The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Dark House, by I. A. R. Wylie

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Title: The Dark House

Author: I. A. R. Wylie

Release Date: September 27, 2004 [eBook #13546]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DARK HOUSE***

E-text prepared by Al Haines

THE DARK HOUSE

by

I. A. R. WYLIE

Author of "The Daughter of Brahma," "The Shining Heights," etc.

1922

PART I

I

1

The cigar was a large one and Robert Stonehouse was small. At the
precise moment, in fact, when he leant out of the upstairs bedroom
window, instinctively seeking fresh air, he became eight years old. He
did not know this, though he did know that it was his birthday and that
a birthday was a great and presumably auspicious occasion. His
conception of what a birthday ought to be was based primarily on one
particular event when he had danced on his mother's bed, shouting, "I'm
five--I'm five!" in unreasonable triumph. His mother had greeted him
gravely, one might say respectfully, and his father, who when he did
anything at all did it in style, had given him a toy fort fully
garrisoned with resplendent Highland soldiers. And there had been a
party of children whom, as a single child, he disliked and despised and
whom he had ordered about unreproved. From start to finish the day had
been his very own.

Soon afterwards his mother disappeared. They said she was dead. He
knew that people died, but death conveyed nothing to him, and when his
father and Christine went down to Kensal Green to choose the grave, he
picked flowers from the other graves and sent them to his mother with
Robert's love. Christine had turned away her face, crying, and James
Stonehouse, whose sense of drama never quite failed him, had smiled
tragically; but Robert never even missed her. His only manifestation
of feeling was a savage hatred of Christine, who tried to take her
place. For a time indeed his mother went completely out of his
consciousness. But after a little she came back to him by a secret
path. In the interval she had ceased to be connected with his evening
prayer and his morning bath and all the ot