Buttrick pried his arm out of Amadee’s grip and strode quickly into the drawing room. As was his habit, Cullum was seated as far away from the tapestry as was physically possible. He rose unsteadily as the doctor entered the room.
“So—so good of you to come, Nathan,” he said. Although his mind was on the verge of splintering into a thousand shards of madness, automatically the heir preserved the vestiges of a courtesy reserved for calmer spirits.
Buttrick placed his bag on a richly damasked ottoman, inspecting his patient’s appearance with a quick, professional glance. He was appalled by Cullum’s decline since the last visit. The man was wrapped in a crimson sitting-robe that seemed made for a larger frame, so grievously had his body wasted under the bearing of his mental burden. The eyes were preternaturally bright, staring from dark sockets. Cullum nervously plucked at the cord of the gown with a hand which shocked Buttrick by its resemblance to Emma’s—blanched, and with yellowed nails. The doctor had seen patients harboring within them vile malignancies fall into such decay. But Cullum’s dissolution was the result of a mental cancer which threatened to destroy both mind and body. It was moot which—soul or flesh—would perish first.
Now the man seemed inflamed by a strange eagerness. He motioned Buttrick to close his bag, and cleared his throat nervously.
“I fear, Nathan, that I have not been the best of patients. All your medications, all your attentions—useless.” He dismissed them with a wave of his blue-veined hand. “Nothing will relieve me. Nothing can ease the weight of this hideous charge I labor under…” Cullum stopped briefly and seemed to listen to the tapestry. Recovering his train of thought, he continued. “Unless—unless I somehow ease my mind of this guardianship!” He spat the word out in mingled tones of fear and loathing.
“Unless I tell the secret I shall die, and the secret shall die with me. And if I tell the secret, the secret shall die, and I shall die with it. Almost a conundrum, eh Buttrick? A true gnomic riddle, eh my friend?”
The physician rose to steady Cullum, for his speech was assuming the peculiar cadence of madness. The man rallied, mumbling, “Not yet—not yet.” In a moment his face took on a grave cast as he spoke in cooler, more ominous tones.
“You must have suspected, Nathan, that the cause of my agony was exceedingly strange. The aneurism,” he tapped his temple, “it is nothing. We Cullums have suffered more unusual maladies than that. My trouble lies deeper than the fragile flesh.” The heir paused reflectively, then continued. “I—I have stood it as long as I could, endured under this hideous burden longer than I thought possible. I am not as strong as Emma was. Not so much of a Cullum, perhaps. She was like my father, Captain Hugh, amazingly strong-willed. The secret of our family horror—I know no other name for it—was safe with her while she lived. But I—two years, man! Two years of ceaseless anxiety. And the last few months have been a waking terror!”
Buttrick had been engrossed by Cullum’s narration. But suddenly he started. A sound, a muffled moan or cry, had issued from the direction of the cabalistic tapestry. Cullum saw the doctor’s apprehensive glance.
“Not yet, my friend. Later you shall know all. For now, Nathan, hear me out.” He flicked his hand at Amadee, who was loitering in the door of the drawing-room. “That will be all, Amadee. Go to your duties.” The Acadian shuffled reluctantly into the bowels of the house. When his footsteps no longer sounded off the flaking walls of the passage, Cullum resumed his monologue.
“It is now time, Nathan, that you knew the well-kept secret of this house, for I shall tell you or die in the attempt. Only by sharing this intolerable weight have I any chance of keeping my sanity.” His lips trembled as he fought to maintain calmness. “It is n-not easy to disburden oneself of such knowledge, but I must, despite the warning, or I shall most surely go mad. Be patient, Nathan, and let me tell it in my own way.”
Buttrick settled uneasily into a sofa. For a moment he felt a sudden impulse to deny Cullum the opportunity to tell his tale. Why should he, Nathan Buttrick, participate in this secret? His precinct was the body, not the diseased mind. With its austere inhabitants and wild setting between the forest wastes and the sullen North Atlantic, Sabbathday was eerie enough without compounding it by a knowledge of the secret of Cullum House.
But gradually Buttrick’s professional instincts exerted themselves. If Cullum did not gain some mental relief, either the torments he underwent would render him mad, or his aneurism would burst under the strain. The doctor settled back and accepted a dark sherry from his patient’s trembling hand.
“Nathan,” said Cullum, “have you ever heard the name—Ligea?”
“Ligea was the… second wife, I believe, of your father, Captain Hugh,” answered Buttrick.
“Yes, if she can be called—a wife!”
Immediately Buttrick knew the reason for Cullum’s bitter statement. The doctor had been only a child when Ligea came to Sabbathday, yet the bizarre tales the townspeople told about her were preserved in his memory. After the death of his first wife, the mother of Laurence and Emma, Captain Hugh Cullum had consigned his children to the care of a relative. He then embarked on his last voyage as master of the steamer Ogunquit to the Baltic port of Riga. When he returned to Sabbathday almost two years later, he brought with him the numerous spoils of Yankee trading and a mistress for Cullum House, the dark Ligea.
Grotesque rumors about this woman soon sprang up amidst the villagers. Perhaps some originated in the mouths of goodwives who envied her exotic charms. For Ligea was oddly beautiful—a tall woman, with a luminous Eastern complexion, sinuous in her movements, heavily accented in her speech. Ligea’s most distinctive feature was her long raven hair of a black deeper than the northern forest night.
Whatever their origin, the stories about Ligea soon were the common coin of conversation around the hearths of Sabbathday. It was said that she had brought the nighthawks to Cullum House. Before her coming, these nocturnal flyers had soared only over the backlands far from town. Now they roosted in the trees of the estate, trembling the night air with the beat of wings.
More serious, some reported that Ligea had been seen on Walpurgis Night wantoning naked through the woods at the fringe of town. One individual who had been abroad at that hour swore that a glowing cloud had passed in from the sea over Sabbathday, and that voices could be heard mumbling in strange tongues from within the floating mass. An ancient dame who dwelt alone near Gallowglass Hill averred that Ligea had spent many afternoons with the few Indian sachems still alive, the degenerate remainder of the Pequot tribe. This nearly extinct race, it was said, held powers over air and sea.
The more intelligent of the townsfolk dismissed these tales as fantasies. Yet all knew that Ligea exerted a strange hold on Captain Hugh. The gruff skipper was quite deferential to her in public, a far cry from his callous treatment of his first wife. There were some who even noticed more than a touch of fear in his attitude toward the tall woman whom he bore on his arm.
However, in her public behavior the woman was impeccable—haughty of mien, knowledgeable in the social graces, distant yet polite. During the couples’ visits to town she comported herself as befitted the wife of a monied landowner. Only a few noted that occasionally she exchanged knowing glances with the most depraved of the town’s moral outcasts.
A year after her arrival in Sabbathday, Ligea was big with child. At this time Hugh Cullum ceased his frequent visits to town and seemed to enter retirement at the end of Windham Road. The village believed that he had secluded himself in deference to his wife’s condition. Not a soul understood that behind the captain’s bluff facade lay a spirit sorely harried by some knowledge which he could impart to no other person.