"Ah," he said, "it is even clearer now. My theory is right. The veil
was, as it were, the symbol that held them together. But now, I wonder,
does the will represent the old lady's revenge, or her forgiveness?"
"We shall know shortly," I interjected.
Fawcett nodded in the dark.
"Captain Drainger built the house," he continued inconsequentially,
"back in the forties for himself and his young bride, and, though it
looks bleak enough now, it was for the Crosby of those days a mansion of
the first class. The captain, the tradition is, was a wild, obstinate
fellow with black hair and brilliant eyes (I fancy Emily has much of her
father in her), and nobody was greatly surprised, when the war broke
out, to have him at first lukewarm, and then avowedly a Confederate. Of
course he might as well have professed atheism or free love in this
locality--he might better have blown his brains out--which he
practically did, anyway. Public sentiment forced him out of the state
and over Mason and Dixon's line, and he entered the rebel army as a
cavalry captain, and deliberately (we heard) got himself killed. Of
course the Drainger fortune, fair enough for those days, went to pieces
at once.
"Mrs. Drainger immediately adopted the policy of complete seclusion she
was to follow ever after. When the captain left, it was said they would
not speak; at any rate, she broke off her friendships, refused herself
to callers, and saw nobody. Her condition served her as an excuse, but
everybody knew, I guess, the real reason why she kept to herself. There,
alone with an old servant who died a year or so later, she walked the
floor of that mockery of a house, or sat brooding over the coming of the
child. It must have been pleasant! Emily was born just before we heard
of the captain's death.
"One or two of her nearest friends tried to comfort her, but she would
see no one except the doctor--who, by the way was my father. I have
inherited the Draingers, you see."
Fawcett's cigar was out, but he did not light another.
"My mother, from whom I got all this, said there was something
magnificent in the way Mrs. Drainger suffered, in the way she resented
any intrusion upon her self-imposed solitude. My mother was a courageous
woman, but she said she was positively frightened when Mrs. Drainger, a
tall, fair woman with straight, level eyes, came to the door in answer
to her knock.
"'You may go back, Lucy Fawcett,' she said. 'A rebel has no friends,'
and shut the door in my mother's mortified face.
"At first there was some grumbling and ill-natured talk, but it soon
ceased. People who knew her family (she was a Merion) saw pretty clearly
that Mrs. Drainger's heart had, for most purposes, stopped beating when
the captain found the bullet he was looking for, and tumbled from his
horse. What was left was the magnificent shell of a woman in that great
shell of a house--that, and the child. I can picture her sitting upright
in some great chair by the shuttered window, peering out at the rank
grass and the elm trees, or else wandering, always majestic, from room
to room with her baby in her arms, listening to the silence. She cut
herself off from the world of the living as though she had been buried,
and she tried to bring up Emily as though they were in the land of the
dead.
"Emily was, of course, her only friend, her only companion, her only
link with life. Tragically enough, she was to fail her. She grew up, a
solitary, imperious child, I imagine much as she is now. She strikes me
as being one of those unfortunate natures who are as old at twelve as
they ever will be. Mother hinted at terrible scenes between the woman,
like a tragedy queen, and her baby, the child stormily demanding to be
like other children, the mother stonily listening and never bending her
ways. The will of the mother--I grow fanciful--was like ice-cold metal,
the child was hot with life, and the result was passionate rebellions,
followed by long weeks of sullen silence. And always Mrs. Drainger
hugged her isolation and hugged her child to that isolation because she
was her father's daughter. How or on what they lived, nobody knows.
"You understand," Fawcett interposed, "that this is mainly conjecture.
They were long before my day then. I am merely putting together what I
heard and my own inferences from what I have seen. And it seems to me,
looking back, that Mrs. Drainger set, as it were, when the captain died,
into that terrible fixed mold she was to wear ever after, and the lonely
child with the brilliant black eyes was not merely fighting solitude,
she was beating her passionate little fists against the granite of her
mother's nature. And I fancy that at an early age (she was very mature,
mind), Emily came to hate her mother quite earnestly and
conscientiously, and, so to speak, without meanness or malice.
"Of course it was impossible to keep the girl totally confined. She did
not, it is true, go to school, but she went out more or less, and in a
queer, unnatural way she made friends. That was later, however. She
never went to parties, since her mother would not give any and she was
proud--all the Draingers are proud. And she had no playmates. Until she
was a young woman, so far as human intercourse was concerned, Emily
might as well have had the plague in the house.
"But she went out as she grew older. For instance, she went to church,
not, I fancy, because she had any need of religion, but because it was a
place she could go without embarrassment or comment."
There was a moment of silence as though Fawcett was pondering how to
continue, and I heard the blur of voices from the hall and prayed that
nobody would come.
"We lived across the street from them in those days," he resumed, "and I
was a young cub from the medical school, home only at vacations. I
really don't know all that happened. Indeed, it seems to me that I have
known the Draingers only by flashes at any time. They were always
wrapped in mysterious human differences, and even when you saw her on
the street some of that surcharged atmosphere of silence seemed to color
Emily's face. She had grown up then. Her clothes were quite orthodox,
and she was handsome as a leopard is handsome, but always she struck me
as haunted by a vague fear, a fear of the house, perhaps, and of her
mother's power to rule her. I used to fancy, watching her return to
their sombre dwelling, that she was drawn back as to a spider's web by
the fascination of its tragic silences. The story of her life is like a
strange book read by lightning, with many leaves turned over unseen
between the flashes."
"You were in love with her!" I cried.
"No," he said slowly. "I might have been, but I wasn't. You are right,
though, in guessing there was love in her story, only it was not I, it
was Charlie Brede who, so to speak, sprang the trap.
"She got to know him at church. Charles was an honest, ordinary, likable
boy with a face like a Greek god and a streak of the most unaccountable
perversity. His obstinacy was at once intense and wild. That made him
interesting and, though there was no greatness behind it, any woman
would have loved his face. Don't imagine, furthermore, because I have
supposed they met at church, that he was narrowly pious. Everybody went
to church in those days--there was nowhere else to go. Charlie was, in
short, an ordinary, well-behaved youngster, except that his face hinted
at possibilities he couldn't have fulfilled, and except for his dash of
narrow rebellion. I don't see how, to such a stormy creature as Emily,
he could have been bearable.
"The affair had got well along when I came home in the spring. At first,
I gathered from the talk, Emily had met him only away from the house
(it was not home), at church or downtown, or in such ways as she could
unsuspiciously contrive. Then somehow Charlie suspected something queer
and insisted, in one of his obstinate fits, on his duty to call.
"I know this because they stood for a long time under the trees in front
of our house, Charles's voice booming up through the scented darkness as
he argued. Emily put him off with various feminine subterfuges--she was,
I remember, rather magnificent in her despairing diplomacy--and I
thought for a while she would succeed. Then I heard Brede's voice,
wrathful and sullen, with a quality of finality.
"'If you are ashamed of me----' he said, and walked off.
"It was the one statement she could not outwit. Emily stood for a
moment, then--I can imagine with what terrific surrender of pride--ran
after him.
"'Charlie, Charlie!' she called. He stopped. She came up to him. There
was a low murmur of voices, and I thought she was crying.
"'Tuesday, then,' he said, and kissed her.
"Emily waited until he was well away, and in the moonlight I could see
her raise her hands to her head in a gesture that might have been
despair, that might have been puzzlement. Then she crossed the street
into the blackness of their porch.
"Did she love him? I don't know. Do you?"
The question hung motionless in the air. Fawcett lit another cigar.
"One would have expected something regal about the man Emily Drainger
should choose. You agree with me, I suspect, that she is--or
was--leonine, terrific. Perhaps she was deceived by his face. Perhaps,
after the manner of lovers, she found splendid lights and vistas in the
Charlie Brede the rest of us considered rather ordinary. Or perhaps,
since she had lived her solitary life so long, pestered and haunted by
her mother, any pair of lips would have awakened in her the same
powerful and primitive impulses. He was her man, and she wanted him, and
she was not to get him. I have even thought that she did not love him
at all: that she was quite willing to feign a passion in order to escape
from that terrible mother with her eyes forever focused on her tragedy,
her mother, and that gaunt, grim house. I am superstitious about that
house. Nothing good can come out of it. It warped Mrs. Drainger out of
all semblance to human nature, and it was warping Emily, and Mrs.
Drainger was somehow the presiding genius, the central heart of that
sinister fascination.
"Charlie called that Tuesday night, I know, because I stayed home to
see. I was quite unashamed in doing so. He had, I must say, courage. But
he did not see Emily. There were two chairs on the porch, and, to the
enormous surprise of the neighborhood, which had not seen Mrs. Drainger
for years, she occupied one of those chairs and Charlie the other, and,
after a fashion, they conversed. I could not hear what they said, but
there was in Mrs. Drainger's calm, in her placid acceptance of the
situation, a quality of danger. I had an impulse to cry out. She made me
think of a steel instrument ready to close. And, as Charlie had an
obstinate streak in him, it became fairly evident that we were
witnessing a duel--a duel for the possession of Emily Drainger. Mute
obstinacy was pitted against will, and Emily, enchained and chafing, was
permitted only to stand by.
"Considered from Mrs. Drainger's point of view, she was not, I suppose,
so hideously unfair. One doesn't shut off the last ray of light from the
prisoner's dungeon or grudge clothing to a naked man. And her daughter
was, as I have intimated, her only link with the living. Hers was the
selfishness of narrow hunger, if you will, of an almost literal
nakedness. And yet one cannot live alone with the dead for twenty years
and remain sane. Since Mrs. Drainger's life was to Mrs. Drainger
entirely normal, she could not, in the nature of the case, imagine what
she was condemning Emily to. The mother thought of Brede, I fancy, as of
some spiritual calamity that would rob her of half her soul, and she
brought to the issue her one power--her power of breaking people's
wills, and fought him as fiercely as she would have fought the devil.
"Charlie called again Friday and had again the pleasure of Mrs.
Drainger's society. He called again next week; this time both Emily and
Mrs. Drainger entertained him. The result was, I imagine, even more
unsatisfactory--what Mrs. Drainger wanted. If it had not been so
terrific, it would have been funny. Some of us, indeed, took to making
wagers on the contest. He called repeatedly. Whether he saw Emily or
not, there was always Mrs. Drainger.
"It is not her mere presence, mind, that was disconcerting. The old lady
was somehow sinister in her silent intensity, in her subtle power of
infiltration. Emily seemed, so far as I could see, thoroughly cowed.
Strain as she would at her leash, the keeper held her, and the tedious
pattern of their struggling conversation concealed bright chains. This,
Mrs. Drainger seemed to say, is what you are coming to. And Charlie
would look appealingly at Emily, and she at him, and they both looked at
the imperturbable monster of a woman, and on Charlie's lips the
desperate proposals to go somewhere, to do something, to get out of it,
died before he could utter them. Only mute obstinacy held him there.
Mrs. Drainger, if she could not prevent his coming, could at least hold
Emily dumb.
"It lasted some four weeks. At length--what was bound to happen--the
weakest snapped. A week went by, and Charlie did not come. Emily haunted
the porch in an ironic appearance of freedom. Mrs. Drainger, in some
subtle way, knew that she had won, that the girl was eternally hers.
Emily's face was pitifully white: she was suffering. Was it love? Or was
it her passionate hatred of the prison that held her, the guardian that
kept her helpless?
"Then, one evening, Charlie came up the street. He looked unwell, as
though the contest of wills had somehow broken him. He walked straight
to the porch where Emily sat. She rose to meet him--I think she was
trembling.
"'Good-bye,' he said, and held out his hand.
"Apparently she did not ask why he had failed her, or where he was
going, or how he came so abruptly to bid her farewell. She took his hand
for a moment, and, with the other, steadied herself against the chair,
and so they stood looking at each other. There must have been queer
lights in their eyes--desire baffled in some strange way, wounded
pride, and an eating, mortal sickness. Charlie's hand dropped, he ran
down the walk, crossed the street straight toward me so that I saw his
white face, and walked away. We never saw him again. Emily stood
watching him, perhaps hoping that he would look back. If he did there
was still a possibility. But he did not, and she heard, I suppose, the
iron gates clang to. She went abruptly into the house. An hour later I
saw her go out, and after an interval, return."
V
The story lay between us like a damp mist.
Fawcett seemed to have forgotten me, but my silence clung to him with
mute tenacity.
"What I should know," his voice rumbled on, "I don't know--that is, of
course, the scene between the two afterwards. When Emily Drainger
returned to her house that night something awful happened. What it was,
she alone now knows. But the next flash I had of their history came
three or four years later--when I had taken up my father's practice
after his death. I have said the Draingers were an inheritance; he had
been called in to see Mrs. Drainger several times and on those times had
seen what I saw later, but I had been away. I could not question him and
he was, above everything, scrupulously exact in keeping the confidences
of his patients--even with me. At any rate, I was called in to see Mrs.
Drainger as my father's son. I saw for the first time that her face was
entirely shrouded in the thick black veil she wore ever after; and the
wearing of that veil dates, I think, from the night that Charlie Brede
and Emily Drainger looked with baffled wonder into each other's eyes.
"Imagine living with the thing. Imagine the torture of patience, the
fixity of will required to keep it eternally on. Do you know how
bandages feel after a time? Think of shrouding your head for twenty
years. But think also of the slow stealthiness with which the mute
reproach of that shrouded face would creep into your nerves if you had
to live with it; think of the imaginative persistency which saw, in this
covering of the features, not merely just the tie that would hold Emily
to her forever, but the tedious process of revenge for an injury not
known to us, for some monstrous moment between the two that only the
dull walls of the house could hear.
"Think, too, of the ingenuity of that symbol. Its very helplessness
forbade to Emily the exultation of revilement. Good Heavens! It is bad
enough to be tied by your own weakness to a face that you hate, but to
be chained forever to that thing, to rise up with it and lie down with
it, to talk to it, to insult it, to listen to it, and yet never see your
sarcasms strike home! Think of hating a black veil for twenty years!
"Emily, of course, had changed. She met me at the door as she met you.
She was a shell burned out by one fierce moment of fire. Something had
toppled in her and collapsed, and only by the pitiless and continual
irony of her silence could she hide her inward loathing. With me she was
proud and acid, but in her mother's room, whither she led me, her
silence was like a frightened, defensive covering which might, at any
moment, be stripped from her, leaving her indecently, almost physically
bare. Her pride, in sum, was broken, but not her hatred. That smoldered
where before it had flamed.
"Mrs. Drainger had some minor complaint, I have forgotten what. Emily
followed me into the room where she sat--she seems to me always to have
been sitting with patient intensity in some corner of that house. I
recall the stab of surprise with which I searched the shadowy room for
the austere and beautiful face of the Mrs. Drainger we knew, and how, in
my confusion, I could see nothing but her hands. Emily mocked me with
her eyes, but did not speak. Then I saw.
"I remember I asked Mrs. Drainger, for some reason, to remove the veil.
I was raw in those days. Emily stiffened behind me and, I thought,
started to speak, but the rigid silence of Mrs. Drainger was never
broken. Her very speechlessness rebuked me. I prescribed for her and got
out of the house.
"If you will believe me, Gillingham," Fawcett went on with a change of
voice, "I have visited that house for twenty years and during that time
Mrs. Drainger, so far as I know, has never divested herself of her veil.
I got that much out of Emily. But I could get no more. She seemed to
freeze when I sought after reasons. I do not know what she had done, but
I do know that the wearing of that black mantle represented to them that
flaming crisis in their relationship when Emily lost forever her one
hope of escape.
"I have watched them for twenty years. Twenty years--think of it! They
were like two granite rocks, clashed once together, and thereafter
frozen into immobility. They have never changed. All pretense of
affection had dropped from them--even before me. There was only naked
hate. Year after weary year, seeing no one, never going anywhere, they
have rasped and worn each other merely by being what they are.
"And now the ultimate ingenuity, the last refinement of unhappiness! The
veil, I say, is a symbol of their shuddering cohesion which death would
normally destroy. But the will of this woman, as it triumphed over life,
she has made to triumph over death: if Emily removes the veil she
becomes, with her lack of training, her useless equipment, a helpless
beggar; if she does not remove it, if she never sees her mother's face,
she will be tormented by memory, bound forever, as she was in life, to a
blank and inscrutable shawl. Is it forgiveness--or justice, mercy or
revenge?"
Fawcett broke off as a swirl of guests flooded the coolness of the
porch.
"I will tell you what happens," I said when I could.
"Do," he returned. "And you must take precautions."