The Mortimer Mirror

In Which Is Exhibited a Not Particularly Pretty Family Group and an Heirloom's Revenge

FARADAY KEENE

GLENN MORTIMER would not use his library again. He was dead, he was gone, he would never be there any more. And his old room was no business of mine; I was only his secretary and nurse. His little parvenue wife never thought of him, why should I? Yet every day till the day when his wife said she "saw something" there, and locked the door, I went at evening into the library, and lighted the reading-lamp. Not the other lights, just that one. Nothing would have made the servants do it. They avoided that room, from the night when he died there alone, during his own man's dinner-hour, upright in his rolling-chair. (Heart . . . the trouble was called. And though I knew that his wife and her lover had killed him, there wasn't a thing I could do. Her lover was a doctor, he knew plenty of ways to make a rich man's wife into a rich man's widow.)

For the time, then, till the room was shut up for good, I suppose no foot but mine ever crossed the sill of that door. I took over the cleaning and dusting ... no proper work for me, of course, but often I've found the best thing to do with my college degree was to forget it. . . after I saw that not a maid or a man in the house would touch the room for any money. I didn't mind. Sometimes when all was in order just as he liked it, and I had turned on the light, I would sit for a few minutes in the big chair. The leather one. The rolling invalid-chair was gone long ago; she had sent it away.

On the one occasion when the door was thrown open again, for extra light on the job of moving the hall mirror, they swore . . . the old cabinet-maker and his men who had come to get the mirror . . . that they had never touched the reading-lamp. I believe that to be true. But it is also true that I did not touch it either.

THEY unfastened the mirror from the wall just before dusk, by the western light that filled the hall from the library windows; and then they waited for the cart, to take it away. Today that tall and wide and hideously framed old glass reflects two little withered ladies at their tea; they are his aunts, the Mortimer ladies. They had given the glass to Glenn Mortimer, and they took it back again.

Glenn Mortimer was younger than I. His wife needn't have dwelt as long as she did on how she wanted him "humoured". I like younger people. I myself am forty-three. I hope I'm not one of those women who don't know how to grow old. When I saw him, I felt my face get red with anger to think how she had tried to prejudice me, to make me expect a difficult invalid. Never was invalid less difficult, for anyone. But I take credit to myself for having seen, not later than the third minute of my talk with her, that she was silly and false. The legend of his humours hung, I found, on the one and sole episode of the mirror. And his firmness on this single point, that for the first time made her fear him, must, I suppose, in the end have made her hate him too.

"Just to show you," she had said, "how he gets ideas, I must give you an instance. As his . . . what do we call you? . . . secretarynurse," and here she smiled as if inviting me to share her amusement at the proved existence of this strange animal, which might, from her tone, have been a unicorn (though I knew she herself had been old Mrs. Mortimer's paid companion when he married her), " you'll need to know his ways. You'll observe, in the hall upstairs, next to the library door, and where no visitor to the drawing-room can miss it, a huge mirror, in a frame. Oh, that frame! Would you believe it, that thing is there, in my house, because his stuffy old aunts gave it to him when they took an apartment? I believe the carved rabbit, or cherub, or pineapple (perhaps you can tell what it is), on top of it, would have been sacrificed to the height of their new ceiling. Now it's there, in my hall! He likes it . . ." And so on.

HE was a cripple. He had once been, I imagine, tall; now he was humped in a chair. He could not take a single step. Handsome face; dark hair, and dark tormented eyes. Age thirty-five. No occupation, just idle rich. She had smashed him at a bridgehead, driving the new sport-car; one heard she was doing eighty miles. Thrown clear, she struck the water, and swam out; he struck the abutment of the bridge. No one ever heard him complain.

And she had taken a lover, all of us knew it. A sleek young doctor, family-physician type; he came and went in the house, and sometimes stopped at the library door to speak to its master. The library was Glenn Mortimer's world. From the ground floor an elevator rose to it. The elevator went no higher. Why spoil the whole house, his wife had asked him sensibly, when, with the adjoining small drawingroom made into his bedroom, with his own new and so perfect bath, and his man at hand, he needed nothing above those two lower floors? As for herself, she said, she gladly gave up to him the only room she really liked to receive in (the larger drawing-room was impossible, as he must know, except for parties) ; she would be content with a newly decorated sitting-room on the story above. So up and down two flights of stairs the lady's social life was flowing, with an eddy halfway down now and then, but with decreasing frequency, toward the library door, inside which door, and facing it . . . always facing it . . . Glenn Mortimer sat with hungry eyes.

He loved her abominably. I mean, to a pitch of perfectly abominable suffering. And she was ten times kinder to her dog. If it was painful to watch, it must have been torture to feel. I did my share of war-work, I remember the eyes of little starving children. His were like them.

I remember the day when his first suspicion of her unfaithfulness entered his mind. I did not see it enter, but I saw it cast out . . . and with him the two things could not have been far apart. He spoke to her on a morning after a night when she came in late . . . very late .. . with the doctor. "Don't you think," he had said to her, holding his head straight up above the ruined shoulders, "that all these nightlights in the hall are unnecessary? Why does that big blazing Florentine lantern have to burn all night long just over the turn of the stairs? Of course I don't see it, I'm in the other room in bed; but it's an unrestful idea. I'd rather know that the stairs are dark." She shot him a burning look, she was not the kind to understand he was telling her that his wife did not need to be watched. But all the same, the stairs were dark after that. If he lay in the erstwhile drawing-room, in his anatomically-adjusted bed, and gnawed his fingers, who cared? Sometimes, when I was feeling wakeful myself, I wondered what pictures he saw against the dark, of a little sitting-room upstairs, decorated like a jewel-box, that he had never seen ... of another room with the tall Spanish bed, that he had seen for the last time. I know I often shivered with my own helpless cold rage, thinking of furtive steps up and down deep-carpeted stairs . . .

She asked me to stay on after his death, and I stayed. Four months. How those two had killed him, I never knew; of course the certificate was all in order. I stayed to cover the shame and scandal of her life with her lover, till they should marry, and he move into the house for good. I would keep Glenn Mortimer's house for him, dead ... I who could do nothing for him living; I would cover up the ways of the adultress, and rule the servants' tongues. It would not be long.

IT might have been longer (for those vulgar lovers had all their desire, and marriage could wait), if she had not "seen something". She saw it in the mirror, and I saw it too, one evening when, after lighting the lamp in the library, I met her in the hall. She stopped for a moment, between the first and second flights of the stairs, on that unwonted level in her own house where she had stopped so little . . . where she never stopped any more. And while we stood so, talking, I can't say we turned about ... we were turned, something made us turn, I felt it working on her as it did on me. We faced round. Now we were looking toward the end of the hall, and saw in the mirror there a piece of the library reflected, through the door. Part of the rug; a stool. I was beginning to trace, low down and to one side, a singular curved line, rounding out beyond the door-frame, and not distinct ... almost as if one could blink it away ... a dim motionless arc, the segment of a circle of some size . . . when there came a gasp in my ear. "Do you see it?" she panted. "Do you see something there . . . something like the rim of a wheel?" That was what it was like, of course, that dim, curved line against the light. And as we looked, it turned . . .

I got her upstairs, I pretended to know nothing. But the door was locked after that. And now she was all in a fever to be married, and off. She would sell the house, she would go away. And the old aunts sent for the great glass.

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When the time came, I was there in the hall, along with the old cabinetmaker who was to pack it. I hated to see it go. Glenn Mortimer had liked it, it was "family". It was standing propped in a corner of the wall, at an angle to its old accustomed place; and in it one now saw a part of the library which it had not reflected before. It showed the lamp, and the broad desk with the dust on it; and all at once I saw that, over the desk, in the falling dusk, the lamp was lighted.

In that same moment, her foot was on the stair; she was coming down. She came lightly, her lover was waiting. Beside the big glass, the old man stood patiently at guard. Like the mirror, he too was "family"; he had always worked for the Mortimers. His men were late with the boards and sacking to pack it for handling, and so he stood there, dignified and quiet, folding his stained hands, awaiting the courteous notice of the lady of the house as she passed.

She did not notice him. Swiftly she came down like a bright darting bird, and did not see the mirror, in its unaccustomed place, till she was fairly on it. I was facing it too, and to me also it came like a shock to see the reflection of her little elegant figure, so sharply arrested: the slim frock, the hard bright rosy face, the tiny smart hat pulled down on her head, all mirrored in what had been, ten minutes earlier, the corner of two blank walls. And then, as her face went suddenly and horribly white before my eyes, I could see what she saw behind us both, in the glass, through the library door: a brooding, seated shape, dark against the glow of a lamp, a shape that swept forward toward the threshold, smoothly—on wheels . . .

Her paralysis broke without a sound, I think she was too terrified to scream. With a single bound of her light body, she put the length of one frantic and incredible leap between her and that door. And then indeed she screamed! . . . Screamed twice, shrieks to pierce the marrow ... as the staircase opened under her frightened feet that vainly sought the floor. Disoriented, deceived by the great glass in its unfamiliar place, she had leaped for escape toward the side-corridor . . . toward where the corridor with its stout safe floor should have been . . . and found empty space. With all the force of her distracted spring of fear, she pitched forward and down.

They picked her up with her broken neck from where she had struck, there at her lover's feet.