In her terror and dread of his approach, she turned hastily to the
window and leaped down. Wildly she scrambled up, bruised and shaken, and
screaming hoarsely, while in unthinking terror she moved her hands, as
if beating off unwelcome hands, she ran pantingly up the road which led
to Deems's house.
The silence and the air of happy quietness that filled the house of her
friends seemed to lay a spell upon Martha. Caring for her as if she were
of the household, Deems and his wife were gratified by the change that
apparently was coming over their charge.
In their room, after Martha had bid them good night, Deems questioned
his wife.
"And how is Martha behavin', now?"
"You couldn't tell she's the same woman. Remember how she was when we
found her at the door that night--all mumbling and frightened so she
couldn't talk? Well, now she's calm and happy like. What she needed was
being with some one."
The quietness of her surroundings had had its effect on Martha. They
showed in the calm self-possession with which she walked about,
persisting in her efforts to help Mrs. Lennon in her household work. The
atmosphere of bustling activity--Deems's coming and going from the
village, from the cemetery, whither he went with his trowel and spade to
keep in repairs the many graves and plots on the hillside--all this
seemed to have drawn on some reservoir of unsuspected vitality and
composure within Martha.
These were the visible effects. In fact, however, there had grown in
Martha's mind a plan--a desire to cut herself forever free of Jim's
sinister possession--and this plan she fed from a reservoir of nervous
power that was fear and terror converted into cunning and despair. She
went about the house not as if relieved of fear of Jim, but cautiously,
as if somewhere in back of her mind was a way out, a way out, to win
which required care and watchfulness.
In this spirit she observed Deems's movements about the house until she
learned where he left his lantern and the box where he put away his
trowel and mallet and chisel. Now that the plan was clear in her own
mind, there was nothing to do but carry it out. She would cut the
dreadful tie that held her to Jim--the tie, the potency of which gave to
the dead man the power of holding her so completely. Reckoning thus, she
became wary of her companions as if fearing that they might in some way
interfere with her plans if they got wind of them. She knew that her
every move was watched, for she found that Mrs. Lennon had constituted
herself her guardian. Since her coming to the house, she had never left
its shelter, finding at first that companionship and reassurance which
gave her courage and resolution against Jim and the power to survive the
terror of thought of him, and finding finally that, with the formation
of her plan, she would have to conceal it from Deems and his wife. She
came to this conclusion in this wise.
One day, in the kitchen she came upon a newly sharpened cleaver, its
edge invisibly thin and its broad, flat side gleaming in the sun. Mrs.
Lennon was by the window and from without came the sounds of Deems
chopping wood.
Her mind was filled with a sudden clearness of thought and, swinging the
cleaver in the air, she said to Mrs. Lennon:
"You know--here's how I can break away from Jim. When he reaches
out--reaches out for me, I can just cut off his hand."
Mrs. Lennon stood motionless, startled by the unexpected words. She had
thought Martha's mind free of all fears of Jim. She was brought up
sharply by this sudden speech and gesture. "Deems," she called, "Deems,
come here."
Deems had taken the cleaver hastily from Martha's hands, and that night
told his wife that Martha would have to be watched closely. He feared
that Martha was becoming deranged.
Martha had discovered that she was watched when one night she left her
room. She heard the door open and instantly she felt the hands of Mrs.
Lennon on her arm and heard a gentle, persuasive voice asking her to
return to bed.
It was the next day, in the dusk of a turn in the hallway, that Martha
once more felt the presence of Jim. If her life in the peaceful
household of her friends had brought an outward calm, a mantle of repose
and quiet, this was instantly torn up by the vision that formed before
her eyes in the half dim hallway. Instantly she was the old Martha, held
in the grasp of terror. Her face was drawn in tense, white lines, her
lips were deformed, and with trembling gaunt hands she thrust back the
apparition. Her screams, "Jim, let me be, let me be," brought Mrs.
Lennon running and called Deems from his work in the wood-shed.
They found her in a faint on the floor. They carried her to her room and
put her to bed, Mrs. Lennon speaking to her, soothing and trying to
bring her back to her former calm.
There followed a few days of rain which seemed in some way to make
Martha less uneasy and restless. Deems and his wife, seeing her silent
and apparently resting, felt that slowly the terror she had been
suffering was being washed out. Martha's attitude encouraged this
feeling. She rested in silence, attentive to the dropping of the rain
and learning once more to wear her old-time composure.
When Deems returned toward nightfall one day, it was with the news that
the incessant rains had done serious damage in the cemetery. Dripping
from the drenching he had received in his tour of inspection, his boots
muddy, and his hands dirty from holding to the precarious bushes, he
shook with cold as he reported on what he had found. In his narrative he
had quite forgotten the presence of Martha who sat by, silent and
waxen-faced.
"And you ought to see," he said, turning to his wife, "how the rain has
run down those graves. You know, it's loosened Jim Sloan's stone so, I'm
afraid it'll fall against the first heavy blow."
Martha's exclamation "Oh!" recalled to him her presence. He stopped
talking for a while, then hoping to blot out the effects of his
statement he began a lively story of the number of trees that had fallen
across the road, and how he had been told that over at Rampaco the
post-office had been struck by lightning.
He did not know it, but Martha was deaf to his reports. She had her own
thoughts. She felt herself curiously strong of will, and there raced in
her blood the high determination to act that very night. Not for nothing
had she spent the rain drenched days in terrified silence in her room.
All of her energies that were still capable of being mustered to her
resolve, she had converted in the crucible of her will, and huddled in
terror, she had forged the determination to go out when the time came
and to cut herself free of the fiendish power that was searing her mind
and slowly crushing her. She remembered that in her faint, when she lay
limp and inert, a thing of dread, she had felt herself crumple up at the
touch of Jim--Jim reaching out to her. Now she would cut herself free of
him at the very source of his power over her. She would go that very
night.
She cast a glance toward the closet where Deems kept his trowel and
chisel. She would have need of them, she knew. She said "Good night"
rather more loudly and vehemently than she had intended, for she was
feeling nervous.
She was awakened by a feeling of cold. As she sat up she saw that the
door was open. What was it drew her eyes through the hallway and out
into the open and brought her up suddenly? There came upon her an
eeriness that startled and chilled her, and suddenly, as if it were
coming at her through the open door, fingers out-thrust, there appeared
the hand.
She was out of bed on the instant. Somehow in her throat she repressed
the upstartled cry, "Jim," by an effort that strained all her nerves and
made her face bloodless white. She could not, however, repress
completely the instinctive movement of her hands to ward off the
menacing hand. Suddenly a panic seized her and in terrified haste she
moved to the closet and, feeling a moment, took what she knew was
Deems's chisel.
Do what she could, she could not stem the flow of panic, and suddenly as
she began to pant and breathe heavily with the strain of terror, she
began also to gasp her pleadings to Jim.
"Don't, Jim. Don't take me," and, as if not at all of her own volition,
but at that of a guiding power, she moved out of the house, ghastly in
the night, mumbling and shivering.
She was still atremble--she was now chilled by the dampness of ground
and air--when she stood by Jim Sloan's gravestone. White it gleamed
against the sky, and now Martha's trembling and murmuring turned into a
furious industry as she raised the chisel to the stone.
"Jim--you'll let me be, won't you? You'll let me be? I want 'a live
yet." She began a frenzied hacking at the gravestone, seeing nothing but
the play of her chisel, and the white, fearful stone towering over her,
hearing nothing but the rasp of the chisel--not even hearing the rattle
of the loosened gravel as it slid from under the stone.
Deems Lennon and his wife were awakened by a heavy crash. "What can it
be?" he asked his wife, and then left the bed and ran up to Martha's
room. She was gone. Instantly they were both fully awake.
"It's Jim's grave she's gone to," ventured Deems. "Remember the way she
said 'Oh!' that time I told how the rain loosened the stone? Come on,
we'll go see."
In the dark when they were near the spot where the stone used to stand,
they heard a moaning. They approached and found Martha caught under the
stone, her body crushed, her dying breath coming slowly and heavily,
carrying her words, "Let me go! Jim, let me go!"