THE LITTLE COFFIN
In the morning I was lying on the floor where I had fainted, between
the bureau and the bed.
Was it going to turn out that I could not live in the House of the Five
Pines after all, that I should never be at peace with it? Would there
be another manifestation the next night, and another the night after,
until my mind was gone? I felt that it was going now.
At midnight I could not help but think that what I heard was caused by
ghosts; by day I refused to accept anything supernatural and forced
myself to a material explanation.
Did I, or did I not, lock the cat inside the haunted room?
There was only one way to find out. I unwired the door and climbed up
again, and found in the sunlight that there was nothing more alive in
the attic than the rocking-horse. Opening the eaves closet, a shaft of
light disclosed a hole in one end large enough to admit a cat, granting
that she could climb to the roof by means of one of the pine-trees. But
cats do not prowl around in the rain.
Why had I been so certain that the New Captain had not preceded me
through the eaves closet the day before? While I was coming up the
stairs he could have pushed the little door wide enough open to crawl
out under the bed and put the bed back again. He might do it another
time, or half a dozen times a day, until I put a nail into it, playing
hide-and-seek up one stairway and down the other. He could have crept
up the secret stairs and been hiding in the attic at the very time that
I wired up the door at the foot.
This time I tried to make the fastening more secure, but found that
the flimsy partition had warped with the wet weather; and I ended by
locking the outside door of the coat-closet with a key that I managed
to fit to it after trying each one in the house. The two doors of the
eaves closet upstairs I nailed securely from my side.
“Now get out if you can,” I said aloud. I felt like some one who steps
up on the stage and ties the hands of the magician. At the same time I
realized perfectly that if whatever was not there in the attic when I
fastened it up could get in later, it could also get out.
I went back to the theory that I held yesterday.
One thing troubled me. Why, if the New Captain was living, had he
permitted his will to be found? He could have hidden it, or have had
Mattie dispose of it, so as to prevent its working against himself.
By the terms that he had drawn up the house was to be sold; nothing
could be more inconvenient to one who was trying to hide in it. Unless
he deliberately planned to have it sold for the malicious purpose of
driving out Mattie! He had bequeathed her nothing. If the house passed
into other hands, she would inevitably be forced out; while he, as long
as he lived furtively between two walls, was safe. Or perhaps he meant
to make himself manifest after she had gone. Perhaps that was what he
was trying to convey.
Why had he come to hate her? Yesterday I was sure that it was she who
had tired of him, wearied of a liaison with a daft person, glad to go;
to-day I was convinced that it was he who had grown restless under the
oppression of her management. In doubt that death would release him
from her spell, fearing to survive another cataleptic burial, he had
cunningly drawn up this document which would rid him of her.
To test this hypothesis would be to ascertain beyond a doubt whether
or not the New Captain was actually buried. There was a vault in the
cemetery in the Hawes name, but unless I investigated the interior I
would never feel sure that the old rogue was in it. I determined to
make the judge show me the New Captain’s coffin.
On my way through the town I sent a telegram to Jasper, paralleling my
letter and contradicting the substance of it:
Don’t like house. May give it up.
That would prepare him, should I decide to leave.
The judge was at home, but “busy.” Would I wait? I would, I assured
Isabella.
The age of leisure has not vanished from the earth; it has taken the
“accommodation” train, gone down the cape, and stopped off at Star
Harbor. While my host finished washing his Ford, or whatever he was
loitering over, I had full time to recognize the oddity of my behavior.
Judge Bell himself was not so surprised to receive me as I was to be
there. And yet a canny sense of the value of silence kept me from
straightway breaking down and confessing the details of the sleepless
nights which had led up to my demand. I felt, self-consciously, that,
having bought the House of the Five Pines in spite of warnings, it
had become so much _my_ house and _my_ mystery that I had no right to
complain. If I confided in the judge, he would not try to help me.
He would take my ghosts to his bosom as just so much corroborative
evidence of his own pet psychic formulas. The time to explain was after
I had solved my problems.
So when my host finally appeared I only said that I wanted to be sure
the New Captain was in his coffin, and the judge replied that he could
not blame me much for that.
“Are you sorry you bought the place?” he asked, switching the late
asters with his cane as we crossed the downs.
“I’m sorry that we had to turn Mattie out.”
The message in the book I did not mention.
“Some one would have bought it,” the judge declared, speaking
officially, and then he added, as his own thought, “She was done with
life, anyway, long ago.”
The cemetery lay on one side of a low hill, behind the roof-tops of the
town. The gravestones were small, and sheep nibbled the grass between
them, so that as we approached it looked like nothing more than a
pasture sprinkled with boulders.
A late, traveling circus had pitched its tents at the foot of
the slope, and we were silent as we threaded our way through the
rough-looking professionals who were standing around in the sun,
trying to dry out after last night’s storm. Men were shaving, their
pocket-mirrors hung upon a tree; women were combing their hair or
sitting smoking, half-dressed, in the open. A charred fire showed where
their breakfast had been cooked, and the open flap of a tent exposed
their sleeping-quarters, with some of the ill-favored crew still under
the blankets.
The elephant, as large as a monument, had been led down to the brook.
“We’ll have to hurry or we won’t get back in time for the parade,” the
judge said. “I hear they are going to have a parade.”
He was as pleased as a child, and stopped and patted the elephant.
I could hear the caravan’s laughter behind us when we reached the old
Hawes tomb. From the edge of the graveyard the circus band was tuning
up. Grief was taking a holiday.
The judge unlocked the gate of the iron fence around the vault, and
then he unlocked the grating and we went down two steps into the
damp interior. The sunlight from the open door behind us flooded the
cellar-like aperture, making its contents crudely visible. The stone
walls gave out no hint of horror. Only an aroma of melancholy filled
the resting-place of this strange family who had once been a dynamic
force in their corner of the world and were now become a row of rusty
boxes.
I saw the coffin marked with the brass plate of old Captain Jeremiah
Hawes, and the coffin of “Mis’ Hawes,” his wife, and, on the lowest
tier, that of the New Captain.
“Where is Mattie?” I asked.
The judge waved his hand ambiguously toward the bay. I took it to
mean that she had not been honored with the sanctuary of the family
vault. In the end, she was not a Hawes. Without saying anything more,
it seemed as if we understood each other. Mattie had been buried in
unhallowed ground.
Not that the New Captain was ever anything more than an infidel. I was
indignant when I realized how much better he had fared than she. Some
one, probably the judge, had white-washed his soul in spite of his
preferences and given him a Christian burial. With Mattie things were
different, in death even as in life. I did not dare to inquire any
further for fear I would learn that they had taken her poor drowned
body and thrown it under a heap of stones at a crossroads. Customs of
the Old World and superstitions of the New lingered in this neck of
New England where, not too many years ago, forlorn old women had been
burned as witches.
The New Captain’s great iron box was strong and solid; it did not look
as if anything could get out of it or ever had. The judge and I stood
staring at it.
“I saw him myself,” the judge said, “before the lid was fastened down,
and he had been lying in that room a week then, like he asked to in
his will. He was dead all right; you didn’t need to look at him.”
“Was there a funeral service?”
“You bet there was. The Old Captain’s parson saw to that--Brother
Jimps--gone now, too. There was some talk against it. The new minister
he said he wouldn’t ’a’ done it, but I knew enough not to ask him.”
The judge chuckled over his grim recollections.
“Yes, I saw the thing was all done proper at the time; but I guess it
wouldn’t be going outside of my rights any if I was to open the coffin
now and set your mind at rest.”
“Please _don’t_!”
“I brought a chisel--”
“Stop! No wonder she was queer.”
“Who?”
“Mattie.”
“Oh, yes, she was queer all right. But then, she always was. You don’t
want me to open it?”
It struck me that there was a great deal of the inquisitive little boy
left in the old judge, but I did not have the courage to gratify him.
“Let’s go,” I answered. “I’ve seen everything I need.”
It was at this precise moment that I caught sight of a small coffin. It
did not lie in state on the stone shelves on each side of the vault,
but was pushed back into a dark corner.
“What’s that?” I asked sharply.
The old judge did not answer.
“Did the Old Captain have another child? Did the New Captain have a
brother--or a sister?”
The judge stood in the open doorway, his face turned toward the downs.
I could hardly hear his words when at length he answered.
“That is his son.”
Not understanding, I looked at him and then at the little coffin; and
then at him again.
“Whose?”
“The New Captain’s. He never had any brothers nor any sisters.”
“But,” I protested, “I did not know he had a child.”
“Nobody else knows it.”
He drew me outside and locked up the grating with his large, hand-made,
iron key.
We walked away in silence. But it was more than I could stand.
“Did he live in the house?” I asked, at last.
“I don’t know anything about it,” answered the judge unhappily. “I
was hoping you wouldn’t ask.” There was upon his face an oldness and
discouragement with life that I had never seen there before. “I was
his best friend, and his only friend at the end, and he never told me
anything about it. The day we buried his mother, old Mis’ Hawes, I saw
that little coffin in the vault, just like you did, only there weren’t
so much dust on it then. I was staring down at it, after the other
pallbearers had gone. The New Captain seen me.
“‘What are you looking at? Come on!’ said he. And I said, ‘Who is
that?’ and he said, ‘That’s my son; now you know who it is.’
“That’s all he ever said and all I ever asked him, and I never
mentioned it to any one since then.”
A great comprehension suddenly came to me, and I was dazed with what
was whirling through my mind. I would have acknowledged the finding of
the loft to him, except, from the way the judge had dealt with the
matter all these years, I realized that he preferred to be left in
ignorance. What he had never inquired into he did not want to know. I
did not attempt to intimate to him how much the discovery of the little
coffin meant to me. It was one secret more added to the burden of the
House of the Five Pines, but one mystery less.
After a while I asked, “How long ago was that, judge?”
And he answered, “Mis’ Hawes died in the early eighties.”
A whiff of vault-like air seemed to pass over my heart. I was back once
more in the dark loft, with the rain beating down on the roof. That was
the period when boys wore fluted calico shirts.
* * * * *
The judge and I walked slowly down the slope between the headstones and
the crosses. On one grave was a carved stone lamb, and a stray live
one had lain down beside it. Milk-bottles blossoming with petunias and
lard-pails filled with earth in which bloomed yellow nasturtiums made
a brave display. Tall Lorraine crosses, with Portuguese names carved
in the weathered wood, were lettered in red and gold. The wreaths were
of beads, such as they use in the Western Islands, from which far lands
the fishers had brought the customs of their forefathers. Many little
mounds were enclosed with a low wooden fence, marked with a headboard
at one end, as if an open-bottomed crib had been set down on the grass.
Here and there an old musket stuck into the ground or a cheap flag,
faded since last Decoration Day, showed that from this village, too,
our country had taken toll in the fighting of its wars. Some of the
soldiers’ graves were dated 1777.
At one side of the hill, where the grass dwindled away into the
encroaching sand, was a sort of potters’ field, with unpainted pine
crosses of uniform size. Thinking that perhaps it was a military
section, I bent down and read the names.
_David Lester, Lost at sea, 1856_.... _Jo Lippa, aged 19. Lost on the
Veronica, off the Great Banks, 1890_.... _Capt. Miles Longsworth,
1790-1830. Drowned with six of his crew on an Iceland Voyage_....
_Samuel Polk, 1880-1915. Lost at Sea._
A group of them would bear the same dates, as if half a dozen had been
drowned in the same disaster.
“What does it mean?” I asked.
“They are all sailors,” replied the judge, gravely, “who were lost at
sea. When their bodies are not recovered, their families feel better if
they can give them a grave with the others on the hill. Sometimes we
have the funeral, too, if many have gone down together. Last year there
was eleven on one vessel.”
I remembered what Ruth had told me about wrecks and the “graveyard of
the cape.”
“But I would rather have my boy’s cross here,” I vowed, “than
there!”--with a gesture back toward the Hawes’s big vault. “Passers-by
at least may know what these sailors’ names are and that they once have
lived.”
The old judge bowed his head.
I put my hand in his rough hand and led him on. “I’m sorry,” I said.
He smiled at me a little in a far-off way, as if it were some one
else he were smiling at. I could not bear to watch his face. The
peculiarities that his isolated life had cultivated did not separate
us so much now. He seemed pathetically human and, like all of us,
needing sympathy, struggling forlornly against the obstacles that
his own limitations had created. It no longer seemed strange that
he was attempting divination and second sight, trying to wrest the
undiscoverable from the mute unknown. After all, he might be the only
one of us whose philosophy was right.
Materialism fell away from me in that sand-swept graveyard where only
the gray sheep moved among the symbols of the dead. Objectivity lost
its grip; the subjective was the only reality. I recalled what the
Hindus believed: that this world was an unnecessary torment, valuable
only for the acquiring of grace, which might as well be accomplished by
sitting upon a pillar; that the only truth was the life of the spirit,
which had begun with the spinning of the Wheel and would endure so long
as it revolved. The ascetics of all religions had preached nearly the
same thing, in terms understandable to their own generation and their
own race. The impulse of the soul, confined in its body’s prison, to
reach out to souls which had left theirs but which still hovered near,
was the only pastime worth an adult’s serious attention.
Out on the daisy-covered downs where the rain-washed sunlight blinded
one to the immediate vista, where the reluctant storm-clouds overhead
moved in white masses through the brilliant sky and banked themselves
upon the ocean’s rim, the strength of the judge’s spiritualism subdued
my worldliness. In a new meekness and dependence of will I did not want
to lose sight of him. And I had no impulse whatever to return to the
House of the Five Pines.
As we came near the circus grounds the line of skinny horses and the
tarnished animal-wagon, the weary clown and the dusty elephant, were
already winding their way to the village. The judge began to hurry.
“What are you going to do this afternoon?” I asked.
He looked as uncomfortable as his Isabella.
“Why, to tell the truth, I--I’m busy,” he stumbled.
“Judge, are you going to the circus?”
“No, I ain’t.”
“Well, whatever it is, I’m going to do it, too.”
“Do you mean that?” His eyes penetrated mine as a seer who would
probe the faith of a novitiate. “All right. Be around to my house at
two-thirty. I’ll take you to a séance.”