It was the year of Harpledon’s first “jumble sale” that all these odds and ends of observation first began to connect themselves in my mind.
Harpledon had decided that it ought to have a village hospital and dispensary, and Cranch was among the first to promise a subscription and to join the committee. A meeting was called at Mrs. Durant’s and after much deliberation it was decided to hold a village fair and jumble sale in somebody’s grounds; but whose? We all hoped Cranch would lend his garden; but no one dared to ask him. We sounded each other cautiously, before he arrived, and each tried to shift the enterprise to his neighbour; till at last Homer Davids, our chief celebrity as a painter, and one of the shrewdest heads in the community, said drily: “Oh, Cranch wouldn’t care about it.”
“How do you know he wouldn’t?” some one queried.
“Just as you all do; if not, why is it that you all want some one else to ask him?”
Mrs. Durant hesitated. “I’m sure — ” she began.
“Oh, well, all right, then! You ask him,” rejoined Davids cheerfully.
“I can’t always be the one — ”
I saw her embarrassment, and volunteered: “If you think there’s enough shade in my garden . . . ”
By the way their faces lit up I saw the relief it was to them all not to have to tackle Cranch. Yet why, having a garden he was proud of, need he have been displeased at the request?
“Men don’t like the bother,” said one of our married ladies; which occasioned the proper outburst of praise for my unselfishness, and the observation that Cranch’s maids, who had all been for years in his service, were probably set in their ways, and wouldn’t care for the confusion and extra work. “Yes, old Catherine especially; she guards the place like a dragon,” one of the ladies remarked; and at that moment Cranch appeared. Having been told what had been settled he joined with the others in complimenting me; and we began to plan for the jumble sale.
The men needed enlightenment on this point, I as much as the rest, but the prime mover immediately explained: “Oh, you just send any old rubbish you’ve got in the house.”
We all welcomed this novel way of clearing out our cupboards, except Cranch who, after a moment, and with a whimsical wrinkling of his brows, said: “But I haven’t got any old rubbish.”
“Oh, well, children’s cast-off toys for instance,” a newcomer threw out at random.
There was a general smile, to which Cranch responded with one of his rare expressive gestures, as who should say: “Toys — in my house? But whose?”
I laughed, and one of the ladies, remembering our old joke, cried out: “Why, but the hobby-horse!”
Cranch’s face became a well-bred blank. Long-suffering courtesy was the note of the voice in which he echoed: “Hobbyhorse —?”
“Don’t you remember?” It was Mrs. Durant who prompted him. “Our old joke? The wonderful black-and-white hobby-horse that Miss Lucilla Selwick said she saw you driving home with when you first arrived here? It had a real mane.” Her colour rose a little as she spoke.
There was a moment’s pause, while Cranch’s brow remained puzzled; then a smile slowly cleared his face. “Of course!” he said. “I’d forgotten. Well, I feel now that I was young enough for toys thirty years ago; but I didn’t feel so then. And we should have to apply to Miss Selwick to know what became of that hobby-horse. Meanwhile,” he added, putting his hand in his pocket, “here’s a small offering to supply some new ones for the fair.”
The offering was not small: Cranch always gave liberally, yet always produced the impression of giving indifferently. Well, one couldn’t have it both ways; some of our most gushing givers were the least lavish. The committee was delighted . . .
“It was queer,” I said afterward to Mrs. Durant. “Why did the hobby-horse joke annoy Cranch? He used to like it.”
She smiled. “He may think it’s lasted long enough. Harpledon jokes do last, you know.”
Yes; perhaps they did, though I had never thought of it before.
“There’s one thing that puzzles me,” I went on; “I never know beforehand what is going to annoy him.”
She pondered. “I’ll tell you, then,” she said suddenly. “It has annoyed him that no one thought of asking him to give one of his water-colours to the sale.”
“Didn’t we?”
“No. Homer Davids was asked, and that made it . . . rather more marked . . . ”
“Oh, of course! I suppose we all forgot — ”
She looked away. “Well,” she said, “I don’t suppose he likes to be forgotten.”
“You mean: to have his accomplishments forgotten?”
“Isn’t that a little condescending? I should say, his gifts,” she corrected a trifle sharply. Sharpness was so unusual in her that she may have seen my surprise, for she added, in her usual tone: “After all, I suppose he’s our most brilliant man, isn’t he?” She smiled a little, as if to take the sting from my doing so.
“Of course he is,” I rejoined. “But all the more reason — how could a man of his kind resent such a trifling oversight? I’ll write at once — ”
“Oh, don’t!” she cut me short, almost pleadingly.
Mrs. Durant’s word was law: Cranch was not asked for a water-colour. Homer Davids’s, I may add, sold for two thousand dollars, and paid for a heating-system for our hospital. A Boston millionaire came down on purpose to buy the picture. It was a great day for Harpledon.
About a week after the fair I went one afternoon to call on Mrs. Durant, and found Cranch just leaving. His greeting, as he hurried by, was curt and almost hostile, and his handsome countenance so disturbed and pale that I hardly recognized him. I was sure there could be nothing personal in his manner; we had always been on good terms, and, next to Mrs. Durant, I suppose I was his nearest friend at Harpledon — if ever one could be said to get near Waldo Cranch! After he had passed me I stood hesitating at Mrs. Durant’s open door — front doors at Harpledon were always open in those friendly days, except, by the way, Cranch’s own, which the stern Catherine kept chained and bolted. Since meeting me could not have been the cause of his anger, it might have been excited by something which had passed between Mrs. Durant and himself; and if that were so, my call was probably inopportune. I decided not to go in, and was turning away when I heard hurried steps, and Mrs. Durant’s voice. “Waldo!” she said.
I suppose I had always assumed that she called him so; yet the familiar appellation startled me, and made me feel more than ever in the way. None of us had ever given Cranch his Christian name.
Mrs. Durant checked her steps, perceiving that the back in the doorway was not Cranch’s but mine. “Oh, do come in,” she murmured, with an attempt at ease.
In the little drawing-room I turned and looked at her. She, too, was visibly disturbed; not angry, as he had been, but showing, on her white face and reddened lids, the pained reflection of his anger. Was it against her, then, that he had manifested it? Probably she guessed my thought, or felt her appearance needed to be explained, for she added quickly: “Mr. Cranch has just gone. Did he speak to you?”
“No. He seemed in a great hurry.”
“Yes . . . I wanted to beg him to come back . . . to try to quiet him . . . ”
She saw my bewilderment, and picked up a copy of an illustrated magazine which had been tossed on the sofa. “It’s that — ” she said.
The pages fell apart at an article entitled: “Colonial Harpledon,” the greater part of which was taken up by a series of clever sketches signed by the Boston architect whom she had brought to Cranch’s a few months earlier.
Of the six or seven drawings, four were devoted to the Cranch house. One represented the facade and its pillared gates, a second the garden front with the windowless side of the wing, the third a corner of the box garden surrounding the Chinese summer-house; while the fourth, a full-page drawing, was entitled: “The back of the slaves’ quarters and service-court: quaint window-grouping.”
On that picture the magazine had opened; it was evidently the one which had been the subject of discussion between my hostess and her visitor.
“You see . . . you see . . . ” she cried.
“This picture? Well, what of it? I suppose it’s the far side of the wing — the side we’ve never any of us seen.”
“Yes; that’s just it. He’s horribly upset . . . ”
“Upset about what? I heard him tell the architect he could come back some other day and see the wing . . . some day when the maids were not sitting in the court; wasn’t that it?”
She shook her head tragically. “He didn’t mean it. Couldn’t you tell by the sound of his voice that he didn’t?”
Her tragedy airs were beginning to irritate me. “I don’t know that I pay as much attention as all that to the sound of his voice.”
She coloured, and choked back her tears. “I know him so well; I’m always sorry to see him lose his self-control. And then he considers me responsible.”
“You?”
“It was I who took the wretched man there. And of course it was an indiscretion to do that drawing; he was never really authorized to come back. In fact, Mr. Cranch gave orders to Catherine and all the other servants not to let him in if he did.”
“Well —?”
“One of the maids seems to have disobeyed the order; Mr. Cranch imagines she was bribed. He has been staying in Boston, and this morning, on the way back, he saw this magazine at the book-stall at the station. He was so horrified that he brought it to me. He came straight from the train without going home, so he doesn’t yet know how the thing happened.”
“It doesn’t take much to horrify him,” I said, again unable to restrain a faint sneer.
“What’s the harm in the man’s having made that sketch?”
“Harm?” She looked surprised at my lack of insight. “No actual harm, I suppose; but it was very impertinent; and Mr. Cranch resents such liberties intensely. He’s so punctilious.”
“Well, we Americans are not punctilious, and being one himself, he ought to know it by this time.”
She pondered again. “It’s his Spanish blood, I suppose . . . he’s frightfully proud.” As if this were a misfortune, she added: “I’m very sorry for him.”
“So am I, if such trifles upset him.”
Her brows lightened. “Ah, that’s what I tell him — such things are trifles, aren’t they? As I said just now: ‘Your life’s been too fortunate, too prosperous. That’s why you’re so easily put out.’”
“And what did he answer?”
“Oh, it only made him angrier. He said: ‘I never expected that from you’ — that was when he rushed out of the house.” Her tears flowed over, and seeing her so genuinely perturbed I restrained my impatience, and took leave after a few words of sympathy.
Never had Harpledon seemed to me more like a tea-cup than with that silly tempest convulsing it. That there should be grownup men who could lose their self-command over such rubbish, and women to tremble and weep with them! For a moment I felt the instinctive irritation of normal man at such foolishness; yet before I reached my own door I was as mysteriously perturbed as Mrs. Durant.
The truth was, I had never thought of Cranch as likely to lose his balance over trifles. He had never struck me as unmanly; his quiet manner, his even temper, showed a sound sense of the relative importance of things. How then could so petty an annoyance have thrown him into such disorder?
I stopped short on my threshold, remembering his face as he brushed past me. “Something is wrong; really wrong,” I thought. But what? Could it be jealousy of Mrs. Durant and the Boston architect? The idea would not bear a moment’s consideration, for I remembered her face too.
“Oh, well, if it’s his silly punctilio,” I grumbled, trying to reassure myself, and remaining, after all, as much perplexed as before.
All the next day it poured, and I sat at home among my books. It must have been after ten in the evening when I was startled by a ring. The maids had gone to bed, and I went to the door, and opened it to Mrs. Durant. Surprised at the lateness of her visit, I drew her in out of the storm. She had flung a cloak over her light dress, and the lace scarf on her head dripped with rain. Our houses were only a few hundred yards apart, and she had brought no umbrella, nor even exchanged her evening slippers for heavier shoes.
I took her wet cloak and scarf and led her into the library. She stood trembling and staring at me, her face like a marble mask in which the lips were too rigid for speech; then she laid a sheet of note-paper on the table between us. On it was written, in Waldo Cranch’s beautiful hand: “My dear friend, I am going away on a journey. You will hear from me,” with his initials beneath. Nothing more. The letter bore no date.
I looked at her, waiting for an explanation. None came. The first word she said was: “Will you come with me — now, at once?”
“Come with you — where?”
“To his house — before he leaves. I’ve only just got the letter, and I daren’t go alone . . . ”
“Go to Cranch’s house? But I . . . at this hour . . . What is it you are afraid of?” I broke out, suddenly looking into her eyes.
She gave me back my look, and her rigid face melted. “I don’t know — any more than you do — That’s why I’m afraid.”
“But I know nothing. What on earth has happened since I saw you yesterday?”
“Nothing till I got this letter.”
“You haven’t seen him?”
“Not since you saw him leave my house yesterday.”
“Or had any message — any news of him?”
“Absolutely nothing. I’ve just sat and remembered his face.”
My perplexity grew. “But surely you can’t imagine . . . If you’re as frightened as that you must have some other reason for it,” I insisted.
She shook her head wearily. “It’s the having none that frightens me. Oh, do come!”
“You think his leaving in this way means that he’s in some kind of trouble?”
“In dreadful trouble.”
“And you don’t know why?”
“No more than you do!” she repeated.
I pondered, trying to avoid her entreating eyes. “But at this hour — come, do consider! I don’t know Cranch so awfully well. How will he take it? You say he made a scene yesterday about that silly business of the architect’s going to his house without leave . . . ”
“That’s just it. I feel as if his going away might be connected with that.”
“But then he’s mad!” I exclaimed. “No; not mad. Only — desperate.”
I stood irresolute. It was evident that I had to do with a woman whose nerves were in fiddle-strings. What had reduced them to that state I could not conjecture, unless, indeed, she were keeping back the vital part of her confession. But that, queerly enough, was not what I suspected. For some reason I felt her to be as much in the dark over the whole business as I was; and that added to the strangeness of my dilemma.
“Do you know in the least what you’re going for?” I asked at length.
“No, no, no — but come!”
“If he’s there, he’ll kick us out, most likely; kick me out, at any rate.”
She did not answer; I saw that in her anguish she was past speaking. “Wait till I get my coat,” I said.
She took my arm, and side by side we hurried in the rain through the shuttered village. As we passed the Selwick house I saw a light burning in old Miss Selwick’s bedroom window. It was on the tip of my tongue to say: “Hadn’t we better stop and ask Aunt Lucilla what’s wrong? She knows more about Cranch than any of us!”
Then I remembered Cranch’s expression the last time Aunt Lucilla’s legend of the hobby-horse had been mentioned before him — the day we were planning the jumble sale — and a sudden shiver checked my pleasantry. “He looked then as he did when he passed me in the doorway yesterday,” I thought; and I had a vision of my ancient relative, sitting there propped up in her bed and looking quietly into the unknown while all the village slept. Was she aware, I wondered, that we were passing under her window at that moment, and did she know what would await us when we reached our destination?
Mrs. Durant, in her thin slippers, splashed on beside me through the mud.
“Oh,” she exclaimed, stopping short with a gasp, “look at the lights!”
We had crossed the green, and were groping our way under the dense elm-shadows, and there before us stood the Cranch house, all its windows illuminated. It was the only house in the village except Miss Selwick’s that was not darkened and shuttered.
“Well, he can’t be gone; he’s giving a party, you see,” I said derisively.
My companion made no answer. She only pulled me forward, and yielding once more I pushed open the tall entrance gates. In the brick path I paused. “Do you still want to go in?” I asked.
“More than ever!” She kept her tight clutch on my arm, and I walked up the path at her side and rang the bell.
The sound went on jangling for a long time through the stillness; but no one came to the door. At length Mrs. Durant laid an impatient hand on the door-panel. “But it’s open!” she exclaimed.
It was probably the first time since Waldo Cranch had come back to live in the house that unbidden visitors had been free to enter it. We looked at each other in surprise and I followed Mrs. Durant into the lamplit hall. It was empty.
With a common accord we stood for a moment listening; but not a sound came to us, though the doors of library and drawing-room stood open, and there were lighted lamps in both rooms.
“It’s queer,” I said, “all these lights, and no one about.”
My companion had walked impulsively into the drawing-room and stood looking about at its familiar furniture. From the panelled wall, distorted by the wavering lamp-light, the old Spanish ancestress glared down duskily at us out of the shadows. Mrs. Durant had stopped short — a sound of voices, agitated, discordant, a strange man’s voice among them, came to us from across the hall. Silently we retraced our steps, opened the dining-room door, and went in. But here also we found emptiness; the talking came from beyond, came, as we now perceived, from the wing which none of us had ever entered. Again we hesitated and looked at each other. Then “Come!” said Mrs. Durant in a resolute tone; and again I followed her.
She led the way into a large pantry, airy, orderly, well-stocked with china and glass. That too was empty; and two doors opened from it. Mrs. Durant passed through the one on the right, and we found ourselves, not, as I had expected, in the kitchen, but in a kind of vague unfurnished anteroom. The quarrelling voices had meanwhile died out; we seemed once more to have the mysterious place to ourselves. Suddenly, beyond another closed door, we heard a shrill crowing laugh. Mrs. Durant dashed at this last door and it let us into a large high-studded room. We paused and looked about us. Evidently we were in what Cranch had always described as the lumber-room on the ground floor of the wing. But there was no lumber in it now. It was scrupulously neat, and fitted up like a big and rather bare nursery; and in the middle of the floor, on a square of drugget, stood a great rearing black and white animal: my Aunt Lucilla’s hobby-horse . . .
I gasped at the sight; but in spite of its strangeness it did not detain me long, for at the farther end of the room, before a fire protected by a tall nursery fender, I had seen something stranger still. Two little boys in old-fashioned round jackets and knickerbockers knelt by the hearth, absorbed in the building of a house of blocks. Mrs. Durant saw them at the same moment. She caught my arm as if she were about to fall, and uttered a faint cry.
The sound, low as it was, produced a terrifying effect on the two children. Both of them dropped their blocks, turned around as if to dart at us, and then stopped short, holding each other by the hand, and staring and trembling as if we had been ghosts.
At the opposite end of the room, we stood staring and trembling also; for it was they who were the ghosts to our terrified eyes. It must have been Mrs. Durant who spoke first.
“Oh . . . the poor things . . . ” she said in a low choking voice.
The little boys stood there, motionless and far off, among the ruins of their house of blocks. But, as my eyes grew used to the faint light — there was only one lamp in the big room — and as my shaken nerves adjusted themselves to the strangeness of the scene, I perceived the meaning of Mrs. Durant’s cry.
The children before us were not children; they were two tiny withered men, with frowning foreheads under their baby curls, and heavy-shouldered middle-aged bodies. The sight was horrible, and rendered more so by the sameness of their size and by their old-fashioned childish dress. I recoiled; but Mrs. Durant had let my arm go, and was moving softly forward. Her own arms outstretched, she advanced toward the two strange beings. “You poor poor things, you,” she repeated, the tears running down her face.
I thought her tender tone must have drawn the little creatures; but as she advanced they continued to stand motionless, and then suddenly — each with the same small falsetto scream — turned and dashed toward the door. As they reached it, old Catherine appeared and held out her arms to them.
“Oh, my God — how dare you, madam? My young gentlemen!” she cried.
They hid their dreadful little faces in the folds of her skirt, and kneeling down she put her arms about them and received them on her bosom. Then, slowly, she lifted up her head and looked at us.
I had always, like the rest of Harpledon, thought of Catherine as a morose old Englishwoman, civil enough in her cold way, but yet forbidding. Now it seemed to me that her worn brown face, in its harsh folds of gray hair, was the saddest I had ever looked upon.
“How could you, madam; oh, how could you? Haven’t we got enough else to bear?” she asked, speaking low above the cowering heads on her breast. Her eyes were on Mrs. Durant.
The latter, white and trembling, gave back the look. “Enough else? Is there more, then?”
“There’s everything — .” The old servant got to her feet, keeping her two charges by the hand. She put her finger to her lips, and stooped again to the dwarfs. “Master Waldo, Master Donald, you’ll come away now with your old Catherine. No one’s going to harm us, my dears; you’ll just go upstairs and let Janey Sampson put you to bed, for it’s very late; and presently Catherine’ll come up and hear your prayers like every night.” She moved to the door; but one of the dwarfs hung back, his forehead puckering, his eyes still fixed on Mrs. Durant in indescribable horror.
“Good Dobbin,” cried he abruptly, in a piercing pipe.
“No, dear, no; the lady won’t touch good Dobbin,” said Catherine. “It’s the young gentlemen’s great pet,” she added, glancing at the Roman steed in the middle of the floor. She led the changelings away, and a moment later returned. Her face was ashen-white under its swarthiness, and she stood looking at us like a figure of doom.
“And now, perhaps,” she said, “you’ll be good enough to go away too.”
“Go away?” Mrs. Durant, instead, came closer to her. “How can I— when I’ve just had this from your master?” She held out the letter she had brought to my house.
Catherine glanced coldly at the page and returned it to her.
“He says he’s going on a journey. Well, he’s been, madam; been and come back,” she said.
“Come back? Already? He’s in the house, then? Oh, do let me — ” Mrs. Durant dropped back before the old woman’s frozen gaze.
“He’s lying overhead, dead on his bed, madam — just as they carried him up from the beach. Do you suppose, else, you’d have ever got in here and seen the young gentlemen? He rushed out and died sooner than have them seen, the poor lambs; him that was their father, madam. And here you and this gentleman come thrusting yourselves in . . . ”
I thought Mrs. Durant would reel under the shock; but she stood quiet, very quiet — it was almost as if the blow had mysteriously strengthened her.
“He’s dead? He’s killed himself?” She looked slowly about the trivial tragic room. “Oh, now I understand,” she said.
Old Catherine faced her with grim lips. “It’s a pity you didn’t understand sooner, then; you and the others, whoever they was, forever poking and prying; till at last that miserable girl brought in the police on us — ”
“The police?”
“They was here, madam, in this house, not an hour ago, frightening my young gentlemen out of their senses. When word came that my master had been found on the beach they went down there to bring him back. Now they’ve gone to Hingham to report his death to the coroner. But there’s one of them in the kitchen, mounting guard. Over what, I wonder? As if my young gentlemen could run away! Where in God’s pity would they go? Wherever it is, I’ll go with them; I’ll never leave them . . . And here we were at peace for thirty years, till you brought that man to draw the pictures of the house . . . ”
For the first time Mrs. Durant’s strength seemed to fail her; her body drooped, and she leaned her weight against the door. She and the housekeeper stood confronted, two stricken old women staring at each other; then Mrs. Durant’s agony broke from her. “Don’t say I did it — don’t say that!”
But the other was relentless. As she faced us, her arms outstretched, she seemed still to be defending her two charges. “What else would you have me say, madam? You brought that man here, didn’t you? And he was determined to see the other side of the wing, and my poor master was determined he shouldn’t.” She turned to me for the first time. “It was plain enough to you, sir, wasn’t it? To me it was, just coming and going with the tea-things. And the minute your backs was turned, Mr. Cranch rang, and gave me the order: ‘That man’s never to set foot here again, you understand.’ And I went out and told the other three; the cook, and Janey, and Hannah Oast, the parlour-maid. I was as sure of the cook and Janey as I was of myself; but Hannah was new, she hadn’t been with us not above a year, and though I knew all about her, and had made sure before she came that she was a decent close-mouthed girl, and one that would respect our . . . our misfortune . . . yet I couldn’t feel as safe about her as the others, and of her temper I wasn’t sure from the first. I told Mr. Cranch so, often enough; I said: ‘Remember, now, sir, not to put her pride up, won’t you?’ For she was jealous, and angry, I think, at never being allowed to see the young gentlemen, yet knowing they were there, as she had to know. But their father would never have any but me and Janey Sampson about them.
“Well — and then, in he came yesterday with those accursed pictures. And however had the man got in? And where was Hannah? And it must have been her doing . . . and swearing and cursing at her . . . and me crying to him and saying: ‘For God’s sake, sir, let be, let be . . . don’t stir the matter up . . . just let me talk to her . . . And I went in to my little boys, to see about their supper; and before I was back, I heard a trunk bumping down the stairs, and the gardener’s lad outside with a wheel-barrow, and Hannah Oast walking away out of the gate like a ramrod. ‘Oh, sir, what have you done? Let me go after her!’ I begged and besought him; but my master, very pale, but as calm as possible, held me back by the arm, and said: ‘Don’t you worry, Catherine. It passed off very quietly. We’ll have no trouble from her.’ ‘No trouble, sir, from Hannah Oast? Oh, for pity’s sake, call her back and let me smooth it over, sir!’ But the girl was gone, and he wouldn’t leave go of my arm nor yet listen to me, but stood there like a marble stone and saw her drive away, and wouldn’t stop her. ‘I’d die first, Catherine,’ he said, his kind face all changed to me, and looking like that old Spanish she-devil on the parlour wall, that brought the curse on us . . . And this morning the police came. The gardener got wind of it, and let us know they was on the way; and my master sat and wrote a long time in his room, and then walked out, looking very quiet, and saying to me he was going to the post office, and would be back before they got here. And the next we knew of him was when they carried him up to his bed just now . . . And perhaps we’d best give thanks that he’s at rest in it. But, oh, my young gentlemen . . . my young gentlemen!”
I never saw the “young gentlemen” again. I suppose most men are cowards about calamities of that sort, the irremediable kind that have to be faced anew every morning. It takes a woman to shoulder such a lasting tragedy, and hug it to her . . . as I had seen Catherine doing; as I saw Mrs. Durant yearning to do . . .
It was about that very matter that I interviewed the old housekeeper the day after the funeral. Among the papers which the police found on poor Cranch’s desk was a letter addressed to me. Like his message to Mrs. Durant it was of the briefest. “I have appointed no one to care for my sons; I expected to outlive them. Their mother would have wished Catherine to stay with them. Will you try to settle all this mercifully? There is plenty of money, but my brain won’t work. Good-bye.”
It was a matter, first of all, for the law; but before we entered on that phase I wanted to have a talk with old Catherine. She came to me, very decent in her new black; I hadn’t the heart to go to that dreadful house again, and I think perhaps it was easier for her to speak out under another roof. At any rate, I soon saw that, after all the years of silence, speech was a relief; as it might have been to him too, poor fellow, if only he had dared! But he couldn’t; there was that pride of his, his “Spanish pride” as she called it.
“Not but what he would have hated me to say so, sir; for the Spanish blood in him, and all that went with it, was what he most abominated . . . But there it was, closer to him than his marrow . . . Oh, what that old woman done to us! He told me why, once, long ago — it was about the time when he began to understand that our little boys were never going to grow up like other young gentlemen. ‘It’s her doing, the devil,’ he said to me; and then he told me how she’d been a great Spanish heiress, a rich merchant’s daughter, and had been promised, in that foreign way they have, to a young nobleman who’d never set eyes on her; and when the bridegroom came to the city where she lived, and saw her sitting in her father’s box across the theatre, he turned about and mounted his horse and rode off the same night; and never a word came from him — the shame of it! It nigh killed her, I believe, and she swore then and there she’d marry a foreigner and leave Spain; and that was how she took up with young Mr. Cranch that was in her father’s bank; and the old gentleman put a big sum into the Cranch shipping business, and packed off the young couple to Harpledon . . . But the poor misbuilt thing, it seems, couldn’t ever rightly get over the hurt to her pride, nor get used to the cold climate, and the snow and the strange faces; she would go about pining for the orange-flowers and the sunshine; and though she brought her husband a son, I do believe she hated him, and was glad to die and get out of Harpledon . . . That was my Mr. Cranch’s story . . .
“Well, sir, he despised his great-grandfather more than he hated the Spanish woman. ‘Marry that twisted stick for her money, and put her poisoned blood in us I’ He used to put it that way, sir, in his bad moments. And when he was twenty-one, and travelling abroad, he met the young English lady I was maid to, the loveliest soundest young creature you ever set eyes on. They loved and married, and the next year — oh, the pity — the next year she brought him our young gentlemen . . . twins, they were . . . When she died, a few weeks after, he was desperate . . . more desperate than I’ve ever seen him till the other day. But as the years passed, and he began to understand about our little boys — well, then he was thankful she was gone. And that thankfulness was the bitterest part of his grief.
“It was when they was about nine or ten that he first saw it; though I’d been certain long before that. We were living in Italy then. And one day — oh, what a day, sir! — he got a letter, Mr. Cranch did, from a circus-man who’d heard somehow of our poor little children . . . Oh, sir! . . . Then it was that he decided to leave Europe, and come back to Harpledon to live. It was a lonely lost place at that time; and there was all the big wing for our little gentlemen. We were happy in the old house, in our way; but it was a solitary life for so young a man as Mr. Cranch was then, and when the summer folk began to settle here I was glad of it, and I said to him: ‘You go out, sir, now, and make friends, and invite your friends here. I’ll see to it that our secret is kept.’ And so I did, sir, so I did . . . and he always trusted me. He needed life and company himself; but he would never separate himself from the little boys. He was so proud — and yet so soft-hearted! And where could he have put the little things? They never grew past their toys — there’s the worst of it. Heaps and heaps of them he brought home to them, year after year. Pets he tried too . . . but animals were afraid of them — just as I expect you were, sir, when you saw them,” she added suddenly, “but with no reason; there were never gentler beings. Little Waldo especially — it’s as if they were trying to make up for being a burden . . . Oh, for pity’s sake, let them stay on in their father’s house, and me with them, won’t you, sir?”
As she wished it, so it was. The legal side of the matter did not take long to settle, for the Cranches were almost extinct; there were only some distant cousins, long since gone from Harpledon. Old Catherine was suffered to remain on with her charges in the Cranch house, and one of the guardians appointed by the courts was Mrs. Durant.
Would you have believed it? She wanted it — the horror, the responsibility and all. After that she lived all the year round at Harpledon; I believe she saw Cranch’s sons every day. I never went back there; but she used sometimes to come up and see me in Boston. The first time she appeared — it must have been about a year after the events I have related — I scarcely knew her when she walked into my library. She was an old bent woman; her white hair now seemed an attribute of age, not a form of coquetry. After that, each time I saw her she seemed older and more bowed. But she told me once she was not unhappy — “not as unhappy as I used to be,” she added, qualifying the phrase.
On the same occasion — it was only a few months ago — she also told me that one of the twins was ill. She did not think he would last long, she said; and old Catherine did not think so either. “It’s little Waldo; he was the one who felt his father’s death the most; the dark one; I really think he understands. And when he goes, Donald won’t last long either.” Her eyes filled with tears. “Presently I shall be alone again,” she added.
I asked her then how old they were; and she thought for a moment, murmuring the years over slowly under her breath. “Only forty-one,” she said at length — as if she had said “Only four.”
Women are strange. I am their other guardian; and I have never yet had the courage to go down to Harpledon and see them.
THE snow was still falling thickly when Orrin Bosworth, who farmed the land south of Lone-top, drove up in his cutter to Saul Rutledge’s gate. He was surprised to see two other cutters ahead of him. From them descended two muffled figures. Bosworth, with increasing surprise, recognized Deacon Hibben, from North Ashmore, and Sylvester Brand, the widower, from the old Bearcliff farm on the way to Lonetop.
It was not often that anybody in Hemlock County entered Saul Rutledge’s gate; least of all in the dead of winter, and summoned (as Bosworth, at any rate, had been) by Mrs. Rutledge, who passed, even in that unsocial region, for a woman of cold manners and solitary character. The situation was enough to excite the curiosity of a less imaginative man than Orrin Bosworth.
As he drove in between the broken-down white gate-posts topped by fluted urns the two men ahead of him were leading their horses to the adjoining shed. Bosworth followed, and hitched his horse to a post. Then the three tossed off the snow from their shoulders, clapped their numb hands together, and greeted each other.
“Hallo, Deacon.”
“Well, well, Orrin — .” They shook hands.
“‘Day, Bosworth,” said Sylvester Brand, with a brief nod. He seldom put any cordiality into his manner, and on this occasion he was still busy about his horse’s bridle and blanket.
Orrin Bosworth, the youngest and most communicative of the three, turned back to Deacon Hibben, whose long face, queerly blotched and mouldy-looking, with blinking peering eyes, was yet less forbidding than Brand’s heavily-hewn countenance.
“Queer, our all meeting here this way. Mrs. Rutledge sent me a message to come,” Bosworth volunteered.
The Deacon nodded. “I got a word from her too — Andy Pond come with it yesterday noon. I hope there’s no trouble here — ”
He glanced through the thickening fall of snow at the desolate front of the Rutledge house, the more melancholy in its present neglected state because, like the gate-posts, it kept traces of former elegance. Bosworth had often wondered how such a house had come to be built in that lonely stretch between North Ashmore and Cold Corners. People said there had once been other houses like it, forming a little township called Ashmore, a sort of mountain colony created by the caprice of an English Royalist officer, one Colonel Ashmore, who had been murdered by the Indians, with all his family, long before the Revolution. This tale was confirmed by the fact that the ruined cellars of several smaller houses were still to be discovered under the wild growth of the adjoining slopes, and that the Communion plate of the moribund Episcopal church of Cold Corners was engraved with the name of Colonel Ashmore, who had given it to the church of Ashmore in the year 1723. Of the church itself no traces remained. Doubtless it had been a modest wooden edifice, built on piles, and the conflagration which had burnt the other houses to the ground’s edge had reduced it utterly to ashes. The whole place, even in summer, wore a mournful solitary air, and people wondered why Saul Rutledge’s father had gone there to settle.
“I never knew a place,” Deacon Hibben said, “as seemed as far away from humanity. And yet it ain’t so in miles.”
“Miles ain’t the only distance,” Orrin Bosworth answered; and the two men, followed by Sylvester Brand, walked across the drive to the front door. People in Hemlock County did not usually come and go by their front doors, but all three men seemed to feel that, on an occasion which appeared to be so exceptional, the usual and more familiar approach by the kitchen would not be suitable.
They had judged rightly; the Deacon had hardly lifted the knocker when the door opened and Mrs. Rutledge stood before them.
“Walk right in,” she said in her usual dead-level tone; and Bosworth, as he followed the others, thought to himself; “Whatever’s happened, she’s not going to let it show in her face.”
It was doubtful, indeed, if anything unwonted could be made to show in Prudence Rutledge’s face, so limited was its scope, so fixed were its features. She was dressed for the occasion in a black calico with white spots, a collar of crochet-lace fastened by a gold brooch, and a gray woollen shawl crossed under her arms and tied at the back. In her small narrow head the only marked prominence was that of the brow projecting roundly over pale spectacled eyes. Her dark hair, parted above this prominence, passed tight and fiat over the tips of her ears into a small braided coil at the nape; and her contracted head looked still narrower from being perched on a long hollow neck with cord-like throat-muscles. Her eyes were of a pale cold gray, her complexion was an even white. Her age might have been anywhere from thirty-five to sixty.
The room into which she led the three men had probably been the dining-room of the Ashmore house. It was now used as a front parlour, and a black stove planted on a sheet of zinc stuck out from the delicately fluted panels of an old wooden mantel. A newly-lit fire smouldered reluctantly, and the room was at once close and bitterly cold.
“Andy Pond,” Mrs. Rutledge cried to some one at the back of the house, “step out and call Mr. Rutledge. You’ll likely find him in the wood-shed, or round the barn somewheres.” She rejoined her visitors. “Please suit yourselves to seats,” she said.
The three men, with an increasing air of constraint, took the chairs she pointed out, and Mrs. Rutledge sat stiffly down upon a fourth, behind a rickety bead-work table. She glanced from one to the other of her visitors.
“I presume you folks are wondering what it is I asked you to come here for,” she said in her dead-level voice. Orrin Bosworth and Deacon Hibben murmured an assent; Sylvester Brand sat silent, his eyes, under their great thicket of eyebrows, fixed on the huge boot-tip swinging before him.
“Well, I allow you didn’t expect it was for a party,” continued Mrs. Rutledge.
No one ventured to respond to this chill pleasantry, and she continued: “We’re in trouble here, and that’s the fact. And we need advice — Mr. Rutledge and myself do.” She cleared her throat, and added in a lower tone, her pitilessly clear eyes looking straight before her: “There’s a spell been cast over Mr. Rutledge.”
The Deacon looked up sharply, an incredulous smile pinching his thin lips. “A spell?”
“That’s what I said: he’s bewitched.”
Again the three visitors were silent; then Bosworth, more at ease or less tongue-tied than the others, asked with an attempt at humour: “Do you use the word in the strict Scripture sense, Mrs. Rutledge?”
She glanced at him before replying: “That’s how he uses it.”
The Deacon coughed and cleared his long rattling throat. “Do you care to give us more particulars before your husband joins us?”
Mrs. Rutledge looked down at her clasped hands, as if considering the question. Bosworth noticed that the inner fold of her lids was of the same uniform white as the rest of her skin, so that when she dropped them her rather prominent eyes looked like the sightless orbs of a marble statue. The impression was unpleasing, and he glanced away at the text over the mantelpiece, which read:
The Soul That Sinneth It Shall Die.
“No,” she said at length, “I’ll wait.”
At this moment Sylvester Brand suddenly stood up and pushed back his chair. “I don’t know,” he said, in his rough bass voice, “as I’ve got any particular lights on Bible mysteries; and this happens to be the day I was to go down to Starkfield to close a deal with a man.”
Mrs. Rutledge lifted one of her long thin hands. Withered and wrinkled by hard work and cold, it was nevertheless of the same leaden white as her face. “You won’t be kept long,” she said. “Won’t you be seated?”
Farmer Brand stood irresolute, his purplish underlip twitching. “The Deacon here —— such things is more in his line . . . ”
“I want you should stay,” said Mrs. Rutledge quietly; and Brand sat down again.
A silence fell, during which the four persons present seemed all to be listening for the sound of a step; but none was heard, and after a minute or two Mrs. Rutledge began to speak again.
“It’s down by that old shack on Lamer’s pond; that’s where they meet,” she said suddenly.
Bosworth, whose eyes were on Sylvester Brand’s face, fancied he saw a sort of inner flush darken the farmer’s heavy leathern skin. Deacon Hibben leaned forward, a glitter of curiosity in his eyes.
“They — who, Mrs. Rutledge?”
“My husband, Saul Rutledge . . . and her . . . ”
Sylvester Brand again stirred in his seat. “Who do you mean by her?” he asked abruptly, as if roused out of some far-off musing.
Mrs. Rutledge’s body did not move; she simply revolved her head on her long neck and looked at him.
“Your daughter, Sylvester Brand.”
The man staggered to his feet with an explosion of inarticulate sounds. “My — my daughter? What the hell are you talking about? My daughter? It’s a damned lie . . . it’s . . . it’s . . . ”
“Your daughter Ora, Mr. Brand,” said Mrs. Rutledge slowly.
Bosworth felt an icy chill down his spine. Instinctively he turned his eyes away from Brand, and, they rested on the mildewed countenance of Deacon Hibben. Between the blotches it had become as white as Mrs. Rutledge’s, and the Deacon’s eyes burned in the whiteness like live embers among ashes.
Brand gave a laugh: the rusty creaking laugh of one whose springs of mirth are never moved by gaiety. “My daughter Ora?” he repeated.
“Yes.”
“My dead daughter?”
“That’s what he says.”
“Your husband?”
“That’s what Mr. Rutledge says.”
Orrin Bosworth listened with a sense of suffocation; he felt as if he were wrestling with long-armed horrors in a dream. He could no longer resist letting his eyes return to Sylvester Brand’s face. To his surprise it had resumed a natural imperturbable expression. Brand rose to his feet. “Is that all?” he queried contemptuously.
“All? Ain’t it enough? How long is it since you folks seen Saul Rutledge, any of you?” Mrs. Rutledge flew out at them.
Bosworth, it appeared, had not seen him for nearly a year; the Deacon had only run across him once, for a minute, at the North Ashmore post office, the previous autumn, and acknowledged that he wasn’t looking any too good then. Brand said nothing, but stood irresolute.
“Well, if you wait a minute you’ll see with your own eyes; and he’ll tell you with his own words. That’s what I’ve got you here for — to see for yourselves what’s come over him. Then you’ll talk different,” she added, twisting her head abruptly toward Sylvester Brand.
The Deacon raised a lean hand of interrogation.
“Does your husband know we’ve been sent for on this business, Mrs. Rutledge?” Mrs. Rutledge signed assent.
“It was with his consent, then —?”
She looked coldly at her questioner. “I guess it had to be,” she said. Again Bosworth felt the chill down his spine. He tried to dissipate the sensation by speaking with an affectation of energy.
“Can you tell us, Mrs. Rutledge, how this trouble you speak of shows itself . . . what makes you think . . .?”
She looked at him for a moment; then she leaned forward across the rickety bead-work table. A thin smile of disdain narrowed her colourless lips. “I don’t think — I know.”
“Well — but how?”
She leaned closer, both elbows on the table, her voice dropping. “I seen ’em.”
In the ashen light from the veiling of snow beyond the windows the Deacon’s little screwed-up eyes seemed to give out red sparks. “Him and the dead?”
“Him and the dead.”
“Saul Rutledge and — and Ora Brand?”
“That’s so.”
Sylvester Brand’s chair fell backward with a crash. He was on his feet again, crimson and cursing. “It’s a God-damned fiend-begotten lie . . . ”
“Friend Brand . . . friend Brand . . . ” the Deacon protested.
“Here, let me get out of this. I want to see Saul Rutledge himself, and tell him — ”
“Well, here he is,” said Mrs. Rutledge.
The outer door had opened; they heard the familiar stamping and shaking of a man who rids his garments of their last snowflakes before penetrating to the sacred precincts of the best parlour. Then Saul Rutledge entered.
As he came in he faced the light from the north window, and Bosworth’s first thought was that he looked like a drowned man fished out from under the ice — “self-drowned,” he added. But the snow-light plays cruel tricks with a man’s colour, and even with the shape of his features; it must have been partly that, Bosworth reflected, which transformed Saul Rutledge from the straight muscular fellow he had been a year before into the haggard wretch now before them.
The Deacon sought for a word to ease the horror. “Well, now, Saul — you look’s if you’d ought to set right up to the stove. Had a touch of ague, maybe?”
The feeble attempt was unavailing. Rutledge neither moved nor answered. He stood among them silent, incommunicable, like one risen from the dead.
Brand grasped him roughly by the shoulder. “See here, Saul Rutledge, what’s this dirty lie your wife tells us you’ve been putting about?”
Still Rutledge did not move. “It’s no lie,” he said.
Brand’s hand dropped from his shoulder. In spite of the man’s rough bullying power he seemed to be undefinably awed by Rut-ledge’s look and tone.
“No lie? You’ve gone plumb crazy, then, have you?”
Mrs. Rutledge spoke. “My husband’s not lying, nor he ain’t gone crazy. Don’t I tell you I seen ’em?”
Brand laughed again. “Him and the dead?”
“Yes.”
“Down by the Lamer pond, you say?”
“Yes.”
“And when was that, if I might ask?”
“Day before yesterday.”
A silence fell on the strangely assembled group. The Deacon at length broke it to say to Mr. Brand: “Brand, in my opinion we’ve got to see this thing through.”
Brand stood for a moment in speechless contemplation: there was something animal and primitive about him, Bosworth thought, as he hung thus, lowering and dumb, a little foam beading the corners of that heavy purplish underlip. He let himself slowly down into his chair. “I’ll see it through.”
The two other men and Mrs. Rutledge had remained seated. Saul Rutledge stood before them, like a prisoner at the bar, or rather like a sick man before the physicians who were to heal him. As Bosworth scrutinized that hollow face, so wan under the dark sunburn, so sucked inward and consumed by some hidden fever, there stole over the sound healthy man the thought that perhaps, after all, husband and wife spoke the truth, and that they were all at that moment really standing on the edge of some forbidden mystery. Things that the rational mind would reject without a thought seemed no longer so easy to dispose of as one looked at the actual Saul Rutledge and remembered the man he had been a year before. Yes; as the Deacon said, they would have to see it through . . .
“Sit down then, Saul; draw up to us, won’t you?” the Deacon suggested, trying again for a natural tone.
Mrs. Rutledge pushed a chair forward, and her husband sat down on it. He stretched out his arms and grasped his knees in his brown bony fingers; in that attitude he remained, turning neither his head nor his eyes.
“Well, Saul,” the Deacon continued, “your wife says you thought mebbe we could do something to help you through this trouble, whatever it is.”
Rutledge’s gray eyes widened a little. “No; I didn’t think that. It was her idea to try what could be done.”
“I presume, though, since you’ve agreed to our coming, that you don’t object to our putting a few questions?”
Rutledge was silent for a moment; then he said with a visible effort: “No; I don’t object.”
“Well — you’ve heard what your wife says?”
Rutledge made a slight motion of assent. “And — what have you got to answer? How do you explain . . .?”
Mrs. Rutledge intervened. “How can he explain? I seen ’em.”
There was a silence; then Bosworth, trying to speak in an easy reassuring tone, queried: “That so, Saul?”
“That’s so.”
Brand lifted up his brooding head. “You mean to say you . . . you sit here before us all and say . . . ”
The Deacon’s hand again checked him. “Hold on, friend Brand. We’re all of us trying for the facts, ain’t we?” He turned to Rutledge. “We’ve heard what Mrs. Rutledge says. What’s your answer?”
“I don’t know as there’s any answer. She found us.”
“And you mean to tell me the person with you was . . . was what you took to be . . . ” the Deacon’s thin voice grew thinner: “Ora Brand?”
Saul Rutledge nodded.
“You knew . . . or thought you knew . . . you were meeting with the dead?”
Rutledge bent his head again. The snow continued to fall in a steady unwavering sheet against the window, and Bosworth felt as if a winding-sheet were descending from the sky to envelop them all in a common grave.
“Think what you’re saying! It’s against our religion! Ora . . . poor child! . . . died over a year ago. I saw you at her funeral, Saul. How can you make such a statement?”
“What else can he do?” thrust in Mrs. Rutledge.
There was another pause. Bosworth’s resources had failed him, and Brand once more sat plunged in dark meditation. The Deacon laid his quivering finger-tips together, and moistened his lips.
“Was the day before yesterday the first time?” he asked.
The movement of Rutledge’s head was negative.
“Not the first? Then when . . . ”
“Nigh on a year ago, I reckon.”
“God! And you mean to tell us that ever since —?”
“Well . . . look at him,” said his wife. The three men lowered their eyes.
After a moment Bosworth, trying to collect himself, glanced at the Deacon. “Why not ask Saul to make his own statement, if that’s what we’re here for?”
“That’s so,” the Deacon assented. He turned to Rutledge. “Will you try and give us your idea . . . of . . . of how it began?”
There was another silence. Then Rutledge tightened his grasp on his gaunt knees, and still looking straight ahead, with his curiously clear unseeing gaze: “Well,” he said, “I guess it begun away back, afore even I was married to Mrs. Rutledge . . . ” He spoke in a low automatic tone, as if some invisible agent were dictating his words, or even uttering them for him. “You know,” he added, “Ora and me was to have been married.”
Sylvester Brand lifted his, head. “Straighten that statement out first, please,” he interjected.
“What I mean is, we kept company. But Ora she was very young. Mr. Brand here he sent her away. She was gone nigh to three years, I guess. When she come back I was married.”
“That’s right,” Brand said, relapsing once more into his sunken attitude.
“And after she came back did you meet her again?” the Deacon continued.
“Alive?” Rutledge questioned.
A perceptible shudder ran through the room.
“Well — of course,” said the Deacon nervously.
Rutledge seemed to consider. “Once I did — only once. There was a lot of other people round. At Cold Corners fair it was.” “Did you talk with her then?”
“Only a minute.”
“What did she say?”
His voice dropped. “She said she was sick and knew she was going to die, and when she was dead she’d come back to me.”
“And what did you answer?”
“Nothing.”
“Did you think anything of it at the time?”
“Well, no. Not till I heard she was dead I didn’t. After that I thought of it — and I guess she drew me.” He moistened his lips.
“Drew you down to that abandoned house by the pond?”
Rutledge made a faint motion of assent, and the Deacon added: “How did you know it was there she wanted you to come?”
“She . . . just drew me . . . ”
There was a long pause. Bosworth felt, on himself and the other two men, the oppressive weight of the next question to be asked. Mrs. Rutledge opened and closed her narrow lips once or twice, like some beached shell-fish gasping for the tide. Rutledge waited.
“Well, now, Saul, won’t you go on with what you was telling us?” the Deacon at length suggested.
“That’s all. There’s nothing else.”
The Deacon lowered his voice. “She just draws you?”
“Yes.”
“Often?”
“That’s as it happens . . . ”
“But if it’s always there she draws you, man, haven’t you the strength to keep away from the place?”
For the first time, Rutledge wearily turned his head toward his questioner. A spectral smile narrowed his colourless lips. “Ain’t any use. She follers after me . . . ”
There was another silence. What more could they ask, then and there? Mrs. Rut-ledge’s presence checked the next question. The Deacon seemed hopelessly to revolve the matter. At length he spoke in a more authoritative tone. “These are forbidden things. You know that, Saul. Have you tried prayer?”
Rutledge shook his head.
“Will you pray with us now?”
Rutledge cast a glance of freezing indifference on his spiritual adviser. “If you folks want to pray, I’m agreeable,” he said. But Mrs. Rutledge intervened.
“Prayer ain’t any good. In this kind of thing it ain’t no manner of use; you know it ain’t. I called you here, Deacon, because you remember the last case in this parish. Thirty years ago it was, I guess; but you remember. Lefferts Nash — did praying help him? I was a little girl then, but I used to hear my folks talk of it winter nights. Lefferts Nash and Hannah Cory. They drove a stake through her breast. That’s what cured him.”
“Oh — ” Orrin Bosworth exclaimed.
Sylvester Brand raised his head. “You’re speaking of that old story as if this was the same sort of thing?”
“Ain’t it? Ain’t my husband pining away the same as Lefferts Nash did? The Deacon here knows — ”
The Deacon stirred anxiously in his chair. “These are forbidden things,” he repeated. “Supposing your husband is quite sincere in thinking himself haunted, as you might say. Well, even then, what proof have we that the . . . the dead woman . . . is the spectre of that poor girl?”
“Proof? Don’t he say so? Didn’t she tell him? Ain’t I seen ’em?” Mrs. Rutledge almost screamed.
The three men sat silent, and suddenly the wife burst out: “A stake through the breast That’s the old way; and it’s the only way. The Deacon knows it!”
“It’s against our religion to disturb the dead.”
“Ain’t it against your religion to let the living perish as my husband is perishing?” She sprang up with one of her abrupt movements and took the family Bible from the what-not in a corner of die parlour. Putting the book on the table, and moistening a livid finger-tip, she turned the pages rapidly, till she came to one on which she laid her hand like a stony paper-weight. “See here,” she said, and read out in her level chanting voice:
“‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.’
“That’s in Exodus, that’s where it is,” she added, leaving the book open as if to confirm the statement.
Bosworth continued to glance anxiously from one to the other of the four people about the table. He was younger than any of them, and had had more contact with the modern world; down in Starkfield, in the bar of the Fielding House, he could hear himself laughing with the rest of the men at such old wives’ tales. But it was not for nothing that he had been born under the icy shadow of Lonetop, and had shivered and hungered as a lad through the bitter Hemlock County winters. After his parents died, and he had taken hold of the farm himself, he had got more out of it by using improved methods, and by supplying the increasing throng of summer-boarders over Stotesbury way with milk and vegetables. He had been made a selectman of North Ashmore; for so young a man he had a standing in the county. But the roots of the old life were still in him. He could remember, as a little boy, going twice a year with his mother to that bleak hill-farm out beyond Sylvester Brand’s, where Mrs. Bosworth’s aunt, Cressidora Cheney, had been shut up for years in a cold clean room with iron bars in the windows. When little Orrin first saw Aunt Cressidora she was a small white old woman, whom her sisters used to “make decent” for visitors the day that Orrin and his mother were expected. The child wondered why there were bars to the window. “Like a canary-bird,” he said to his mother. The phrase made Mrs. Bosworth reflect. “I do believe they keep Aunt Cressidora too lonesome,” she said; and the next time she went up the mountain with the little boy he carried to his great-aunt a canary in a little wooden cage. It was a great excitement; he knew it would make her happy.
The old woman’s motionless face lit up when she saw the bird, and her eyes began to glitter. “It belongs to me,” she said instantly, stretching her soft bony hand over the cage.
“Of course it does, Aunt Cressy,” said Mrs. Bosworth, her eyes filling.
But the bird, startled by the shadow of the old woman’s hand, began to flutter and beat its wings distractedly. At the sight, Aunt Cressidora’s calm face suddenly became a coil of twitching features. “You she-devil, you!” she cried in a high squealing voice; and thrusting her hand into the cage she dragged out the terrified bird and wrung its neck. She was plucking the hot body, and squealing “she-devil, she-devil!” as they drew little Orrin from the room. On the way down the mountain his mother wept a great deal, and said: “You must never tell anybody that poor Auntie’s crazy, or the men would come and take her down to the asylum at Starkfield, and the shame of it would kill us all. Now promise.” The child promised.
He remembered the scene now, with its deep fringe of mystery, secrecy and rumour. It seemed related to a great many other things below the surface of his thoughts, things which stole up anew, making him feel that all the old people he had known, and who “believed in these things,” might after all be right. Hadn’t a witch been burned at North Ashmore? Didn’t the summer folk still drive over in jolly buckboard loads to see the meeting-house where the trial had been held, the pond where they had ducked her and she had floated? . . . Deacon Hibben believed; Bosworth was sure of it. If he didn’t, why did people from all over the place come to him when their animals had queer sicknesses, or when there was a child in the family that had to be kept shut up because it fell down flat and foamed? Yes, in spite of his religion, Deacon Hibben knew . . .
And Brand? Well, it came to Bosworth in a flash: that North Ashmore woman who was burned had the name of Brand. The same stock, no doubt; there had been Brands in Hemlock County ever since the white men had come there. And Orrin, when he was a child, remembered hearing his parents say that Sylvester Brand hadn’t ever oughter married his own cousin, because of the blood. Yet the couple had had two healthy girls, and when Mrs. Brand pined away and died nobody suggested that anything had been wrong with her mind. And Vanessa and Ora were the handsomest girls anywhere round. Brand knew it, and scrimped and saved all he could to send Ora, the eldest, down to Starkfield to learn book-keeping. “When she’s married I’ll send you,” he used to say to little Venny, who was his favourite. But Ora never married. She was away three years, during which Venny ran wild on the slopes of Lonetop; and when Ora came back she sickened and died — poor girl! Since then Brand had grown more savage and morose. He was a hard-working farmer, but there wasn’t much to be got out of those barren Bearcliff acres. He was said to have taken to drink since his wife’s death; now and then men ran across him in the “dives” of Stotesbury. But not often. And between times he laboured hard on his stony acres and did his best for his daughters. In the neglected grave-yard of Cold Corners there was a slanting head-stone marked with his wife’s name; near it, a year since, he had laid his eldest daughter. And sometimes, at dusk, in the autumn, the village people saw him walk slowly by, turn in between the graves, and stand looking down on the two stones. But he never brought a flower there, or planted a bush; nor Venny either. She was too wild and ignorant . . .
Mrs. Rutledge repeated: “That’s in Exodus.”
The three visitors remained silent, turning about their hats in reluctant hands. Rutledge faced them, still with that empty pellucid gaze which frightened Bosworth. What was he seeing?
“Ain’t any of you folks got the grit —?” his wife burst out again, half hysterically.
Deacon Hibben held up his hand. “That’s no way, Mrs. Rutledge. This ain’t a question of having grit. What we want first of all is . . . proof . . . ”
“That’s so,” said Bosworth, with an explosion of relief, as if the words had lifted something black and crouching from his breast. Involuntarily the eyes of both men had turned to Brand. He stood there smiling grimly, but did not speak.
“Ain’t it so, Brand?” the Deacon prompted him.
“Proof that spooks walk?” the other sneered.
“Well — I presume you want this business settled too?”
The old farmer squared his shoulders. “Yes — I do. But I ain’t a sperritualist. How the hell are you going to settle it?”
Deacon Hibben hesitated; then he said, in a low incisive tone: “I don’t see but one way — Mrs. Rutledge’s.”
There was a silence.
“What?” Brand sneered again. “Spying?”
The Deacon’s voice sank lower. “If the poor girl does walk . . . her that’s your child . . . wouldn’t you be the first to want her laid quiet? We all know there’ve been such cases . . . mysterious visitations . . . Can any one of us here deny it?”
“I seen ’em,” Mrs. Rutledge interjected.
There was another heavy pause. Suddenly Brand fixed his gaze on Rutledge. “See here, Saul Rutledge, you’ve got to clear up this damned calumny, or I’ll know why. You say my dead girl comes to you.” He laboured with his breath, and then jerked out: “When? You tell me that, and I’ll be there.”
Rutledge’s head drooped a little, and his eyes wandered to the window. “Round about sunset, mostly.”
“You know beforehand?”
Rutledge made a sign of assent.
“Well, then — tomorrow, will it be?” Rutledge made the same sign.
Brand turned to the door. “I’ll be there.” That was all he said. He strode out between them without another glance or word. Deacon Hibben looked at Mrs. Rutledge. “We’ll be there too,” he said, as if she had asked him; but she had not spoken, and Bosworth saw that her thin body was trembling all over. He was glad when he and Hibben were out again in the snow.