The wind rose in a sharp gust, rattling the insecure windows and sighing
forlornly about the corners of the house. The door unlatched itself,
swung inward hesitatingly, and hung wavering for a moment on its sagging
hinges. A formless cloud of gray fog blew into the warm, steamy room.
But whatever ghostly visitant had paused upon the threshold, he had
evidently decided not to enter, for the catch snapped shut with a quick,
passionate vigor. The echo of the slamming door rang eerily through the
house.
Mart Brenner's wife laid down the ladle with which she had been stirring
the contents of a pot that was simmering on the big, black stove, and
dragging her crippled foot behind her, she hobbled heavily to the door.
As she opened it a new horde of fog-wraiths blew in. The world was a
gray, wet blanket. Not a light from the village below pierced the mist,
and the lonely army of tall cedars on the black hill back of the house
was hidden completely.
"Who's there?" Mrs. Brenner hailed. But her voice fell flat and muffled.
Far off on the beach she could dimly hear the long wail of a fog-horn.
The faint throb of hope stilled in her breast. She had not really
expected to find any one at the door unless perhaps it should be a
stranger who had missed his way at the cross-roads. There had been one
earlier in the afternoon when the fog first came. But her husband had
been at home then and his surly manner quickly cut short the stranger's
attempts at friendliness. This ugly way of Mart's had isolated them
from all village intercourse early in their life on Cedar Hill.
Like a buzzard's nest, their home hung over the village on the
unfriendly sides of the bleak slope. Visitors were few and always
reluctant, even strangers, for the village told weird tales of Mart
Brenner and his kin. The village said that he--and all those who
belonged to him as well--were marked for evil and disaster. Disaster had
truly written itself throughout their history. His mother was mad, a
tragic madness of bloody prophecies and dim fears; his only son a
witless creature of eighteen, who for all his height and bulk, spent his
days catching butterflies in the woods on the hill, and his nights in
laboriously pinning them, wings outspread, upon the bare walls of the
house.
The room where the Brenner family lived its queer, taciturn life was
tapestried in gold, the glowing tapestry of swarms of outspread yellow
butterflies sweeping in gilded tides from the rough floors to the black
rafters overhead.
Olga Brenner herself was no less tragic than her family. On her face,
written in the acid of pain, was the history of the blows and cruelty
that had warped her active body. Owing to her crippled foot, her entire
left side sagged hopelessly and her arm swung away, above it, like a
branch from a decayed tree. But more saddening than her distorted body
was the lonely soul that looked out of her tired faded eyes.
She was essentially a village woman with a profound love of its
intimacies and gossip, its fence-corner neighborliness. The horror with
which the village regarded her, as the wife of Mart Brenner, was an
eating sore. It was greater than the tragedy of her poor, witless son,
the hatred of old Mrs. Brenner, and her ever-present fear of Mart. She
had never quite given up her unreasoning hope that some day some one
might come to the house in one of Mart's long, unexplained absences and
sit down and talk with her over a cup of tea. She put away the feeble
hope again as she turned back into the dim room and closed the door
behind her.
"Must have been that bit of wind," she meditated. "It plays queer tricks
sometimes."
She went to the mantel and lighted the dull lamp. By the flicker she
read the face of the clock.
"Tobey's late!" she exclaimed uneasily. Her mind never rested from its
fear for Tobey. His childlike mentality made him always the same burden
as when she had rocked him hour after hour, a scrawny mite of a baby on
her breast.
"It's a fearful night for him to be out!" she muttered.
"Blood! Blood!" said a tragic voice from a dark corner by the stove.
Barely visible in the ruddy half-dark of the room a pair of demoniac
eyes met hers.
Mrs. Brenner threw her shriveled and wizened mother-in-law an angry and
contemptuous glance.
"Be still!" she commanded. "'Pears to me that's all you ever
say--blood!"
The glittering eyes fell away from hers in a sullen obedience. But the
tragic voice went on intoning stubbornly, "Blood on his hands! Red!
Dripping! I see blood!"
Mrs. Brenner shuddered. "Seems like you could shut up a spell!" she
complained.
The old woman's voice trailed into a broken and fitful whispering.
Olga's commands were the only laws she knew, and she obeyed them. Mrs.
Brenner went back to the stove. But her eyes kept returning to the clock
and thence to the darkening square of window where the fog pressed
heavily into the very room.
Out of the gray silence came a shattering sound that sent the ladle
crashing out of Mrs. Brenner's nerveless hand and brought a moan from
the dozing old woman!
It was a scream, a long, piercing scream, so intense, so agonized that
it went echoing about the room as tho a disembodied spirit were
shrieking under the rafters! It was a scream of terror, an innocent, a
heart-broken scream!
"Tobey!" cried Mrs. Brenner, her face rigid.
The old woman began to pick at her ragged skirt, mumbling "Blood! Blood
on his hands! I see it!"
"That was on the hill," said Mrs. Brenner slowly, steadying her voice.
She put her calloused hand against her lips and stood listening with
agonized intentness. But now the heavy, foggy silence had fallen again.
At intervals came the long, faint wail of the fog-horn. There was no
other sound. Even the old woman in the shadowy corner had ceased her
mouthing.
Mrs. Brenner stood motionless, with her hand against her trembling lips,
her head bent forward for four of the dull intervals between the
siren-call.
Then there came the sound of steps stumbling around the house. Mrs.
Brenner, with her painful hobble, reached the door before the steps
paused there, and threw it open.
The feeble light fell on the round, vacant face of her son, his
inevitable pasteboard box, grim with much handling, clutched close to
his big breast, and in it the soft beating and thudding of imprisoned
wings.
Mrs. Brenner's voice was scarcely more than a whisper, "Tobey!" but it
rose shrilly as she cried, "Where you been? What was that scream?"