Quill's Window Part 3

Extinguishing the lantern, he started down the hill at a reckless, break-neck speed. He had the uncanny feeling that he was being followed, that Edward Crown was d.o.g.g.i.ng his footsteps. Halfway down, he stumbled and fell sprawling. As he started to rise, a sound smote his ears--the sound of footsteps. For many seconds he held his breath, terror clutching his throat. He WAS being followed!

Some one was shuffling down the rock behind him. The collie! He had forgotten the dog. But even as he drew in the deep breath of relief, he felt his blood suddenly freeze in his veins. It was not the dog. Something approached that moaned and whimpered and was not mortal. It pa.s.sed by him as he crouched to the earth,--a shadow blacker than the night itself. Suddenly the truth burst upon him.

"My G.o.d! Alix!"

Half an hour later he staggered into his house, bearing the form of his daughter,--tenderly, carefully, not as he had borne the despised dead.

She had followed him to the top of Quill's Window, she had witnessed the ghastly interment, and she had whispered a prayer for the boy who was gone.

The next day her baby was born and that night she died. Coming out of a stupor just before death claimed her, she said to David Windom:

"I am going to Edward. I do not forgive you, father. You must not ask that of me. You say it is my duty to save you from the gallows,--a child's duty to her parent. I have promised. I shall keep my promise. It is not in my heart to send you to the gallows. You are my father. You have always loved me. This is my baby,--mine and Edward's. She may live,--G.o.d knows I wish I might have died yesterday and spared her the accursed breath of life,--she may grow up to be a woman, just as I grew up. I do not ask much of you in return for what I have done for you, father. You have killed my Edward. I loved him with all my soul. I do not care to live. But my child must go on living, I suppose. My child and his. She is his daughter. I cannot expect you to love her, but I do expect you to take care of her. You say that blood is thicker than water. You are right. I cannot find it in my heart to betray you. You may tell the world whatever story you like about Edward. He is dead, and I shall soon be dead. You can hurt neither of us, no matter what you do. I ask two things of you. One is that you will be good to my baby as long as you may live, and the other is that you will bury me up there where you put Edward last night. I must lie near him always. Say to people that I have asked you to bury me in that pit at the top of Quill's Window,--that it was my whim, if you like.

Close it up after you have placed me there and cover it with great rocks, so that Edward and I may never be disturbed. I want no headstone, no epitaph. Just the stones as they were hewn by G.o.d."

David Windom promised. He was alone in the room with her when she died.

IV

Twenty years pa.s.sed. Windom came at last to the end of his days.

He had fulfilled his promises to Alix. He had taken good care of her daughter, he had given her everything in his power to give, and he had worshipped her because she was like both of the Alixes he had loved. She was Alix Crown,--Alix the Third, he called her.

On the day of his death, Windom confessed the crime of that far off night in March. In the presence of his lawyer, his doctor, his granddaughter and the prosecuting attorney of the county, he revealed the secret he had kept for a score of years. The mystery of Edward Crown's disappearance was cleared up, and for the first time in her young life Alix was shorn of the romantic notion that one day her missing father would appear in the flesh, out of the silences, to claim her as his own. From earliest childhood, her imagination had dealt with all manner of dramatic situations; she had existed in the glamour of uncertainty; she had looked upon herself as a character worthy of a place in some gripping tale of romance. The mound of rocks on the crest of Quill's Window, surrounded by a tall iron paling fence with its padlocked gate, covered only the body of the mother she had never seen. She did not know until this enlightening hour that her father was also there and had been throughout all the years in which fancy played so important a part.

Like all the rest of the world, she was given to understand that her father had cruelly abandoned her mother. In her soul she had always cherished the hope that this heartless monster might one day stand before her, pleading and penitent, only to be turned away with the scorn he so richly deserved. She even pictured him as rich and powerful, possessed of everything except the one great boon which she alone could give him,--a daughter's love. And she would point to the top of Quill's Window and tell him that he must first look there for forgiveness,--under the rocks where his broken-hearted victim slept.

The truth stunned her. She was a long time in realizing that her grandfather, whom she both loved and feared,--this grim, adoring old giant,--not only had murdered her father but undoubtedly had killed her mother as well. The story that David Windom had written out and signed at the certain approach of death, read aloud in his presence by the shocked and incredulous lawyer, and afterwards printed word for word in the newspapers at the old man's command, changed the whole course of life for her. In fact, her nature underwent a sharp but subtle change. There was nothing left to her of the old life, no thought, no purpose, no fancy; all had been swept up in a heap and destroyed in the short s.p.a.ce of half an hour. Everything in her life had to be reconstructed, made-over to suit the new order. She could no longer harbour vengeful thoughts concerning her father, she could no longer charge him with the wanton destruction of her mother's happiness.

The grandfather she had loved all her life a.s.sumed another shape entirely; he was no longer the same, and never again could be the same. She did not hate him. That was impossible. She had never seen her parents, so she had not known the love of either. They did not belong in her life except through the sheerest imagination. Her grandfather was the only real thing she had had in life, and she had adored him. He had killed two people who were as nothing to her, but he had taken the place of both. How could she bring herself to hate this man who had destroyed what were no more than names to her? Father,--Mother! Two words,--that was all. And for twenty long years he had been paying,--Oh, how he must have paid!

She recalled his reason for taking her to England when she was less than eight years old and leaving her there until she was twelve.

She remembered that he had said he wanted her to be like her grandmother, to grow up among her people, to absorb from them all that had made the first Alix so strong and fine and true. And then he had come to take her from them, back to the land of her birth, because, he said, he wanted her to be like her mother, the second Alix,--an American woman. She recalled his bitter antipathy to co-educational inst.i.tutions and his unyielding resolve that she should complete her schooling in a Sacred Heart Convent. She remembered the commotion this decision created among his neighbours. In her presence they had a.s.sailed him with the charge that he was turning the girl over, body and soul, to the Catholic Church, and he had uttered in reply the never to be forgotten words:

"If I never do anything worse than that for her, I'll be d.a.m.ned well satisfied with my chance of getting into heaven as soon as the rest of you."

When David's will was read, it was found that except for a few small bequests, his entire estate, real and personal, was left to his granddaughter, Alix Crown, to have and to hold in perpetuity without condition or restriction of any sort or character.

The first thing she did was to have a strong picket fence constructed around the base of the hill leading up to Quill's Window, shutting off all accessible avenues of approach to the summit. Following close upon the publication of David Windom's confession, large numbers of people were urged by morbid curiosity to visit the strange burial-place of Edward and Alix Crown. The top of Quill's Window became the most interesting spot in the county. Alix the Third was likewise an object of vast interest, and the old, deserted farmhouse on the ridge came in for its share of curiosity.

Almost immediately after the double tragedy and the birth of little Alix, David Windom moved out of the house and took up his residence in the riverside village of Windomville, a mile to the south.

The old house was closed, the window shutters nailed up, the doors barred, and all signs of occupancy removed. It was said that he never put foot inside the yard after his hasty, inexplicable departure.

The place went to rack and ruin. In course of time he built a new and modern house nearer the village, and this was now one of the show places of the district.

The influence of Alix the First was expressed in the modelling of house and grounds, the result being a picturesque place with a distinctly English atmosphere, set well back from the highway in the heart of a grove of oaks,--a substantial house of brick with a steep red tile roof, white window cas.e.m.e.nts, and a wide brick terrace guarded by a low ivy-draped wall. English ivy swathed the two corners of the house facing the road, mounting high upon the tall red chimneys at the ends. There were flower-beds below the terrace, and off to the right there was an old-fashioned garden.

The stables were at the foot of the hill some distance to the rear of the house.

The village of Windomville lay below, hugging the river, a relic of the days when steamboats plied up and down the stream and railways were remote, a sleepy, insignificant, intensely rural hamlet of less than six hundred inhabitants. Its one claim to distinction was the venerable but still active ferry that laboured back and forth across the river. Of secondary importance was the ancient dock, once upon a time the stopping place of steamboats, but now a rotten, rickety obstruction upon which the downstream drift lodged in an unsightly ma.s.s.

In the solid red-brick house among the oaks Alix the Third had spent her childhood days. She was taken to England when she was eight by her haunted grandfather, not only to receive the bringing-up of an English child, but because David Windom's courage was breaking down. As she grew older, the resemblance to Edward Crown became more and more startling. She had his dark, smiling eyes; his wavy brown hair; her very manner of speech was like his. To David Windom, she was the re-incarnation of the youth he had slain. Out of her eyes seemed to look the soul of Edward Crown. He could not stand it.

She became an obsession, a curious source of fascination. He could not bear her out of his sight, and yet when she was with him, smiling up into his eyes,--he was deathly afraid of her. There were times when he was almost overcome by the impulse to drop to his knees and plead for forgiveness as he looked into the clear, friendly, questioning eyes of Edward Crown.

And her voice, her speech,--therein lay the true cause of his taking her to England. When she came home to him, after four years, there was no trace of Edward Crown in her voice or manner of speaking.

She was almost as English as Alix the First. But her eyes had not changed; he was still a haunted man.

In the little graveyard on the outskirts of the village more than a score of Windoms lie. With them lies all that was mortal of fair Alix the First, and beside her is David Windom, the murderer.

CHAPTER III

COURTNEY THANE

"And what has become of Alix the Third?" inquired the young man, squinting at his wrist.w.a.tch and making out in the semi-darkness that it was nearly half-past nine.

He had listened somewhat indulgently to the story of the three Alixes.

The old man, prompted and sometimes disputed by other members of the family, had narrated in his own simple way the foregoing tale, arriving at the end in a far more expeditious and certainly in a less studied manner than the present chronicler employs in putting the facts before his readers. The night was hot. He was occasionally interrupted by various members of the little group on the front porch of the big old farmhouse, the interruption invariably taking the form of a conjecture concerning the significance of certain signs ordinarily infallible in denoting the approach of rain. Heat lightning had been playing for an hour or more in the gloomy west; a tree-toad in a nearby elm was prophesying thunder in unmelodious song: night-birds fluttered restlessly among the lofty branches; widely separated whiffs of a freshening wind came around the corner of the house. All of these had a barometric meaning to the wistful group. There was a thunderstorm on the way. It was sure to come before morning. The prayers inaugurated a month ago were at last to be answered.

As old man Brown drily remarked: "There's one satisfaction about prayin' for rain. If you keep at it long enough, you're bound to get what you're askin' for. Works the same way when you're prayin'

for it to stop rainin'. My grandfather once prayed for a solid two months before he got rain, and then, by gosh, he had to pray for nearly three weeks to get it to quit."

Supper over, the young man had reminded his venerable angling companion of his promise to relate the history of Quill's Window.

Old Caleb Brown was the father of Mrs. Vick,--Lucinda Vick, wife of the farmer in whose house the young man was spending a month as a boarder.

The group on the porch included Amos Vick, anxious, preoccupied, and interested only in the prospect of rain; his daughter Rosabel, aged eighteen, a very pretty and vivacious girl, interested only in the young man from the far-off, mysterious city in the East; his son Caleb, a rugged youth of nineteen; Mrs. Vick, and a neighbour named White, who had come over for the sole purpose of finding out just what Amos Vick thought about the weather. Two dogs lay panting on the dry gra.s.s at the foot of the steps.

"Oh, she's living over there in the Windom house," said Mrs. Vick.

"Sort of running the place," explained Mr. Brown, a trace of irony in his voice.

"Well," put in Amos Vick, speaking for the first time in many minutes, "she's got a lot of sense, that girl has. She may be letting on that she's running the farm, but she ain't, you bet. That's where she's smart. She's got sense enough to know she don't know anything about running a farm, and while she puts on a lot of airs and acts kind of important like, the real truth is she leaves everything to old Jim Bagley. I guess you don't know who Jim Bagley is, do you, Courtney?"

"I can't say that I do," replied the young man.

"Well, he's about the slickest citizen you ever saw. From what father here says about your granddad, he must have been a purty hard customer to deal with, but, by ginger, if he was any worse than Jim Bagley in driving a bargain, I'm glad he died as long ago as he did."

"You're just sore, Amos," said his wife, "because Mr. Bagley got the best of you in that hog deal three years ago."

"Oh, Lord, ain't you ever going to get tired of throwin' that up to me?" groaned Mr. Vick. "I never mention Jim Bagley's name but what you up and say something about them hogs. Now, as a matter of fact, them hogs--"

"For goodness sake, Pa, you're not going to tell Mr. Thane about that hog business, are you?" cried Rosabel.

"Well, when your Ma begins to insinuate that I got the worst of--"

"I don't say that you got the worst of it, Amos," interrupted Mrs.

Vick good-humouredly. "I only say that he got the best of it."

"Well, if that don't come to the same--"