clothes⁠—then I felt it bumping against the coverlet. And, Sydney!” She drew closer. Her blanched cheeks and frightened eyes made my heart bleed. Her voice became but an echo of itself. “It followed me.”

“Marjorie!”

“It got into the bed.”

“You imagined it.”

“I didn’t imagine it. I heard it crawl along the sheets, till it found a way between them, and then it crawled towards me. And I felt it⁠—against my face.⁠—And it’s there now.”

“Where?”

She raised the forefinger of her left hand.

“There!⁠—Can’t you hear it droning?”

She listened, intently. I listened too. Oddly enough, at that instant the droning of an insect did become audible.

“It’s only a bee, child, which has found its way through the open window.”

“I wish it were only a bee, I wish it were.⁠—Sydney, don’t you feel as if you were in the presence of evil? Don’t you want to get away from it, back into the presence of God?”

“Marjorie!”

“Pray, Sydney, pray!⁠—I can’t!⁠—I don’t know why, but I can’t!”

She flung her arms about my neck, and pressed herself against me in paroxysmal agitation. The violence of her emotion bade fair to unman me too. It was so unlike Marjorie⁠—and I would have given my life to save her from a toothache. She kept repeating her own words⁠—as if she could not help it.

“Pray, Sydney, pray!”

At last I did as she wished me. At least, there is no harm in praying⁠—I never heard of its bringing hurt to anyone. I repeated aloud the Lord’s Prayer⁠—the first time for I know not how long. As the divine sentences came from my lips, hesitatingly enough, I make no doubt, her tremors ceased. She became calmer. Until, as I reached the last great petition, “Deliver us from evil,” she loosed her arms from about my neck, and dropped upon her knees, close to my feet. And she joined me in the closing words, as a sort of chorus.

“For Thine is the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, forever and ever. Amen.”

When the prayer was ended, we both of us were still. She with her head bowed, and her hands clasped; and I with something tugging at my heartstrings which I had not felt there for many and many a year, almost as if it had been my mother’s hand;⁠—I daresay that sometimes she does stretch out her hand, from her place among the angels, to touch my heartstrings, and I know nothing of it all the while.

As the silence still continued, I chanced to glance up, and there was old Lindon peeping at us from his hiding-place behind the screen. The look of amazed perplexity which was on his big red face struck me with such a keen sense of the incongruous that it was all I could do to keep from laughter. Apparently the sight of us did nothing to lighten the fog which was in his brain, for he stammered out, in what was possibly intended for a whisper,

“Is⁠—is she m-mad?”

The whisper⁠—if it was meant for a whisper⁠—was more than sufficiently audible to catch his daughter’s ears. She started⁠—raised her head⁠—sprang to her feet⁠—turned⁠—and saw her father.

“Papa!”

Immediately her sire was seized with an access of stuttering.

“W-w-what the d-devil’s the⁠—the m-m-meaning of this?”

Her utterance was clear enough⁠—I fancy her parent found it almost painfully clear.

“Rather it is for me to ask, what is the meaning of this! Is it possible, that, all the time, you have actually been concealed behind that⁠—screen?”

Unless I am mistaken the old gentleman cowered before the directness of his daughter’s gaze⁠—and endeavoured to conceal the fact by an explosion of passion.

“Do-don’t you s-speak to me li-like that, you un-undutiful girl! I⁠—I’m your father!”

“You certainly are my father; though I