I did not know. I do know, however, that my strange experience on that day was the beginning of the end; the end that is not yet, but is swiftly on the way—for me!
V.
As the the day wore on, I grew restless and uneasy; ill at ease and dissatisfied.
So after dinner I went for a long walk along the country roads. When I returned my wife was asleep. I lay down softly beside her, and, tired out by my long walk, was soon asleep myself.
Asleep, I dreamed. Dreamed of Toi Wah and Toi Wah's kitten. And I heard again, in my sleep, the plaintive cry of the cat mother as she called anxiously and lovingly for her kitten that would never return.
So vivid and so real was the dream that I awoke with a cry of the cat in my ears. And as I awoke, I seemed to hear it again—plaintive, subdued, a half-cat, half-human cry, as if a woman had cried aloud and then quickly suppressed the cry.
And my wife was gone!
I sprang up hastily. The moonlight was streaming through the window. It was almost as light as day. She was nowhere in the room.
I went swiftly down the hall and descended the stairs, making no noise with my bare feet. The door of my grandmother's room was open. I looked in. Two luminous eyes, with a greenish tinge, glowed out at me from the semi-darkness of the far corner.
For an instant my heart stood still, and then raced palpitatingly on. I took a deep breath and went toward the unknown thing with glowing eyes that crouched in that corner.
As I reached the pool of moonlight in the center of the room, I heard a gasp of fear, a sudden movement, and my wife fled past me, out of the room and up the stairs.
I heard the bedroom door slam behind her, heard the key turn in the lock.
As she rushed past me and up the stairs, the patter of her feet fell on my ears like the soft padding of Toi Wah's footsteps that had filled my youthful years with fear. My blood chilled at this old, until now, forgotten sound.
What craven fear was this? I tried to pull myself together, to reason rationally. Fear of a cat long dead, whose mouldering bones were upstairs on the attic floor! What was there to fear? Was I going mad?
The slamming of the bedroom door, the turning of the key in the lock, instantly changed my thought and roused in me an overwhelming fury. Was I to be locked out of my own bedroom—our bedroom?
I rushed up the stairs. I knocked on the door, I rattled the knob. I pounded with my fists on the panels. I shouted, "Open! Open the door!"
In the midst of my furious onslaught, the door suddenly opened and a sleepy-eyed little figure stood aside to allow me to enter.
"Why, Robert!" she exclaimed, as I stood there, bewildered and ashamed, a furious conflict of doubt, fear and uncertainty raging in my mind. "What's the matter? Where have you been? I was sound asleep, and you frightened me, shouting and pounding at the door."
Was I deceived? Partly. But in her eyes! Ah! In her eyes was that sly, inscrutable catlike look that I had never seen there until that day. And now that look never leaves them, it is there always!
"What were you doing below stairs—alone in my grandmother's room?" I stammered.
She arched her brows incredulously.
"I?—below stairs? Why, Robert, what is wrong with you? I just this moment awoke from a sound sleep to let you in. How could I be below stairs?"
"But the bedroom door was locked!" I exclaimed.
"You must have gone below yourself," she explained, "and shut the door after you. It has a spring lock. You surely must have had some hideous dream. Dear, come to bed now." And she went back to bed.
Again I dissembled as I had that day when I found her standing before Toi Wah's portrait. I knew, beyond a reasonable doubt, that she was lying. I knew I had been fully awake and in my right senses when I had gone down stairs and found her there. Evidently she desired to deceive me, and until I could fathom her motive I would pretend to believe her. So, muttering something to the effect that she must be right, I got into bed also.
But not to sleep. There came trooping into my harried mind all the old youthful terrors of the dark, and I lived over all those terror-haunted days when I dwelt in fear of Toi Wah or of a shadowy something, I knew not what.
Lying there in the dark, I resolved that morning would find me leaving that seemingly ghost-ridden place forever. My peace of mind, my happiness, to be free from fear—these things were worth all the fine old country places in the world. And with this resolution, I slept.
I slept far into the day, awaking at noon to find my wife had gone out with some of our neighbors for a game of tennis and afternoon tea. So, clearly, I could not arrange to leave until the next day. I must await my wife's return, and in the meantime formulate some sort of reasonable excuse to explain to her my precipitate return to town, after planning a year's sojourn in the country.
And then, too, it was daylight now, sober matter-of-fact daylight, and, as was always the case with me, the terrors of the night then seemed unreal, half forgotten nightmares. So I dismissed the subject from my mind for the time being, and set out for a long walk across the fields.
It was near dinner time when I returned. As I opened the door of the dining-room, my wife turned from where she stood by the fire-place to greet me, and I was again struck by her resemblance to Toi Wah. The arrangement of her hair heightened this effect. And when she smiled—I cannot describe it! Such a sly, secret, feline smile!
"Robert," she said, as she came to me and put up her lips to be kissed. "Do you know what day this is?"
I shook my head.
"Why, it's my birthday, you forgetful boy! My twenty-first birthday, and I have a surprise for you.
"The old Buddhist priest, who taught me when I was a child gave me a flagon of rare old Chinese Lotus wine, when he parted from me, which I was to keep inviolate until my twenty-first birthday. I would be married then, he said, and on that day I was to unseal the old flagon and drink the wine with my husband in memory of my old teacher who would then be in the bosom of Nirvana.
"Look!" and she turned to the serving-table on which sat a small, squat wicker-covered flagon, and handed it to me.
I looked at it curiously. It was sealed with a small brass seal, which was stamped all over with dim Chinese characters.
"What are these characters?" I asked, handing her the flagon.
She looked closely at the seal.
"Oh! One of those wise old Buddhist sayings, which the Chinese stick on everything." She smiled. "Shall I translate it? I can, you know."
I nodded.
"'Wine maketh the heart glad or sad, good or evil. Drink Oh! Man to thy choice!'" she read.
Then she pulled off the seal and poured out the wine; a thick amber liquid, so heavy that it poured like thick
