THE TENANTLESS HOUSE
Dark was falling keen and cool, for frost was in the air, touching the
fall foliage on the hills to crimson and amber, silvering the long
curving road that skirted the river bluff, and etching delicate hoar
tracery on the spidery framework of the long black railroad bridge that
hung above "the hole." The warning light from a signal-post threw a
crimson splash on the ground. Its green pane cast a pallor on a bearded
face turned out over the gloomy water.
The man who had paused there had come from far, and his posture
betokened weariness, but his features were sharp and eager. He turned
and paced back along the track to the signal-post.
"It was here," he said aloud. He stood a moment, his hands clenched.
"The new life began here. Here, then, is where the old life ended." From
where he stood he could see blossoming the yellow lights of the little
city, five miles away. He set his shoulders, whistled to the small dog
that nosed near-by, and set off at a quick pace down the road.
What had brought him there? He scarcely could have told. Partly,
perhaps, a painful curiosity, a flagellant longing to press the iron
that had seared him to his soul. So, after a fortnight of drifting, the
dark maelstrom of his thoughts had swept him to its dead center. This
was the spot that held the key to the secret whose shame had sent him
hither by night, like a jailbird revisiting the haunts that can know him
no more. He came at length to a fork in the road; he mechanically took
the right, and it led him soon to a paved road and to more cheerful
thoroughfares.
Once in the streets, a bar to curious glances, he turned up his coat
collar and settled the brim of his felt hat more closely over his eyes.
He halted once before a shadowed door with a barred window set in its
upper panel--the badge of a gambling-house. As he had walked, baffling
hints of pictures, unfilled outlines like a painter's studies had been
flitting before him, as faces flit noiselessly across the opaque ground
of a camera-obscura. Now, down the steps from that barred door, a filmy,
faded, Chesterfieldian figure seemed to be coming toward him with
outstretched hand--one of the ghosts of his world of shadows.
He walked on. He crossed an open square and presently came to the gate
of a Gothic chapel, set well back from the street. Its great
rose-window was alight, for on this evening was to be held a memorial
service for the old man whose money had built the pile, who had died a
fortnight before in a distant sanatorium. A burnished brass plate was
set beside the gate, bearing the legend: "St. James Chapel. Reverend
Henry Sanderson, Rector." The gaze with which the man's eye traced the
words was as mechanical as the movement with which his hand, in his
pocket, closed on the little gold cross; for organ practice was
beginning, and the air, throbbing to it, was peopled with confused
images--but no realization of the past emerged.
He turned at the sound of wheels, and the blur shocked itself apart to
reveal a kindly face that looked at him for an instant framed in the
window of a passing carriage. With the look a specter plucked at the
flesh of the wayfarer with intangible fingers. He shrank closer against
the palings.
Inside the carriage Bishop Ludlow settled back with a sigh. "Only a face
on the pavement," he said to his wife, "but it reminded me somehow of
Harry Sanderson."
"How strange it is!" she said--the bishop had no secrets from his
wife--"never a word or a sign, and everything in his study just as he
left it. What can you do, John? It is four months ago now, and the
parish needs a rector."
He did not reply for a moment. The question touched the trouble that was
ever present in his mind. The whereabouts of Harry Sanderson had caused
him many sleepless hours, and the look of frozen realization which had
met his stern and horrified gaze that unforgetable night--a look like
that of a tranced occultist waked in the demon-constrained commission of
some rueful impiety--had haunted the good man's vigils. He had knowledge
of the by-paths of the human soul, and the more he reflected the less
the fact had fitted. The wild laugh of Hugh's, as he had vanished into
the darkness, had come to seem the derisive glee of the tempter
rejoicing in his handiwork. Recollection of Harry's depression and the
insomnia of which he had complained had deepened his conviction that
some phase of mental illness had been responsible. In the end he had
revolted against his first crass conclusion. When the announced vacation
had lengthened into months, he had been still more deeply perplexed, for
the welfare of the parish must be considered.
"I know," he said at length. "I may have failed in my whole duty, but I
haven't known how to tell David Stires, especially since we heard of his
illness. I had written to him--the whole story; the ink was not dry on
the paper when the letter came from Jessica telling us of his death."
Behind them, as they talked, the man on the pavement was walking on
feverishly, the organ music pursuing him, the dog following with a
reluctant whine.
At last he came to a wide, dark lawn set thick with aspens clustering
about a white house that loomed grayly in the farther shadow. He
hesitated a moment, then walked slowly up the broad, weed-grown garden
path toward its porch. In the half light the massive silver door-plate
stood out clearly. He had known instinctively that that house had been a
part of his life, and yet a tremor caught him as he read the
name--STIRES. The intuition that had bent his steps from the street, the
old stirring of dead memory, had brought him to his past at last. This
house had been his home!
He stood looking at it with trouble in his face. He seemed now to
remember the wide colonnaded porch, the tall fluted columns, the green
blinds. Clearly it was unoccupied. He remembered the scent of jasmin
flowers! He remembered--
He started. A man in his shirt-sleeves was standing by a half-open side
door, regarding him narrowly.
"Thinking of buying?" The query was good-humoredly satiric. "Or maybe
just looking the old ranch over with a view to a shake-down!"
The trespasser smiled grimly. It was not the first time he had seen that
weather-beaten face. "You have given up surgery as a profession, I see,"
he said.
The other came nearer, looked at him in a puzzled way, then laughed.
"If it isn't the card-sharp we picked up on the railroad track!" he
said, "dog and all! I thought you were far down the coast, where it's
warmer. Nothing much doing with you, eh?"
"Nothing much," answered the man he addressed. Others might recognize
him as the black sheep, but this nondescript watchman whom chance had
set here could not. He knew him only as the dingy vagabond whose broken
head he had bandaged in the box-car!
"I'm in better luck," went on the man in shirt-sleeves. "I struck this
about two months ago, as gardener first, and now I'm a kind of a sort of
a watchman. They gave me a bunk in the summer-house there"--he jerked
his thumb backward over his shoulder--"but I know a game worth two of
that for these cold nights. I'll show you. I can put you up for the
night," he added, "if you like."
The wayfarer shook his head. "I must get away to-night, but I'm much
obliged."
"Haven't done anything, have you?" asked his one-time companion
curiously. "You didn't seem that sort."
The bearded face turned away. "I'm not 'wanted' by the police, no. But
I'm on the move, and the sooner I take the trail the better. I don't
mind night travel."
"You'd be better for a rest," said the watchman, "but you're the doctor.
Come in and we'll have a nip of something warm, anyhow."
He led the way to the open door and beckoned the other inside, closing
it carefully to. "It's a bully old hole," he observed, as he lit a brace
of candles. "It wasn't any trick to file a key, and I sleep in the
library now as snug as a bug in a rug." He held the light higher. "You
look a sight better," he said. "More flesh on your bones, and the beard
changes you some, too. That scar healed up fine on your forehead--it's
nothing but a red line now."
His guest followed him into a spacious hall, scarce conscious of what he
did. A double door to the left was shut, but he nevertheless knew
perfectly that the room it hid had a tall French window, letting on to a
garden where camelias had once dropped like blood. The open door to the
right led to the library.
There the yellow light touched the dark wainscoting, the marble
mantelpiece, dim paintings on the wall, and a great brass-bound Korean
desk in a corner. What black thing had once happened in that room? What
face had once looked at him from that wheel-chair? It was an old face,
gray and lined and passionate--his father, doubtless. He told himself
this calmly, with an odd sense of apartness.
The other's glance followed his pridefully. "It's a fine property," he
said. "The owner's an invalid, I hear, with one leg in the grave. He's
in some sanatorium and can't get much good of it. Nice pictures, them,"
he added, sweeping a candle round. "That's a good-looker over
there--must be the old man's daughter, I reckon. Well, I'll go and get
you a finger or two to keep the frost out of your lungs. It'll be cold
as Billy-be-dam to-night. Make yourself at home." The door closed behind
him.
The man he left was trembling violently. He had scarcely repressed a
cry. The portrait that hung above the mantelpiece was Jessica's, in a
house-dress of soft Romney-blue and a single white rose caught in her
hair. "The old man's daughter!"--the words seemed to echo and reecho
about the walls, voicing a new agony without a name. Then Jessica was
his sister!
The owner of the house, his father, an invalid in a sanatorium? It was a
sanatorium on the ridge of Smoky Mountain where she had stayed, into
which he had broken that stormy night! Had his father been there then,
yearning in pain and illness over that evil career of his in the town
beneath? Was relationship the secret of Jessica's interest, her
magnanimity, that he had dreamed was something more? A dizzy sickness
fell upon him, and he clenched his hands till the nails struck purple
crescents into the palms.
As he stared dry-eyed at the picture in the candle-light, the misery
slowly passed. He must _know_. Who she was, what she was to him, he must
learn beyond peradventure. He cast a swift glance around him; orderly
rows of books stared from the shelves, the mahogany table held only a
pile of old magazines. He strode to the desk, drew down its lid and
tried the drawers. They opened readily and he rapidly turned over their
litter of papers, written in the same crabbed hand that had etched the
one damning word on the draft he had found in the cabin on Smoky
Mountain.
This antique desk, with its crude symbols and quaint brass-work, a gift
to him once upon a time from Harry Sanderson, had been David Stires'
carry-all; he had been spending a last half-hour in sorting its contents
when the bank-messenger, on that fateful day, had brought him the slip
of paper that had told his son's disgrace. Most of the papers the
searcher saw at a glance were of no import, and they gave him no clue to
what he sought. Then, mysteriously guided by the subtle memory that
seemed of late to haunt him, though he was but half conscious of its
guidance, his nervous fingers suddenly found and pressed a spring--a
panel fell down, and he drew out a folded parchment.
Another instant and he was bending over it with the candle, his fingers
tracing familiar legal phrases of a will laid there long ago. He read
with the blood shrinking from his heart:
"_To my son Hugh, in return for the care and sorrow he has caused me all
the days of his life, for his dissolute career and his graceless
desertion, I do give and bequeath the sum of one thousand dollars and
the memory of his misspent youth. The residue of my estate, real and
personal, I do give and bequeath to my ward, Jessica Holme_--"
The blood swept back to his heart in a flood. Ward, not daughter! He
could still keep the one sweet thing left him. His love was justified.
Tears sprang to his eyes, and he laid the parchment back and closed the
desk. He hastily brushed the drops away, as the rough figure of the
watchman entered and set down two glasses and a bottle with a flourish.
"There you are; that'll be worth five miles to you!" He poured noisily.
"Here's how!" he said.
His guest drank, set down the glass and held out his hand. "Good luck,"
he said. "You've got a good, warm berth here; maybe I shall find one,
too, one of these days."
The dog thrust a cold muzzle into his hand as he walked down the gravel
path slowly, feeling the glow of the liquor gratefully, with the
grudging release it brought from mental tension. He had not consciously
asked himself whither now. In some subconscious corner of his brain this
had been asked and answered. He was going to his father. Not to seek to
change the stern decree; not to annul those bitter phrases: _his
dissolute career--the memory of his misspent youth!_ Only to ask his
forgiveness and to make what reparation was possible, then to go out
once more to the world to fight out his battle. His way was clear before
him now. Fate had guided him, strangely and certainly, to knowledge. He
was thankful for that. He had come a silent shadow; like a shadow he
would go.
He retraced his steps, and again stood on the square near where the
rose-window of the Gothic chapel cast a tinted luster on the clustering
shrubbery. The audience-room was full now, a string of carriages waited
at the curb, and as he stood on the opposite pavement the treble of the
choir rose full and clear:
"Lead, kindly Light, amid th' encircling gloom,
Lead Thou me on;
The night is dark, and I am far from home,
Lead Thou me on!
Keep Thou my feet! I do not care to see
The distant scene; one step enough for me."
He drew his hat-brim over his eyes, and mingled with the hurrying
street.