“It’s harder to burn down a house than you think,” Luke said.
“—but agreed to allow me a short lease to carry out my researches, on condition that a member of the family be one of my party.”
“They hope,” Luke said solemnly, “that I will dissuade you from digging up the lovely old scandals.”
“There. Now I have explained how I happen to be here, and why Luke has come. As for you two ladies, we all know by now that you are here because I wrote you, and you accepted my invitation. I hoped that each of you might, in her own way, intensify the forces at work in the house; Theodora has shown herself possessed of some telepathic ability, and Eleanor has in the past been intimately involved in poltergeist phenomena—”
“I?”
“Of course.” The doctor looked at her curiously. “Many years ago, when you were a child. The stones—”
Eleanor frowned, and shook her head. Her fingers trembled around the stem of her glass, and then she said, “That was the neighbors. My mother said the neighbors did that. People are always jealous.”
“Perhaps so.” The doctor spoke quietly and smiled at Eleanor. “The incident has been forgotten long ago, of course; I only mentioned it because that is why I wanted you in Hill House.”
“When
I
was a child,” Theodora said lazily, “—‘many years ago,’ Doctor, as you put it so tactfully—I was whipped for throwing a brick through a greenhouse roof. I remember I thought about it for a long time, remembering the whipping but remembering also the lovely crash, and after thinking about it very seriously I went out and did it again.”
“I don’t remember very well,” Eleanor said uncertainly to the doctor.
“But
why?
” Theodora asked. “I mean, I can accept that Hill House is supposed to be haunted, and you want us here, Doctor Montague, to help keep track of what happens—and I bet besides that you wouldn’t at all like being here
alone
—but I just don’t understand. It’s a horrible old house, and if I rented it I’d scream for my money back after one fast look at the front hall, but what’s
here?
What really frightens people so?”
“I will not put a name to what has no name,” the doctor said. “I don’t know.”
“They never even told me what was going on,” Eleanor said urgently to the doctor. “My mother said it was the neighbors, they were always against us because she wouldn’t mix with them. My mother—”
Luke interrupted her, slowly and deliberately. “I think,” he said, “that what we all want is facts. Something we can understand and put together.”
“First,” the doctor said, “I am going to ask you all a question. Do you want to leave? Do you advise that we pack up now and leave Hill House to itself, and never have anything more to do with it?”
He looked at Eleanor, and Eleanor put her hands together tight; it is another chance to get away, she was thinking, and she said, “No,” and glanced with embarrassment at Theodora. “I was kind of a baby this afternoon,” she explained. “I did let myself get frightened.”
“She’s not telling all the truth,” Theodora said loyally. “She wasn’t any more frightened than I was; we scared each other to death over a rabbit.”
“Horrible creatures, rabbits,” Luke said.
The doctor laughed. “I suppose we were all nervous this afternoon, anyway. It is a rude shock to turn that corner and get a clear look at Hill House.”
“I thought he was going to send the car into a tree,” Luke said.
“I am really very brave now, in a warm room with a fire and company,” Theodora said.
“I don’t think we could leave now if we wanted to.” Eleanor had spoken before she realized clearly what she was going to say, or what it was going to sound like to the others; she saw that they were staring at her, and laughed and added lamely, “Mrs. Dudley would never forgive us.” She wondered if they really believed that that was what she had meant to say, and thought, Perhaps it has us now, this house, perhaps it will not let us go.
“Let us have a little more brandy,” the doctor said, “and I will tell you the story of Hill House.” He returned to his classroom position before the fireplace and began slowly, as one giving an account of kings long dead and wars long done with; his voice was carefully unemotional. “Hill House was built eighty-odd years ago,” he began. “It was built as a home for his family by a man named Hugh Crain, a country home where he hoped to see his children and grandchildren live in comfortable luxury, and where he fully expected to end his days in quiet. Unfortunately Hill House was a sad house almost from the beginning; Hugh Crain’s young wife died minutes before she first was to set eyes on the house, when the carriage bringing her here overturned in the driveway, and the lady was brought—ah,
lifeless,
I believe is the phrase they use—into the home her husband had built for her. He was a sad and bitter man, Hugh Crain, left with two small daughters to bring up, but he did not leave Hill House.”
“Children grew up here?” Eleanor asked incredulously.
The doctor smiled. “The house is dry, as I said. There were no swamps to bring them fevers, the country air was thought to be beneficial to them, and the house itself was regarded as luxurious. I have no doubt that two small children could play here, lonely perhaps, but not unhappy.”
“I hope they went wading in the brook,” Theodora said. She stared deeply into the fire. “Poor little things. I hope someone let them run in that meadow and pick wildflowers.”
“Their father married again,” the doctor went on. “Twice more, as a matter of fact. He seems to have been—unlucky in his wives. The second Mrs. Crain died of a fall, although I have been unable to ascertain how or why. Her death seems to have been as tragically unexpected as her predecessor’s. The third Mrs. Crain died of what they used to call consumption, somewhere in Europe; there is, somewhere in the library, a collection of postcards sent to the two little girls left behind in Hill House from their father and their stepmother traveling from one health resort to another. The little girls were left here with their governess until their stepmother’s death. After that Hugh Crain declared his intention of closing Hill House and remaining abroad, and his daughters were sent to live with a cousin of their mother’s, and there they remained until they were grown up.”
“I hope Mama’s cousin was a little jollier than old Hugh,” Theodora said, still staring darkly into the fire. “It’s not nice to think of children growing up like mushrooms, in the dark.”
“They felt differently,” the doctor said. “The two sisters spent the rest of their lives quarreling over Hill House. After all his high hopes of a dynasty centered here, Hugh Crain died somewhere in Europe, shortly after his wife, and Hill House was left jointly to the two sisters, who must have been quite young ladies by then; the older sister had, at any rate, made her debut into society.”
“And put up her hair, and learned to drink champagne and carry a fan . . .”
“Hill House was empty for a number of years, but kept always in readiness for the family; at first in expectation of Hugh Crain’s return, and then, after his death, for either of the sisters who chose to live there. Somewhere during this time it was apparently agreed between the two sisters that Hill House should become the property of the older; the younger sister had married—”
“Aha,” Theodora said. “The
younger
sister married. Stole her sister’s beau, I’ve no doubt.”
“It was said that the older sister was crossed in love,” the doctor agreed, “although that is said of almost any lady who prefers, for whatever reason, to live alone. At any rate, it was the older sister who came back here to live. She seems to have resembled her father strongly; she lived here alone for a number of years, almost in seclusion, although the village of Hillsdale knew her. Incredible as it may sound to you, she genuinely loved Hill House and looked upon it as her family home. She eventually took a girl from the village to live with her, as a kind of companion; so far as I can learn there seems to have been no strong feeling among the villagers about the house then, since old Miss Crain—as she was inevitably known—hired her servants in the village, and it was thought a fine thing for her to take the village girl as a companion. Old Miss Crain was in constant disagreement with her sister over the house, the younger sister insisting that she had given up her claim on the house in exchange for a number of family heirlooms, some of considerable value, which her sister then refused to give her. There were some jewels, several pieces of antique furniture, and a set of gold-rimmed dishes, which seemed to irritate the younger sister more than anything else. Mrs. Sanderson let me rummage through a box of family papers, and so I have seen some of the letters Miss Crain received from her sister, and in all of them those dishes stand out as the recurrent sore subject. At any rate, the older sister died of pneumonia here in the house, with only the little companion to help her—there were stories later of a doctor called too late, of the old lady lying neglected upstairs while the younger woman dallied in the garden with some village lout, but I suspect that these are only scandalous inventions; I certainly cannot find that anything of the sort was widely believed at the time, and in fact most of the stories seem to stem directly from the poisonous vengefulness of the younger sister, who never rested in her anger.”
“I don’t like the younger sister,” Theodora said. “First she stole her sister’s lover, and then she tried to steal her sister’s dishes. No, I don’t like her.”
“Hill House has an impressive list of tragedies connected with it, but then, most old houses have. People have to live and die
somewhere
, after all, and a house can hardly stand for eighty years without seeing some of its inhabitants die within its walls. After the death of the older sister, there was a lawsuit over the house. The companion insisted that the house was left to her, but the younger sister and her husband maintained most violently that the house belonged legally to them and claimed that the companion had tricked the older sister into signing away property which she had always intended leaving to her sister. It was an unpleasant business, like all family quarrels, and as in all family quarrels incredibly harsh and cruel things were said on either side. The companion swore in court—and here, I think, is the first hint of Hill House in its true personality—that the younger sister came into the house at night and stole things. When she was pressed to enlarge upon this accusation, she became very nervous and incoherent, and finally, forced to give some evidence for her charge, said that a silver service was missing, and a valuable set of enamels, in addition to the famous set of gold-rimmed dishes, which would actually be a very difficult thing to steal, when you think about it. For her part, the younger sister went so far as to mention murder and demand an investigation into the death of old Miss Crain, bringing up the first hints of the stories of neglect and mismanagement. I cannot discover that these suggestions were ever taken seriously. There is no record whatever of any but the most formal notice of the older sister’s death, and certainly the villagers would have been the first to wonder if there had been any oddness about the death. The companion won her case at last, and could, in my opinion, have won a case for slander besides, and the house became legally hers, although the younger sister never gave up trying to get it. She kept after the unfortunate companion with letters and threats, made the wildest accusations against her everywhere, and in the local police records there is listed at least one occasion when the companion was forced to apply for police protection to prevent her enemy from attacking her with a broom. The companion went in terror, seemingly; her house burgled at night—she never stopped insisting that they came and stole things—and I read one pathetic letter in which she complained that she had not spent a peaceful night in the house since the death of her benefactor. Oddly enough, sympathy around the village was almost entirely with the younger sister, perhaps because the companion, once a village girl, was now lady of the manor. The villagers believed—and still believe, I think—that the younger sister was defrauded of her inheritance by a scheming young woman. They did not believe that she would murder her friend, you see, but they were delighted to believe that she was dishonest, certainly because they were capable of dishonesty themselves when opportunity arose. Well, gossip is always a bad enemy. When the poor creature killed herself—”
“Killed herself?” Eleanor, shocked into speech, half rose. “She had to kill herself?”
“You mean, was there another way of escaping her tormentor? She certainly did not seem to think so. It was accepted locally that she had chosen suicide because her guilty conscience drove her to it. I am more inclined to believe that she was one of those tenacious, unclever young women who can hold on desperately to what they believe is their own but cannot withstand, mentally, a constant nagging persecution; she had certainly no weapons to fight back against the younger sister’s campaign of hatred, her own friends in the village had been turned against her, and she seems to have been maddened by the conviction that locks and bolts could not keep out the enemy who stole into her house at night—”
“She should have gone away,” Eleanor said. “Left the house and run as far as she could go.”
“In effect, she did. I really think the poor girl was hated to death; she hanged herself, by the way. Gossip says she hanged herself from the turret on the tower, but when you have a house like Hill House with a tower and a turret, gossip would hardly allow you to hang yourself anywhere else. After her death, the house passed legally into the hands of the Sanderson family, who were cousins of hers and in no way as vulnerable to the persecutions of the younger sister, who must have been a little demented herself by that time. I heard from Mrs. Sanderson that when the family—it would have been her husband’s parents—first came to see the house, the younger sister showed up to abuse them, standing on the road to howl at them as they went by, and found herself packed right off to the local police station. And that seems to be the end of the younger sister’s part in the story: from the day the first Sanderson sent her packing to the brief notice of her death a few years later, she seems to have spent her time brooding silently over her wrongs, but far away from the Sandersons. Oddly enough, in all her ranting, she insisted always on one point—she had not, would not, come into this house at night, to steal or for any other reason.”