That forsworn identity which Adam Bogardus had submitted to be clothed in as a burial garment was now become a thing for the living to flee from. He had seen a woman in full health whiten and cower before it;—she who stood beside his bed and looked at him with dreadful eyes, eyes of his girl-wife growing old in the likeness of her father. Hard, reluctant eyes forced to own the truth which the ashen lips denied. Are we responsible for our silences? He had not spoken to her. Nay, the living must speak first, or the ghostly dead depart unquestioned. He asked only that he might forget her and be himself forgotten. If it were that woman's right to call herself Emily Bogardus, then was there no Adam her husband. Better the old disguise which left him free to work out his own sentence and pay his forfeit to the law. He had never desired that one breath of it should be commuted, or wished to accept an enslaving pardon from those for whose sake he had put himself out of the way. If he could have taken his own comparative spiritual measurement, he might have smiled at the humor of that forgiveness promised him in the name of the Highest by his son.
For many peaceful years solitude had been the habit of his soul. Gently as he bore with human obligations, he escaped from them with a sense of relief which shamed him somewhat when he thought of the good friends to whom he owed this very blessed power to flee. It was quite as Leander had surmised. He could not command his faculties—memory especially—when a noise of many words and questions bruised his brain.
The stillness of the desert closed about him with delicious healing. He was a world-weary child returned to the womb of Nature. His old camp-craft came back; his eye for distance, his sense of the trail, his little pet economies with food and fire. There was no one to tell him what to eat and when to eat it. He was invisible to men. Each day's march built up his muscle, and every night's deep sleep under the great high stars steadied his nerves and tightened his resolve.
He thought of the young man—his son—with a mixture of pain and tenderness. But Paul was not the baby-boy he had put out of his arms with a father's smile at One Man station. Paul was himself a man now; he had coerced him at the last, neither did he understand.
The blind instinct of flight began after a while to shape its own direction. It was no new leaning with the packer. As many times as he had crossed this trail he never had failed to experience the same pull. He resisted no longer. He gave way to strange fancies and made them his guides.
At some time during his flight from the hospital, in one of those blanks that overtook him, he knew not how, he had met with a great loss. The words had slipped from his memory—of that message which had kept him in fancied touch with his wife all these many deluding years. Without them he was like a drunkard deprived of his habitual stimulant. The craving to connect and hold them—for they came to him sometimes in tantalizing freaks of memory, and slipped away again like beads rolling off a broken thread—was almost the only form of mental suffering he was now conscious of. What had become of the message itself? Had they left it exposed to every heartless desecration in that abandoned spot?—a scrap of paper driven like a bit of tumble-weed before the wind, snatched at by spikes of sage, trampled into the mire of cattle, nuzzled by wild beasts? Or, had they put it away with that other beast where he lay with the scoff on his dead face? Out of dreams and visions of the night that place of the parting ways called to him, and the time was now come when he must go.
He approached it by one of those desert trails that circle for miles on the track of water and pounce as a bird drops upon its prey into the trampled hollow at One Man station—a place for the gathering of hoofs in the midst of the plain.
He could trace what might have been the foundation of a house, a few blackened stones, a hearthstone showing where a chimney perhaps had stood, but these evidences of habitation would never have been marked except by one who knew where to look. He searched the ground over for signs of the tragedy that bound him to that spot—a smiling desolation, a sunny nothingness. The effect of this careless obliteration was quieting. Nature had played here once with two men and a woman. One of the toy men was lost, the other broken. She had forgotten where she put the broken one. There were mounds which looked like graves, but the seeker knew that artificial mounds in a place like this soon sink into hollows; and there were hollows like open graves, filled with unsightly human rubbish, washed in by the yearly rains.
He spent three days in the hollow, doing nothing, steeped in sunshine, lying down to rest broad awake in the tender twilight, making his peace with this place of bitter memory before bidding it good-by. His thoughts turned eastward as the planets rose. Time he was working back towards home. He would hardly get there if he started now, before his day was done. He saw his mother's grave beside his father's, in the southeast corner of the burying-ground, where the trees were thin. All who drove in through the big gate of funerals could see the tall white shafts of the Beviers and Brodericks and Van Eltens, but only those who came on foot could approach his people in the gravelly side-hill plots. “I'd like to be put there alongside the old folks in that warm south corner.” He could see their names on the plain gray slate stones, rain-stained and green with moss.
On the third May evening of his stay the horizon became a dust-cloud, the setting sun a ball of fire. Loomed the figure of a rider topping the heaving backs of his herd. All together they came lumbering down the slopes, all heading fiercely for the water. The rider plunged down a side-draw out of the main cloud. Clanking bells, shuffling hoofs, the “Whoop-ee-youp!” came fainter up the gulch. The cowboy was not pleased as he dashed by to see an earlier camp-fire smoking in the hollow. But he was less displeased, being half French, than if he had been pure-bred American.
The old man, squatting by his cooking-fire, gave him a civil nod, and he responded with a flourish of his quirt. The reek of sage smoke, the smell of dust and cattle rose rank on the cooling air. It was good to Boniface, son of the desert; it meant supper and bed, or supper and talk, for “Bonny” Maupin (“Bonny Moppin,” it went in the vernacular) would talk every other man to sleep, full or empty, with songs thrown in. To-night, however, he must talk on an empty stomach, for his chuck wagon was not in sight.
“W'ich way you travelin'?” he began, lighting up after a long pull at his flask. The old man had declined, though he looked as if he needed a drink.
“East about,” was the answer.
“Goin' far?”
“Well; summer's before us. I cal'late to keep moving till snow falls.”
“Shucks! You ain' pressed for time. Maybe you got some friend back there. Goin' back to git married?” He winked genially to point the jest and the old man smiled indulgently.
“Won't you set up and take a bite with me? You don't look to have much of a show for supper along.”
“Thanks, very much! I had bully breakfast at Rock Spring middlin' late this morning. They butcherin' at that place. Five fat hog. My chuck wagon he stay behin' for chunk of fresh pig. I won' spoil my appetide for that tenderloin. Hol' on yourself an' take supper wis me. No?—That fellah be 'long 'bout Chris'mas if he don' git los'! He always behin', pig or no pig!”
Bonny strolled away collecting fire-wood. Presently he called back, pointing dramatically with his small-toed boot. “Who's been coyotin' round here?” The hard ground was freshly disturbed in spots as by the paws of some small inquisitive animal. There was no answer.
“What you say? Whose surface diggin's is these? I never know anybody do some mining here.”
“That was me”—Bonny backed a little nearer to catch the old man's words. “I was looking round here for something I lost.”
“What luck you have? You fin' him?”
“Well, now, doos it reely matter to you, sonny?”
“Pardner, it don' matter to me a d—n, if you say so! I was jus' askin' myself what a man would look for if he los' it here. Since I strike this 'ell of a place the very groun' been chewed up and spit out reg'lar, one hundred times a year. 'T'is a gris' mill!”
“I didn't gretly expect to find what I was lookin' for. I was just foolin' around to satisfy myself.”
“That satisfy me!” said Bonny pleasantly; and yet he was a trifle discomfited. He strolled away again and began to sing with a boyish show of indifference to having been called “sonny.”
“Oh, Sally is the gal for me! Oh, Sally's the gal for me! On moonlight night when the star is bright—Oh”—
“Halloa! This some more your work, oncle? You ain' got no chicken wing for arm if you lif' this.—Ah, be dam! I see what you lif' him with. All same stove-lid.” Talking and swearing to himself cheerfully, Bonny applied the end of a broken whiffletree to the blunt lip of the old hearthstone which marked the stage-house chimney. He had tried a step-dance on it and found it hollow. More fresh digging, and marks upon the stone where some prying tool had taken hold and slipped, showed he was not the first who had been curious.
“There you go, over on you' back, like snap' turtle; I see where you lay there before. What the dev'! I say!” Bonny, much excited with his find, extracted a rusty tin tobacco-box from the hole, pried open the spring lid and drew forth its contents: a discolored canvas bag bulging with coin and whipped around the neck with a leather whang. The canvas was rotten; Bonny supported its contents tenderly as he brought it over to the old man.
“Oncle, I ask you' pardon for tappin' that safe. Pretty good lil' nest-egg, eh? But now you got to find her some other place.”
“That don't belong to me,” said the old man indifferently.
“Aw—don't be bashful! I onderstan' now what you los'. You dig here—there—migs up the scent. I just happen to step on that stone—ring him, so, with my boot-heel!”
“That ain't my pile,” the other persisted. “I started to build a fire on that stone two nights ago. It rung hollow like you say. I looked and found what you found—”
“And put her back! My soul to God! An' you here all by you'self!”
“Why not? The stuff ain't mine.”
“Who is she? How long since anybody live here?”
“I don't know,—good while, I guess.”
“Well, sar! Look here! I open that bag. I count two hondre' thirteen dolla'—make it twelve for luck, an' call it you' divvee! You strike her first. What you say: we go snac'?”
“I haven't got any use for that money. You needn't talk to me about it.”
“Got no h'use!—are you a reech man? Got you' private car waitin' for you out in d' sagebrush? Sol' a mine lately?”
“I don't know why it strikes you so funny. It's no concern of mine if a man puts his money in the ground and goes off and leaves it.”
“Goes off and die! There was one man live here by himself—he die, they say, 'with his boots on.' He, I think, mus' be that man belong to this money. What an old stiff want with two hondre' thirteen dolla'? That money goin' into a live man's clothes.” Bonny slapped his chappereros, and the dust flew.
“I've no objection to its going into your clothes,” said the old man.
“You thing I ain' particular, me? Well, eef the party underground was my frien', and I knew his fam'ly, and was sure the money was belong to him—I'd do differend—perhaps. Mais,—it is going—going—gone! You won' go snac'?”
The old man smiled and looked steadily away.
“Blas' me to h—l! but you aire the firs' man ever I strike that jib at the sight of col' coin. She don' frighten me!”
Bonny always swore when he felt embarrassed.
“Well, sar! Look here! You fin' you'self so blame indifferend—s'pose you so indifferend not to say nothing 'bout this, when my swamper fellah git in. I don' wish to go snac' wis him. I don' feel oblige'. See?”
“What you want to pester me about this money for!” The old man was weary. “I didn't come here, lookin' for money, and I don't expect to take none away with me. So I'll say good-night to ye.”
“Hol' on, hol' on! Don' git mad. What time you goin' off in the morning?”
“Before you do, I shouldn't wonder.”
“But hol'! One fine idea—blazin' good idea—just hit me now in the head! Wan' to come on to Chicago wis me? I drop this fellah at Felton. He take the team back, and I get some one to help me on the treep. Why not you? Ever tek' care of stock?”
“Some consid'able years ago I used to look after stock. Guess I'd know an ox from a heifer.”
“Ever handle 'em on cattle-car?”
“Never.”
“Well, all there is, you feed 'em, and water 'em, and keep 'em on their feets. If one fall down, all the others they have too much play. They rock”—Bonny exhibited—“and fall over and pile up in heap. I like to do one turn for you. We goin' the same way—you bring me the good luck, like a bird in the han'. This is my clean-up, you understand. You bring me the beautiful luck. You turn me up right bower first slap. Now it's goin' be my deal. I like to do by you!”
The packer turned over and looked up at the cool sky, pricked through with early stars. He was silent a long time. His pale old face was like a fine bit of carving in the dusk.
“What you think?” asked Moppin, almost tenderly. “I thing you better come wis me. You too hold a man to go like so—alone.”
“I'll have to think about it first;—let you know in the morning.”
A Rush of wheels and a spatter of hoofs coming up the drive sent Mrs. Dunlop to the sitting-room window. She tried to see out through streaming showers that darkened the panes.
“Isn't that Mrs. Bogardus? Why, it is! Put on your shoes, Chauncey, quick! Help her in 'n' take her horse to the shed. Take an umbrella with you.” Chauncey the younger, meekly drying his shoes by the kitchen fire, put them on, not stopping to lace them, and slumped down the porch steps, pursued by his mother's orders. She watched him a moment struggling with a cranky umbrella, and then turned her attention to herself and the room.
Mrs. Bogardus made her calls in the morning, and always plainly on business. She had not seen the inside of Cerissa's parlor for ten years. This was a grievance which Cerissa referred to spasmodically, being seized with it when she was otherwise low in her mind.
“My sakes! Can't I remember my mother telling how her mother used to drive over and spend the afternoon, and bring her sewing and the baby—whichever one was the baby. They called each other Chrissy and Angevine, and now she don't even speak of her own children to us by their first names. It's 'Mrs. Bowen' and 'Mr. Paul;' just as if she was talking to her servants.”
“What's that to us? We've got a good home here for as long as we want to stay. She's easy to work for, if you do what she says.”
Chauncey respected Mrs. Bogardus's judgment and her straightforward business habits. Other matters he left alone. But Cerissa was ambitious and emotional, and she stayed indoors, doing little things and thinking small thoughts. She resented her commanding neighbor's casual manners. There was something puzzling and difficult to meet in her plainness of speech, which excluded the personal relation. It was like the cut and finish of her clothes—mysterious in their simplicity, and not to be imitated cheaply.
When the two met, Cerissa was immediately reduced to a state of flimsy apology which she made up for by being particularly hot and self-assertive in speaking of the lady afterward.
“There is the parlor, in perfect order,” she fretted, as she stood waiting to open the front door; “but of course she wouldn't let me take her in there—that would be too much like visiting.”
The next moment she had corrected her facial expression, and was offering smiling condolences to Mrs. Bogardus on the state of her attire.
“It is only my jacket. You might put that somewhere to dry,” said the lady curtly. Raindrops sparkled on the wave of thick iron-gray hair that lifted itself, with a slight turn to one side, from her square low brow. Her eyes shone dark against the fresh wind color in her cheeks. She had the straight, hard, ophidian line concealing the eyelid, which gives such a peculiar strength to the direct gaze of a pair of dark eyes. If one suspects the least touch of tenderness, possibly of pain, behind that iron fold, it lends a fascination equal to the strength. There was some excitement in Mrs. Bogardus's manner, but Cerissa did not know her well enough to perceive it. She merely thought her looking handsomer, and, if possible, more formidable than usual.
She sat by the fire, folding her skirts across her knees, and showing the edges of the most discouragingly beautiful petticoats,—a taste perhaps inherited from her wide-hipped Dutch progenitresses. Mrs. Bogardus reveled in costly petticoats, and had an unnecessary number of them.
“How nice it is in here!” she said, looking about her. Cerissa, with the usual apologies, had taken her into the kitchen to dry her skirts. There was a slight taint of steaming shoe leather, left by Chauncey when driven forth. Otherwise the kitchen was perfection,—the family room of an old Dutch farmhouse, built when stone and hardwood lumber were cheap,—thick walls; deep, low window-seats; beams showing on the ceiling; a modern cooking-stove, where Emily Bogardus could remember the wrought brass andirons and iron backlog, for this room had been her father's dining-room. The brick tiled hearth remained, and the color of those century and a half old bricks made a pitiful thing of Cerissa's new oil-cloth. The woodwork had been painted—by Mrs. Bogardus's orders, and much to Cerissa's disgust—a dark kitchen green,—not that she liked the color herself, but it was the artistic demand of the moment,—and the place was filled with a green golden light from the cherry-trees close to the window, which a break in the clouds had suddenly illumined.
“You keep it beautifully,” said Mrs. Bogardus, her eyes shedding compliments as she looked around. “I should not dare go in my own kitchen at this time of day. There are no women nowadays who know how to work in the way ladies used to work. If I could have such a housekeeper as you, Cerissa.”
Cerissa flushed and bridled. “What would Chauncey do!”
“I don't expect you to be my housekeeper,” Mrs. Bogardus smiled. “But I envy Chauncey.”
“She has come to ask a favor,” thought Cerissa. “I never knew her so pleasant, for nothing. She wants me to do up her fruit, I guess.” Cerissa was mistaken. Mrs. Bogardus simply was happy—or almost happy—and deeply stirred over a piece of news which had come to her in that morning's mail.
“I have telephoned Bradley not to send his men over on Monday. My son is bringing his wife home. They may be here all summer. The place belongs to them now. Did Chauncey tell you? Mr. Paul writes that he has some building plans of his own, and he wishes everything left as it is for the present, especially this house. He wants his wife to see it first just as it is.”
“Well, to be sure! They've been traveling a long time, haven't they? And how is his health now?”
“Oh, he is very well indeed. You will be glad not to have the trouble of those carpenters, Cerissa? Pulling down old houses is dirty work.”
“Oh, dear! I wouldn't mind the dirt. Anything to get rid of that old rat's nest on top of the kitchen chamber. I hate to have such out of the way places on my mind. I can't get around to do every single thing, and it's years—years, Mrs. Bogardus, since I could get a woman to do a half-day's cleaning up there in broad daylight!”
Mrs. Bogardus stared. What was the woman talking about!
“I call it a regular eyesore on the looks of the house besides. And it keeps all the old stories alive.”
“What stories?”
“Why, of course your father wasn't out of his head—we all know that—when he built that upstairs room and slep' there and locked himself in every night of his life. It was only on one point he was a little warped: the fear of bein' robbed. A natural fear, too,—an old man over eighty livin' in such a lonesome place and known to be well off. But—you'll excuse my repeating the talk—but the story goes now that he re'ly went insane and was confined up there all the last years of his life. And that's why the windows have got bars acrost them. Everybody notices it, and they ask questions. It's real embarrassin', for of course I don't want to discuss the family.”
“Who asks questions?” Mrs. Bogardus's eyes were hard to meet when her voice took that tone.
“Why, the city folks out driving. They often drive in the big gate and make the circle through the grounds, and they're always struck when they see that tower bedroom with windows like a prison. They say, 'What's the story about that room, up there?'”
“When people ask you questions about the house, you can say you did not live here in the owner's time and you don't know. That's perfectly simple, isn't it?”
“But I do know! Everybody knows,” said Cerissa hotly. “It was the talk of the whole neighborhood when that room was put up; and I remember how scared I used to be when mother sent me over here of an errand.”
Mrs. Bogardus rose and shook out her skirts. “Will Chauncey bring my horse when it stops raining? By the way, did you get the furniture down that was in that room, Cerissa?—the old secretary? I am going to have it put in order for Mr. Paul's room. Old furniture is the fashion now, you know.”
Cerissa caught her breath nervously. “Mrs. Bogardus—I couldn't do a thing about it! I wanted Chauncey to tell you. All last week I tried to get a woman, or a man, to come and help me clear out that place, but just as soon as they find out what's wanted—'You'll have to get somebody else for that job,' they say.”
“What is the matter with them?”
“It's the room, Mrs. Bogardus; if I was you—I'm doing now just as I'd be done by—I would not take Mrs. Paul Bogardus up into that room—not even in broad daylight; not if it was my son's wife, in the third month of her being a wife.”
“Well, upon my word!” said Mrs. Bogardus, smiling coldly. “Do you mean to say these women are afraid to go up there?”
“It was old Mary Hornbeck who started the talk. She got what she called her 'warning' up there. And the fact is, she was a corpse within six months from that day. Chauncey and me, we used to hear noises, but old houses are full of noises. We never thought much about it; only, I must say I never had any use for that part of the house. Chauncey keeps his seeds and tools in the lower room, and some of the winter vegetables, and we store the parlor stove in there in summer.”
“Well, about this 'warning'?” Mrs. Bogardus interrupted.
“Yes! It was three years ago in May, and I remember it was some such a day as this—showery and broken overhead, and Mary disappointed me; but she came about noon, and said she'd put in half a day anyhow. She got her pail and house-cloths; but she wasn't gone not half an hour when down she come white as a sheet, and her mouth as dry as chalk. She set down all of a shake, and I give her a drink of tea, and she said: 'I wouldn't go up there again, not for a thousand dollars.' She unlocked the door, she said, and stepped inside without thinkin'. Your father's old rocker with the green moreen cushions stood over by the east window, where he used to sit. She heard a creak like a heavy step on the floor, and that empty chair across the room, as far as from here to the window, begun to rock as if somebody had just rose up from them cushions. She watched it till it stopped. Then she took another step, and the step she couldn't see answered her, and the chair begun to rock again.”
“Was that all?”
“No, ma'am; that wasn't all. I don't know if you remember an old wall clock with a brass ball on top and brass scrolls down the sides and a painted glass door in front of the pendulum with a picture of a castle and a lake? The paint's been wore off the glass with cleaning, so the pendulum shows plain. That clock has not been wound since we come to live here. I don't believe a hand has touched it since the night he was carried feet foremost out of that room. But Mary said she could count the strokes go tick, tick, tick! She listened till she could have counted fifty, for she was struck dumb, and just as plain as the clock before her face she could see the minute-hand and the pendulum, both of 'em dead still. Now, how do you account for that!
“I told Chauncey about it, and he said it was all foolishness. Do all I could he would go up there himself, that same evening. But he come down again after a while, and he was almost as white as Mary. 'Did you see anything?' I says. 'I saw what Mary said she saw,' says he, 'and I heard what she heard.' But no one can make Chauncey own up that he believes it was anything supernatural. 'There is a reason for everything,' he says. 'The miracles and ghosts of one generation are just school-book learning to the next; and more of a miracle than the miracles themselves.'”
“Chauncey shows his sense,” Mrs. Bogardus observed.
“He was real disturbed, though, I could see; and he told me particular not to make any talk about it. I never have opened the subject to a living soul. But when Mary died, within six months, folks repeated what she had been saying about her 'warning.' The 'death watch' she called it. We can't all of us control our feelings about such things, and she was a lonely widow woman.”
“Well, do you believe that ticking is going on up there now?” asked Mrs. Bogardus.
Cerissa looked uneasy.
“Is the door locked?”
“I re'ly couldn't say,” she confessed.
“Do you mean to say that all you sensible people in this house have avoided that room for three years? And you don't even know if the door is locked?”
“I—I don't use that part for anything, and cleaning is wasted on a place that's never used, and I can't get anybody”—
“I am not criticising your housekeeping. Will you go up there with me now, Cerissa? I want to understand about this.”
“What, just now, do you mean? I'm afraid I haven't got the time this morning, Mrs. Bogardus. Dinner's at half-past twelve. It's a quarter to eleven”—
“Very well. You think the door is not locked?”
“If it is, the key must be in the door. Oh, don't go, please, Mrs. Bogardus. Wait till Chauncey conies in”—
“I wish you'd send Chauncey up when he does come in. Ask him to bring a screw-driver.” Mrs. Bogardus rose and examined her jacket. It was still damp. She asked for a cape, or some sort of wrap, as her waist was thin, and the rain had chilled the morning air.
For the sake of decency, Cerissa escorted her visitor across the hall passage into the loom-room—a loom-room in name only for upwards of three generations. Becky had devoted it to the rough work of the house, and to certain special uses, such as the care of the butchering products, the making of soft soap and root beer. Here the churning was done, by hand, with a wooden dasher, which spread a circle of white drops, later to become grease-spots. The floor of the loom-room was laid in large brick tiles, more or less loose in their sockets, with an occasional earthy depression marking the grave of a missing tile. Becky's method of cleaning was to sluice it out and scrub it with an old broom. The seepage of generations before her time had thus added their constant quota to the old well's sum of iniquity.
Mrs. Bogardus had not visited this part of the old house for many years. After her father's death she had shrunk from its painful associations. Later she grew indifferent; but as she passed now into the gloomy place—doubly dark with the deep foliage of June on a rainy morning—she was afraid of her own thoughts. Henceforth she was a woman with a diseased consciousness. “What can't be cured must be seared,” flashed over her as she set her face to the stairway.
These stairs, leading up into the back attic or “kitchen chamber,” being somewhat crowded for space, advanced two steps into the room below. As the stair door opened outward, and the stairs were exceedingly steep and dark, every child of the house, in turn, had suffered a bad fall in consequence; but the arrangement remained in all its natural depravity, for “children must learn.”
Little Emmy of the old days had loved to sit upon these steps, a trifle raised above the kitchen traffic, yet cognizant of all that was going on, and ready to descend promptly if she smelled fresh crullers frying, or baked sweet apples steaming hot from the oven. If Becky's foot were heard upon the stairs above, she would jump quick enough; but if the step had a clumping, boyish precipitancy, she sat still and laughed, and planted her back against the door. Often she had teased Adam in this way, keeping him prisoner from his duties, helpless in his good nature either to scold her or push her off. But once he circumvented her, slipping off his shoes and creeping up the stairs again, and making his escape by the roof and the boughs of the old maple. Then it was Emmy who was teased, who sat a foolish half hour on the stairs alone and missed a beautiful ride to the wood lot; but she would not speak to Adam for two days afterward.
Becky's had been the larger of the two bedrooms in the attic, Adam's the smaller—tucked low under the eaves, and entered by crawling around the big chimney that came bulking up to the light like a great tree caught between house walls. The stairs hugged the chimney and made use of its support. Adam would warm his hands upon it coming down on bitter mornings. From force of habit, Emily Bogardus laid her smooth white hand upon the clammy bricks. No tombstone could be colder than that heart of house warmth now.
The roof of the kitchen chamber had been raised a story higher, and the chimney as it went up contracted to quite a modern size. This elevation gave room for the incongruous tower bedroom that had hurt the symmetry of the old house, spoiled its noble sweep of roof, and given rise to so much unpleasant conjecture as to its use. It was this excrescence, the record of those last unloved and unloving years of her father's life, which Mrs. Bogardus would have removed, but was prevented by her son.
“You go back now, Cerissa,” she said to the panting woman behind her. “I see the key is in the lock. You may send Chauncey after a while; there is no hurry.”
“Oh!” gasped Cerissa. “Do you see that!”
“What?”
“I thought there was something—something behind that slit.”
“There isn't. Step this way. There, can't you see the light?”
Mrs. Bogardus grasped Cerissa by the shoulders and held her firmly in front of a narrow loophole that pierced the partition close beside the door. Light from the room within showed plainly; but it gave an unpleasantly human expression to the entrance, like a furtive eye on the watch.
“He would always be there,” Cerissa whispered.
“Who?”
“Your father. If anybody wanted to see him after he shut himself in there for the night, they had to stand to be questioned through that wall-slit before he opened the door. Yes, ma'am! He was on the watch in there the whole time like a thing in a trap.”
“Are you afraid to go back alone?” Mrs. Bogardus spoke with chilling irony.
Cerissa backed away in silence, her heart thumping. “She's putting it on,” she said to herself. “I never see her turn so pale. Don't tell me she ain't afraid!”
There was a hanging shelf against the chimney on which a bundle of dry herbs had been left to turn into dust. Old Becky might have put them there the autumn before she died; or some successor of hers in the years that were blank to the daughter of the house. As she pushed open the door a sighing draught swept past her and seemed to draw her inward. It shook the sere bundle. Its skeleton leaves, dissolving into motes, flickered an instant athwart the light. They sifted down like ashes on the woman's dark head as she passed in. Her color had faded, but not through fear of ghost clocks. It was the searing process she had to face. And any room where she sat alone with certain memories of her youth was to her a torture chamber.
“She's been up there an awful long time. I wouldn't wonder if she's fainted away.”
“What would she faint at? I guess it's pretty cold, though. Give me some more tea; put plenty of milk so I can drink it quick.”
Chauncey's matter of fact tone always comforted Cerissa when she was nervous. She did not mind that he jeered or that his words were often rude; no man of her acquaintance could say things nicely to women, or ever tried. A certain amount of roughness passed for household wit. Chauncey put the screw-driver in his pocket, his wife and son watching him with respectful anxiety. He thought rather well of his own courage privately. But the familiar details of the loom-room cheered him on his way, the homely tools of his every-day work were like friendly faces nodding at him. He knocked loudly on the door above, and was answered by Mrs. Bogardus in her natural voice.
“Bosh—every bit of it bosh!” he repeated courageously.
She was seated by the window in the chair with the green cushions. Her face was turned towards the view outside. “What a pity those cherries were not picked before the rain,” she observed. “The fruit is bursting ripe; I'm afraid you'll lose the crop.”
Chauncey moved forward awkwardly without answering.
“Stop there one moment, will you?” Mrs. Bogardus rose and demonstrated. “You notice those two boards are loose. Now, I put this chair here,”—she laid her hand on the back to still its motion. “Step this way. You see? The chair rocks of itself. So would any chair with a spring board under it. That accounts for that, I think. Now come over here.” Chauncey placed himself as she directed in front of the high mantel with the clock above it. She stood at his side and they listened in silence to that sound which Mary Hornbeck, deceased, had deemed a spiritual warning.
“Would you call that a 'ticking'? Is that like any sound an insect could make?” the mistress asked.
“I should call it more like a 'ting,'” said Chauncey. “It comes kind o' muffled like through the chimbly—a person might be mistaken if they was upset in their nerves considerable.”
“What old people call the 'death-watch' is supposed to be an insect that lives in the walls of old houses, isn't it? and gives warning with a ticking sound when somebody is going to be called away? Now to me that sounds like a soft blow struck regularly on a piece of hollow iron—say the end of a stove-pipe sticking in the chimney. When I first came up here, there was only a steady murmur of wind and rain. Then the clouds thinned and the sun came out and drops began to fall—distinctly. Your wife says the ticking was heard on a day like this, broken and showery. Now, if you will unscrew that clock, I think you will find there's a stove-pipe hole behind it; and a piece of pipe shoved into the chimney just far enough to catch the drops as they gather and fall.”
Chauncey went to work. He sweated in the airless room. The powerful screws blunted the lips of his tool but would not start.
“I guess I'll have to give it up for to-day. The screws are rusted in solid. Want I should pry her out of the woodwork?”
“No, don't do that,” said Mrs. Bogardus. “Why should we spoil the panel? This seems a very comfortable room. My son is right. It would be foolish to tear it down. Such a place as this might be very useful if you people would get over your notions about it.”
“I never had no notions,” Chauncey asserted. “When the women git talkin' they like to make out a good story, and whichever one sees the most and hears the most makes the biggest sensation.”
Mrs. Bogardus waited till he had finished without appearing to have heard what he was saying.
“Where is the key to this door?” she laid her hand over a knob to the right of the stairs.
“I guess if there is one it's on the other side. Yes, it's in the key-hole.” Chauncey turned the knob and shoved and lifted. The door yielded to his full strength, and he allowed Mrs. Bogardus to precede him. She stepped into a room hardly bigger than a closet with one window, barred like those in the outer room. It was fitted up with toilet conveniences according to the best advices of its day. Over all the neat personal arrangements there was the slur of neglect, a sad squalor which even a king's palace wears with time.
Chauncey tested the plumbing with a noise that was plainly offensive to his companion, but she bore with it—also with his reminiscences gathered from neighborhood gossip. “He wa'n't fond of spending money, but he didn't spare it here: this was his ship cabin when he started on his last voyage. It looked funny—a man with all his land and houses cooped up in a place like this; but he wanted to be independent of the women. He hated to have 'em fussin' around him. He had a woman to come and cook up stuff for him to help himself to; but she wouldn't stay here overnight, nor he wouldn't let her. As for a man in the house,—most men were thieves, he thought, or waiting their chance to be. It was real pitiful the way he made his end.”
“Open that window and shut the door when you come out,” said Mrs. Bogardus. “I will send some one to help you down with that secretary. Cerissa knows about it. It is to be sent up on the Hill.”
Christine's marriage took place while Paul and Moya were lingering in the Bruneau, for Paul's health ostensibly. Banks and Horace had been left to the smiling irony of justice. They never had a straight chance to define their conduct in the woods; for no one accused them. No awkward questions were asked in the city drawing-rooms or at the clubs. For a tough half hour or so at Fort Lemhi they had realized how they stood in the eyes of those unbiased military judges. The shock had a bracing effect for a time. Both boys were said to be much improved by their Western trip and by the hardships of that frightful homeward march.
Mrs. Bogardus had matched her gift of Stone Ridge to her son, which was a gift of sentiment, with one of more substantial value to her daughter,—the income from certain securities settled upon her and her heirs. Banks was carefully unprovided for. The big house in town was full of ghosts—the ghosts that haunt such homes, made desolate by a breach of hearts. The city itself was crowded with opportunities for giving and receiving pain between mother and daughter. Christine had developed all the latent hardness of her mother's race with a sickly frivolity of her own. She made a great show of faith in her marriage venture. She boomed it in her occasional letters, which were full of scarce concealed bravado as graceful as snapping her fingers in her mother's face.
Mrs. Bogardus leased her house in town, and retired before the ghosts, but not escaping them; Stone Ridge must be put in order for its new master and mistress, and Stone Ridge had its own ghosts. She informed her absentees that, before their return, she should have left for Southern California to look after some investments which she had neglected there of late. It was then she spoke of her plan for restoring the old house by pulling down that addition which disfigured it; and Paul had objected to this erasure. It would take from the house's veracity, he said. The words carried their unintentional sting.
But it was Moya's six lines at the bottom of his page that changed and softened everything. Moya—always blessed when she took the initiative—contrived, as swiftly as she could set them down, to say the very words that made the home-coming a coming home indeed.
“Will Madam Bogardus be pleased to keep her place as the head of her son's house?” she wrote. “This foolish person he has married wants to be anything rather than the mistress of Stone Ridge. She wants to be always out of doors, and she needs to be. Oh, must you go away now—now when we need you so much? It cannot be said here on paper how much I need you! Am I not your motherless daughter? Please be there when we come, and please stay there!”
“For a little while then,” said the lonely woman, smiling at the image of that sweet, foolish person in her thoughts. “For a little while, till she learns her mistake.” Such mistakes are the cornerstone of family friendship.
It was an uneventful summer on the Hill, but one of rather wearing intensity in the inner relations of the household, one with another; for nothing could be quite natural with a pit of concealment to be avoided by all, and an air of unconsciousness to be carefully preserved in avoiding it. Moya's success in this way was so remarkable that Paul half hated it. How was it possible for her to speak to his mother so lightly; never the least apparent premeditation or fear of tripping; how look at her with such sweet surface looks that never questioned or saw beneath? He could not meet his mother's eyes at all when they were alone together, or endure a silence in her company.
Both women were of the type called elemental. They understood each other without knowing why. Moya felt the desperate truth contained in the mother's falsehood, and broke forth into passionate defense of her as against her husband's silence.
He answered her one day by looking up a little green book of fairy tales and reading aloud this fragment of “The Golden Key.”
“'I never tell lies, even in fun.' (The mysterious Grandmother speaks.)
“'How good of you!' (says the Child in the Wood.)
“'I couldn't if I tried. It would come true if I said it, and then I should be punished enough.'”
Moya's eyes narrowed reflectively.
“How constantly you are thinking of this! I think of it only when I am with you. As if a woman like your mother, who has done one thing, should be all that thing, and nothing more to us, her children!”
Moya was giving herself up, almost immorally, Paul sometimes thought, to the fascination Mrs. Bogardus's personality had for her. In a keenly susceptible state herself, at that time, there was something calming and strengthening in the older woman's perfected beauty, her physical poise, and the fitness of everything she did and said and wore to the given occasion. As a dark woman she was particularly striking in summer clothing. Her white effects were tremendous. She did not pretend to study these matters herself, but in years of experience, with money to spend, she had learned well in whom to confide. When women are shut up together in country houses for the summer, they can irritate each other in the most foolish ways. Mrs. Bogardus never got upon your nerves.
But, for Paul, there was a poison in his mother's beauty, a dread in her influence over his impressionable young wife, thrilled with the awakening forces of her consonant being. Moya would drink deep of every cup that life presented. Motherhood was her lesson for the day. “She is a queen of mothers!” she would exclaim with an abandon that was painful to Paul; he saw deformity where Moya was ready to kneel. “I love her perfect love for you—for me, even! She is above all jealousy. She doesn't even ask to be understood.”
Paul was silent.
“And oh, she knows, she knows! She has been through it all—in such despair and misery—all that is before me, with everything in the world to make it easy and all the beautiful care she gives me. She is the supreme mother. And I never had a mother to speak to before. Don't, don't, please, keep putting that dreadful thing between us now!”
So Paul took the dreadful thing away with him and was alone with it, and knew that his mother saw it in his eyes when their eyes met and avoided. When, after a brief household absence, he would see her again he wondered, “Has she been alone with it? Has it passed into another phase?”—as of an incurable disease that must take its time and course.
Mrs. Bogardus did not spare her conscience in social ways all this time. It was a part of her life to remember that she had neighbors—certain neighbors. She included Paul without particularly consulting him whenever it was proper for him to support her in her introduction of his wife to the country-house folk, many of whom they knew in town.
All his mother's friends liked Paul and supposed him to be very clever, but they had never taken him seriously. “Now, at last,” they said, “he has done something like other people. He is coming out.” Experienced matrons were pleased to flatter him on his choice of a bride. The daughters studied Moya, and decided that she was “different,” but “all right.” She had a careless distinction of her own. Some of her “things” were surprisingly lovely—probably heirlooms; and army women are so clever about clothes.
Would they spend the winter in town?
Paul replied absently: they had not decided. Probably they would not go down till after the holidays.
What an attractive plan? What an ideal family Christmas they would have all together in the country! Christine had not been up all summer, had she? Here Moya came to her husband's relief, through a wife's dual consciousness in company, and covered his want of spirits with a flood of foolish chatter.
The smiling way in which women the most sincere can posture and prance on the brink of dissimulation was particularly sickening to Paul at this time. Why need they put themselves in situations where it was required? The situations were of his mother's creation. He imagined she must suffer, but had little sympathy with that side of her martyrdom. Moya seemed a trifle feverish in her acceptance of these affairs of which she was naturally the life and centre. A day of entertaining often faded into an evening of subtle sadness.
Paul would take her out into the moonlight of that deep inland country. The trees were dark with leaves and brooded close above them; old water-fences and milldams cast inky shadows on the still, shallow ponds clasped in wooded hills. No region could have offered a more striking contrast to the empty plains. Moya felt shut in with old histories. The very ground was but moulding sand in which generations of human lives had been poured, and the sand swept over to be reshaped for them.
“We are not living our own life yet,” Paul would say; not adding, “We are protecting her.” Here was the beginning of punishment helplessly meted out to this proud woman whose sole desire was towards her children—to give, and not to receive.
“But this is our Garden?” Moya would muse. “We are as nearly two alone as any two could be.”
“If you include the Snake. We can't leave out the Snake, you know.”
“Snake or Seraph—I don't believe I know the difference. Paul, I cannot have you thinking things.”
“I?—what do I think?”
“You are thinking it is bad for me to be so much with her. You, as a man and a husband, resent what she, as a woman and a wife, has dared to do. And I, as another woman and wife, I say she could do nothing else and be true. For, don't you see? She never loved him. The wifehood in her has never been reached. She was a girl, then a mother, then a widow. How could she”—
“Do you think he would have claimed her as his wife? Oh, you do not know him;—she has never known him. If we could be brave and face our duty to the whole truth, and leave the rest to those sequences, never dreamed of, that wait upon great acts. Such surprises come straight from God. Now we can never know how he would have risen to meet a nobler choice in her. He had not far to rise! Well, we have our share of blessings, including piazza teas; but as a family we have missed one of the greatest spiritual opportunities,—such as come but once in a lifetime.”
“Ah, if she was not ready for it, it was not her opportunity. God is very patient with us, I believe.”