CHAPTER I.
_The Dead City_
The city without life lay handsomely along a river in the early sunlightof a September morning. Death had seemingly not been long upon it, norhad it made any scar. No breach or rent or disorder or sign of violencecould be seen. The long, shaded streets breathed the still airs of utterpeace and quiet. From the half-circle around which the broad river bentits moody current, the neat houses, set in cool, green gardens, wereterraced up the high hill, and from the summit of this a stately marbletemple, glittering of newness, towered far above them in placidbenediction.
Mile after mile the streets lay silent, along the river-front, up to thehilltop, and beyond into the level; no sound nor motion nor sign of lifethroughout their length. And when they had run their length, and theoutlying fields were reached, there, too, was the same brooding spell asthe land stretched away in the hush and haze. The yellow grain,heavy-headed with richness, lay beaten down and rotting, for there wereno reapers. The city, it seemed, had died calmly, painlessly, drowsily,as if overcome by sleep.
From a skiff in mid-river, a young man rowing toward the dead cityrested on his oars and looked over his shoulder to the temple on thehilltop. There was something very boyish in the reverent eagerness withwhich his dark eyes rested upon the pile, tracing the splendid linesfrom its broad, gray base to its lofty spire, radiant with white andgold. As he looked long and intently, the colour of new life flushedinto a face that was pinched and drawn. With fresh resolution, he bentagain to his oars, noting with a quick eye that the current had carriedhim far down-stream while he stopped to look upon the holy edifice.
Landing presently at the wharf, he was stunned by the hush of thestreets. This was not like the city of twenty thousand people he hadleft three months before. In blank bewilderment he stood, turning toeach quarter for some solution of the mystery. Perceiving at length thatthere was really no life either way along the river, he startedwonderingly up a street that led from the waterside,--a street which,when he had last walked it, was quickening with the rush of a mightycommerce.
Soon his expression of wonder was darkened by a shade of anxiety. Therewas an unnerving quality in the trance-like stillness; and the mysteryof it pricked him to forebodings. He was now passing empty workshops,hesitating at door after door with ever-mounting alarm. Then he began tocall, but the sound of his voice served only to aggravate the silence.
Growing bolder, he tried some of the doors and found them to yield,letting him into a kind of smothered, troubled quietness even moreoppressive than that outside. He passed an empty ropewalk, the hempstrewn untidily about, as if the workers had left hurriedly. He peeredcuriously at idle looms and deserted spinning-wheels--desertedapparently but the instant before he came. It seemed as if the peoplewere fled maliciously just in front, to leave him in this fearfullest ofall solitudes. He wondered if he did not hear their quick, furtivesteps, and see the vanishing shadows of them.
He entered a carpenter's shop. On the bench was an unfinished door, aplane left where it had been shoved half the length of its edge, thefresh pine shaving still curling over the side. He left with an uncannyfeeling that the carpenter, breathing softly, had watched him from somehiding-place, and would now come stealthily out to push his plane again.
He turned into a baker's shop and saw freshly chopped kindling piledagainst the oven, and dough actually on the kneading-tray. In a tanner'svat he found fresh bark. In a blacksmith's shop he entered next thefire was out, but there was coal heaped beside the forge, with theladling-pool and the crooked water-horn, and on the anvil was ahorseshoe that had cooled before it was finished.
With something akin to terror, he now turned from this street of shopsinto one of those with the pleasant dwellings, eager to find somethingalive, even a dog to bark an alarm. He entered one of the gardens,clicking the gate-latch loudly after him, but no one challenged. He drewa drink from the well with its loud-rattling chain and clumsy,water-sodden bucket, but no one called. At the door of the house hewhistled, stamped, pounded, and at last flung it open with all the noisehe could make. Still his hungry ears fed on nothing but sinister echoes,the barren husks of his own clamour. There was no curt voice of a man,no quick, questioning tread of a woman. There were dead white ashes onthe hearth, and the silence was grimly kept by the dumb household gods.
His nervousness increased. So vividly did his memory people the streetsand shops and houses that the air was vibrant with sound,--low-tonedconversations, shouts, calls, laughter, the voices of children, thecreaking of wagons, pounding hammers, the clangour of many works; yetall muffled away from him, as if coming from some phantom-land. Hiseyes, too, were kept darting from side to side by vague forms thatflitted privily near by, around corners, behind him, lurking always alittle beyond his eyes, turn them quickly as he would. Now, facing thestreet, he shouted, again and again, from sheer nervousness; but theechoes came back alone.
He recalled a favourite day-dream of boyhood,--a dream in which hebecame the sole person in the world, wandering with royal libertythrough strange cities, with no voice to chide or forbid, free to chooseand partake, as would a prince, of all the wonders and delights thatboyhood can picture; his own master and the master of all the marvelsand treasures of earth. This was like the dream come true; but itdistressed him. It was necessary to find the people at once. He had afeeling that his instant duty was to break some malign spell that layupon the place--or upon himself. For one of them was surely bewitched.
Out he strode to the middle of the street, between two rows of yellowingmaples, and there he shouted again and still more loudly to evoke someshape or sound of life, sending a full, high, ringing call up the emptythoroughfare. Between the shouts he scanned the near-by houses intently.
At last, half-way up the next block, even as his lungs filled foranother peal, he thought his eyes caught for a short half-second themere thin shadow of a skulking figure. It had seemed to pass through agrape arbour that all but shielded from the street a house slightly morepretentious than its neighbours. He ran toward the spot, calling as hewent. But when he had vaulted over the low fence, run across the gardenand around the end of the arbour, dense with the green leaves andclusters of purple grapes, the space in front of the house was bare. Ifmore than a trick-phantom of his eye had been there, it had vanished.
He stood gazing blankly at the front door of the house. Was it fancythat he had heard it shut a second before he came? that his nerves stillresponded to the shock of its closing? He had already imagined so manynoises of the kind, so many misty shapes fleeing before him with littlesoft rustlings, so many whispers at his back and hushed cries behind theclosed doors. Yet this door had seemed to shut more tangibly, with awarmer promise of life. He went quickly up the three wooden steps,turned the knob, and pushed it open--very softly this time. No oneappeared. But, as he stood on the threshold, while the pupils of hiseyes dilated to the gloom of the hall into which he looked, his earsseemed to detect somewhere in the house a muffled footfall and the soundof another door closed softly.
He stepped inside and called. There was no answer, but above his head aboard creaked. He started up the stairs in front of him, and, as he didso, he seemed to hear cautious steps across a bare floor above. Hestopped climbing; the steps ceased. He started up, and the steps cameagain. He knew now they came from a room at the head of the stairs. Hebounded up the remaining steps and pushed open the door with a loud"Halloo!"
The room was empty. Yet across it there was the indefinable trail of apresence,--an odour, a vibration, he knew not what,--and where a bar ofsunlight cut the gloom under a half-raised curtain, he saw the motes inthe air all astir. Opposite the door he had opened was another, leading,apparently, to a room at the back of the house. From behind it, he couldhave sworn came the sounds of a stealthily moved body and softenedbreathing. A presence, unseen but felt, was all about. Not withouteffort did he conquer the impulse to look behind him at every breath.
Determined to be no longer eluded, he crossed the r
oom on tiptoe andgently tried the opposite door. It was locked. As he leaned against it,almost in a terror of suspense, he knew he heard again those littleseemings of a presence a door's thickness away. He did not hesitate.Still holding the turned knob in his hand, he quickly crouched back andbrought his flexed shoulder heavily against the door. It flew open witha breaking sound, and, with a little gasp of triumph, he was in the roomto confront its unknown occupant.
To his dismay, he saw no one. He peered in bewilderment to the fartherside of the room, where light struggled dimly in at the sides of acurtained window. There was no sound, and yet he could acutely feel thatpresence; insistently his nerves tingled the warning of another'snearness. Leaning forward, still peering to sound the dim corners of theroom, he called out again.
Then, from behind the door he had opened, a staggering blow was dealthim, and, before he could recover, or had done more than blindly crookone arm protectingly before his face, he was borne heavily to the floor,writhing in a grasp that centered all its crushing power about histhroat.