I
The snow was still falling thickly when Orrin Bosworth, who farmed the
land south of Lonetop, drove up in his cutter to Saul Rutledge’s gate.
He was surprised to see two other cutters ahead of him. From them
descended two muffled figures. Bosworth, with increasing surprise,
recognized Deacon Hibben, from North Ashmore, and Sylvester Brand, the
widower, from the old Bearcliff farm on the way to Lonetop.
It was not often that anybody in Hemlock County entered Saul Rutledge’s
gate; least of all in the dead of winter, and summoned (as Bosworth, at
any rate, had been) by Mrs. Rutledge, who passed, even in that unsocial
region, for a woman of cold manners and solitary character. The
situation was enough to excite the curiosity of a less imaginative man
than Orrin Bosworth.
As he drove in between the broken-down white gate-posts topped by fluted
urns the two men ahead of him were leading their horses to the adjoining
shed. Bosworth followed, and hitched his horse to a post. Then the three
tossed off the snow from their shoulders, clapped their numb hands
together, and greeted each other.
“Hallo, Deacon.”
“Well, well, Orrin—.” They shook hands.
“’Day, Bosworth,” said Sylvester Brand, with a brief nod. He seldom put
any cordiality into his manner, and on this occasion he was still busy
about his horse’s bridle and blanket.
Orrin Bosworth, the youngest and most communicative of the three, turned
back to Deacon Hibben, whose long face, queerly blotched and
mouldy-looking, with blinking peering eyes, was yet less forbidding than
Brand’s heavily-hewn countenance.
“Queer, our all meeting here this way. Mrs. Rutledge sent me a message
to come,” Bosworth volunteered.
The Deacon nodded. “I got a word from her too—Andy Pond come with it
yesterday noon. I hope there’s no trouble here—”
He glanced through the thickening fall of snow at the desolate front of
the Rutledge house, the more melancholy in its present neglected state
because, like the gate-posts, it kept traces of former elegance.
Bosworth had often wondered how such a house had come to be built in
that lonely stretch between North Ashmore and Cold Corners. People said
there had once been other houses like it, forming a little township
called Ashmore, a sort of mountain colony created by the caprice of an
English Royalist officer, one Colonel Ashmore, who had been murdered by
the Indians, with all his family, long before the Revolution. This tale
was confirmed by the fact that the ruined cellars of several smaller
houses were still to be discovered under the wild growth of the
adjoining slopes, and that the Communion plate of the moribund Episcopal
church of Cold Corners was engraved with the name of Colonel Ashmore,
who had given it to the church of Ashmore in the year 1723. Of the
church itself no traces remained. Doubtless it had been a modest wooden
edifice, built on piles, and the conflagration which had burnt the other
houses to the ground’s edge had reduced it utterly to ashes. The whole
place, even in summer, wore a mournful solitary air, and people wondered
why Saul Rutledge’s father had gone there to settle.
“I never knew a place,” Deacon Hibben said, “as seemed as far away from
humanity. And yet it ain’t so in miles.”
“Miles ain’t the only distance,” Orrin Bosworth answered; and the two
men, followed by Sylvester Brand, walked across the drive to the front
door. People in Hemlock County did not usually come and go by their
front doors, but all three men seemed to feel that, on an occasion which
appeared to be so exceptional, the usual and more familiar approach by
the kitchen would not be suitable.
They had judged rightly; the Deacon had hardly lifted the knocker when
the door opened and Mrs. Rutledge stood before them.
“Walk right in,” she said in her usual dead-level tone; and Bosworth, as
he followed the others, thought to himself: “Whatever’s happened, she’s
not going to let it show in her face.”
It was doubtful, indeed, if anything unwonted could be made to show in
Prudence Rutledge’s face, so limited was its scope, so fixed were its
features. She was dressed for the occasion in a black calico with white
spots, a collar of crochet-lace fastened by a gold brooch, and a gray
woollen shawl, crossed under her arms and tied at the back. In her small
narrow head the only marked prominence was that of the brow projecting
roundly over pale spectacled eyes. Her dark hair, parted above this
prominence, passed tight and flat over the tips of her ears into a small
braided coil at the nape; and her contracted head looked still narrower
from being perched on a long hollow neck with cord-like throat-muscles.
Her eyes were of a pale cold gray, her complexion was an even white. Her
age might have been anywhere from thirty-five to sixty.
The room into which she led the three men had probably been the
dining-room of the Ashmore house. It was now used as a front parlour,
and a black stove planted on a sheet of zinc stuck out from the
delicately fluted panels of an old wooden mantel. A newly-lit fire
smouldered reluctantly, and the room was at once close and bitterly
cold.
“Andy Pond,” Mrs. Rutledge cried to some one at the back of the house,
“step out and call Mr. Rutledge. You’ll likely find him in the
wood-shed, or round the barn somewheres.” She rejoined her visitors.
“Please suit yourselves to seats,” she said.
The three men, with an increasing air of constraint, took the chairs she
pointed out, and Mrs. Rutledge sat stiffly down upon a fourth, behind a
rickety bead-work table. She glanced from one to the other of her
visitors.
“I presume you folks are wondering what it is I asked you to come here
for,” she said in her dead-level voice. Orrin Bosworth and Deacon Hibben
murmured an assent; Sylvester Brand sat silent, his eyes, under their
great thicket of eyebrows, fixed on the huge boot-tip swinging before
him.
“Well, I allow you didn’t expect it was for a party,” continued Mrs.
Rutledge.
No one ventured to respond to this chill pleasantry, and she continued:
“We’re in trouble here, and that’s the fact. And we need advice—Mr.
Rutledge and myself do.” She cleared her throat, and added in a lower
tone, her pitilessly clear eyes looking straight before her: “There’s a
spell been cast over Mr. Rutledge.”
The Deacon looked up sharply, an incredulous smile pinching his thin
lips. “A spell?”
“That’s what I said: he’s bewitched.”
Again the three visitors were silent; then Bosworth, more at ease or
less tongue-tied than the others, asked with an attempt at humour: “Do
you use the word in the strict Scripture sense, Mrs. Rutledge?”
She glanced at him before replying: “That’s how _he_ uses it.”
The Deacon coughed and cleared his long rattling throat. “Do you care to
give us more particulars before your husband joins us?”
Mrs. Rutledge looked down at her clasped hands, as if considering the
question. Bosworth noticed that the inner fold of her lids was of the
same uniform white as the rest of her skin, so that when she dropped
them her rather prominent eyes looked like the sightless orbs of a
marble statue. The impression was unpleasing, and he glanced away at the
text over the mantelpiece, which read:
_The Soul That Sinneth It Shall Die._
“No,” she said at length, “I’ll wait.”
At this moment Sylvester Brand suddenly stood up and pushed back his
chair. “I don’t know,” he said, in his rough bass voice, “as I’ve got
any particular lights on Bible mysteries; and this happens to be the day
I was to go down to Starkfield to close a deal with a man.”
Mrs. Rutledge lifted one of her long thin hands. Withered and wrinkled
by hard work and cold, it was nevertheless of the same leaden white as
her face. “You won’t be kept long,” she said. “Won’t you be seated?”
Farmer Brand stood irresolute, his purplish underlip twitching. “The
Deacon here—such things is more in his line....”
“I want you should stay,” said Mrs. Rutledge quietly; and Brand sat down
again.
A silence fell, during which the four persons present seemed all to be
listening for the sound of a step; but none was heard, and after a
minute or two Mrs. Rutledge began to speak again.
“It’s down by that old shack on Lamer’s pond; that’s where they meet,”
she said suddenly.
Bosworth, whose eyes were on Sylvester Brand’s face, fancied he saw a
sort of inner flush darken the farmer’s heavy leathern skin. Deacon
Hibben leaned forward, a glitter of curiosity in his eyes.
“They—_who_, Mrs. Rutledge?”
“My husband, Saul Rutledge ... and her....”
Sylvester Brand again stirred in his seat. “Who do you mean by _her_?”
he asked abruptly, as if roused out of some far-off musing.
Mrs. Rutledge’s body did not move; she simply revolved her head on her
long neck and looked at him.
“Your daughter, Sylvester Brand.”
The man staggered to his feet with an explosion of inarticulate sounds.
“My—my daughter? What the hell are you talking about? My daughter? It’s
a damned lie ... it’s ... it’s....”
“Your daughter _Ora_, Mr. Brand,” said Mrs. Rutledge slowly.
Bosworth felt an icy chill down his spine. Instinctively he turned his
eyes away from Brand, and they rested on the mildewed countenance of
Deacon Hibben. Between the blotches it had become as white as Mrs.
Rutledge’s, and the Deacon’s eyes burned in the whiteness like live
embers among ashes.
Brand gave a laugh: the rusty creaking laugh of one whose springs of
mirth are never moved by gaiety. “My daughter _Ora_?” he repeated.
“Yes.”
“My _dead_ daughter?”
“That’s what he says.”
“Your husband?”
“That’s what Mr. Rutledge says.”
Orrin Bosworth listened with a sense of suffocation; he felt as if he
were wrestling with long-armed horrors in a dream. He could no longer
resist letting his eyes return to Sylvester Brand’s face. To his
surprise it had resumed a natural imperturbable expression. Brand rose
to his feet. “Is that all?” he queried contemptuously.
“All? Ain’t it enough? How long is it since you folks seen Saul
Rutledge, any of you?” Mrs. Rutledge flew out at them.
Bosworth, it appeared, had not seen him for nearly a year; the Deacon
had only run across him once, for a minute, at the North Ashmore post
office, the previous autumn, and acknowledged that he wasn’t looking any
too good then. Brand said nothing, but stood irresolute.
“Well, if you wait a minute you’ll see with your own eyes; and he’ll
tell you with his own words. That’s what I’ve got you here for—to see
for yourselves what’s come over him. Then you’ll talk different,” she
added, twisting her head abruptly toward Sylvester Brand.
The Deacon raised a lean hand of interrogation.
“Does your husband know we’ve been sent for on this business, Mrs.
Rutledge?”
Mrs. Rutledge signed assent.
“It was with his consent, then—?”
She looked coldly at her questioner. “I guess it had to be,” she said.
Again Bosworth felt the chill down his spine. He tried to dissipate the
sensation by speaking with an affectation of energy.
“Can you tell us, Mrs. Rutledge, how this trouble you speak of shows
itself ... what makes you think...?”
She looked at him for a moment; then she leaned forward across the
rickety bead-work table. A thin smile of disdain narrowed her colourless
lips. “I don’t think—I know.”
“Well—but how?”
She leaned closer, both elbows on the table, her voice dropping. “I seen
’em.”
In the ashen light from the veiling of snow beyond the windows the
Deacon’s little screwed-up eyes seemed to give out red sparks. “Him and
the dead?”
“Him and the dead.”
“Saul Rutledge and—and Ora Brand?”
“That’s so.”
Sylvester Brand’s chair fell backward with a crash. He was on his feet
again, crimson and cursing. “It’s a God-damned fiend-begotten lie....”
“Friend Brand ... friend Brand ...” the Deacon protested.
“Here, let me get out of this. I want to see Saul Rutledge himself, and
tell him—”
“Well, here he is,” said Mrs. Rutledge.
The outer door had opened; they heard the familiar stamping and shaking
of a man who rids his garments of their last snowflakes before
penetrating to the sacred precincts of the best parlour. Then Saul
Rutledge entered.