House Of Mystery

A Bonus Book

by William Henry Irwin

Irwin's classic story, featuring psychic Rasalie LaGrange, is also a classic turn-of-the-last-century romance.

ISBN 1-59431-580-9 Paranormal / Bonus / Romance

Cover Art: Maggie Dix

Also available in RTF and HTML formats



Chapter 1

The Unknown Girl

In a Boston and Albany parlor-car, east bound through the Berkshires, sat a young man respectfully, but intently studying a young woman. Now and then, from the newspapers heaped in mannish confusion about his chair, he selected another sheet. Always, he took advantage of this opportunity to face the chair across the aisle and to sweep a glance over a piquant little profile, intent on a sober-looking book. Again, he would gaze out of the window; and he gazed oftenest when a freight train hid the beauties of outside nature. The dun sides of freight cars make out of a window a passable mirror. Twice, in those dim and confused glimpses, he caught just a flicker of her eye across her book, as though, she, on her part, were studying him.

It was her back hair which had first entangled Dr. Blake's thoughts; it was the graceful nape of her neck which had served to hold them fast. When the hair and the neck below dawned on him, he identified her as that blonde girl whom he had noted at the train gate, waving farewell to some receding friend--and noted with approval. As a traveler on many seas and much land, he knew the lonely longing to address the woman in the next seat. He knew also, as all seasoned travelers in America know, that such desire is sometimes gratified, and without any surrender of decency, in the frank and easy West--but never east of Chicago. This girl, however, exercised somehow, a special pull upon his attention and his imagination. And he found himself playing a game by which he had mitigated many a journey of old. He divided his personality into two parts--man and physician--and tried, by each separate power, to find as much as he could from surface indications about this travel-mate of his.

Mr. Walter Huntington Blake perceived, besides the hair like dripping honey, deep blue eyes--the blue not of a turquoise but of a sapphire--and an oval face a little too narrow in the jaw, so that the chin pointed a delicate Gothic arch. He noted a good forehead, which inclined him to the belief that she "did" something--some subtle addition which he could not formulate confirmed that observation. He saw that her hands were long and tipped with nails no larger than a grain of maize, that when they rested for a moment on her face, in the shifting attitudes of her reading, they fell as gently as flower-stalks swaying together in a breeze. He saw that her shoulders had a slight slope, which combined with hands and eyes to express a being all feminine--the kind made for a lodestone to a man who has known the hard spots of the world, like Mr. Walter Huntington Blake.

"A pippin!" pronounced Mr. Blake, the man.

Dr. Blake, the physician, on the other hand, caught a certain languor in her movements, a physical tenuity which, in a patient, he would have considered diagnostic. So transparent was her skin that when her profile dipped forward across a bar of sunshine the light shone through the bridge of her nose--a little observation charming to Blake, the man, but a guide to Blake, the physician. She had the look, Dr. Blake told himself, which old-fashioned country nurses of the herb-doctor school refer to as "called." He knew that, in about one case out of three, that look does in fact amount to a real "call"--the outward expression of an obscure disease.

"Her heart?" queried Blake, the physician. The transparent, porcelain quality of her skin would indicate that. But he found, as he watched, no nervous twitching, no look as of an incipient sack under her eyes; nor did the transparent quality seem waxy. There was, too, a certain pinkness in the porcelain which showed that her blood ran red and pure.

Then Mr. Blake and Dr. Blake re-fused into one psychology and decided that her appearance of delicacy was subtly psychological. It haunted him with an irritating effect of familiarity--as of a symptom which he ought to recognize. In all ways was it intertwined with the expression of her mouth. She had never smiled enough; therein lay all the trouble. She presented a very pretty problem to his imagination. Here she was, still so very young that little was written on her face, yet the little, something unusual, baffling. The mouth, too tightly set, too drooping--that expressed it all. To educate such a one in the ways of innocent frivolity!

When the porter's "last call for luncheon" brought that flutter of satisfaction by which a bored parlor-car welcomes even such a trivial diversion as food, Dr. Blake waited a fair interval for her toilet preparations, and followed toward the dining-car. He smiled a little at himself as he realized that he was craftily scheming to find a seat, if not opposite her, at least within seeing distance. On a long and lonely day-journey, he told himself, travelers are like invalids--the smallest incident rolls up into a mountain of adventure. Here he was, playing for sight of an interesting girl, as another traveler timed the train-speed by the mile-posts, or counted the telegraph poles along the way.

So he came out suddenly into the Pullman car ahead--and almost stumbled over the nucleus of his meditations. She was half-kneeling beside a seat, clasping in her arms the figure of a little, old woman. He hesitated, stock still. The blonde girl shifted her position as though to take better hold of her burden, and glanced backward with a look of appeal. The doctor came forward on that; and his sight caught the face of the old woman. Her eyes were closed, her head had dropped to one side and lay supine upon the girl's shoulder. It appeared to be a plain case of faint.

"I am a physician," he said simply, "Get the porter, will you?" Without an instant's question or hesitation, the girl permitted him to relieve her, and turned to the front of the car. Other women and one fussy, noisy man were coming up now. Dr. Blake waved them aside. "We need air most of all--open that window, will you?" The girl was back with the porter. "Is the compartment occupied? Then open it. We must put her on her back." The porter fumbled for his keys. Dr. Blake gathered up the little old woman in his arms, and spoke over his shoulder to the blonde girl:

"You will come with us?" She nodded. Somehow, he felt that he would have picked her from the whole car to assist in this emergency. She was like one of those born trained nurses who ask no questions, need no special directions, and are as reliable as one's instruments.