As he came in he faced the light from the north window, and Bosworth’s
first thought was that he looked like a drowned man fished out from
under the ice—“self-drowned,” he added. But the snow-light plays cruel
tricks with a man’s colour, and even with the shape of his features; it
must have been partly that, Bosworth reflected, which transformed Saul
Rutledge from the straight muscular fellow he had been a year before
into the haggard wretch now before them.
The Deacon sought for a word to ease the horror. “Well, now, Saul—you
look’s if you’d ought to set right up to the stove. Had a touch of ague,
maybe?”
The feeble attempt was unavailing. Rutledge neither moved nor answered.
He stood among them silent, incommunicable, like one risen from the
dead.
Brand grasped him roughly by the shoulder. “See here, Saul Rutledge,
what’s this dirty lie your wife tells us you’ve been putting about?”
Still Rutledge did not move. “It’s no lie,” he said.
Brand’s hand dropped from his shoulder. In spite of the man’s rough
bullying power he seemed to be undefinably awed by Rutledge’s look and
tone.
“No lie? You’ve gone plumb crazy, then, have you?”
Mrs. Rutledge spoke. “My husband’s not lying, nor he ain’t gone crazy.
Don’t I tell you I seen ’em?”
Brand laughed again. “Him and the dead?”
“Yes.”
“Down by the Lamer pond, you say?”
“Yes.”
“And when was that, if I might ask?”
“Day before yesterday.”
A silence fell on the strangely assembled group. The Deacon at length
broke it to say to Mr. Brand: “Brand, in my opinion we’ve got to see
this thing through.”
Brand stood for a moment in speechless contemplation: there was
something animal and primitive about him, Bosworth thought, as he hung
thus, lowering and dumb, a little foam beading the corners of that heavy
purplish underlip. He let himself slowly down into his chair. “I’ll see
it through.”
The two other men and Mrs. Rutledge had remained seated. Saul Rutledge
stood before them, like a prisoner at the bar, or rather like a sick man
before the physicians who were to heal him. As Bosworth scrutinized that
hollow face, so wan under the dark sunburn, so sucked inward and
consumed by some hidden fever, there stole over the sound healthy man
the thought that perhaps, after all, husband and wife spoke the truth,
and that they were all at that moment really standing on the edge of
some forbidden mystery. Things that the rational mind would reject
without a thought seemed no longer so easy to dispose of as one looked
at the actual Saul Rutledge and remembered the man he had been a year
before. Yes; as the Deacon said, they would have to see it through....
“Sit down then, Saul; draw up to us, won’t you?” the Deacon suggested,
trying again for a natural tone.
Mrs. Rutledge pushed a chair forward, and her husband sat down on it. He
stretched out his arms and grasped his knees in his brown bony fingers;
in that attitude he remained, turning neither his head nor his eyes.
“Well, Saul,” the Deacon continued, “your wife says you thought mebbe we
could do something to help you through this trouble, whatever it is.”
Rutledge’s gray eyes widened a little. “No; I didn’t think that. It was
her idea to try what could be done.”
“I presume, though, since you’ve agreed to our coming, that you don’t
object to our putting a few questions?”
Rutledge was silent for a moment; then he said with a visible effort:
“No; I don’t object.”
“Well—you’ve heard what your wife says?”
Rutledge made a slight motion of assent.
“And—what have you got to answer? How do you explain...?”
Mrs. Rutledge intervened. “How can he explain? I seen ’em.”
There was a silence; then Bosworth, trying to speak in an easy
reassuring tone, queried: “That so, Saul?”
“That’s so.”
Brand lifted up his brooding head. “You mean to say you ... you sit here
before us all and say....”
The Deacon’s hand again checked him. “Hold on, friend Brand. We’re all
of us trying for the facts, ain’t we?” He turned to Rutledge. “We’ve
heard what Mrs. Rutledge says. What’s your answer?”
“I don’t know as there’s any answer. She found us.”
“And you mean to tell me the person with you was ... was what you took
to be ...” the Deacon’s thin voice grew thinner: “Ora Brand?”
Saul Rutledge nodded.
“You knew ... or thought you knew ... you were meeting with the dead?”
Rutledge bent his head again. The snow continued to fall in a steady
unwavering sheet against the window, and Bosworth felt as if a
winding-sheet were descending from the sky to envelop them all in a
common grave.
“Think what you’re saying! It’s against our religion! Ora ... poor
child! ... died over a year ago. I saw you at her funeral, Saul. How can
you make such a statement?”
“What else can he do?” thrust in Mrs. Rutledge.
There was another pause. Bosworth’s resources had failed him, and Brand
once more sat plunged in dark meditation. The Deacon laid his quivering
finger-tips together, and moistened his lips.
“Was the day before yesterday the first time?” he asked.
The movement of Rutledge’s head was negative.
“Not the first? Then when....”
“Nigh on a year ago, I reckon.”
“God! And you mean to tell us that ever since—?”
“Well ... look at him,” said his wife. The three men lowered their eyes.
After a moment Bosworth, trying to collect himself, glanced at the
Deacon. “Why not ask Saul to make his own statement, if that’s what
we’re here for?”
“That’s so,” the Deacon assented. He turned to Rutledge. “Will you try
and give us your idea ... of ... of how it began?”
There was another silence. Then Rutledge tightened his grasp on his
gaunt knees, and still looking straight ahead, with his curiously clear
unseeing gaze: “Well,” he said, “I guess it begun away back, afore even
I was married to Mrs. Rutledge....” He spoke in a low automatic tone, as
if some invisible agent were dictating his words, or even uttering them
for him. “You know,” he added, “Ora and me was to have been married.”
Sylvester Brand lifted his head. “Straighten that statement out first,
please,” he interjected.
“What I mean is, we kept company. But Ora she was very young. Mr. Brand
here he sent her away. She was gone nigh to three years, I guess. When
she come back I was married.”
“That’s right,” Brand said, relapsing once more into his sunken
attitude.
“And after she came back did you meet her again?” the Deacon continued.
“Alive?” Rutledge questioned.
A perceptible shudder ran through the room.
“Well—of course,” said the Deacon nervously.
Rutledge seemed to consider. “Once I did—only once. There was a lot of
other people round. At Cold Corners fair it was.”
“Did you talk with her then?”
“Only a minute.”
“What did she say?”
His voice dropped. “She said she was sick and knew she was going to die,
and when she was dead she’d come back to me.”
“And what did you answer?”
“Nothing.”
“Did you think anything of it at the time?”
“Well, no. Not till I heard she was dead I didn’t. After that I thought
of it—and I guess she drew me.” He moistened his lips.
“Drew you down to that abandoned house by the pond?”
Rutledge made a faint motion of assent, and the Deacon added: “How did
you know it was there she wanted you to come?”
“She ... just drew me....”
There was a long pause. Bosworth felt, on himself and the other two men,
the oppressive weight of the next question to be asked. Mrs. Rutledge
opened and closed her narrow lips once or twice, like some beached
shell-fish gasping for the tide. Rutledge waited.
“Well, now, Saul, won’t you go on with what you was telling us?” the
Deacon at length suggested.
“That’s all. There’s nothing else.”
The Deacon lowered his voice. “She just draws you?”
“Yes.”
“Often?”
“That’s as it happens....”
“But if it’s always there she draws you, man, haven’t you the strength
to keep away from the place?”
For the first time, Rutledge wearily turned his head toward his
questioner. A spectral smile narrowed his colourless lips. “Ain’t any
use. She follers after me....”
There was another silence. What more could they ask, then and there?
Mrs. Rutledge’s presence checked the next question. The Deacon seemed
hopelessly to revolve the matter. At length he spoke in a more
authoritative tone. “These are forbidden things. You know that, Saul.
Have you tried prayer?”
Rutledge shook his head.
“Will you pray with us now?”
Rutledge cast a glance of freezing indifference on his spiritual
adviser. “If you folks want to pray, I’m agreeable,” he said. But Mrs.
Rutledge intervened.
“Prayer ain’t any good. In this kind of thing it ain’t no manner of use;
you know it ain’t. I called you here, Deacon, because you remember the
last case in this parish. Thirty years ago it was, I guess; but you
remember. Lefferts Nash—did praying help _him_? I was a little girl
then, but I used to hear my folks talk of it winter nights. Lefferts
Nash and Hannah Cory. They drove a stake through her breast. That’s what
cured him.”
“Oh—” Orrin Bosworth exclaimed.
Sylvester Brand raised his head. “You’re speaking of that old story as
if this was the same sort of thing?”
“Ain’t it? Ain’t my husband pining away the same as Lefferts Nash did?
The Deacon here knows—”
The Deacon stirred anxiously in his chair. “These are forbidden things,”
he repeated. “Supposing your husband is quite sincere in thinking
himself haunted, as you might say. Well, even then, what proof have we
that the ... the dead woman ... is the spectre of that poor girl?”
“Proof? Don’t he say so? Didn’t she tell him? Ain’t I seen ’em?” Mrs.
Rutledge almost screamed.
The three men sat silent, and suddenly the wife burst out: “A stake
through the breast! That’s the old way; and it’s the only way. The
Deacon knows it!”
“It’s against our religion to disturb the dead.”
“Ain’t it against your religion to let the living perish as my husband
is perishing?” She sprang up with one of her abrupt movements and took
the family Bible from the what-not in a corner of the parlour. Putting
the book on the table, and moistening a livid finger-tip, she turned the
pages rapidly, till she came to one on which she laid her hand like a
stony paper-weight. “See here,” she said, and read out in her level
chanting voice:
“‘_Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live._’
“That’s in Exodus, that’s where it is,” she added, leaving the book open
as if to confirm the statement.
Bosworth continued to glance anxiously from one to the other of the four
people about the table. He was younger than any of them, and had had
more contact with the modern world; down in Starkfield, in the bar of
the Fielding House, he could hear himself laughing with the rest of the
men at such old wives’ tales. But it was not for nothing that he had
been born under the icy shadow of Lonetop, and had shivered and hungered
as a lad through the bitter Hemlock County winters. After his parents
died, and he had taken hold of the farm himself, he had got more out of
it by using improved methods, and by supplying the increasing throng of
summer-boarders over Stotesbury way with milk and vegetables. He had
been made a selectman of North Ashmore; for so young a man he had a
standing in the county. But the roots of the old life were still in him.
He could remember, as a little boy, going twice a year with his mother
to that bleak hill-farm out beyond Sylvester Brand’s, where Mrs.
Bosworth’s aunt, Cressidora Cheney, had been shut up for years in a cold
clean room with iron bars in the windows. When little Orrin first saw
Aunt Cressidora she was a small white old woman, whom her sisters used
to “make decent” for visitors the day that Orrin and his mother were
expected. The child wondered why there were bars to the window. “Like a
canary-bird,” he said to his mother. The phrase made Mrs. Bosworth
reflect. “I do believe they keep Aunt Cressidora too lonesome,” she
said; and the next time she went up the mountain with the little boy he
carried to his great-aunt a canary in a little wooden cage. It was a
great excitement; he knew it would make her happy.
The old woman’s motionless face lit up when she saw the bird, and her
eyes began to glitter. “It belongs to me,” she said instantly,
stretching her soft bony hand over the cage.
“Of course it does, Aunt Cressy,” said Mrs. Bosworth, her eyes filling.
But the bird, startled by the shadow of the old woman’s hand, began to
flutter and beat its wings distractedly. At the sight, Aunt Cressidora’s
calm face suddenly became a coil of twitching features. “You she-devil,
you!” she cried in a high squealing voice; and thrusting her hand into
the cage she dragged out the terrified bird and wrung its neck. She was
plucking the hot body, and squealing “she-devil, she-devil!” as they
drew little Orrin from the room. On the way down the mountain his mother
wept a great deal, and said: “You must never tell anybody that poor
Auntie’s crazy, or the men would come and take her down to the asylum at
Starkfield, and the shame of it would kill us all. Now promise.” The
child promised.
He remembered the scene now, with its deep fringe of mystery, secrecy
and rumour. It seemed related to a great many other things below the
surface of his thoughts, things which stole up anew, making him feel
that all the old people he had known, and who “believed in these
things,” might after all be right. Hadn’t a witch been burned at North
Ashmore? Didn’t the summer folk still drive over in jolly buckboard
loads to see the meeting-house where the trial had been held, the pond
where they had ducked her and she had floated?... Deacon Hibben
believed; Bosworth was sure of it. If he didn’t, why did people from all
over the place come to him when their animals had queer sicknesses, or
when there was a child in the family that had to be kept shut up because
it fell down flat and foamed? Yes, in spite of his religion, Deacon
Hibben _knew_....
And Brand? Well, it came to Bosworth in a flash: that North Ashmore
woman who was burned had the name of Brand. The same stock, no doubt;
there had been Brands in Hemlock County ever since the white men had
come there. And Orrin, when he was a child, remembered hearing his
parents say that Sylvester Brand hadn’t ever oughter married his own
cousin, because of the blood. Yet the couple had had two healthy girls,
and when Mrs. Brand pined away and died nobody suggested that anything
had been wrong with her mind. And Vanessa and Ora were the handsomest
girls anywhere round. Brand knew it, and scrimped and saved all he could
to send Ora, the eldest, down to Starkfield to learn book-keeping. “When
she’s married I’ll send you,” he used to say to little Venny, who was
his favourite. But Ora never married. She was away three years, during
which Venny ran wild on the slopes of Lonetop; and when Ora came back
she sickened and died—poor girl! Since then Brand had grown more savage
and morose. He was a hard-working farmer, but there wasn’t much to be
got out of those barren Bearcliff acres. He was said to have taken to
drink since his wife’s death; now and then men ran across him in the
“dives” of Stotesbury. But not often. And between times he laboured hard
on his stony acres and did his best for his daughters. In the neglected
grave-yard of Cold Corners there was a slanting head-stone marked with
his wife’s name; near it, a year since, he had laid his eldest daughter.
And sometimes, at dusk, in the autumn, the village people saw him walk
slowly by, turn in between the graves, and stand looking down on the two
stones. But he never brought a flower there, or planted a bush; nor
Venny either. She was too wild and ignorant....
Mrs. Rutledge repeated: “That’s in Exodus.”
The three visitors remained silent, turning about their hats in
reluctant hands. Rutledge faced them, still with that empty pellucid
gaze which frightened Bosworth. What was he seeing?
“Ain’t any of you folks got the grit—?” his wife burst out again, half
hysterically.
Deacon Hibben held up his hand. “That’s no way, Mrs. Rutledge. This
ain’t a question of having grit. What we want first of all is ...
proof....”
“That’s so,” said Bosworth, with an explosion of relief, as if the words
had lifted something black and crouching from his breast. Involuntarily
the eyes of both men had turned to Brand. He stood there smiling grimly,
but did not speak.
“Ain’t it so, Brand?” the Deacon prompted him.
“Proof that spooks walk?” the other sneered.
“Well—I presume you want this business settled too?”
The old farmer squared his shoulders. “Yes—I do. But I ain’t a
sperritualist. How the hell are you going to settle it?”
Deacon Hibben hesitated; then he said, in a low incisive tone: “I don’t
see but one way—Mrs. Rutledge’s.”
There was a silence.
“What?” Brand sneered again. “Spying?”
The Deacon’s voice sank lower. “If the poor girl _does_ walk ... her
that’s your child ... wouldn’t you be the first to want her laid quiet?
We all know there’ve been such cases ... mysterious visitations.... Can
any one of us here deny it?”
“I seen ’em,” Mrs. Rutledge interjected.
There was another heavy pause. Suddenly Brand fixed his gaze on
Rutledge. “See here, Saul Rutledge, you’ve got to clear up this damned
calumny, or I’ll know why. You say my dead girl comes to you.” He
laboured with his breath, and then jerked out: “When? You tell me that,
and I’ll be there.”
Rutledge’s head drooped a little, and his eyes wandered to the window.
“Round about sunset, mostly.”
“You know beforehand?”
Rutledge made a sign of assent.
“Well, then—tomorrow, will it be?”
Rutledge made the same sign.
Brand turned to the door. “I’ll be there.” That was all he said. He
strode out between them without another glance or word. Deacon Hibben
looked at Mrs. Rutledge. “We’ll be there too,” he said, as if she had
asked him; but she had not spoken, and Bosworth saw that her thin body
was trembling all over. He was glad when he and Hibben were out again in
the snow.