At the fork of the road there was the dead tree where buzzards were
roosting, and through its boughs I saw the last flare of the sunset. On
either side the November woods were flung in broken masses against the
sky. When I stopped they appeared to move closer and surround me with
vague, glimmering shapes. It seemed to me that I had been driving for
hours; yet the ancient negro who brought the message had told me to
follow the Old Stage Road till I came to Buzzard’s Tree at the fork.
“F’om dar on hit’s moughty nigh ter Marse Jur’dn’s place,” the old man
had assured me, adding tremulously, “en young Miss she sez you mus’ come
jes’ ez quick ez you kin.” I was young then (that was more than thirty
years ago), and I was just beginning the practice of medicine in one of
the more remote counties of Virginia.
My mare stopped, and leaning out, I gazed down each winding road, where
it branched off, under half bared boughs, into the autumnal haze of the
distance. In a little while the red would fade from the sky, and the
chill night would find me still hesitating between those dubious ways
which seemed to stretch into an immense solitude. While I waited
uncertainly there was a stir in the boughs overhead, and a buzzard’s
feather floated down and settled slowly on the robe over my knees. In
the effort to drive off depression, I laughed aloud and addressed my
mare in a jocular tone:
“We’ll choose the most God-forsaken of the two, and see where it leads
us.”
To my surprise the words brought an answer from the trees at my back.
“If you’re goin’ to Isham’s store, keep on the Old Stage Road,” piped a
voice from the underbrush.
Turning quickly, I saw the dwarfed figure of a very old man, with a
hunched back, who was dragging a load of pine knots out of the woods.
Though he was so stooped that his head reached scarcely higher than my
wheel, he appeared to possess unusual vigour for one of his age and
infirmities. He was dressed in a rough overcoat of some wood brown
shade, beneath which I could see his overalls of blue jeans. Under a
thatch of grizzled hair his shrewd little eyes twinkled cunningly, and
his bristly chin jutted so far forward that it barely escaped the
descending curve of his nose. I remember thinking that he could not be
far from a hundred; his skin was so wrinkled and weather-beaten that, at
a distance, I had mistaken him for a negro.
I bowed politely. “Thank you, but I am going to Jordan’s End,” I
replied.
He cackled softly. “Then you take the bad road. Thar’s Jur’dn’s
turnout.” He pointed to the sunken trail, deep in mud, on the right.
“An’ if you ain’t objectin’ to a little comp’ny, I’d be obleeged if
you’d give me a lift. I’m bound thar on my own o’ count, an’ it’s a long
ways to tote these here lightwood knots.”
While I drew back my robe and made room for him, I watched him heave the
load of resinous pine into the buggy, and then scramble with agility to
his place at my side.
“My name is Peterkin,” he remarked by way of introduction. “They call me
Father Peterkin along o’ the gran’child’en.” He was a garrulous soul, I
suspected, and would not be averse to imparting the information I
wanted.
“There’s not much travel this way,” I began, as we turned out of the
cleared space into the deep tunnel of the trees. Immediately the
twilight enveloped us, though now and then the dusky glow in the sky was
still visible. The air was sharp with the tang of autumn; with the
effluvium of rotting leaves, the drift of wood smoke, the ripe flavour
of crushed apples.
“Thar’s nary a stranger, thoughten he was a doctor, been to Jur’dn’s End
as fur back as I kin recollect. Ain’t you the new doctor?”
“Yes, I am the doctor.” I glanced down at the gnomelike shape in the
wood brown overcoat. “Is it much farther?”
“Naw, suh, we’re all but thar jest as soon as we come out of Whitten
woods.”
“If the road is so little travelled, how do you happen to be going
there?”
Without turning his head, the old man wagged his crescent shaped
profile. “Oh, I live on the place. My son Tony works a slice of the farm
on shares, and I manage to lend a hand at the harvest or corn shuckin’,
and, now-and-agen, with the cider. The old gentleman used to run the
place that away afore he went deranged, an’ now that the young one is
laid up, thar ain’t nobody to look arter the farm but Miss Judith. Them
old ladies don’t count. Thar’s three of ’em, but they’re all
addle-brained an’ look as if the buzzards had picked ’em. I reckon that
comes from bein’ shut up with crazy folks in that thar old tumbledown
house. The roof ain’t been patched fur so long that the shingles have
most rotted away, an’ thar’s times, Tony says, when you kin skearcely
hear yo’ years fur the rumpus the wrens an’ rats are makin’ overhead.”
“What is the trouble with them—the Jordans, I mean?”
“Jest run to seed, suh, I reckon.”
“Is there no man of the family left?”
For a minute Father Peterkin made no reply. Then he shifted the bundle
of pine knots, and responded warily. “Young Alan, he’s still livin’ on
the old place, but I hear he’s been took now, an’ is goin’ the way of
all the rest of ’em. ’Tis a hard trial for Miss Judith, po’ young thing,
an’ with a boy nine year old that’s the very spit an’ image of his pa.
Wall, wall, I kin recollect away back yonder when old Mr. Timothy Jur’dn
was the proudest man anywhar aroun’ in these parts; but arter the War
things sorter begun to go down hill with him, and he was obleeged to
draw in his horns.”
“Is he still living?”
The old man shook his head. “Mebbe he is, an’ mebbe he ain’t. Nobody
knows but the Jur’dn’s, an’ they ain’t tellin’ fur the axin’.”
“I suppose it was this Miss Judith who sent for me?”
“’T would most likely be she, suh. She was one of the Yardlys that lived
over yonder at Yardly’s Field; an’ when young Mr. Alan begun to take
notice of her, ’twas the first time sence way back that one of the
Jur’dn’s had gone courtin’ outside the family. That’s the reason the
blood went bad like it did, I reckon. Thar’s a sayin’ down aroun’ here
that Jur’dn an’ Jur’dn won’t mix.” The name was invariably called Jurdin
by all classes; but I had already discovered that names are rarely
pronounced as they are spelled in Virginia.
“Have they been married long?”
“Ten year or so, suh. I remember as well as if ’twas yestiddy the day
young Alan brought her home as a bride, an’ thar warn’t a soul besides
the three daft old ladies to welcome her. They drove over in my son
Tony’s old buggy, though ’twas spick an’ span then. I was goin’ to the
house on an arrant, an’ I was standin’ right down thar at the ice pond
when they come by. She hadn’t been much in these parts, an’ none of us
had ever seed her afore. When she looked up at young Alan her face was
pink all over and her eyes war shinin’ bright as the moon. Then the
front do’ opened an’ them old ladies, as black as crows, flocked out on
the po’ch. Thar never was anybody as peart-lookin’ as Miss Judith was
when she come here; but soon arterwards she begun to peak an’ pine,
though she never lost her sperits an’ went mopin’ roun’ like all the
other women folks at Jur’dn’s End. They married sudden, an’ folks do say
she didn’t know nothin’ about the family, an’ young Alan didn’t know
much mo’ than she did. The old ladies had kep’ the secret away from him,
sorter believin’ that what you don’t know cyarn’ hurt you. Anyways they
never let it leak out tell arter his chile was born. Thar ain’t never
been but that one, an’ old Aunt Jerusly declars he was born with a caul
over his face, so mebbe things will be all right fur him in the long
run.”
“But who are the old ladies? Are their husbands living?”
When Father Peterkin answered the question he had dropped his voice to a
hoarse murmur. “Deranged. All gone deranged,” he replied.
I shivered, for a chill depression seemed to emanate from the November
woods. As we drove on, I remembered grim tales of enchanted forests
filled with evil faces and whispering voices. The scents of wood earth
and rotting leaves invaded my brain like a magic spell. On either side
the forest was as still as death. Not a leaf quivered, not a bird moved,
not a small wild creature stirred in the underbrush. Only the glossy
leaves and the scarlet berries of the holly appeared alive amid the bare
interlacing branches of the trees. I began to long for an autumn
clearing and the red light of the afterglow.
“Are they living or dead?” I asked presently.
“I’ve hearn strange tattle,” answered the old man nervously, “but nobody
kin tell. Folks do say as young Alan’s pa is shut up in a padded place,
and that his gran’pa died thar arter thirty years. His uncles went crazy
too, an’ the daftness is beginnin’ to crop out in the women. Up tell now
it has been mostly the men. One time I remember old Mr. Peter Jur’dn
tryin’ to burn down the place in the dead of the night. Thar’s the end
of the wood, suh. If you’ll jest let me down here. I’ll be gittin’ along
home across the old-field, an’ thanky too.”
At last the woods ended abruptly on the edge of an abandoned field which
was thickly sown with scrub pine and broomsedge. The glow in the sky had
faded now to a thin yellow-green, and a melancholy twilight pervaded the
landscape. In this twilight I looked over the few sheep huddled together
on the ragged lawn, and saw the old brick house crumbling beneath its
rank growth of ivy. As I drew nearer I had the feeling that the
surrounding desolation brooded there like some sinister influence.
Forlorn as it appeared at this first approach, I surmised that Jordan’s
End must have possessed once charm as well as distinction. The
proportions of the Georgian front were impressive, and there was beauty
of design in the quaint doorway, and in the steps of rounded stone which
were brocaded now with a pattern of emerald moss. But the whole place
was badly in need of repair. Looking up, as I stopped, I saw that the
eaves were falling away, that crumbled shutters were sagging from
loosened hinges, that odd scraps of hemp sacking or oil cloth were
stuffed into windows where panes were missing. When I stepped on the
floor of the porch, I felt the rotting boards give way under my feet.
After thundering vainly on the door, I descended the steps, and followed
the beaten path that led round the west wing of the house. When I had
passed an old boxwood tree at the corner, I saw a woman and a boy of
nine years or so come out of a shed, which I took to be the smokehouse,
and begin to gather chips from the woodpile. The woman carried a basket
made of splits on her arm, and while she stooped to fill this, she
talked to the child in a soft musical voice. Then, at a sound that I
made, she put the basket aside, and rising to her feet, faced me in the
pallid light from the sky. Her head was thrown back, and over her dress
of some dark calico, a tattered gray shawl clung to her figure. That was
thirty years ago; I am not young any longer; I have been in many
countries since then, and looked on many women; but her face, with that
wan light on it, is the last one I shall forget in my life. Beauty! Why,
that woman will be beautiful when she is a skeleton, was the thought
that flashed into my mind.
She was very tall, and so thin that her flesh seemed faintly luminous,
as if an inward light pierced the transparent substance. It was the
beauty, not of earth, but of triumphant spirit. Perfection, I suppose,
is the rarest thing we achieve in this world of incessant compromise
with inferior forms; yet the woman who stood there in that ruined place
appeared to me to have stepped straight out of legend or allegory. The
contour of her face was Italian in its pure oval; her hair swept in
wings of dusk above her clear forehead; and, from the faintly shadowed
hollows beneath her brows, the eyes that looked at me were purple-black,
like dark pansies.
“I had given you up,” she began in a low voice, as if she were afraid of
being overheard. “You are the doctor?”
“Yes, I am the doctor. I took the wrong road and lost my way. Are you
Mrs. Jordan?”
She bowed her head. “Mrs. Alan Jordan. There are three Mrs. Jordans
besides myself. My husband’s grandmother and the wives of his two
uncles.”
“And it is your husband who is ill?”
“My husband, yes. I wrote a few days ago to Doctor Carstairs.” (Thirty
years ago Carstairs, of Baltimore, was the leading alienist in the
country.) “He is coming to-morrow morning; but last night my husband was
so restless that I sent for you to-day.” Her rich voice, vibrating with
suppressed feeling, made me think of stained glass windows and low organ
music.
“Before we go in,” I asked, “will you tell me as much as you can?”
Instead of replying to my request, she turned and laid her hand on the
boy’s shoulder. “Take the chips to Aunt Agatha, Benjamin,” she said,
“and tell her that the doctor has come.”
While the child picked up the basket and ran up the sunken steps to the
door, she watched him with breathless anxiety. Not until he had
disappeared into the hall did she lift her eyes to my face again. Then,
without answering my question, she murmured, with a sigh which was like
the voice of that autumn evening, “We were once happy here.” She was
trying, I realized, to steel her heart against the despair that
threatened it.
My gaze swept the obscure horizon, and returned to the mouldering
woodpile where we were standing. The yellow-green had faded from the
sky, and the only light came from the house where a few scattered lamps
were burning. Through the open door I could see the hall, as bare as if
the house were empty, and the spiral staircase which crawled to the
upper story. A fine old place once, but repulsive now in its abject
decay, like some young blood of former days who has grown senile.
“Have you managed to wring a living out of the land?” I asked, because I
could think of no words that were less compassionate.
“At first a poor one,” she answered slowly. “We worked hard, harder than
any negro in the fields, to keep things together, but we were happy.
Then three years ago this illness came, and after that everything went
against us. In the beginning it was simply brooding, a kind of
melancholy, and we tried to ward it off by pretending that it was not
real, that we imagined it. Only of late, when it became so much worse,
have we admitted the truth, have we faced the reality—”
This passionate murmur, which had almost the effect of a chant rising
out of the loneliness, was addressed, not to me, but to some abstract
and implacable power. While she uttered it her composure was like the
tranquillity of the dead. She did not lift her hand to hold her shawl,
which was slipping unnoticed from her shoulders, and her eyes, so like
dark flowers in their softness, did not leave my face.
“If you will tell me all, perhaps I may be able to help you,” I said.
“But you know our story,” she responded. “You must have heard it.”
“Then it is true? Heredity, intermarriage, insanity?”
She did not wince at the bluntness of my speech. “My husband’s
grandfather is in an asylum, still living after almost thirty years. His
father—my husband’s, I mean—died there a few years ago. Two of his
uncles are there. When it began I don’t know, or how far back it
reaches. We have never talked of it. We have tried always to forget it-
Even now I cannot put the thing into words— My husband’s mother died of
a broken heart, but the grandmother and the two others are still living.
You will see them when you go into the house. They are old women now,
and they feel nothing.”
“And there have been other cases?”
“I do not know. Are not four enough?”
“Do you know if it has assumed always the same form?” I was trying to be
as brief as I could.
She flinched, and I saw that her unnatural calm was shaken at last. “The
same, I believe. In the beginning there is melancholy, moping.
Grandmother calls it, and then—” She flung out her arms with a
despairing gesture, and I was reminded again of some tragic figure of
legend.
“I know, I know,” I was young, and in spite of my pride, my voice
trembled. “Has there been in any case partial recovery, recurring at
intervals?”
“In his grandfather’s case, yes. In the others none. With them it has
been hopeless from the beginning.”
“And Carstairs is coming?”
“In the morning. I should have waited, but last night—” Her voice broke,
and she drew the tattered shawl about her with a shiver. “Last night
something happened. Something happened,” she repeated, and could not go
on. Then, collecting her strength with an effort which made her tremble
like a blade of grass in the wind, she continued more quietly, “To-day
he has been better. For the first time he has slept, and I have been
able to leave him. Two of the hands from the fields are in the room.”
Her tone changed suddenly, and a note of energy passed into it. Some
obscure resolution brought a tinge of colour to her pale cheek. “I must
know,” she added, “if this is as hopeless as all the others.”
I took a step toward the house. “Carstairs’s opinion is worth as much as
that of any man living,” I answered.
“But will he tell me the truth?”
I shook my head. “He will tell you what he thinks. No man’s judgment is
infallible.”
Turning away from me, she moved with an energetic step to the house. As
I followed her into the hall the threshold creaked under my tread, and I
was visited by an apprehension, or, if you prefer, by a superstitious
dread of the floor above. Oh, I got over that kind of thing before I was
many years older; though in the end I gave up medicine, you know, and
turned to literature as a safer outlet for a suppressed imagination.
But the dread was there at that moment, and it was not lessened by the
glimpse I caught, at the foot of the spiral staircase, of a scantily
furnished room, where three lean black-robed figures, as impassive as
the Fates, were grouped in front of a wood fire. They were doing
something with their hands. Knitting, crocheting, or plaiting straw?
At the head of the stairs the woman stopped and looked back at me. The
light from the kerosene lamp on the wall fell over her, and I was struck
afresh not only by the alien splendour of her beauty, but even more by
the look of consecration, of impassioned fidelity that illumined her
face.
“He is very strong,” she said in a whisper. “Until this trouble came on
him he had never had a day’s illness in his life. We hoped that hard
work, not having time to brood, might save us; but it has only brought
the thing we feared sooner.”
There was a question in her eyes, and I responded in the same subdued
tone. “His health, you say, is good?” What else was there for me to ask
when I understood everything?
A shudder ran through her frame. “We used to think that a blessing, but
now—” She broke off and then added in a lifeless voice, “We keep two
field hands in the room day and night, lest one should forget to watch
the fire, or fall asleep.”
A sound came from a room at the end of the hall, and, without finishing
her sentence, she moved swiftly toward the closed door. The
apprehension, the dread, or whatever you choose to call it, was so
strong upon me, that I was seized by an impulse to turn and retreat down
the spiral staircase. Yes, I know why some men turn cowards in battle.
“I have come back, Alan,” she said in a voice that wrung my
heartstrings.
The room was dimly lighted; and for a minute after I entered, I could
see nothing clearly except the ruddy glow of the wood fire in front of
which two negroes were seated on low wooden stools. They had kindly
faces, these men; there was a primitive humanity in their features,
which might have been modelled out of the dark earth of the fields.
Looking round the next minute, I saw that a young man was sitting away
from the fire, huddled over in a cretonne-covered chair with a high back
and deep wings. At our entrance the negroes glanced up with surprise;
but the man in the winged chair neither lifted his head nor turned his
eyes in our direction. He sat there, lost within the impenetrable
wilderness of the insane, as remote from us and from the sound of our
voices as if he were the inhabitant of an invisible world. His head was
sunk forward; his eyes were staring fixedly at some image we could not
see; his fingers, moving restlessly, were plaiting and unplaiting the
fringe of a plaid shawl. Distraught as he was, he still possessed the
dignity of mere physical perfection. At his full height he must have
measured not under six feet three; his hair was the colour of ripe
wheat, and his eyes, in spite of their fixed gaze, were as blue as the
sky after rain. And this was only the beginning, I realized. With that
constitution, that physical frame, he might live to be ninety.
“Alan!” breathed his wife again in her pleading murmur.
If he heard her voice, he gave no sign of it. Only when she crossed the
room and bent over his chair, he put out his hand, with a gesture of
irritation, and pushed her away, as if she were a veil of smoke which
came between him and the object at which he was looking. Then his hand
fell back to its old place, and he resumed his mechanical plaiting of
the fringe.
The woman lifted her eyes to mine. “His father did that for twenty
years,” she said in a whisper that was scarcely more than a sigh of
anguish.
When I had made my brief examination, we left the room as we had come,
and descended the stairs together. The three old women were still
sitting in front of the wood fire. I do not think they had moved since
we went upstairs; but, as we reached the hall below, one of them, the
youngest, I imagine, rose from her chair, and came out to join us. She
was crocheting something soft and small, an infant’s sacque, I perceived
as she approached, of pink wool. The ball had rolled from her lap as she
stood up, and it trailed after her now, like a woollen rose, on the bare
floor. When the skein pulled at her, she turned back and stooped to pick
up the ball, which she rewound with caressing fingers. Good God, an
infant’s sacque in that house!
“Is it the same thing?” she asked.
“Hush!” responded the younger woman kindly. Turning to me she added, “We
cannot talk here,” and opening the door, passed out on the porch. Not
until we had reached the lawn, and walked in silence to where my buggy
stood beneath an old locust tree, did she speak again.
Then she said only, “You know now?”
“Yes, I know,” I replied, averting my eyes from her face while I gave my
directions as briefly as I could. “I will leave an opiate,” I said.
“To-morrow, if Carstairs should not come, send for me again. If he does
come,” I added, “I will talk to him and see you afterward.”
“Thank you,” she answered gently; and taking the bottle from my hand,
she turned away and walked quickly back to the house.
I watched her as long as I could; and then getting into my buggy, I
turned my mare’s head toward the woods, and drove by moonlight, past
Buzzard’s Tree and over the Old Stage Road, to my home. “I will see
Carstairs to-morrow,” was my last thought that night before I slept.
But, after all, I saw Carstairs only for a minute as he was taking the
train. Life at its beginning and its end had filled my morning; and when
at last I reached the little station, Carstairs had paid his visit, and
was waiting on the platform for the approaching express. At first he
showed a disposition to question me about the shooting, but as soon as I
was able to make my errand clear, his jovial face clouded.
“So you’ve been there?” he said. “They didn’t tell me. An interesting
case, if it were not for that poor woman. Incurable, I’m afraid, when
you consider the predisposing causes. The race is pretty well
deteriorated, I suppose. God! what isolation! I’ve advised her to send
him away. There are three others, they tell me, at Staunton.”
The train came; he jumped on it, and was whisked away while I gazed
after him. After all, I was none the wiser because of the great
reputation of Carstairs.
All that day I heard nothing more from Jordan’s End; and then, early
next morning, the same decrepit negro brought me a message.
“Young Miss, she tole me ter ax you ter come along wid me jes’ ez soon
ez you kin git ready.”
“I’ll start at once, Uncle, and I’ll take you with me.”
My mare and buggy stood at the door. All I needed to do was to put on my
overcoat, pick up my hat, and leave word, for a possible patient, that I
should return before noon. I knew the road now, and I told myself, as I
set out, that I would make as quick a trip as I could. For two nights I
had been haunted by the memory of that man in the armchair, plaiting and
unplaiting the fringe of the plaid shawl. And his father had done that,
the woman had told me, for twenty years!
It was a brown autumn morning, raw, windless, with an overcast sky and a
peculiar illusion of nearness about the distance. A high wind had blown
all night, but at dawn it had dropped suddenly, and now there was not so
much as a ripple in the broomsedge. Over the fields, when we came out of
the woods, the thin trails of blue smoke were as motionless as cobwebs.
The lawn surrounding the house looked smaller than it had appeared to me
in the twilight, as if the barren fields had drawn closer since my last
visit. Under the trees, where the few sheep were browsing, the piles of
leaves lay in windrifts along the sunken walk and against the wings of
the house.
When I knocked the door was opened immediately by one of the old women,
who held a streamer of black cloth or rusty crape in her hands.
“You may go straight upstairs,” she croaked; and, without waiting for an
explanation, I entered the hall quickly, and ran up the stairs.
The door of the room was closed, and I opened it noiselessly, and
stepped over the threshold. My first sensation, as I entered, was one of
cold. Then I saw that the windows were wide open, and that the room
seemed to be full of people, though, as I made out presently, there was
no one there except Alan Jordan’s wife, her little son, the two old
aunts, and an aged crone of a negress. On the bed there was something
under a yellowed sheet of fine linen (what the negroes call “a burial
sheet,” I suppose), which had been handed down from some more affluent
generation.
When I went over, after a minute, and turned down one corner of the
covering, I saw that my patient of the other evening was dead. Not a
line of pain marred his features, not a thread of gray dimmed the
wheaten gold of his hair. So he must have looked, I thought, when she
first loved him. He had gone from life, not old, enfeebled and
repulsive, but enveloped still in the romantic illusion of their
passion.
As I entered, the two old women, who had been fussing about the bed,
drew back to make way for me, but the witch of a negress did not pause
in the weird chant, an incantation of some sort, which she was mumbling.
From the rag carpet in front of the empty fireplace, the boy, with his
father’s hair and his mother’s eyes, gazed at me silently, broodingly,
as if I were trespassing; and by the open window, with her eyes on the
ashen November day, the young wife stood as motionless as a statue.
While I looked at her a redbird flew out of the boughs of a cedar, and
she followed it with her eyes.
“You sent for me?” I said to her.
She did not turn. She was beyond the reach of my voice, of any voice, I
imagine; but one of the palsied old women answered my question.
“He was like this when we found him this morning,” she said. “He had a
bad night, and Judith and the two hands were up with him until daybreak.
Then he seemed to fall asleep, and Judith sent the hands, turn about, to
get their breakfast.”
While she spoke my eyes were on the bottle I had left there. Two nights
ago it had been full, and now it stood empty, without a cork, on the
mantelpiece. They had not even thrown it away. It was typical of the
pervading inertia of the place that the bottle should still be standing
there awaiting my visit.
For an instant the shock held me speechless; when at last I found my
voice it was to ask mechanically.
“When did it happen?”
The old woman who had spoken took up the story. “Nobody knows. We have
not touched him. No one but Judith has gone near him.” Her words trailed
off into unintelligible muttering. If she had ever had her wits about
her, I dare-say fifty years at Jordan’s End had unsettled them
completely.
I turned to the woman at the window. Against the gray sky and the black
intersecting branches of the cedar, her head, with its austere
perfection, was surrounded by that visionary air of legend. So Antigone
might have looked on the day of her sacrifice, I reflected. I had never
seen a creature who appeared so withdrawn, so detached, from all human
associations. It was as if some spiritual isolation divided her from her
kind.
“I can do nothing,” I said.
For the first time she looked at me, and her eyes were unfathomable.
“No, you can do nothing,” she answered. “He is safely dead.”
The negress was still crooning on; the other old women were fussing
helplessly. It was impossible in their presence, I felt, to put in words
the thing I had to say.
“Will you come downstairs with me?” I asked. “Outside of this house?”
Turning quietly, she spoke to the boy. “Run out and play, dear. He would
have wished it.” Then, without a glance toward the bed, or the old women
gathered about it, she followed me over the threshold, down the stairs,
and out on the deserted lawn. The ashen day could not touch her, I saw
then. She was either so remote from it, or so completely a part of it,
that she was impervious to its sadness. Her white face did not become
more pallid as the light struck it; her tragic eyes did not grow deeper;
her frail figure under the thin shawl did not shiver in the raw air. She
felt nothing, I realized suddenly.
Wrapped in that silence as in a cloak, she walked across the windrifts
of leaves to where my mare was waiting. Her step was so slow, so
unhurried, that I remember thinking she moved like one who had all
eternity before her. Oh, one has strange impressions, you know, at such
moments!
In the middle of the lawn, where the trees had been stripped bare in the
night, and the leaves were piled in long mounds like double graves, she
stopped and looked in my face. The air was so still that the whole place
might have been in a trance or asleep. Not a branch moved, not a leaf
rustled on the ground, not a sparrow twittered in the ivy; and even the
few sheep stood motionless, as if they were under a spell. Farther away,
beyond the sea of broomsedge, where no wind stirred, I saw the flat
desolation of the landscape. Nothing moved on the earth, but high above,
under the leaden clouds, a buzzard was sailing.
I moistened my lips before I spoke. “God knows I want to help you!” At
the back of my brain a hideous question was drumming. How had it
happened? Could she have killed him? Had that delicate creatine nerved
her will to the unspeakable act? It was incredible. It was
inconceivable. And yet.....
“The worst is over,” she answered quietly, with that tearless agony
which is so much more terrible than any outburst of grief. “Whatever
happens, I can never go through the worst again. Once in the beginning
he wanted to die. His great fear was that he might live too long, until
it was too late to save himself. I made him wait then. I held him back
by a promise.”
So she had killed him, I thought. Then she went on steadily, after a
minute, and I doubted again.
“Thank God, it was easier for him than he feared it would be,” she
murmured.
No, it was not conceivable. He must have bribed one of the negroes. But
who had stood by and watched without intercepting? Who had been in the
room? Well, either way! “I will do all I can to help you,” I said.
Her gaze did not waver. “There is so little that any one can do now,”
she responded, as if she had not understood what I meant. Suddenly,
without the warning of a sob, a cry of despair went out of her, as if it
were torn from her breast. “He was my life,” she cried, “and I must go
on!”
So full of agony was the sound that it seemed to pass like a gust of
wind over the broomsedge. I waited until the emptiness had opened and
closed over it. Then I asked as quietly as I could: “What will you do
now?”
She collected herself with a shudder of pain. “As long as the old people
live, I am tied here. I must bear it out to the end. When they die, I
shall go away and find work. I am sending my boy to school. Doctor
Carstairs will look after him, and he will help me when the time comes.
While my boy needs me, there is no release.” While I listened to her, I
knew that the question on my lips would never be uttered. I should
always remain ignorant of the truth. The thing I feared most, standing
there alone with her, was that some accident might solve the mystery
before I could escape. My eyes left her face and wandered over the dead
leaves at our feet. No, I had nothing to ask her.
“Shall I come again?” That was all.
She shook her head. “Not unless I send for you. If I need you, I will
send for you,” she answered; but in my heart I knew that she would never
send for me.
I held out my hand, but she did not take it; and I felt that she meant
me to understand, by her refusal, that she was beyond all consolation
and all companionship. She was nearer to the bleak sky and the deserted
fields than she was to her kind.
As she turned away, the shawl slipped from her shoulders to the dead
leaves over which she was walking; but she did not stoop to recover it,
nor did I make a movement to follow her. Long after she had entered the
house I stood there, gazing down on the garment that she had dropped.
Then climbing into my buggy, I drove slowly across the field and into
the woods.