THE DARK OF THE MOON
The wide circle of open lawn before the ruined house was less dark than
the pathway, but the shadows beneath the trees were inky black and the
pines themselves were bowing and thundering in the heavy storm. There
was no rain, only the boisterous wind whipping the branches and driving
great masses of clouds across the sky with now and then a gleam of stars
between. Stars glinted now and again in the pool also, long beams of
light in the ruffled water, although, as she came near, there chanced to
be quiet for a moment so that she saw reflected the irregular circle of
light that Miss Miranda had told her was the Northern Crown.
She stood still by the pool for a long minute, her heart beating very
loud, the pulses throbbing in her ears as it does after running. Very
keenly she was peering into the dark at the long lines of ruined walls,
seeing nothing at first, but by and by catching glimpses of a tiny,
moving light. It stopped, vanished, reappeared, and moved on before she
could be certain that she really saw it. At last it came nearer, moving
along past the door that David had used, slipped over the tumbled wall,
even showed double for a second in the shattered old mirror. She was
trying to speak, to cry out, but she could not find her voice, could
only stare, fascinated, quaking inwardly with the thought that the
light, after all, might be something unearthly. But as it progressed
farther toward the end of the house where the fire had raged fiercest,
the sense of danger brought her to her senses at last.
“Stop,” she cried frantically. “It is not safe there. Stop, come back.”
She had called a second too late. There was a sound of rending walls and
tumbling bricks, a crash, a startled cry and then a groan. She rushed
across the grass, could find no place to climb over and ran up and down
wildly, seeking a point of vantage where she might scramble across. A
new sound caught her attention, for flying feet were coming up the path.
“Oh, David, David is it you?” she cried, in an overwhelming rush of
relief. “I can’t climb up, I can’t reach him.”
“You are not to try it, it is not safe,” David ordered sternly, setting
his foot on the first big block of stone even as he spoke.
“I am going where you go,” she replied and evidently he realized it was
no time for argument.
“Then this is the best way over. Here, give me your hand, and be careful
of that loose beam.”
They scrambled over the summit and, amid a shower of sliding bricks,
slipped down on the other side. A dark figure lay stretched upon the
stones, moving a little and still holding a flickering, lighted candle.
It was Michael.
“Yes, Miss Betsey dear,” he affirmed cheerfully, when they had at last
brought him to recognize who they were, “and I’ve a broken leg I’m
thinking from the way it feels by not having any feeling at all. And
will you hold up the candle and see what is running down my face?”
“Oh, Michael, Michael, what were you doing, how could you be so
foolish?” Betsey reproached him; “your head is cut and what is running
over your face is blood.” She began, forthwith, to try to tie it up with
her handkerchief.
“Then glory be to all the Saints,” was Michael’s unexpectedly joyful
reply; “there is nothing that will break the charm of ill luck like the
letting of blood. It will all go well now.”
Betsey looked helplessly at David. Was the poor old man gone out of his
wits entirely?
“Don’t you know better than to risk your life over such nonsense? Won’t
you ever learn better, Michael?” David said severely, although the
pathetic broken figure on the stones was one to call forth only pity.
“Yes,” assented the old Irishman meekly, “I know better and the priest
is always telling me so. But yet—when there’s trouble to them you love
and seemingly no way out of it, why, you look back at the old fancies
and wonder if they were not true after all, and you feel the need to try
this thing or to try that thing, just in case there might be help in
it.”
“And what were you doing here?” David asked.
“It is on this house that the ill luck lies, for it was in its burning
that the evil fortune began and it is only through its building up again
that happiness can come back to Miss Miranda. And so—and so—just to make
the luck change, it is the old way to take a candle in your hand and to
walk through every part of the house saying spells as you go. And the
last of the spells must be said in the hour before midnight in the dark
of the moon. But Miss Betsey stopped me,” he concluded regretfully.
“This was to be the last night, yet I did not get the whole of the way.”
“She came just in time,” David corrected him. “The walls beyond here are
weaker even than these, and high enough to bury you completely if they
should fall. I was awake and heard the gate swinging, and I was trying
to think how it came to be open, but it was Betsey that was quick enough
to understand in time. When she ran down the stairs I got up to follow
her, yet I really did not guess what was happening until I heard you
fall. You must thank her that you are still alive.”
“But if the bad luck still holds,” protested Michael pitifully, “then it
will be all to do over again!”
He was silent as though gathering strength for further speech and then
began once more.
“And I must tell you that what has been going amiss is, the whole of it,
through fault of mine. There was a day, it was before you ever came to
the cottage, when Mr. Donald was last here that—that—” His voice
faltered, perhaps through weakness, perhaps through reluctance to go on,
but he drew a breath and continued bravely. “That very morning, when I
was getting my breakfast I spilled the salt dish and I thought to
myself, ‘Michael Martin, you will be losing your temper with some one
this day.’ But who was there for me to quarrel with except Miss Miranda
and her father and the good Saints know I could never be vexed with
them. So I went about my work and thought no more about it.
“But that afternoon I went over to the old house, it was late winter
still and I was wishing to gather some pine cones for Miss Miranda’s
hearth, and, for all the cold, I sat down on a stone to smoke a pipe and
think about the old times and how happy we all were before the fire
came. And there was Mr. Donald, walking about the broken walls, peering
here and peering there, but not stepping within for he is of the sort
that are always careful of the safety of their precious skins.”
He stopped again to rest his trembling voice.
“Don’t try to tell us, Michael, if it is so hard,” Elizabeth said.
“I must tell you, Miss Betsey,” he replied, “I have hid it in my heart
too long. He says to me, ‘I am just looking to see where the fire really
started, it seems that it must have been at this end where the workshop
stood.’ I says ‘Yes, sir,’ not being wishful to have any talk with him.
And after a little he says again, ‘It was a beautiful old place. I can
see plainly why Miranda longs for it and cannot be happy where she is.’
And this time I says nothing but puffs away at my pipe. It roused my
anger, some way, to see him peering about, though I am a slow-witted
fellow and had no guess at what he was looking for. At last he speaks
once more. ‘Why don’t they build it up again, Michael?’ he says. ‘They
could if they weren’t such a careless impractical pair. They should be
living here again, I have no patience with them.’ Then my wrath boils up
in me and I tells him what I thinks. ‘You have no patience, have you,’
says I, ‘with them that took you in and cared for you and bore with
those ways you have that no one likes. You’re prosperous yourself
through their help, if you want them to rebuild their house why don’t
you give them aid in doing it? Miss Miranda toils and saves and has her
garden and her ducks and anything she can think of to make things go
forward, so that her father will have what he needs for his work.’ All
of that I says to him and I wish the Saints had struck me dumb before I
spoke.
“‘She works so that her father may have what he needs?’ he repeats. ‘So
that is how things stand, just as I had been suspecting. Thank you,
Michael, that is all I wanted to know,’ he says and goes, leaving me
gaping after him as he walks away over the snow. I did not know even
then what use he was to make of what I had told him, but I saw well
enough that I had done harm. And so I have been doing all I could to
make amends,” he ended sadly; “I have watched over the house that he
should never come near with Miss Miranda not there, though I guessed but
little what it was he would do. And when it seemed of no use and I felt
helpless and afraid, thinking of the mischief I had done, I have turned
to trying to drive away the ill luck in the old fashion, with spells and
charms, just—just because there might be something in them after all.”
He ceased speaking and closed his eyes, worn out by the effort of
confession.
“He used to watch by the garden gate long before Miss Miranda’s cousin
ever showed himself,” was Betsey’s whispered comment to David. “He was
sitting there on the bench in the dark, that night we sat by the pool
and Miss Miranda told us the story of the green jade tree. He was
probably watching on the very evening that Donald Reynolds finally
came.”
“Yes,” David reminded her bitterly, “and slipped away on a chase after a
will-o’-the-wisp, lit his candle and came up here to this place when he
might have been of some real use at home. He even brought us there after
him, though he did not know it, just at the time when the man he dreaded
had really come. If he had only been sensible—”
“Don’t let him think of that,” said Betsey. “Yes, he went at just the
wrong minute but he must be kept from remembering it.”
Michael must have suspected that their whispered discussion concerned
the truth of his strange notions.
“Maybe I was wrong,” he said miserably, “but did not my own eyes see
Something stand there by the pool, did not my ears hear a splash in the
water that boded no good. If it had only been running water—”
Betsey felt David start suddenly in the dark.
“Say that again, Michael,” he ordered breathlessly.
The old Irishman repeated the words faithfully, even to the groan at the
end of them. David’s excitement was rapidly communicating itself to
Betsey.
“That was on the night Miss Miranda’s father was taken ill,” she said,
although of this explanation there was no need.
“I know, I know,” the boy returned quickly, “but wasn’t Mr. Reynolds in
his shop all the rest of the evening? That is what has puzzled me.”
“I looked in once and he was gone,” she answered, “but it was for such a
little while that I never thought of it again. Oh, if we should find
what is lost, at last!”
David was already on his feet, peering over the stone wall toward the
pool.
“We should try to get Michael home first,” Betsey objected, seeing
already what was in his mind.
“No, no,” the Irishman insisted, having only a vague notion of what they
were about, but feeling excitement in the air. “You shall not move me
one inch if there is aught to do first that may help Miss Miranda.”
“You must lie very still,” warned Betsey.
“Indeed and I will,” promised Michael obediently, “but—what is it you
are going to do, you two?”
They did not stop to explain, so great was their haste. They went
clambering over the wall again, and tumbled down the other side upon the
grass. The wind, from which they had been sheltered below, caught them
again as they ran to the pool. They knelt down at opposite sides of the
shallow curve and plunged their arms, shoulder deep, into the tossing
water.
“I have found something,” exclaimed Betsey almost immediately; “it feels
like thin metal blades set in a ring.”
She drew her prize, dripping, from the basin and held it up. As she sat
back on her heels the wind loosened her hair and flung its dark mass
over her shoulder. David, unable to see, took the object in his hand and
felt of it carefully.
“That is certainly the missing valve,” he pronounced, “so we know now
that we are right. The other parts were two steel tubes, about as long
as my hand. Those will not be so easy to find. They may have rolled away
to the deep end.”
No amount of fumbling on the bottom revealed anything further except
that Betsey, lifting a stone, grasped a frog that was beneath it and
almost tumbled into the water with the dreadful start its slippery
little body caused her. She sat up, panting, and attempted to wring out
her wet sleeve.
“What if we could not find them after all,” she lamented. “Mr. Reynolds
must have meant that no one, not even himself, should ever have them
again.”
But David was not willing to give up so easily.
“It is like a needle in a haystack,” he admitted, “but even such things
have been found.”
He poised himself at the edge of the basin, then slid into the water
with the clean straight dive of an expert swimmer. Once he went down,
and twice, and came up empty handed. The third time he was gone so long
that the water quieted and the reflected stars shone once more in their
places. Betsey, leaning over to watch in an agony of apprehension, felt
her tired spirit completely give way.
“Oh, David,” she wailed, although under her breath, “don’t be drowned
and leave me alone in the dark.”
As though in answer to her words a widening circle suddenly appeared on
the surface and David’s head rose at the center of the pool. He gasped
and spluttered and shook the water from his eyes.
“I have them,” he announced joyfully, “one in each hand. Now we have
found them all.”
He came clambering out on the edge of the basin, the water pouring from
him in streams, his red head sleek and shining.
“I got a little short of breath that last time,” he admitted. “I kept
touching the things and they kept rolling away, I thought I would never
get them in my hands. They would have rusted to bits in a little longer;
we have not found them at all too soon.”
Michael’s wits seemed to be wandering a little when they returned to
him, nor did he appear to understand very clearly the account that, both
speaking excitedly, they poured into his ears.
“Of course, of course,” he kept repeating a little impatiently, “did I
not tell you that the secret of the ill luck charm lay in the pool of
stars?”
“You did, Michael,” Betsey agreed soothingly at last, “but you see we
did not quite understand.”
“And now,” said David, getting up, “I am going back to the cottage to
telephone for the doctor and to bring help to carry Michael home. It
will not be long.”
Betsey sat very quiet after he had gone. The wind whooped and whirled
overhead, bowing the trees and beating back and forth the branches of
the vines and shrubs. All at once she began to hear a strange cracking,
a grating of stones and the snapping of ivy stems, the crushing of
bushes, then an appalling rumble that grew to a deafening crash of
falling stone. Even in the sheltered corner where they were, the ground
rocked and a cloud of gritty dust blew in upon them, almost choking them
both. Michael, startled, actually managed to raise himself on his elbow.
“What was that?” he asked.
“The wind has carried down the last walls that were standing in the
south wing,” she replied. “David said that they have been crumbling for
years and that lately, with feet going back and forth over them, they
have grown more and more ready to fall. I am glad you did not go
farther, you might have been hurt worse than this.”
The old man’s brain seemed to have been aroused by the shock into a
moment of absolute clearness.
“I should have been buried entirely, I am thinking,” he remarked, “and
there would have been an end to an old fool and his whims and fancies. I
sought to set things right in my own way and have done nothing but harm,
while it is you and Mr. David have found out all the trouble by your
plain good sense and loyal friendship, and will know how to mend what
has gone amiss. It is your standing so firm by Miss Miranda that has
made things go well again.”
“But it was you who told me to stand by her,” Betsey reminded him
comfortingly. “I would never have dreamed that I could help her if you
had not told me so.”
He was quiet a little but presently spoke again.
“When they come to carry me home it may be the pain of lifting me over
the wall will disorder my wits once more. So I should tell you what was
to be a secret, that Mr. Ted comes home to-day. That was why I was so
anxious the bad luck should be gone on this very night, and thanks to
you, it is. He was not quite certain of the time and did not wish to
disappoint his sister, so it was to old Michael he sent the message to
be on the watch for him. We were always great friends, Mr. Ted and me,
and to think that the blessed Saint Christopher has brought him home
safe at last.”
He must have made an effort to tell this, feeling that his senses were
once more slipping from him for almost immediately he went off again
into confused muttering.
“He saved my life,” he said once, more clearly, “he saved my sheep, him
and those great beautiful white dogs, but—” the thread of consciousness
had snapped again—“they were always the hunters, those greyhounds of the
King of Connemara; though they lived a thousand years ago you can hear
their cry over the hills to this day!”
It was, to Betsey, a moment of great relief, when she heard feet upon
the grassy pathway, saw the gleam of lanterns through the rifts in the
broken walls and knew that help had come. Later, however, there was a
very hard hour at the old man’s tiny cottage when the doctor attended to
his broken leg and the gash in his head.
“He will get through all right,” was the cheerful assurance given when
the affair was over. “I have attended Michael before, he gets himself
into many scrapes but he always comes out of them.”
The nurse had come down to give assistance, but she and the doctor were
both needed at Mr. Reynolds’ bedside. When questioned about Miss
Miranda’s father, the doctor merely shook his head.
They went away, leaving Betsey to watch Michael alone, since David also
had betaken himself to the cottage. She sat for hour after long hour
until it was beginning to be morning, as she could see from her place by
the bed near the tiny window. The birds were singing; perhaps it was
that same thrush that had greeted her before, that was swinging from the
drooping elm tree and calling its welcome to the dawn. Michael was
sleeping peacefully, she felt very weary herself as she sat there
watching the gray light turn slowly to bright day. A step fell on the
threshold, a heavy step that could be none other than Mrs. Bassett’s.
“These are the strangest doings that ever I heard of,” she exclaimed as
she came in, taking off her coat and putting on her apron almost with
the same motion. “To think that I slept through it all and never knew a
thing until that boy, tinkering in the workshop before it was light,
happened to wake me. I’ve got the breakfast ready up there at Miss
Miranda’s, and set everything to rights and now I am just going to stay
here while you go back and get some sleep. What a time you have had,
poor dear! They say Mr. Reynolds has got through the night a little
better than they hoped, though there is still nothing that will rouse
him from that stupor.”
The sun was really up and shining as Betsey passed through the garden
toward the cottage. The world was very clean and glittering and very
still, with only the old cock strutting across the poultry yard and
lifting his voice in a loud, full crow that sounded far through the
quiet of the dawn. It was a pleasant, homely, familiar sound after the
strange adventures and unrealities of the night. Betsey began to wonder
if it had not indeed been all a dream and she would not presently
discover that she had dropped asleep before the toy-cupboard, the tree
of jade or the silver Saint Christopher in her hand.
Black Dick, strutting and fluttering before the workshop, seemed to be
telling her, before she could run across the grass to the door, that
something of great moment was going on inside. David was busy with his
back toward her, a very jubilant and excited David, still in the damp,
bedraggled clothes of last night’s adventures, but whistling gayly and
handling wrench and hammer as though life itself depended on his speed.
He looked at her over his shoulder, smiling his widest and happiest
smile.
“Don’t go,” he said, breathless and eager, “don’t go.
Something—something is just going to happen!”
There was the snapping of a switch and the slow creak of a lever that
had not recently been moved. Then followed a faint and rising hum, a
whir of wheels grew louder and deeper, that filled the death-like
silence of the room with gay song, that sounded over the garden and
through the house, that reached the ears of the invalid upstairs and
made him stir and smile and open his eyes.
Betsey listened enthralled, too filled with breathless delight to heed
any other sound. Yet the gate from the lane was flung hastily and
noisily open and a man in uniform came striding up the path. She did not
even heed when Dick, with joyous cawing, spread wide black wings to fly
to the stranger’s shoulder, she only looked up, startled, to see him
standing in the inner hallway beyond the workshop door. There was
something of Miss Miranda in his bearing, something of her spirit in his
dancing eyes. And his voice, somehow, had a faint ring of her father’s
when he called up the stair, the same familiar call, but with no note of
worried helplessness like Mr. Reynolds’, only the ringing tidings of a
brother’s long-desired homecoming—
“Miranda, oh, Miranda.”
CONCLUSION
The summer had slipped away, the garden on the hillside was golden
instead of green and old white Dobbin was plowing for autumn’s sowing
instead of spring’s. Michael, possessed still of a slight limp and a
scar on his seamed forehead, but hale and lusty as before, dug among the
potatoes and had no one to tempt him from his habitual silence. Miss
Miranda was busy elsewhere and as for Elizabeth and David, the garden
and the yellow fields knew them no more.
Betsey’s father had come home and had set up his housekeeping in the
college town so that he and his daughter need not be separated again.
Aunt Susan also had returned, laden with souvenirs, curios, new clothes,
and glorious accounts of what she had seen. The descriptions, however,
like her collection of photographs, were apt to become a little jumbled
when brought out for exhibition, so that Betsey was never really quite
certain whether Bermuda was chiefly delightful for its mountain ranges
or its shopping, or whether Lake Louise, a marvel of scenic wonder as
she understood, was situated in the Canadian Rockies or the Garden of
the Gods. As a result she could not feel any sharp or definite regret
for what she had missed.
The completed invention had brought Miss Miranda’s father both fame and
fortune, even as his scientist friend had prophesied, and what was
better, had won him back to health. The first result of its success was
that the ruined walls of the old house had vanished and the big, gray,
beautiful building was going up again under the hands of an army of
workmen. Mr. Reynolds could be seen upon the lawn, superintending mildly
with Miss Miranda at his side, a very changed and happy Miss Miranda who
seemed to love watching one stone replaced above another as though each
were a miracle. When Elizabeth and David should come back for the first
vacation of their college year, the house would be under roof at least,
so that warm red tiles and sharp gable-lines would be reflected in the
pool on the lawn. There would be scarlet leaves floating in the water
then, and dry, brown grass nodding at the edge and, on quiet evenings,
there would rock upon the ripples the shining stars of Orion or the
laughing Pleiades.
That time, however, was still distant, for Betsey and David were
entering, this morning, on their first day of college. They had
journeyed from Harwood and came up from the station together, but now
stood near the great gray arch that led to the main campus, at the place
where they must part. The Scientific School, where David was to enter,
stood just across the road, showing a brick-columned entrance-way with
heavy iron gates and a hurrying throng passing out and in. The two had
been discussing the future year most earnestly when they set out, but
the talk had languished and they had fallen quite silent now. Hundreds
of people, it seemed, were hastening past them, all young, all eager,
all absorbed in their varied errands.
“I dread a little,” Betsey confessed at last; “it is so new and strange
and different. I wanted so much to come here, but now, just at the last
minute, I would be glad to go home again.”
David nodded.
“I feel the same way,” he agreed. “But I think anything big enough to be
worth while is bound to be dreaded a little too. The feeling won’t last
long. Well, the bell is ringing, we must go on, I think.”
They said good-by and turned to go in their opposite directions. Beyond
the vine-covered arch a great bell was swinging in one of those same
towers that they had watched across the valley, a silvery, sweet-voiced
bell, for all the greatness of its sound. Betsey walked forward,
surrounded more and more by hurrying companions, a few of them girls
from her school whom she knew, many, many of them strangers, but all
looking as though they might some day be friends. It was a
close-pressing throng as she came to the entrance of the main building
where she must go in, so that she had to mount slowly, step by step, to
the door. She could look back, down the straight walk, under the arch,
through the great gate opposite to where, far beyond, a similar group
was pressing into a similar doorway. For a fleeting second she felt a
little lonely, a little homesick, before such sensations were carried
away in the rush of excited thought of all that was in store for her.
She was glad that she could still see David’s red head from afar and
that it was the last thing of which she caught a glimpse, just as the
hastening crowd swept her across the threshold and into a new world.
THE END
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