Quill's Window Part 2

Windom did not believe in women's colleges. He believed in the free school with its broadening influence, its commingling of the s.e.xes in the search for learning, and in the divine right of woman to develop her mind through the channels that lead ultimately and inevitably to superiority of man. He believed that the girl trained and educated in schools devoted exclusively to the finer s.e.x fails to achieve understanding as well as education. The only way to give a girl a practical education,--and he believed that every woman should have one,--was to start her off even with the boy who was training to become her master in all respects.

During her second year at the University she met Edward Crown, a senior. He was the son of a blacksmith in the city, and he was working his way through college with small a.s.sistance from his parent, who held to the conviction that a man was far better off if he developed his muscles by hard work and allowed the brain to take care of itself. Young Crown was a good-looking fellow of twenty-three, clean-minded, ambitious, dogged in work and dogged in play. He had "made" the football team in his soph.o.m.ore year.

Customary sn.o.bbishness had kept him out of the fraternities and college societies. He may have been a good fellow, a fine student, and a cracking end on the eleven, and all that, but he was not acceptable material for any one of the half dozen fraternities.

When he left college with his hard-earned degree it was to accept a position with a big engineering company, a job which called him out to the far Northwest. Alix Windom was his promised wife. They were deeply, madly in love with each other. Separation seemed unendurable. She was willing to go into the wilderness with him, willing to endure the hardships and the discomforts of life in a construction camp up in the mountains of Montana. She would share his poverty and his trials as she would later share his triumphs.

But when they went to David Windom with their beautiful dream, the world fell about their ears.

David Windom, recovering from the shock of surprise, ordered Edward from the house. He would sooner see his child dead than the wife of Nick Crown's son,--Nick Crown, a drunken rascal who had been known to beat his wife,--Nick Crown who was not even fit to lick the feet of the horses he shod!

One dark, rainy night in late June, Alix stole out of the old farmhouse on the ridge and met her lover at the abandoned tollgate half a mile up the road. He waited there with a buggy and a fast team of horses. Out of a ramshackle cupboard built in the wall of the toll-house, they withdrew the bundles surrept.i.tiously placed there by Alix in antic.i.p.ation of this great and daring event, and made off toward the city at a break-neck, reckless speed. They were married before midnight, and the next day saw them on their way to the Far West. But not before Alix had despatched a messenger to her father, telling him of her act and asking his forgiveness for the sake of the love she bore him. The same courier carried back to the city a brief response from David Windom. In a shaken, sprawling hand he informed her that if she ever decided to return to her home ALONE, he would receive her and forgive her for the sake of the love he bore her, but if she came with the coward who stole her away from him, he would kill him before her eyes.

II

The summer and fall and part of the winter pa.s.sed, and in early March Alix came home.

David Windom, then a man of fifty, gaunt and grey and powerful, seldom had left the farm in all these months. He rode about his far-spread estate, grim and silent, his eyes clouded, his voice almost metallic, his manner cold and repellent. His tenants, his labourers, his neighbours, fearing him, rarely broke in upon his reserve. Only his animals loved him and were glad to see him,--his dogs, his horses, even his cattle. He loved them, for they were staunch and faithful. Never had he uttered his daughter's name in all these months, nor was there a soul in the community possessed of the hardihood to inquire about her or to sympathize with him.

It was a fierce, cruel night in March that saw the return of Alix.

A fine, biting snow blew across the wide, open farmlands; the beasts of the field were snugly under cover; no man stirred abroad unless driven by necessity; the cold, wind-swept roads were deserted. So no one witnessed the return of Alix Crown and her husband. They came out of the bleak, unfriendly night and knocked at David Windom's door. There were lights in his sitting-room windows; through them they could see the logs blazing in the big fireplace, beside which sat the lonely, brooding figure of Alix's father. It was late,--nearly midnight,--and the house was still. Old Maria Bliss and the one other servant had been in bed for hours. The farmhands slept in a cottage Windom had erected years before, acting upon his wife's suggestion. It stood some two or three hundred yards from the main house.

A dog in the stables barked, first in anger and then with unmistakable joy. David's favourite, a big collie, sprang up from his place on the rug before the fire and looked uneasily toward the door opening onto the hall. Then came a rapping at the front door. The collie growled softly as he moved toward the door. He sniffed the air in the hall and suddenly began to whine joyously, wagging his tail as he bounded back and forth between his master and the door.

David Windom knew then that his daughter had come home.

He sprang to his feet and took two long strides toward the door.

Abruptly, as if suddenly turned to stone, he stopped. For a long time he stood immovable in the middle of the room. The rapping was repeated, louder, heavier than before. He turned slowly, retraced his steps to the fireplace and took from its rack in the corner a great iron poker. His face was ashen grey, his eyes were wide and staring and terrible. Then he strode toward the door, absolutely unconscious of the glad, prancing dog at his side.

In the poor shelter of the little porch stood Alix, bent and shivering, and, behind her, Edward Crown, at whose feet rested two huge "telescope satchels." The light from within fell dimly upon the white, upturned face of the girl. She held out her hands to the man who towered above her on the doorstep.

"Daddy! Daddy!" she cried brokenly. "Oh, my daddy! Let me come in--let me,--I--I am freezing."

But David Windom was peering over her head at the indistinct face of the man beyond. He wanted to be sure. Lifting his powerful arm, he struck.

Edward Crown, stiff and numb with cold and weak from an illness of some duration, did not raise an arm to ward off the blow, nor was he even prepared to dodge. The iron rod crashed down upon his head.

His legs crumpled up; he dropped in a heap at the top of the steps and rolled heavily to the bottom, sprawling out on the snow-covered brick walk.

The long night wore on. Windom had carried his daughter into the sitting-room, where he placed her on a lounge drawn up before the fire. She had fainted. After an hour he left her and went out into the night. The body of Edward Crown was lying where it had fallen.

It was covered by a thin blanket of snow. For a long time he stood gazing down upon the lifeless shape. The snow cut his face, the wind threshed about his coatless figure, but he heeded them not. He was muttering to himself. At last he turned to re-enter the house.

His daughter was standing in the open doorway.

"Is--is that Edward down there?" she asked, in weak, lifeless tones.

She seemed dull, witless, utterly without realization.

"Go back in the house," he whispered, as he drew back from her in a sort of horror,--horror that had not struck him in the presence of the dead.

"Is that Edward?" she insisted, her voice rising to a queer, monotonous wail.

"I told you to stay in the house," he said. "I told you I would look after him, didn't I? Go back, Alix,--that's a good girl. Your--your daddy will--Oh, my G.o.d! Don't look at me like that!"

"Is he dead?" she whispered, still standing very straight in the middle of the doorway. She was not looking at the inert thing on the walk below, but into her father's eyes. He did not, could not answer. He seemed frozen stiff. She went on in the same dull, whispered monotone. "I begged him to let me come alone. I begged him to let me see you first. But he would come. He brought me all the way from the West and he--he was not afraid of you. You have done what you said you would do. You did not give him a chance.

And always,--always I have loved you so. You will never know how I longed to come back and have you kiss me, and pet me, and call me those silly names you used--"

"What's done, is done," he broke in heavily. "He is dead. It had to be. I was insane,--mad with all these months of hatred. It is done.

Come,--there is nothing you can do. Come back into the house. I will carry him in--and wake somebody. Tomorrow they will come and take me away. They will hang me. I am ready. Let them come. You must not stand there in the cold, my child."

She toppled forward into his arms, and he lifted her as if she were a babe and carried her into the house. The collie was whining in the corner. Windom sat down in the big armchair before the fire, still holding the girl in his arms. She was moaning weakly. Suddenly a great, overwhelming fear seized him,--the fear of being hanged!

A long time afterward,--it was after two,--he arose from his knees beside the lounge and prepared to go out into the night once more.

Alix had promised not to send her father to the gallows. She was almost in a stupor after the complete physical and mental collapse, but she knew what she was doing, she realized what she was promising in return for the blow that had robbed her of the man she loved.

No one will ever know just what took place in that darkened sitting-room, for the story as afterwards related was significantly lacking in details. The light had been extinguished and the doors silently closed by the slayer. The stiffening body of Edward Crown out in the snow was not more silent than the interior of the old farmhouse, apart from the room in which David Windom pleaded with his stricken daughter.

And all the while he was begging her to save him from the consequences of his crime, his brain was searching for the means to dispose of the body of Edward Crown and to provide an explanation for the return of Alix without her husband.

Circ.u.mstances favoured him in a surprising manner. Young Crown and his wife had travelled down from Chicago in a day coach, and they had left the train at a small way station some five miles west of the Windom farm. Crown was penniless. He did not possess the means to engage a vehicle to transport them from the city to the farm, nor the money to secure lodging for the night in the cheapest hotel.

Alix's pride stood in the way of an appeal to her husband's father or to any one of his friends for a.s.sistance. It was she who insisted that they leave the train at Hawkins station and walk to Windom's house. They had encountered no one who knew them, either on the train or at the station; while on their cold, tortuous journey along the dark highway they did not meet a solitary human being.

No one, therefore, was aware of their return.

Edward Crown's presence in the neighbourhood was unknown. If David Windom's plan succeeded, the fact that Crown had returned with his wife never would be known. To all inquirers both he and his daughter were to return the flat but evasive answer: "It is something I cannot discuss at present," leaving the world to arrive at the obvious conclusion that Alix's husband had abandoned her. And presently people, from sheer delicacy, would cease to inquire. No one would know that Crown had been ill up in the mountains for weeks, had lost his position, and had spent his last penny in getting his wife back to the house in which she was born,--and where her own child was soon to be born.

Windom went about the task of secreting his son-in-law's body in a most systematic, careful manner. He first carried the two "telescopes"

into the house and hid them in a closet. Then he put on an old overcoat and cap, his riding boots and gloves. Stealing out to the rear of the house, he found a lantern and secured it to his person by means of a strap. A few minutes later he was ready to start off on his ghastly mission. Alix nodded her head dumbly when he commanded her to remain in the sitting-room and to make no sound that might arouse Maria Bliss. He promised to return in less than an hour.

"Your father's life depends on your silence, my child, from this moment on," he whispered in her ear.

She started up. "And how about my husband's life?" she moaned.

"What of him? Why do you put yourself--"

"Sh! Your husband is dead. You cannot bring him to life. It is your duty,--do your hear?--your duty to spare the living. Remember what I said to you awhile ago. Never forget it, my child."

"Yes," she muttered. "'Blood is thicker than water.' I remember."

III

He went out into the night, closing the door softly behind him.

The collie was at his heels. He was afraid to go alone. Grimly, resolutely he lifted the body of Edward Crown from the ground and slung it across his shoulder, the head and arms hanging down his back. Desperation added strength to his powerful frame. As if his burden were a sack of meal, he strode swiftly down the walk, through the gate and across the gravel road. The night was as black as ink, yet he went unerringly to the pasture gate a few rods down the road. Unlatching it, he pa.s.sed through and struck out across the open, wind-swept meadow. The dog slunk along close behind him, growling softly. Snow was still falling, but the gale from the north was sweeping it into drifts, obliterating his tracks almost as soon as they were made.

Straight ahead lay the towering, invisible rock, a quarter of a mile away. He descended the ridge slope, swung tirelessly across the swales and mounds in the little valley, and then bent his back to the climb up the steep incline to Quill's Window. Picking his way through a fringe of trees, he came to the tortuous path that led to the crest of the great rock. Panting, dogged, straining every ounce of his prodigious strength, he struggled upward, afraid to stop for rest, afraid to lower his burden. The sides and the flat summit of the rock were full of treacherous fissures, but he knew them well. He had climbed the sides of Quill's Window scores of times as a boy, to sit at the top and gaze off over the small world below, there to dream of the great world outside, and of love, adventure, travel. Many a night, after the death of his beloved Alix, he had gone up there to mourn alone, to be nearer to the heaven which she had entered, to be closer to her. He knew well of the narrow fissure at the top,--six feet deep and the length of a grave! Filled only with the leaves of long dead years!

He lowered his burden to the bare surface of the rock. The wind had swept it clean. Under the protecting screen of his overcoat he struck a match and lighted the lantern. Then for the first time he studied closely the grey, still face of the youth he had slain.

The skull was crushed. There was frozen blood down the back of the head and neck--He started up in sudden consternation. There would be blood-stains where the body had lain so long,--tell-tale, convicting stains! He must be swift with the work in hand. Those stains must be wiped out before the break of day.

Lowering himself into the opening, he began digging at one end with his hands, scooping back quant.i.ties of wet leaves. There was snow down there in the pit,--a foot or more of it. After a few minutes of vigorous clawing, a hole in the side of the fissure was revealed,--an aperture large enough for a man to crawl into. He knew where it led to: down into Quill's cave twenty feet below.

Some one,--perhaps an Indian long before the time of Quill, or it may have been Quill himself,--had chiselled hand and toe niches in the sides of this well and had used the strange shaft as means of getting into and out of the cave. Windom's father had closed this shaft when David was a small boy, after the venturesome youngster had gone down into the cave and, unable to climb out again, had been the cause of an all-day search by his distracted parent and every neighbour for miles around. The elder Windom had blocked the bottom of the hole with a huge boulder, shorn from the side of the cave by some remote wrench of nature. Then he had half filled the cavity from the top by casting in all of the loose stones to be found on the crest of the rock, together with a quant.i.ty of earth.

The work had never been completed. There still remained a hole some ten feet deep.

David Windom clambered out, leaving his lantern below. Letting the dead man's body slide into the crevice, he followed, bent on at least partially finishing the job. When he climbed out a second time, Edward Crown was at the bottom of the hole and the wet, foul leaves again hid the opening. Tomorrow night, and the night after, he would come again to close the hole entirely with earth and stones, hiding forever the grewsome thing in Quill's "chimney," as the flue-like pa.s.sage was called.