we begged her to say what had alarmed her. The younger children were so
agitated that they held their candles unsteadily, and the waving shadows
of our figures danced with uncouth and grotesque movements on the walls
and flung themselves into the most uncanny attitudes. The face of the
dead man, now gleaming ghastly in the light, and now extinguished by
some floating shadow, appeared at each emergence to have taken on a new
and more forbidding expression, a maligner menace. Frightened even more
than ourselves by the girl's scream, rats raced in multitudes about the
place, squeaking shrilly, or starred the black opacity of some distant
corner with steadfast eyes, mere points of green light, matching the
faint phosphorescence of decay that filled the half-dug grave and seemed
the visible manifestation of that faint odor of mortality which tainted
the unwholesome air. The children now sobbed and clung about the limbs
of their elders, dropping their candles, and we were near being left in
total darkness, except for that sinister light, which slowly welled
upward from the disturbed earth and overflowed the edges of the grave
like a fountain.

Meanwhile my sister, crouching in the earth that had been thrown out of
the excavation, had removed her hands from her face and was staring with
expanded eyes into an obscure space between two wine casks.

"There it is!--there it is!" she shrieked, pointing; "God in heaven!
can't you see it?"

And there indeed it was!--a human figure, dimly discernible in the
gloom--a figure that wavered from side to side as if about to fall,
clutching at the wine-casks for support, had stepped unsteadily forward
and for one moment stood revealed in the light of our remaining candles;
then it surged heavily and fell prone upon the earth. In that moment we
had all recognized the figure, the face and bearing of our father--dead
these ten months and buried by our own hands!--our father indubitably
risen and ghastly drunk!

On the incidents of our precipitate flight from that horrible place--on
the extinction of all human sentiment in that tumultuous, mad scramble
up the damp and mouldy stairs--slipping, falling, pulling one another
down and clambering over one another's back--the lights extinguished,
babes trampled beneath the feet of their strong brothers and hurled
backward to death by a mother's arm!--on all this I do not dare to
dwell. My mother, my eldest brother and sister and I escaped; the others
remained below, to perish of their wounds, or of their terror--some,
perhaps, by flame. For within an hour we four, hastily gathering
together what money and jewels we had and what clothing we could carry,
fired the dwelling and fled by its light into the hills. We did not even
pause to collect the insurance, and my dear mother said on her
death-bed, years afterward in a distant land, that this was the only sin
of omission that lay upon her conscience. Her confessor, a holy man,
assured her that under the circumstances Heaven would pardon the
neglect.

About ten years after our removal from the scenes of my childhood I,
then a prosperous forger, returned in disguise to the spot with a view
to obtaining, if possible, some treasure belonging to us, which had been
buried in the cellar. I may say that I was unsuccessful: the discovery
of many human bones in the ruins had set the authorities digging for
more. They had found the treasure and had kept it for their honesty. The
house had not been rebuilt; the whole suburb was, in fact, a desolation.
So many unearthly sights and sounds had been reported thereabout that
nobody would live there. As there was none to question nor molest, I
resolved to gratify my filial piety by gazing once more upon the face of
my beloved father, if indeed our eyes had deceived us and he was still
in his grave. I remembered, too, that he had always worn an enormous
diamond ring, and never having seen it nor heard of it since his death,
I had reason to think he might have been buried in it. Procuring a
spade, I soon located the grave in what had been the backyard and began
digging. When I had got down about four feet the whole bottom fell out
of the grave and I was precipitated into a large drain, falling through
a long hole in its crumbling arch. There was no body, nor any vestige of
one.

Unable to get out of the excavation, I crept through the drain, and
having with some difficulty removed a mass of charred rubbish and
blackened masonry that choked it, emerged into what had been that
fateful cellar.

All was clear. My father, whatever had caused him to be "taken bad" at
his meal (and I think my sainted mother could have thrown some light
upon that matter) had indubitably been buried alive. The grave having
been accidentally dug above the forgotten drain, and down almost to the
crown of its arch, and no coffin having been used, his struggles on
reviving had broken the rotten masonry and he had fallen through,
escaping finally into the cellar. Feeling that he was not welcome in his
own house, yet having no other, he had lived in subterranean seclusion,
a witness to our thrift and a pensioner on our providence. It was he who
had eaten our food; it was he who had drunk our wine--he was no better
than a thief! In a moment of intoxication, and feeling, no doubt, that
need of companionship which is the one sympathetic link between a
drunken man and his race, he had left his place of concealment at a
strangely inopportune time, entailing the most deplorable consequences
upon those nearest and dearest to him--a blunder that had almost the
dignity of crime.




JUPITER DOKE, BRIGADIER-GENERAL


_From the Secretary of War to the Hon. Jupiter Doke, Hardpan Crossroads,