"These Macedonians are a rude and clownish people that call a spade
a spade."--PLUTARCH.
Next morning, I took my car and began a systematic investigation of the
neighborhood. There proved to be few houses within reasonable distance
where such a woman as my lady could be lodged. However, I made my
cautious inquiries even where the quest seemed useless, resolved to
leave no chance untried. No better plan occurred to me than exhibition
of the pomander with a vague story of wishing to return it to a young
lady with red-gold hair. But nowhere did a native show recognition of
the top or the description.
On my way home I overtook a familiar, travel-stained buggy that inspired
me with a fresh disrespect for my own abilities. Why had I not put my
question to our rural mail deliverer in the beginning? Surely here was a
man who knew everyone and went everywhere!
The old white horse rolled placid eyes toward the car that drew up
beside it, then returned to cropping the young grass by the roadside.
The postman looked up from the leather sack open before him, and nodded
to me.
"Morning, Mr. Locke," he greeted. "Now let me get the right stuff into
this here box, an' I'll sort your family's right out for you. There's a
sample package of food sworn to make hens lay or kill 'em, for Cliff
Brown here, that's gone to the bottom of the bag. I don't know but
Cliff's poultry'd thank me to leave it be! Up it's got to come, though!"
"Will it make them lay?" I asked, watching the ruddy old face peering
into the sack.
"I guess it might, if Cliff told 'em they'd have to lay or eat it,
judgin' from the smell that sample's put in my bag."
"Not as sweet as this?" I suggested, and leaned across to lay the
pomander in his gnarled hand.
The familiar expression of acute, almost greedy pleasure flowed into his
face. His nostrils expanded with eager intake of the perfume that seemed
an elixir of delight. He said nothing, absorbed in sensation.
"Do you know of a lady who wears that scent?" I asked. "A lady with
bright fair hair, colored like copper-bronze?"
"Not I!" he denied briefly.
"No one at all like that--with hair warmer in shade than ordinary gold
color, and a lot of it?"
"No. Not around here, nor anywhere I've been! What do you call this
perfumery, Mr. Locke?"
"I have no idea," I answered, sharply disappointed. "No one knows except
the young lady I am trying to find. Are you sure you cannot help me at
all? There is no newcomer in the neighborhood, no visitor at any house
who might be the one I am looking for?"
He shook his head, giving back the pomander with marked reluctance.
"No one who might be able to tell more than yourself?" I persisted.
A gleam of humor lit his eyes. He dropped a cardboard cylinder into Mr.
Clifford Brown's mailbox and began to sort out my letters.
"Far as that goes, I guess Mis' Hill don't miss much of what goes on
around here. When she hears a good bit of tattle, she has her husband
hitch up, and she goes drivin' all day. Ain't a house she knows that
don't get to hear the whole yarn! You know Mis' Royal Hill? Mis' Vere
gets butter and cheese from her. Might ask her!"
I thanked him and drove on.
Mrs. Hill, garrulous wife of the farmer who owned the place next to
ours, was on her porch when I came to a halt before the house. She
granted me more interest than the other natives upon whom I had called
that morning; inviting me into her parlor to "set," when she had
identified me. But she knew nothing of the object of my quest.
"I guessed you must be the new owner up to the Michell place," she
observed, her beady, faded brown eyes busy with my appearance, picking
up details in avid, darting little glances suggestive of a bird pecking
crumbs. "Cliff Brown said a lame feller had bought it. I don't see as
that little limp cripples you much, the way you can rampus 'round in
that fast automobile of yours! Now, I'm perfectly sound, and I wouldn't
be paid to drive the thing. You'd ought to get the other fellow to run
it for you; the handsome one. I guess you like to do it, though? Writer,
ain't you? Books or newspapers?"
I rallied my scattered faculties to answer the machine-gun attack.
"Music?" she echoed, her narrow, sun-dried face wrinkling into new lines
of inquisitiveness. "They said you had a piano in your bedroom, but I
thought they were just foolin' me! Seems I never heard of havin' a piano
upstairs. Most folks like to show 'em off in the parlor. Must be kind of
funny, takin' your company upstairs to play for 'em. But then it's kind
of a funny thing for a man to take to, anyhow! I got a niece ten years
old next August who can play piano so good there don't seem anythin'
left to learn her, so----! But there ain't no use of you drivin' 'round
here lookin' for a fair-headed girl, Mr. Locke. The Slav folk down in
the shanties by the post road are about the only light-complected ones
in this neighborhood. Somehow, we run mostly to plain brown. Senator
Allen has two girls, but they're only home from a boardin' school for
vacation. How do you like your place?"
"Very much," I assured her. "Only, I do not know a great deal about it,
yet. Its history, I mean. Are there any interesting stories about the
house? You know, we city people like a nice legend or ghost story to
tell our friends when they come to visit us."
She chuckled, swinging in her plush-covered rocking-chair, arms folded
on her meagre breast.
"Guess you'll have to make one up! I never heard of none. The Michell
family always owned it--and they were so stiff respectable an' upright
everyone was scared of 'em! Most of the men were clergymen in their
time. The last, Reverend Cotton Mather Michell, went abroad to foreign
parts for missionary work with the heathen, twenty-odd years ago; an'
died there. He never married, so the family's run out. The Michells were
awful hard on women; called 'em vessels of wrath an' beguilers of Adam.
Preached it right out of the pulpit--so I guess no girl in these parts
could have been hired to wed with him, if he'd wanted. His mother died
when he was born, so he'd had no softenin' influence. After news came of
his death, the house was shut up 'till you bought it. My, how you've
changed it, already! I'd admire to go through it."
When I had invited her to call on Phillida and inspect our domicile, and
paid due thanks for information received, she followed me out to the
car.
"All this land 'round here is old and full of Indian relics," she
remarked. "Over to the Sound where the swamps used to be, there was lots
of fightin' with savages. An' they say a witch was stoned to death where
the Catholic convent stands now, on the road up above your place. So I
guess you can figure out a story to tell your company, if you like."
"A convent?" I repeated, my attention caught by a new possibility. "Do
they, perhaps, have visitors there, ladies in retreat for a time, as
convents often do abroad?"
Mrs. Hill laughed, shaking her tightly-combed head.
"No hope of your girl there," she chuckled. "They're the strictest
sisterhood in America, folks say. Poor Clares, I think they're called.
No one, not even their relations, ever see their faces after they join.
They're not allowed to talk to each other, even. Just stay in their
cells, an' pray, even in the middle of the night, an' shave their heads
an' live on a few vegetables an' dry bread."
I laughed with her. Certainly no convent would harbor my lady of
marvelous tresses and magical perfume, of wild fancies and heretical
theories. That thought of mine was indeed far afield. But where, then,
was I next to seek?
I made a detour and used some strategy to gain a view of the Senator's
daughters. They proved to be brunettes who wore their locks cropped
after the fashion of certain Greenwich villagers. My disappointment was
not great; my lady was not suggestive of a boarding-school miss. But I
had hoped to find somewhere a trace of the copper-bronze head whose
royalty of hair I had shorn as the traitors shore King Childeric's
Gothic locks.
I drove home with a sense of blankness upon me. Suppose she never came
again? Suppose the episode was ended? Not even freedom from the Thing
could compensate for the baffled adventure.
Think of the lame feller with an Adventure!