questioned Katy particularly concerning this old man who was spoken of
quite as if his appearance were taken for granted in the heart of the
farm. Katy recalled one other day when she had seen him asleep as she
thought in a corner of the fence by the big chestnut tree when she and
the boy were nutting. They had moved away to the other side of the tree,
but while she was busy hunting for nuts Middy had strayed off a bit and
foregathered with the old man, who was not asleep at all, but stood with
his back to her pouring a handful of big fat chestnuts into the child's
little skirt, which he held up. She called to him and the old man had
stepped back, and the nuts were spilled. Middy had cried and made her
pick them up, and when that was done the stranger was gone quite out of
sight.
Chauncey, too, was questioned, and testified that the old man of the
fields was no myth. But he deprecated all this exaggerated alarm. The
stranger was some simple-minded old work-house candidate putting off the
evil day. In a few weeks he would have to make for shelter in one of the
neighboring towns. Chauncey could not see what legal hold they had upon
him even if they could catch him. He hardly came under the vagrancy law,
since he had neither begged, nor helped himself appreciably to the means
of subsistence.
“That is just the point,” Mrs. Bogardus insisted. “He has the
means--from somewhere--to lurk around here and make friends with that
child. There may be a gang of kidnappers behind him. He is the harmless
looking decoy. I insist that you keep a sharp lookout, Chauncey. There
shall be a hold upon him, law or no law, if we catch him on our ground.”
A cold rain set in. Paul and Moya wrote of delays in the house
preparations, and hoped the grandmother was not growing tired of her
charge. On the last of the rainy days, in a burst of dubious sunshine,
came a young girl on horseback to have tea with Mrs. Bogardus. She was
one of that lady's discoverers, so she claimed, Miss Sallie Remsen, very
pretty and full of fantastic little affectations founded on her intense
appreciation of the picturesque. She called Mrs. Bogardus “Madam,” and
likened her to various female personages in history more celebrated for
strength of purpose than for the Christian virtues. Mrs. Bogardus, in
her restful ignorance of such futilities, went no deeper into these
allusions than their intention, which she took to be complimentary. Miss
Sallie hugged herself with joy when the rain came down in torrents for
a clear-up shower. Her groom was sent home with a note to inform her
mother that Mrs. Bogardus wished to keep her overnight. All the mothers
were flattered when Mrs. Bogardus took notice of their daughters,--even
much grander dames than she herself could pretend to be.
They had a charming little dinner by themselves to the tune of the rain
outside, and were having their coffee by the drawing-room fire; and Miss
Sallie was thinking by what phrase one could do justice to the massive,
crass ugliness of that self-satisfied apartment, furnished in the
hideous sixties, when the word was sent in that Mrs. Dunlop wished to
speak with Mrs. Bogardus. Something of Cerissa's injured importance
survived the transmission of the message, causing Mrs. Bogardus to smile
to herself as she rose. Cerissa was waiting in the dining-room. She kept
her seat as Mrs. Bogardus entered. Her eyes did not rise higher than the
lady's dress, which she examined with a fierce intentness of comparison
while she opened her errand.
“I thought you'd like to know you've got a strange lodger down to the
old house. I don't seem to ever get moved!” she enlarged. “I'm always
runnin' down there after first one thing 'n' another we've forgot. This
morning 't was my stone batter-pot. Chauncey said he thought it was
getting cold enough for buckwheat cakes. I don't suppose you want to
have stray tramps in there in the old house, building fires in the
loom-room, where, if a spark got loose, it would blaze up them draughty
stairs, and the whole house would go in a minute.” Cerissa stopped to
gain breath.
“Making fires? Are you sure of that? Has any smoke been seen coming out
of that chimney?”
“Why, it's been raining so! And the trees have got so tall! But I could
show you the shucks an' shells he's left there. I know how we left it!”
“You had better speak--No; I will see Chauncey in the morning.” Mrs.
Bogardus never, if she could avoid it, gave an order through a third
person.
“Well, I thought I'd just step in. Chauncey said 't was no use
disturbing you to-night, but he's just that way--so easy about
everything! I thought you wouldn't want to be harboring tramps this wet
weather when most anybody would be tempted to build a fire. I'm more
concerned about what goes on down there now we're _out_ of the house! I
seem to have it on my mind the whole time. A house is just like a child:
the more you don't see it the more you worry about it.”
“I'm glad you have such a home feeling about the place,” said Mrs.
Bogardus, avoiding the onset of words. “Well, good-evening, Cerissa.
Thank you for your trouble. I will see about it in the morning.”
Mrs. Bogardus mentioned what she had just heard to Miss Sallie, who
remarked, with her keen sense of antithesis, what a contrast _that_
fireside must be to _this_.
“Which fireside?”
“Oh, your lodger upon the cold ground,--making his little bit of a
stolen blaze in that cavern of a chimney in the midst of the wet trees!
What a nice thing to have an unwatched place like that where a poor
bird of passage can creep in and make his nest, and not trouble any one.
Think what Jean Valjeans one might shelter”--
“Who?”
“What 'angels unawares.'”
“It will be unawares, my dear,--very much unawares,--when I shelter any
angels of that sort.”
“Oh, you wouldn't turn him out, such weather as this?”
“The house is not mine, in the first place,” Mrs. Bogardus explained
as to a child. “I can't entertain tramps or even angels on my son's
premises, when he's away.”
“Oh, he! He would build the fires himself, and make up their beds,”
laughed Miss Sallie. “If he were here, I believe he would start down
there now, and stock the place with everything you've got in the house
to eat.”
“I hope he'd leave us a little something for breakfast,” said Mrs.
Bogardus a trifle coldly. But she did not mention the cause of her
uneasiness about this particular visitor. She never defended herself.
Miss Sallie was delighted with her callousness to the sentimental rebuke
which had been rather rubbed in. It was so unmodern; one got so weary
of fashionable philanthropy, women who talked of their social sympathies
and their principles in life. She almost hoped that Mrs. Bogardus had
neither. Certainly she never mentioned them.
“What did she say? Did she tell you what I said to her last night?”
Cerissa questioned her husband feverishly after his interview with Mrs.
Bogardus.
“She didn't mention your name,” Chauncey took some pleasure in stating.
“If you hadn't told me yourself, I shouldn't have known you'd meddled in
it at all.”
“What's she going to do about it?”
“How crazy you women are! 'Cause some poor old Sooner-die-than-work
warms his bones by a bit of fire that wouldn't scare a chimbly swaller
out of its nest! Don't you s'pose if there'd been any fire there to
speak of, I'd 'a' seen it? What am I here for? Now I've got to drop
everything, and git a padlock on that door, and lock it up every night,
and search the whole place from top to bottom for fear there's some one
in there hidin' in a rathole!”
“Chauncey! If you've got to do that I don't want you to go in there
alone. You take one of the men with you; and you better have a pistol or
one of the dogs anyhow. Suppose you was to ketch some one in there, and
corner him! He might turn on you, and shoot you!”
“I wish you wouldn't work yourself up so about nothin' at all! Want
me to make a blame jackass of myself raisin' the whole place about a
potato-peel or a bacon-rind!”
“I think you might have some little regard for my feelings,” Cerissa
whimpered. “If you ain't afraid, I'm afraid for you; and I don't see
anything to be ashamed of either. I wish you _wouldn't_ go _alone_
searching through that spooky old place. It just puts me beside myself
to think of it!”
“Well, well! That's enough about it anyhow. I ain't going to do anything
foolish, and you needn't think no more about it.”
Whether it was the effect of his wife's fears, or his promise to her,
or the inhospitable nature of his errand founded on suspicion, certainly
Chauncey showed no spirit of rashness in conducting his search. He
knocked the mud off his boots loudly on the doorsill before proceeding
to attach the padlock to the outer door. He searched the loom-room,
lighting a candle and peering into all its cobwebbed corners. He
examined the rooms lately inhabited, unlocking and locking doors
behind him noisily with increasing confidence in the good old house's
emptiness. Still, in the fireplace in the loom-room there were signs of
furtive cooking which a housekeeper's eye would infallibly detect.
He saw that the search must proceed. It was not all a question of his
wife's fears, as he opened the stair-door cautiously and tramped slowly
up towards the tower bedroom. He could not remember who had gone out
last, on the day the old secretary was moved down. There had been
four men up there, and--yes, the key was still in the lock outside. He
clutched it and it fell rattling on the steps. He swung the door open
and stared into the further darkness beyond his range of vision. He
waved his candle as far as his arm would reach. “Anybody _in_ here?” he
shouted. The silence made his flesh prick. “I'm goin' to lock up now.
Better show up. It's the last chance.” He waited while one could count
ten. “Anybody in here that wants to be let free? Nobody's goin' to hurt
ye.”
To his anxious relief there was no reply. But as he listened, he heard
the loud, measured tick, tick, of the old clock, appalling in the
darkness, on the silence of that empty room. Chauncey could not have
told just how he got the door to, nor where he found strength to lock it
and drag his feet downstairs, but the hand that held the key was moist
with cold perspiration as he reached the open air.
“Well, if that's rain I'd like to know where it comes from!” He looked
up at the moon breaking through drifting clouds. The night was keen and
clear.
“If I was to tell that to Cerissa she'd never go within a mile o' that
house again! Maybe I was mistaken--but I ain't goin' back to see!”
Next morning on calmer reflection he changed his mind about removing the
lawn-mower and other hand-tools from the loom-room as he had determined
overnight should be done. The place continued to be used as a storeroom,
open by day.
At night it was Chauncey's business to lock it up, and he was careful to
repeat his search--as far as the stair-door. Never did the silent room
above give forth a protest, a sound of human restraint or occupation. He
reported to the mistress that all was snug at the old house, and nobody
anywhere about the place.
XXV
THE FELL FROST
After the rain came milder days. The still white mornings slowly
brightened into hazy afternoons. The old moon like a sleep walker stood
exposed in the morning sky. The roads to Stone Ridge were deep in fallen
leaves. Soft-tired wheels rustled up the avenue and horses' feet fell
light, as the last of the summer neighbors came to say good-by.
It was a party of four--Miss Sallie and a good-looking youth of the
football cult on horseback, her mother and an elder sister, the delicate
Miss Remsen, in a hired carriage. Their own traps had been sent to town.
Tea was served promptly, as the visitors had a long road home before
their dinner-hour. In the reduced state of the establishment it was
Katy who brought the tea while Cerissa looked after her little charge.
Cerissa sat on the kitchen porch sewing and expanding under the deep
attention of the cook; they could see Middy a little way off on the
tennis-court wiping the mud gravely from a truant ball he had found
among the nasturtiums. All was as peaceful as the time of day and the
season of the year.
“Yes,” said Cerissa solemnly. “Old Abraham Van Elten was too much
cumbered up with this world to get quit of it as easy as some. If his
spirit is burdened with a message to anybody it's to _her_. He died
unreconciled to her, and she inherited all this place in spite of him,
as you may say. I've come as near believin' in such things since the
goings on up there in that room”--
“She wants Middy fetched in to see the comp'ny,” cried Katy, bursting
into the sentence. “Where is he, till I clean him? And she wants some
more bread and butter as quick as ye can spread it.”
“Well, Katy!” said Cerissa slowly, with severe emphasis. “When I was a
girl, my mother used to tell me it wasn't manners to”--
“I haven't got time to hear about yer mother,” said Katy rudely. “What
have ye done with me boy?” The tennis-court lay vacant on the terrace in
the sun; the steep lawn sloped away and dipped into the trees.
“Don't call,” said the cook warily. “It'll only scare her. He was there
only a minute ago. Run, Katy, and see if he's at the stables.”
It was not noticed, except by Mrs. Bogardus, that no Katy, and no boy,
and no bread and butter, had appeared. Possibly the last deficiency had
attracted a little playful attention from the young horseback riders,
who were accusing each other of eating more than their respective
shares.
At length Miss Sallie perceived there was something on her hostess's
mind. “Where is John Middleton?” she whispered. “Katy is dressing him
all over, from head to foot, isn't she? I hope she isn't curling his
hair. John Middleton has such wonderful hair! I refuse to go back to
New York till I have introduced you to John Middleton Bogardus,” she
announced to the young man, who laughed at everything she said. Mrs.
Bogardus smiled vacantly and glanced at the door.
“Let me go find Katy,” cried Miss Sally. Katy entered as she spoke,
and said a few words to the mistress. “Excuse me.” Mrs. Bogardus rose
hastily. She asked Miss Sallie to take her place at the tea-tray.
“What is it?”
“The boy--they cannot find him. Don't say anything.” She had turned ashy
white, and Katy's pretty flushed face had a wild expression.
In five minutes the search had begun. Mrs. Bogardus was at the
telephone, calling up the quarry, for she was short of men. One order
followed another quickly. Her voice was harsh and deep. She had frankly
forgotten her guests. Embarrassed by their own uselessness, yet unable
to take leave, they lingered and discussed the mystery of this sudden,
acute alarm.
“It is the sore spot,” said Miss Sally sentimentally. “You know her
husband was missing for years before she gave him up; and then that
dreadful time, three years ago, when they were so frightened about
Paul.”
Having spread the alarm, Mrs. Bogardus took the field in person. Her
head was bare in the keen, sunset light. She moved with strong, fleet
steps, but a look of sudden age stamped her face.
“Go back, all of you!” she said to the women, who crowded on her heels.
“There are plenty of places to look.” Her stern eyes resisted their
frightened sympathy. She was not ready to yield to the consciousness of
her own fears.
To the old house she went, by some sure instinct that told her the road
to trouble. But her trouble stood off from her, and spared her for one
moment of exquisite relief; as if the child of Paul and Moya had no part
in what was waiting for her. The door at the foot of the stairs stood
open. She heard a soft, repeated thud. Panting, she climbed the stairs;
and as she rounded the shoulder of the chimney, there, on the top step
above her, stood the fair-haired child, making the only light in the
place. He was knocking, with his foolish ball, on the door of the
chamber of fear. Three generations of the living and the dead were
brought together in this coil of fate, and the child, in his happy
innocence, had joined the knot.
The woman crouching on the stairs could barely whisper, “Middy!” lest
if she startled him he might turn and fall. He looked down at her,
unsurprised, and paused in his knocking. “Man--in there--won't 'peak to
Middy!” he said.
She crept towards him and sat below him, coaxing him into her lap. The
strange motions of her breast, as she pressed his head against her, kept
the boy quiet, and in that silence she heard an inner sound--the awful
pulse of the old clock beating steadily, calling her, demanding the
evidence of her senses,--she who feared no ghosts,--beating out the
hours of an agony she was there to witness. And she was yet in time. The
hapless creature entrapped within that room dragged its weight
slowly across the floor. The clock, sole witness and companion of its
sufferings, ticked on impartially. Neither is this any new thing, it
seemed to say. A life was starved in here before--not for lack of food,
but love,--love,--love!
She carried the child out into the air, and he ran before her like a
breeze. The women who met them stared at her sick and desperate face.
She made herself quickly understood, and as each listener drained her
meaning the horror spread. There was but one man left on the place,
within call, he with the boyish face and clean brown hands, who had
ridden across the fields for an afternoon's idle pleasure. He stepped to
her side and took the key out of her hand. “You ought not to do this,”
he said gently, as their eyes met.
“Wednesday, Thursday, Friday,” she counted mechanically. “He has been
in there six days and seven nights by my orders.” She looked straight
before her, seeing no one, as she gave her commands to the women: fire
and hot water and stimulants, in the kitchen of the old house at once,
and another man, if one could be found to follow her.
The two figures moving across the grass might have stepped out of an
illustration in the pages of some current magazine. In their thoughts
they had already unlocked the door of that living death and were face to
face with the insupportable facts of nature.
The morbid, sickening, prison odor met them at the door--humanity's
helpless protest against bolts and bars. Again the young man begged his
companion not to enter. She took one deep breath of the pure outside
air and stepped before him. They searched the emptiness of the barely
furnished room. The clock ticked on to itself. Mrs. Bogardus's companion
stood irresolute, not knowing the place. The fetid air confused
his senses. But she went past him through the inner door, guided by
remembrance of the sounds she had heard.
She had seen it. She approached it cautiously, stooping for a better
view, and closing in upon it warily, as one cuts off the retreat of a
creature in the last agonies of flight. Her companion heard her say:
“Show me your face!--Uncover his face,” she repeated, not moving her
eyes as he stepped behind her. “He will not let me near him. Uncover
it.”
The thing in the corner had some time been a man. There was still enough
manhood left to feel her eyes and to shrink as an earthworm from the
spade. He had crawled close to the baseboard of the room. An old man's
ashen beard straggled through the brown claws wrapped about the face. As
the dust of the threshing floor to the summer grain, so was his likeness
to one she remembered.
“I must see that man's face!” she panted. “He will die if I touch him.
Take away his hands.” It was done, with set teeth, and the face of the
football hero was bathed in sweat. He breathed through tense nostrils,
and a sickly whiteness spread backward from his lips. Suddenly he loosed
his burden. It fell, doubling in a ghastly heap, and he rushed for the
open air.
Mrs. Bogardus groaned. She raised herself up slowly, stretching back her
head. Her face was like the terrible tortured mask of the Medusa. She
had but a moment in which to recover herself. Deliberately she spoke
when her companion returned and stood beside her.
“That was my husband. If he lives I am still his wife. You are not to
forget this. It is no secret. Are you able to help me now? Get a blanket
from the women. I hear some one coming.”
She waited, with head erect and eyes closed and rigid tortured lips
apart, till the feet were heard at the door.
XXVI
PEACE TO THIS HOUSE
Mrs. Remsen and her delicate daughter had driven away to avoid
excitement and the night air.
Chauncey hovered round the piazza steps, talking, with but little
encouragement, to Miss Sallie and the young man who had become the
centre of all eyes.
“I don't see how anybody on the face of the earth could blame her, nor
me either!” Chauncey protested. “If the critter wanted to git out, why
couldn't he say so? I stood there holdin' the door open much as five
minutes. 'Who's in there?' I says. I called it loud enough to wake the
dead. 'Nobody wants to hurt ye,' says I. There want nothing to be afraid
of. He hadn't done nothing anyway. It's the strangest case ever I heard
tell of. And the doctor don't think he was much crazy either.”
“Can he live?” asked Miss Sallie.
“He's alive now, but doctor don't know how long he'll last. There he
comes now. I must go and git his horse.”
The doctor, who seemed nervous,--he was a young local
practitioner,--asked to speak with Miss Sallie's hero apart.
“Did Mrs. Bogardus say anything when she first saw that man? Did you
notice what she said?--how she took it?”
The hero, who was also a gentleman, looked at the doctor coolly.
“It was not a nice thing,” he said. “I saw just as little as I could.”
“You don't understand me,” said the doctor. “I want to know if Mrs.
Bogardus appeared to you to have made any discovery--received any shock
not to be accounted for by--by what you both saw?”
“I shouldn't attempt to answer such a question,” said the youngster
bluntly. “I never saw Mrs. Bogardus in my life before to-day.”
The doctor colored. “Mrs. Bogardus has given me a telegram to send, and
I don't know whether to send it or not. It's going to make a whole lot
of talk. I am not much acquainted with Mrs. Bogardus myself, except by
hearsay. That's partly what surprises me. It looks a little reckless
to send out such a message as that, by the first hand that comes along.
Hadn't we better give her time to think it over?” He opened the telegram
for the other to read. “The man himself can't speak. But he just pants
for breath every time she comes near him: he tries to hide his face. He
acts like a criminal afraid of being caught.”
“He didn't look that way to me--what was left of him. Not in the least
like a criminal.”
“Well, no; that's a fact, too. Now they've got him laid out clean and
neat, he looks as if he might have been a very decent sort of man. But
_that_, you know--that's incredible. If she knows him, why doesn't he
know her? Why won't he own her? He's afraid of her. His eyes are ready
to burst out of his head whenever she comes near him.”
“Did Mrs. Bogardus write that telegram herself?”
“She did.”
“And what did she tell you to do with it?”
“Send it to her son.”
“Then why don't you send it?”
This was the disputed message: “Come. Your father has been found. Bring
Doctor Gainsworth.”
In the local man's opinion, the writer of that dispatch was Doctor
Gainsworth's true patient. What could induce a woman in Mrs. Bogardus's
position to give such hasty publicity to this shocking disclosure,
allowing it were true? The more he dwelt on it the less he liked the
responsibility he was taking. He discussed it openly; and, with the
best intentions, this much-impressed young man gave out his own
counter-theory of the case, hoping to forestall whatever mischief might
have been done. He put himself in the place of Mr. Paul Bogardus, whom
he liked extremely, and tried to imagine that young gentleman's state
of mind when he should look upon this new-found parent, and learn the
manner of his resurrection.
This was the explanation he boldly set forth in behalf of those most
nearly concerned. [He was getting up his diagnosis for an interesting
half hour with the great doctor who had been called in consultation.]
The shock of that awful discovery in the locked chamber, he attested,
had put Mrs. Bogardus temporarily beside herself. Outwardly composed,
her nerves were ripped and torn by the terrible sight that met her
eyes. She was the prey of an hallucination founded on memories of former
suffering, which had worn a channel for every fresh fear to seek. There
was something truly noble and loyal and pathetic in the nature of her
possession. It threw a softened light upon her past. How must she have
brooded, all these years, for that one thought to have ploughed so deep!
It was quite commonly known in the neighborhood that she had come back
from the West years ago without her husband, yet with no proof of his
death. But who could have believed she would cling for half a lifetime
to this forlorn expectancy, depicting her own loss in every sad hulk of
humanity cast upon her prosperous shores!