JEZEBEL
“But what made her do it?” asked Jasper.
We had gone into the house and prepared a supper, and as it was
the first meal either of us had eaten since early morning, we were
sitting a long time at the kitchen table. The oil-lamp shed a cosy
radiance over the blue china on the red checkered cloth, and a bowl of
golden-rod between four brass candlesticks added a touch of festivity
to our late repast. We had begun our home-making.
“She wanted to frighten us away,” I answered.
“Do you think she was here, all those weeks before we moved in, after
they thought she was drowned?”
“She never left the house, I fancy; she moved into the cellar. You see,
Jasper, she always thought the place belonged to her. All her life she
had known no other home, no other way of living, except here. She could
not allow herself to be evicted, because she had nowhere to go. The New
Captain left her nothing to live on, and she had no earning capacity.
You heard how those men talked. She would have become an unwelcome
public charge, and she had suffered too much from the townspeople to
tolerate having them support her. She preferred death.”
“Well, then, why didn’t she really drown herself, instead of just
pretending she did?”
“Ah, that is different,” I answered; “that leads us out of practical
speculation into the realms of psychology. She was not that kind of
person.”
I had thought so much about Mattie that it seemed to me she was
perfectly apparent in her motives and sane in her actions.
“To each one who takes his own life there must be five who go to the
brink of death and, looking over its fearful abyss, retreat again
and let their bark drift on the tide without them. It has never been
demonstrated that people who take their lives in their own hands do
better with it than God. The wreckage of one’s life is mostly caused
by self. Mattie was the sort of person who does not take any sinful
initiative, but to whom life is a whiphandle. The crimes of those
around her made her what she was. In other circumstances she would have
been what is known as ‘a good woman.’ The old mother who refused to
let them marry might have had enough determination to have committed
suicide if she had wanted to, but not Mattie. Or the New Captain might
have taken his own life, for he took Mattie’s life and spoiled it, and
her son’s--and willed her home away from her in his evil legacy after
he had no further use for it himself.”
Jasper motioned for me not to speak so loud.
“Do you still believe--about the boy--what you told me coming from the
train?”
“More than ever,” I answered sadly.
We did not want to question Mattie. We felt that the repose due her
spirit was as important as that which must resuscitate her weakened
body, if she was ever to be a normal human being again. And so for
months, all the time that we were getting ready for winter on the
cape, we learned nothing more about her story.
The walking up and down of the first three nights was self-evident, as
was the bending wall and the swinging mirror; the aura had been created
by her natural need for light and the fact that her only lantern
happened to be red. That I had only seen the aura on the night I read
the occult magazine was not her responsibility; she must have always
had the lantern with her when she went up to the secret room. It was
the boy who arrived with the message from the judge that tempted me
outside, where I happened to see the red light shining through the
skylight. The séance was more readily understandable when one day
Mattie happened to mention casually that she was afraid to go to the
spring for water because once, when she was masquerading, she had met a
colored man there late at night who asked her questions. The rogue had
not known who she was, but he had doubtless followed her and guessed
enough to piece out a plausible spirit for his control to interpret at
the séance.
It was not until one quiet evening the following winter, when we
three sat in front of the blazing fire in the captain’s chimney, as
was our custom, that Mattie brought up the subject of the fifth night.
We had been snow-bound for a week, and the white frost sparkled on
the crust of the drifts when I opened the door upon the starlight and
let in Mattie’s cat. The creature had been hunting fish too long on
the icy shore and was stiff with cold, despairing in its dumb way of
regaining our hospitality before it froze to death on the doorstep. It
bounded into the house like a bad omen, as it had done that day before
the hurricane, and dashed through the kitchen and into Mattie’s arms,
leaping upon her before she could straighten herself up in her chair
and shake off her fireside doze. She tumbled the cat back to the hearth
and looked at it reproachfully.
“That’s the way you done, Jezebel, that night you seen me through the
crack in the door,” she said. “You jumped at me as I was carrying
my lantern down them steep steps and knocked me over. I had hardly
time”--she turned to us with her wistful crinkled smile--“to get back
down through the trap-door. I thought sure you would catch me.”
“I didn’t try,” said I, and Jasper laid down his book and
leaned forward intently to listen. “I thought it part of the
manifestations--the way that the New Captain murdered his son.”
There was an acute silence, broken by the pine-logs crackling higher in
the fireplace.
Mattie put her hands across her eyes to shield them from the blaze.
“It was,” she whispered.
The fire died down again. We waited. But she said no more. After a
while she rose, as if weary of her own thoughts, and said she would go
up now to her room. At the doorway she turned back to us.
“Only I never intended to tell you,” she faltered. “I never meant it to
go so far, not so far as that. That was what I didn’t want you to know.”
So we always pretended that we did not know.
The part that Jezebel played was one of those coincidences of
life which make of tragedy a greater drama in the living than the
presentation of it can ever be.
* * * * *
If you are ever in Star Harbor the House of the Five Pines will be
pointed out to you as one of the show places.
There is a high, well trimmed box-hedge along the street, but if you
look through the gate you will see the wide, close-cut lawn, with
its old-fashioned rose-garden and the sun-dial on one side, and on
the other the children’s playground, with the slide and the seesaw
and the little fountain they love for the birds’ bath. The flagging
to the green-shuttered portal is just as it used to be, but both the
doors with their brass knockers stand wide open. Against the clean
white house hollyhocks paint their gay faces and lean upon the kitchen
lovingly. Ruffled dotted-muslin curtains at all the square-paned
windows show that people live within to whom no detail of housekeeping
is too much trouble. You cannot see the garage that has been built
beneath the captain’s wing in place of the “under” filled with rubbish,
but if you will walk along the back street, after you have finished
staring in from the front, you will notice the driveway that curves
past the new entrance cut in the rear, behind the hall, and you will
see the playhouse made out of a boat. The children will be there,
romping, taking turns riding their old hand-made rocking-horse; and
the loving arbiter of all their quarrels is that little gray-haired
woman in the soft black dress who sits knitting peacefully in the
shadow of the five pines.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.