THE STORY THE OLD MAN TOLD
David Windom's daughter Alix ran away with and married Edward Crown
in the spring of 1894.
Windom was one of the most prosperous farmers in the county. His
lands were wide, his cattle were many, his fields were vast stretches
of green and gold; his granaries, his cribs and his mows, filled
and emptied each year, brought riches and dignity and power to this
man of the soil.
Back when the state was young, his forefathers had fared westward
from the tide-water reaches of Virginia, coming at length to the
rich, unbroken region along the river with the harsh Indian name,
and there they built their cabins and huts on lands that had cost
them little more than a song and yet were of vast dimensions.
They were of English stock. (Another branch of the family, closely
related, remains English to this day, its men sitting sometime in
Parliament and always in the councils of the nation, far removed
in every way from the Windoms in the fertile valley once traversed
by the war-like redskins.) But these Windoms of the valley were no
longer English. There had been six generations of them, and those
of the first two fought under General Washington against the
red-coats and the Hessians in the War of '76.
David Windom, of the fourth generation, went to England for a
wife, however,--a girl he had met on the locally celebrated trip
to Europe in the early seventies. For years he was known from one
end of the county to the other as "the man who has been across the
Atlantic Ocean." The dauntless English bride had come unafraid to
a land she had been taught to regard as wild, peopled by savages
and overrun by ravenous beasts, and she had found it populated
instead by the gentlest sort of men and equally gentle beasts.
She did a great deal for David Windom. He was a proud man
and ambitious. He saw the wisdom of her teachings and he followed
them, not reluctantly but with a fierce desire to refine what God
had given him in the shape of raw material: a good brain, a sturdy
sense of honour, and above all an imagination that lifted him
safely,--if not always sanely,--above the narrow world in which the
farmer of that day spent his entire life. Not that he was uncouth
to begin with,--far from it. He had been irritatingly fastidious
from boyhood up. His thoughts had wandered afar on frequent journeys,
and when they came back to take up the dull occupation they had
abandoned temporarily, they were broader than when they went out to
gather wool. The strong, well-poised English wife found rich soil
in which to work; he grew apace and flourished, and manifold were
the innovations that stirred a complacent community into actual
unrest. A majority of the farmers and virtually all of the farmers'
wives were convinced that Dave Windom was losing his mind, the way
he was letting that woman boss him around.
The women did not like her. She was not one of them and never
could be one of them. Her "hired girls" became "servants" the day
she entered the ugly old farmhouse on the ridge. They were no longer
considered members of the family; they were made to feel something
they had never felt before in their lives: that they were not their
mistress's equals.
The "hired girl" of those days was an institution. As a rule, she
moved in the same social circle as the lady of the house and it
was customary for her to intimately address her mistress by her
Christian name. She enjoyed the right to engage in all conversations;
she was, in short, "as good as anybody." The new Mrs. Windom was
not long in transporting the general housework "girl" into a totally
unexampled state of astonishment. This "girl,"--aged forty-five and
a prominent member of the Methodist Church,--announced to everybody
in the community except to Mrs. Windom herself that she was going
to leave. She did not leave. The calm serenity of the new mistress
prevailed, even over the time-honoured independence in which
the "girl" and her kind unconsciously gloried. Respect succeeded
injury, and before the bride had been in the Windom house a month,
Maria Bliss was telling the other "hired girls" of the neighbourhood
that she wouldn't trade places with them for anything in the world.
Greatly to the consternation and disgust of other householders,
a "second girl" was added to the Windom menage,--a parlour-maid
she was called. This was too much. It was rank injustice. General
housework girls began to complain of having too much work to
do,--getting up at five in the morning, cooking for half a dozen
"hands," doing all the washing and ironing, milking, sweeping and
so on, and not getting to bed till nine or ten o'clock at night,--to
say nothing of family dinners on Sunday and the preacher in every
now and then, and all that. Moreover, Mrs. Windom herself never
looked bedraggled. She took care of her hair, wore good clothes,
went to the dentist regularly (whether she had a toothache or not),
had meals served in what Maria Bliss loftily described as "courses,"
and saw to it that David Windom shaved once a day, dressed better
than his neighbours, kept his "surrey" and "side-bar buggy" washed,
his harness oiled and polished, and wore real riding-boots.
The barnyard took on an orderly appearance, the stables were
repaired, the picket fences gleamed white in the sun, the roof of
the house was painted red, the sides a shimmering white, and there
were green window shutters and green window boxes filled with
geraniums. The front yard was kept mowed, and there were great
flower-beds encircled by snow-white boulders; a hammock was swung
in the shade of two great oaks, and--worst of all! a tennis-court
was laid out alongside the house.
Tennis! That was a game played only by "dudes"! Passers-by looked
with scorn upon young David Windom and his flaxen-haired wife
as they played at the silly game before supper every evening. And
they went frequently to the "opera house" at the county seat, ten
miles up the river; they did not wait for summer to come with its
circus, as all the other farmers were content to do; whenever there
was a good "show" at the theatre in town they sent up for reserved
seats and drove in for supper at the principal hotel. Altogether,
young Mrs. Windom was simply "raising Cain" with the conventions.
Strange to say, David did not "go to smash." To the intense chagrin
of the wiseacres he prospered despite an unprecedented disregard
for the teachings of his father and his grandfather before him. The
wolf stayed a long way off from his door, the prophetic mortgage
failed to lay its blight upon his lands, his crops were bountiful,
his acreage spread as the years went by,--and so his uncles, his
cousins and his aunts were never so happy as when wishing for the
good old days when his father was alive and running the farm as it
should be run! If David had married some good, sensible, thrifty,
hard-working farmer's daughter,--Well, it might not have meant an
improvement in the crops but it certainly would have spared him
the expense of a tennis court, and theatre-going, and absolutely
unnecessary trips to Chicago or Indianapolis whenever SHE took it
into her head to go. Besides, it wasn't natural that they should
deliberately put off having children. It wasn't what God and the
country expected. After a year had passed and there were no symptoms
of approaching motherhood, certain narrow-minded relatives began to
blame Great Britain for the outrage and talked a great deal about
a worn-out, deteriorating race.
Then, after two years, when a girl baby was born to David and his
wife, they couldn't, for the life of them, understand how it came
to pass that it wasn't a boy. There had been nothing but boys in
the Windom family for years and years. It appeared to be a Windom
custom. And here was this fair-haired outsider from across the
sea breaking in with a girl! They could not believe it possible.
David,--a great, strong, perfect specimen of a Windom,--the father
of a girl! Why, they emphasized, he was over six feet tall, strong
as an ox, broad-shouldered,--as fine a figure as you would see in
a lifetime. There was something wrong,--radically wrong.
The district suffered another shock when a nurse maid was added to
David's household,--a girl from the city who had nothing whatever
to do, except to take care of the baby while the unnatural mother
tinkered with the flower-beds, took long walks about the farm,
rode horseback, and played tennis with David and a silly crowd of
young people who had fallen into evil ways.
She died when her daughter was ten years old. Those who had
misunderstood her and criticized her in the beginning, mourned
her deeply, sincerely, earnestly in the end, for she had triumphed
over prejudice, narrow-mindedness, and a certain form of malice.
The whole district was the better for her once hateful innovations,
and there was no one left who scoffed at David Windom for the choice
he had made of a wife.
Her death wrought a remarkable, enduring change in Windom. He became
a silent, brooding man who rarely smiled and whose heart lay up
in the little graveyard on the ridge. The gay, larksome light fled
from his eyes, his face grew stern and sometimes forbidding. She
had taken with her the one great thing she had brought into his
life: ineffable buoyancy. He no longer played, for there was no
one with whom he would play; he no longer sang, for the music had
gone out of his soul; he no longer whistled the merry tunes, for
his lips were stiff and unyielding. Only when he looked upon his
little daughter did the soft light of love well up into his eyes
and the rigid mouth grow tender.
She was like her mother. She was joyous, brave and fair to look
upon. She had the same heart of sunshine, the same heart of iron,
and the blue in her eyes was like the blue of the darkening skies.
She adored the grim, silent man who was her father, and she was
the breath of life to him.
And then, when she was nineteen, she broke the heart of David Windom.
For two years she had been a student in the University situated
but half a score of miles from the place where she was born,
a co-educational institution of considerable size and importance.
Windom did not believe in women's colleges. He believed in the
free school with its broadening influence, its commingling of the
sexes in the search for learning, and in the divine right of woman
to develop her mind through the channels that lead ultimately and
inevitably to superiority of man. He believed that the girl trained
and educated in schools devoted exclusively to the finer sex fails
to achieve understanding as well as education. The only way to give
a girl a practical education,--and he believed that every woman
should have one,--was to start her off even with the boy who was
training to become her master in all respects.
During her second year at the University she met Edward Crown,
a senior. He was the son of a blacksmith in the city, and he was
working his way through college with small assistance from his
parent, who held to the conviction that a man was far better off
if he developed his muscles by hard work and allowed the brain
to take care of itself. Young Crown was a good-looking fellow of
twenty-three, clean-minded, ambitious, dogged in work and dogged
in play. He had "made" the football team in his sophomore year.
Customary snobbishness had kept him out of the fraternities and
college societies. He may have been a good fellow, a fine student,
and a cracking end on the eleven, and all that, but he was not
acceptable material for any one of the half dozen fraternities.
When he left college with his hard-earned degree it was to accept
a position with a big engineering company, a job which called him
out to the far Northwest. Alix Windom was his promised wife. They
were deeply, madly in love with each other. Separation seemed
unendurable. She was willing to go into the wilderness with him,
willing to endure the hardships and the discomforts of life in a
construction camp up in the mountains of Montana. She would share
his poverty and his trials as she would later share his triumphs.
But when they went to David Windom with their beautiful dream, the
world fell about their ears.
David Windom, recovering from the shock of surprise, ordered Edward
from the house. He would sooner see his child dead than the wife
of Nick Crown's son,--Nick Crown, a drunken rascal who had been
known to beat his wife,--Nick Crown who was not even fit to lick
the feet of the horses he shod!
One dark, rainy night in late June, Alix stole out of the old
farmhouse on the ridge and met her lover at the abandoned tollgate
half a mile up the road. He waited there with a buggy and a fast
team of horses. Out of a ramshackle cupboard built in the wall of
the toll-house, they withdrew the bundles surreptitiously placed
there by Alix in anticipation of this great and daring event, and
made off toward the city at a break-neck, reckless speed. They
were married before midnight, and the next day saw them on their
way to the Far West. But not before Alix had despatched a messenger
to her father, telling him of her act and asking his forgiveness
for the sake of the love she bore him. The same courier carried
back to the city a brief response from David Windom. In a shaken,
sprawling hand he informed her that if she ever decided to return
to her home ALONE, he would receive her and forgive her for the
sake of the love he bore her, but if she came with the coward who
stole her away from him, he would kill him before her eyes.
II
The summer and fall and part of the winter passed, and in early
March Alix came home.
David Windom, then a man of fifty, gaunt and grey and powerful,
seldom had left the farm in all these months. He rode about his
far-spread estate, grim and silent, his eyes clouded, his voice
almost metallic, his manner cold and repellent. His tenants, his
labourers, his neighbours, fearing him, rarely broke in upon his
reserve. Only his animals loved him and were glad to see him,--his
dogs, his horses, even his cattle. He loved them, for they were
staunch and faithful. Never had he uttered his daughter's name in
all these months, nor was there a soul in the community possessed
of the hardihood to inquire about her or to sympathize with him.
It was a fierce, cruel night in March that saw the return of Alix.
A fine, biting snow blew across the wide, open farmlands; the beasts
of the field were snugly under cover; no man stirred abroad unless
driven by necessity; the cold, wind-swept roads were deserted. So
no one witnessed the return of Alix Crown and her husband. They came
out of the bleak, unfriendly night and knocked at David Windom's
door. There were lights in his sitting-room windows; through them
they could see the logs blazing in the big fireplace, beside which
sat the lonely, brooding figure of Alix's father. It was late,--nearly
midnight,--and the house was still. Old Maria Bliss and the one
other servant had been in bed for hours. The farmhands slept in
a cottage Windom had erected years before, acting upon his wife's
suggestion. It stood some two or three hundred yards from the main
house.
A dog in the stables barked, first in anger and then with unmistakable
joy. David's favourite, a big collie, sprang up from his place on
the rug before the fire and looked uneasily toward the door opening
onto the hall. Then came a rapping at the front door. The collie
growled softly as he moved toward the door. He sniffed the air in
the hall and suddenly began to whine joyously, wagging his tail as
he bounded back and forth between his master and the door.
David Windom knew then that his daughter had come home.
He sprang to his feet and took two long strides toward the door.
Abruptly, as if suddenly turned to stone, he stopped. For a long
time he stood immovable in the middle of the room. The rapping was
repeated, louder, heavier than before. He turned slowly, retraced
his steps to the fireplace and took from its rack in the corner a
great iron poker. His face was ashen grey, his eyes were wide and
staring and terrible. Then he strode toward the door, absolutely
unconscious of the glad, prancing dog at his side.
In the poor shelter of the little porch stood Alix, bent and
shivering, and, behind her, Edward Crown, at whose feet rested two
huge "telescope satchels." The light from within fell dimly upon
the white, upturned face of the girl. She held out her hands to
the man who towered above her on the doorstep.
"Daddy! Daddy!" she cried brokenly. "Oh, my daddy! Let me come
in--let me,--I--I am freezing."
But David Windom was peering over her head at the indistinct face
of the man beyond. He wanted to be sure. Lifting his powerful arm,
he struck.
Edward Crown, stiff and numb with cold and weak from an illness of
some duration, did not raise an arm to ward off the blow, nor was
he even prepared to dodge. The iron rod crashed down upon his head.
His legs crumpled up; he dropped in a heap at the top of the steps
and rolled heavily to the bottom, sprawling out on the snow-covered
brick walk.
The long night wore on. Windom had carried his daughter into the
sitting-room, where he placed her on a lounge drawn up before the
fire. She had fainted. After an hour he left her and went out into
the night. The body of Edward Crown was lying where it had fallen.
It was covered by a thin blanket of snow. For a long time he stood
gazing down upon the lifeless shape. The snow cut his face, the
wind threshed about his coatless figure, but he heeded them not. He
was muttering to himself. At last he turned to re-enter the house.
His daughter was standing in the open doorway.
"Is--is that Edward down there?" she asked, in weak, lifeless tones.
She seemed dull, witless, utterly without realization.
"Go back in the house," he whispered, as he drew back from her in
a sort of horror,--horror that had not struck him in the presence
of the dead.
"Is that Edward?" she insisted, her voice rising to a queer,
monotonous wail.
"I told you to stay in the house," he said. "I told you I would look
after him, didn't I? Go back, Alix,--that's a good girl. Your--your
daddy will--Oh, my God! Don't look at me like that!"
"Is he dead?" she whispered, still standing very straight in
the middle of the doorway. She was not looking at the inert thing
on the walk below, but into her father's eyes. He did not, could
not answer. He seemed frozen stiff. She went on in the same dull,
whispered monotone. "I begged him to let me come alone. I begged
him to let me see you first. But he would come. He brought me all
the way from the West and he--he was not afraid of you. You have
done what you said you would do. You did not give him a chance.
And always,--always I have loved you so. You will never know how I
longed to come back and have you kiss me, and pet me, and call me
those silly names you used--"
"What's done, is done," he broke in heavily. "He is dead. It had to
be. I was insane,--mad with all these months of hatred. It is done.
Come,--there is nothing you can do. Come back into the house. I
will carry him in--and wake somebody. Tomorrow they will come and
take me away. They will hang me. I am ready. Let them come. You
must not stand there in the cold, my child."
She toppled forward into his arms, and he lifted her as if she were
a babe and carried her into the house. The collie was whining in
the corner. Windom sat down in the big armchair before the fire,
still holding the girl in his arms. She was moaning weakly. Suddenly
a great, overwhelming fear seized him,--the fear of being hanged!
A long time afterward,--it was after two,--he arose from his knees
beside the lounge and prepared to go out into the night once more.
Alix had promised not to send her father to the gallows. She was
almost in a stupor after the complete physical and mental collapse,
but she knew what she was doing, she realized what she was promising
in return for the blow that had robbed her of the man she loved.
No one will ever know just what took place in that darkened
sitting-room, for the story as afterwards related was significantly
lacking in details. The light had been extinguished and the doors
silently closed by the slayer. The stiffening body of Edward Crown
out in the snow was not more silent than the interior of the old
farmhouse, apart from the room in which David Windom pleaded with
his stricken daughter.
And all the while he was begging her to save him from the consequences
of his crime, his brain was searching for the means to dispose
of the body of Edward Crown and to provide an explanation for the
return of Alix without her husband.
Circumstances favoured him in a surprising manner. Young Crown and
his wife had travelled down from Chicago in a day coach, and they
had left the train at a small way station some five miles west of
the Windom farm. Crown was penniless. He did not possess the means
to engage a vehicle to transport them from the city to the farm,
nor the money to secure lodging for the night in the cheapest hotel.
Alix's pride stood in the way of an appeal to her husband's father
or to any one of his friends for assistance. It was she who insisted
that they leave the train at Hawkins station and walk to Windom's
house. They had encountered no one who knew them, either on the
train or at the station; while on their cold, tortuous journey
along the dark highway they did not meet a solitary human being.
No one, therefore, was aware of their return.
Edward Crown's presence in the neighbourhood was unknown. If David
Windom's plan succeeded, the fact that Crown had returned with his
wife never would be known. To all inquirers both he and his daughter
were to return the flat but evasive answer: "It is something I cannot
discuss at present," leaving the world to arrive at the obvious
conclusion that Alix's husband had abandoned her. And presently
people, from sheer delicacy, would cease to inquire. No one would
know that Crown had been ill up in the mountains for weeks, had
lost his position, and had spent his last penny in getting his wife
back to the house in which she was born,--and where her own child
was soon to be born.
Windom went about the task of secreting his son-in-law's body in a most
systematic, careful manner. He first carried the two "telescopes"
into the house and hid them in a closet. Then he put on an old
overcoat and cap, his riding boots and gloves. Stealing out to the
rear of the house, he found a lantern and secured it to his person
by means of a strap. A few minutes later he was ready to start
off on his ghastly mission. Alix nodded her head dumbly when he
commanded her to remain in the sitting-room and to make no sound
that might arouse Maria Bliss. He promised to return in less than
an hour.
"Your father's life depends on your silence, my child, from this
moment on," he whispered in her ear.
She started up. "And how about my husband's life?" she moaned.
"What of him? Why do you put yourself--"
"Sh! Your husband is dead. You cannot bring him to life. It is your
duty,--do your hear?--your duty to spare the living. Remember what
I said to you awhile ago. Never forget it, my child."
"Yes," she muttered. "'Blood is thicker than water.' I remember."
III
He went out into the night, closing the door softly behind him.
The collie was at his heels. He was afraid to go alone. Grimly,
resolutely he lifted the body of Edward Crown from the ground and
slung it across his shoulder, the head and arms hanging down his
back. Desperation added strength to his powerful frame. As if his
burden were a sack of meal, he strode swiftly down the walk, through
the gate and across the gravel road. The night was as black as
ink, yet he went unerringly to the pasture gate a few rods down
the road. Unlatching it, he passed through and struck out across
the open, wind-swept meadow. The dog slunk along close behind him,
growling softly. Snow was still falling, but the gale from the
north was sweeping it into drifts, obliterating his tracks almost
as soon as they were made.
Straight ahead lay the towering, invisible rock, a quarter of a
mile away. He descended the ridge slope, swung tirelessly across
the swales and mounds in the little valley, and then bent his back
to the climb up the steep incline to Quill's Window. Picking his
way through a fringe of trees, he came to the tortuous path that
led to the crest of the great rock. Panting, dogged, straining every
ounce of his prodigious strength, he struggled upward, afraid to
stop for rest, afraid to lower his burden. The sides and the flat
summit of the rock were full of treacherous fissures, but he knew
them well. He had climbed the sides of Quill's Window scores of
times as a boy, to sit at the top and gaze off over the small world
below, there to dream of the great world outside, and of love,
adventure, travel. Many a night, after the death of his beloved
Alix, he had gone up there to mourn alone, to be nearer to the
heaven which she had entered, to be closer to her. He knew well of
the narrow fissure at the top,--six feet deep and the length of a
grave! Filled only with the leaves of long dead years!
He lowered his burden to the bare surface of the rock. The wind
had swept it clean. Under the protecting screen of his overcoat
he struck a match and lighted the lantern. Then for the first time
he studied closely the grey, still face of the youth he had slain.
The skull was crushed. There was frozen blood down the back of the
head and neck--He started up in sudden consternation. There would
be blood-stains where the body had lain so long,--tell-tale,
convicting stains! He must be swift with the work in hand. Those
stains must be wiped out before the break of day.
Lowering himself into the opening, he began digging at one end with
his hands, scooping back quantities of wet leaves. There was snow
down there in the pit,--a foot or more of it. After a few minutes
of vigorous clawing, a hole in the side of the fissure was revealed,--an
aperture large enough for a man to crawl into. He knew where it
led to: down into Quill's cave twenty feet below.
Some one,--perhaps an Indian long before the time of Quill, or it
may have been Quill himself,--had chiselled hand and toe niches in
the sides of this well and had used the strange shaft as means of
getting into and out of the cave. Windom's father had closed this
shaft when David was a small boy, after the venturesome youngster
had gone down into the cave and, unable to climb out again, had
been the cause of an all-day search by his distracted parent and
every neighbour for miles around. The elder Windom had blocked the
bottom of the hole with a huge boulder, shorn from the side of the
cave by some remote wrench of nature. Then he had half filled the
cavity from the top by casting in all of the loose stones to be
found on the crest of the rock, together with a quantity of earth.
The work had never been completed. There still remained a hole some
ten feet deep.
David Windom clambered out, leaving his lantern below. Letting the
dead man's body slide into the crevice, he followed, bent on at
least partially finishing the job. When he climbed out a second
time, Edward Crown was at the bottom of the hole and the wet, foul
leaves again hid the opening. Tomorrow night, and the night after,
he would come again to close the hole entirely with earth and
stones, hiding forever the grewsome thing in Quill's "chimney," as
the flue-like passage was called.
Extinguishing the lantern, he started down the hill at a reckless,
break-neck speed. He had the uncanny feeling that he was being
followed, that Edward Crown was dogging his footsteps. Halfway
down, he stumbled and fell sprawling. As he started to rise, a
sound smote his ears--the sound of footsteps. For many seconds he
held his breath, terror clutching his throat. He WAS being followed!
Some one was shuffling down the rock behind him. The collie! He
had forgotten the dog. But even as he drew in the deep breath of
relief, he felt his blood suddenly freeze in his veins. It was not
the dog. Something approached that moaned and whimpered and was
not mortal. It passed by him as he crouched to the earth,--a shadow
blacker than the night itself. Suddenly the truth burst upon him.
"My God! Alix!"
Half an hour later he staggered into his house, bearing the form
of his daughter,--tenderly, carefully, not as he had borne the
despised dead.
She had followed him to the top of Quill's Window, she had witnessed
the ghastly interment, and she had whispered a prayer for the boy
who was gone.
The next day her baby was born and that night she died. Coming out
of a stupor just before death claimed her, she said to David Windom:
"I am going to Edward. I do not forgive you, father. You must not ask
that of me. You say it is my duty to save you from the gallows,--a
child's duty to her parent. I have promised. I shall keep my
promise. It is not in my heart to send you to the gallows. You
are my father. You have always loved me. This is my baby,--mine
and Edward's. She may live,--God knows I wish I might have died
yesterday and spared her the accursed breath of life,--she may grow
up to be a woman, just as I grew up. I do not ask much of you in
return for what I have done for you, father. You have killed my
Edward. I loved him with all my soul. I do not care to live. But
my child must go on living, I suppose. My child and his. She is his
daughter. I cannot expect you to love her, but I do expect you to
take care of her. You say that blood is thicker than water. You
are right. I cannot find it in my heart to betray you. You may tell
the world whatever story you like about Edward. He is dead, and I
shall soon be dead. You can hurt neither of us, no matter what you
do. I ask two things of you. One is that you will be good to my
baby as long as you may live, and the other is that you will bury
me up there where you put Edward last night. I must lie near him
always. Say to people that I have asked you to bury me in that pit
at the top of Quill's Window,--that it was my whim, if you like.
Close it up after you have placed me there and cover it with great
rocks, so that Edward and I may never be disturbed. I want no
headstone, no epitaph. Just the stones as they were hewn by God."
David Windom promised. He was alone in the room with her when she
died.
IV
Twenty years passed. Windom came at last to the end of his days.
He had fulfilled his promises to Alix. He had taken good care of
her daughter, he had given her everything in his power to give,
and he had worshipped her because she was like both of the Alixes
he had loved. She was Alix Crown,--Alix the Third, he called her.
On the day of his death, Windom confessed the crime of that far
off night in March. In the presence of his lawyer, his doctor,
his granddaughter and the prosecuting attorney of the county, he
revealed the secret he had kept for a score of years. The mystery
of Edward Crown's disappearance was cleared up, and for the first
time in her young life Alix was shorn of the romantic notion that
one day her missing father would appear in the flesh, out of the
silences, to claim her as his own. From earliest childhood, her
imagination had dealt with all manner of dramatic situations; she
had existed in the glamour of uncertainty; she had looked upon
herself as a character worthy of a place in some gripping tale of
romance. The mound of rocks on the crest of Quill's Window, surrounded
by a tall iron paling fence with its padlocked gate, covered only
the body of the mother she had never seen. She did not know until
this enlightening hour that her father was also there and had been
throughout all the years in which fancy played so important a part.
Like all the rest of the world, she was given to understand that
her father had cruelly abandoned her mother. In her soul she had
always cherished the hope that this heartless monster might one
day stand before her, pleading and penitent, only to be turned away
with the scorn he so richly deserved. She even pictured him as rich
and powerful, possessed of everything except the one great boon
which she alone could give him,--a daughter's love. And she would
point to the top of Quill's Window and tell him that he must first
look there for forgiveness,--under the rocks where his broken-hearted
victim slept.
The truth stunned her. She was a long time in realizing that her
grandfather, whom she both loved and feared,--this grim, adoring
old giant,--not only had murdered her father but undoubtedly had
killed her mother as well. The story that David Windom had written
out and signed at the certain approach of death, read aloud in
his presence by the shocked and incredulous lawyer, and afterwards
printed word for word in the newspapers at the old man's command,
changed the whole course of life for her. In fact, her nature
underwent a sharp but subtle change. There was nothing left to her
of the old life, no thought, no purpose, no fancy; all had been
swept up in a heap and destroyed in the short space of half an
hour. Everything in her life had to be reconstructed, made-over to
suit the new order. She could no longer harbour vengeful thoughts
concerning her father, she could no longer charge him with the
wanton destruction of her mother's happiness.
The grandfather she had loved all her life assumed another shape
entirely; he was no longer the same, and never again could be the
same. She did not hate him. That was impossible. She had never seen
her parents, so she had not known the love of either. They did not
belong in her life except through the sheerest imagination. Her
grandfather was the only real thing she had had in life, and she
had adored him. He had killed two people who were as nothing to her,
but he had taken the place of both. How could she bring herself to
hate this man who had destroyed what were no more than names to
her? Father,--Mother! Two words,--that was all. And for twenty
long years he had been paying,--Oh, how he must have paid!
She recalled his reason for taking her to England when she was less
than eight years old and leaving her there until she was twelve.
She remembered that he had said he wanted her to be like her
grandmother, to grow up among her people, to absorb from them all
that had made the first Alix so strong and fine and true. And then
he had come to take her from them, back to the land of her birth,
because, he said, he wanted her to be like her mother, the second
Alix,--an American woman. She recalled his bitter antipathy to
co-educational institutions and his unyielding resolve that she should
complete her schooling in a Sacred Heart Convent. She remembered
the commotion this decision created among his neighbours. In her
presence they had assailed him with the charge that he was turning
the girl over, body and soul, to the Catholic Church, and he had
uttered in reply the never to be forgotten words:
"If I never do anything worse than that for her, I'll be damned
well satisfied with my chance of getting into heaven as soon as
the rest of you."
When David's will was read, it was found that except for a few
small bequests, his entire estate, real and personal, was left to
his granddaughter, Alix Crown, to have and to hold in perpetuity
without condition or restriction of any sort or character.
The first thing she did was to have a strong picket fence constructed
around the base of the hill leading up to Quill's Window, shutting
off all accessible avenues of approach to the summit. Following
close upon the publication of David Windom's confession, large
numbers of people were urged by morbid curiosity to visit the
strange burial-place of Edward and Alix Crown. The top of Quill's
Window became the most interesting spot in the county. Alix the
Third was likewise an object of vast interest, and the old, deserted
farmhouse on the ridge came in for its share of curiosity.
Almost immediately after the double tragedy and the birth of little
Alix, David Windom moved out of the house and took up his residence
in the riverside village of Windomville, a mile to the south.
The old house was closed, the window shutters nailed up, the doors
barred, and all signs of occupancy removed. It was said that he never
put foot inside the yard after his hasty, inexplicable departure.
The place went to rack and ruin. In course of time he built a new
and modern house nearer the village, and this was now one of the
show places of the district.
The influence of Alix the First was expressed in the modelling
of house and grounds, the result being a picturesque place with a
distinctly English atmosphere, set well back from the highway in
the heart of a grove of oaks,--a substantial house of brick with
a steep red tile roof, white window casements, and a wide brick
terrace guarded by a low ivy-draped wall. English ivy swathed the
two corners of the house facing the road, mounting high upon the
tall red chimneys at the ends. There were flower-beds below the
terrace, and off to the right there was an old-fashioned garden.
The stables were at the foot of the hill some distance to the rear
of the house.
The village of Windomville lay below, hugging the river, a relic of
the days when steamboats plied up and down the stream and railways
were remote, a sleepy, insignificant, intensely rural hamlet of
less than six hundred inhabitants. Its one claim to distinction was
the venerable but still active ferry that laboured back and forth
across the river. Of secondary importance was the ancient dock,
once upon a time the stopping place of steamboats, but now a rotten,
rickety obstruction upon which the downstream drift lodged in an
unsightly mass.
In the solid red-brick house among the oaks Alix the Third had spent
her childhood days. She was taken to England when she was eight
by her haunted grandfather, not only to receive the bringing-up of
an English child, but because David Windom's courage was breaking
down. As she grew older, the resemblance to Edward Crown became
more and more startling. She had his dark, smiling eyes; his wavy
brown hair; her very manner of speech was like his. To David Windom,
she was the re-incarnation of the youth he had slain. Out of her
eyes seemed to look the soul of Edward Crown. He could not stand it.
She became an obsession, a curious source of fascination. He could
not bear her out of his sight, and yet when she was with him, smiling
up into his eyes,--he was deathly afraid of her. There were times
when he was almost overcome by the impulse to drop to his knees
and plead for forgiveness as he looked into the clear, friendly,
questioning eyes of Edward Crown.
And her voice, her speech,--therein lay the true cause of his taking
her to England. When she came home to him, after four years, there
was no trace of Edward Crown in her voice or manner of speaking.
She was almost as English as Alix the First. But her eyes had not
changed; he was still a haunted man.
In the little graveyard on the outskirts of the village more than
a score of Windoms lie. With them lies all that was mortal of fair
Alix the First, and beside her is David Windom, the murderer.