The Sword of Damocles

“There’s no such word.”

Bulwer

A wind was blowing through the city. Not a gentle and balmy zephyr, stirring the locks on gentle ladies’ foreheads and rustling the curtains in elegant boudoirs, but a chill and bitter gale that rushed with a swoop through narrow alleys and forsaken courtyards, biting the cheeks of the few solitary wanderers that still lingered abroad in the darkened streets.

In front of a cathedral that reared its lofty steeple in the midst of the squalid houses and worse than squalid saloons of one of the dreariest portions of the East Side, stood the form of a woman. She had paused in her rush down the narrow street to listen to the music, perhaps, or to catch a glimpse of the light that now and then burst from the widely swinging doors as they opened and shut upon some tardy worshipper.

She was tall and fearful looking; her face, when the light struck it, was seared and desperate; gloom and desolation were written on all the lines of her rigid but wasted form, and when she shuddered under the gale, it was with that force and abandon to which passion lends its aid, and in which the soul proclaims its doom.

Suddenly the doors before her swung wide and the preacher’s voice was heard: “Love God and you will love your fellow-men. Love your fellow-men and you best show your love to God.”

She heard, started, and the charm was broken. “Love!” she echoed with a horrible laugh; “there is no love in heaven or on earth!”

And she swept by, and the winds followed and the darkness swallowed her up like a gulf.

It was after a matinée performance at ⸻ Hall some two weeks ago that I stopped to light a cigar in the small corridor leading to the back entrance. I was in a dissatisfied frame of mind. Something in the music I had been playing or the manner in which it had been received had touched unwonted chords in my own nature. I felt alone. I remember asking myself as I stood there, what it all amounted to? Who of all the applauding crowd would watch at my bedside through a long and harassing sickness, or lend their sympathy as they now yielded their praise, if instead of carrying off the honors of the day I had failed to do justice to my reputation. I was just smiling over the only exception I could make to this sweeping assertion, that of the pale-eyed youth you have sometimes observed dogging my steps, when Briggs came up to me.

“There is a woman here, sir, who insists on seeing you; she has been waiting through half the last piece. Shall I tell her you are coming out?”

“A woman!” exclaimed I, somewhat surprised, for my visitors are not apt to be of the gentler sex.

“Yes sir, an old one. She seems very anxious to speak to you. I could not get rid of her no how.”

I hurried forward to the muffled figure which he pointed out cowering against the wall by the door. “Well, my good woman, what do you want?”

She smiled and they hastened on, presently finding themselves in the village streets. Suddenly she paused. “Small towns have their mysteries as well as great cities,” said she; “we are not without ours, look.”

He turned, followed with a glance the direction of her pointing finger and started in his sudden surprise. She had indicated to him the house whose ghostly and frowning front bore written across its grim gray boards, such an inscription of painful remembrance. “It is a solitary looking place, isn’t it?” she went on, innocent of the pain she was inflicting. “No one lives there or ever will, I imagine. Do you see that board nailed across the front door?”

He forced himself to look. He did more, he fixed his eyes upon the desolate structure before him until the aspect of its huge unpainted walls with their long rows of sealed-up windows and high smokeless chimneys was impressed indelibly upon his mind. The large front door with its weird and solemn barrier was the last thing upon which his eye rested.

“Yes,” said he, and involuntarily asked what it meant.

“We do not know exactly,” she responded. “It was nailed across there by the men who followed Colonel Japha to the grave. Colonel Japha was the owner of the house,” she proceeded, too interested to observe the shadow which the utterance of that name had invoked upon his brow. “He was a peculiar man I judge, and had suffered great wrongs they say; at all events his life was very solitary and sad, and on his deathbed

At that moment there was a hush, when suddenly the small clock on the mantelpiece struck eleven, and instantly as if awaiting the signal, there came a rush and a heavy crash which drew everyone to their feet, and the brilliant portrait of my lady fell from the wall, and toppling over the cabinet beneath, slid with the various articles of bronze and china thereon, almost to the very chair in which its handsome prototype had been sitting.

It was a startling interruption and for an instant no one spoke, then Paula with a look towards her cousin breathed to herself rather than said, “Pray God it be not an omen!” And the pale countenances of the two gentlemen standing face to face on either side of that fallen picture, showed that the shadow of the same superstition had insensibly crossed their own minds.

Mrs. Sylvester was the only one who remained unmoved. “Lift if up,” cried she, “and let us see if it has sustained any injury.”

Instantly Bertram and her husband sprang forward, and in a moment its glowing surface was turned upward. Who could read the meaning of the look that crossed her husband’s face as he perceived that the sharp spear of the bronze horseman, which had been overturned in the fall, had penetrated the rosy countenance of the portrait and destroyed that importunate smile forever.

What loneliness! what a monument of buried passions outliving death itself!

Paula paused as she reached the gate; but remembering that Mrs. Hamlin was accustomed to enter the house by a side door, hurried around the corner and carefully surveyed the windows from that quarter. One of the shutters was open, allowing the flame of the setting sun to gild the panes like gold. She did not know then nor has she been able to explain since, what it was that came over her at the sight, but almost before she realized it, she had returned to the gate, opened it, threaded the overgrown garden, reached the door which she had so frequently beheld the aged woman enter and knocked.

Instantly she was seized with a consciousness of what she had done, and frightened at her temerity, meditated an immediate escape. Drawing the folds of her mantle about her form and face, she prepared to fly, when she remembered the look of entreaty with which this woman had said on that night of their conversation, “Do not disappoint me! Do not keep me long in suspense!” and moved by a fresh impulse, turned and inflicted another resounding knock on the door.

The result was unlooked-for and surprising. To the sound from within of a quick passionate cry, there came a hurried movement, followed by a deep silence, then another hasty stir succeeded by a longer silence, then a rush which seemed to bring all