The Best Short Stories of 1915 Part 25

"I have searched the streets through for him ever since," she remonstrated; "I have asked everybody I saw, and no one in the whole place could tell me of any old man answering his description."

They watched his slow, difficult approach over the gravel. He came forward without making the slightest recognition of their presence.

Stopping full in front of them, he took off his hat, applied a straggling red handkerchief uncertainly to his face, and stared up at the house-front.

"They tell me," he muttered, not once looking at either of his interlocutors, "that yer've been and sold it. So yer couldn't stand it, eh, after all? It's what Al Makepeace said 'u'd be the case. Looks innocent, though, as herself did, now, don't it?"

"We've sold it," Julia protested, "only because--because we can't stay here. Jack--Mr. Hastings--and I are going to be married. We are going to live in Europe. My father and mother didn't want--"

"Yer can't make a new dog out of an old dog, ner learn an old dog new tricks," he went on disregardingly; "and I guess it's the same fur's houses be concerned."

"Who are you, anyway?" Hastings asked, getting up to offer the old man a chair.

"Who am I?" the old man echoed, suddenly attentive. "Dear me, dear me!

Whose father was it as planted--and I had his own word fer it--all these 'ere tam'rack trees, and dug the well by the south door? And seen the lady of the house herself, mind yer, go out 'tween them stone posts fer the last time--and darker than pitch it was, too--on her way that night she went to meet Henry--"

At this point the old man was seized by a fit of coughing. When he recovered from it, he just stood there, gazing ahead of him, shaken with the palsy of years, so that he failed to heed the questions they thrice repeated to him.

"No wonder yer couldn't sleep in it, with her curse on the big empty halls! When the crops themselves died the night afterward, without a sign of a frost comin' down to touch them! It was the devil's own guilt in her that did it, Al says. Poor man! poor man! And yer tried ter dress it all up like a corpse, as if yer thought it was dead; but it came to life on yer, did it?" he mumbled, laughing incomprehensibly to himself. "When yer leavin'? To-morrer? Sooner the better fer yer, I guess. Good-day." With which imprecation the old man turned, feebly put on his hat, and dragged himself back down the avenue whence he had come.

They saw the last vestige of him disappear forever.

"He's like a broken spirit brooding over the neighborhood," Hastings said, shivering despite himself.

Julia began to crochet again, nervously absorbed in what she was doing.

"His scattered, crazy words are like the last gasp of the little village. How he epitomizes all the cramped, pent-up emotions of the starved inhabitants who have gone--all the pa.s.sions that must have so drearily burnt themselves out here, with nothing to note but the shifting of the winds or the digging of some well! They who were obliged, from sheer ennui, to create dramas out of their Puritan prejudices. Can't you breathe contagion in the very atmosphere?

Julia, I've had enough of it; I'm glad we're going. If I stayed here a month longer, I should get to feel as indigenous as that gnarled old apple-tree; the ghosts of the soil would claim me."

She stood up and walked away from him across the gravel avenue, as if doing so might help her to seize this occasion for what she had decided at last to tell him. She realized that she must be quick, that in another hour her parents' return might end this one good opportunity for which she had longed and waited.

"Jack dear," she said, moving back toward him, seeing how her own excitement was reflected in the way he, too, had arisen and taken a few steps towards her, "to-morrow is our last day, and there's something that we must talk about before we go."

His head was bowed, his eyes focused tensely up at hers, his arms hanging beside him; the sensitive smile hovered more and more dimly on his lips; his whole body swayed imperceptibly, like the beating of a pulse.

"Jack," she got out, going still closer to him, "I want to show you--Mrs. Eberdeen's room."

He would never quite realize the fullness of the shock it gave him; no deliberate attack could have been so vulnerably aimed, and the completeness of the blow was the greater for being one which he had been unwittingly preparing all along to receive. The house looked miles away; far over it three ducks flew southward.

On the landing above the broad part of the staircase they paused a moment. Instead of going up the left branch, which led to Jack's door, she took him to the right, where, at the head of the stairs, there was another door directly opposite his. As soon as he saw it he went forward quickly and turned the k.n.o.b. It stuck; it was locked; and rather timorously he stepped back to meet Julia's searching look as she handed him a rusty old key.

The musty smell poured out on them like the damp from an opened vault.

She took his hand. They stepped across the threshold.

He saw the lithograph of the two kittens, age-worn and time-blurred, still crooked on the wall beside the bureau; there was the sand-shaker on the maple desk; there hung the yellowed print of the "Last Supper"

above the fireplace--all stark and ghostly in that uncannily late afternoon light, which not even the morning sun could dispel.

He clutched her hand. He looked at the bed, which hadn't been smoothed or touched since he had lain in it a month ago. He remembered it as uncomprehendingly as one remembers mislaying a lost object in a forgotten place. He remembered waking. But the rest he had done was lost in the shadows.

"So this is where it happened--_here!_ How have I ever been in this room before?"

"_What_ happened?" she asked him eagerly, firmly.

"I fainted--before I was sick. But why--why here?" he begged.

She had prepared her answer; she had many times rehea.r.s.ed it; but the words now served inadequately.

"You hadn't eaten anything," she stated softly. "You hadn't slept. You had a fever, and your brain was so tired from--from everything that when you started for _your_ room,--the one opposite, which I had shown to you,--you carelessly turned to the right, and came into this room instead, which I hadn't had a chance yet to tell you about. Haven't you ever known, _since_, that you did it?"

He shook his head.

"This was Mrs. Eberdeen's room," she went on. "It has always been just like this,--at least I think it has,--always, since the house was built. I kept it as a curiosity. I called it Mrs. Eberdeen's room because the natives said she was wicked and had brought ruin to the house. I reasoned that this was why n.o.body had taken these things away or changed them--the wall-paper, I mean, the bed, the carpet, the pictures. And there's precisely one thing," she impetuously concluded, as if she couldn't postpone longer telling him, "that I myself have added."

Hastings smiled wanly at her. She guided him round to the wall at the side of the door in front of which they had been standing; she started to speak again before she saw what it was to which she had referred; and so her own words prevented her from hearing the smothered sound of his recognition.

"I found this," she said, trying to speak carelessly and forcing herself steadfastly to regard it, "in an old shop twelve miles down the Poochuck Road. Isn't it quaint? I got it--because, Jack, it looked like you, and--and because it exactly fitted this panel!"

But her attempted gaiety sank dismally in the silence which followed.

They just stood there. The minutes thudded by; the mustiness enwrapped them. Outside the window a dead piece of branch fell crackling to the ground. Gradually he grew to be unaware of her presence, so sharp and rapid were the currents which successively swept him; and her petty curiosity, all her poor need for speculation, was lost in the depth of the spell cast over him now. She dared not look at him, she dared not take her eyes off the object before them.

It was crudely painted. It was the portrait of a young man dressed a hundred or more years ago. He seemed to be walking forward out of the picture. In many places the pigment was so nearly gone that the brown fuzz of canvas showed through. The colors clung as delicate as cobwebs to the stern face and erect stalwart figure.

"Who is it?" Hastings articulated, scarce audibly. But though he had to ask, if only to save himself from going mad, his words were no more than frail signals of his distress, for he knew that he alone knew the answer. Electrically, crashingly, it had been borne in upon him at almost the first instant of his beholding them where it was that he had seen before those tightly compressed lips, with the mole still visible near the corner; he knew those calm, cruel eyes, still averted from his own; in a flash he had identified the purple satin waistcoat.

"You, Jack,"--she faced him determinedly--"you looked like _him_; you were like him, absolutely, in every detail, when you came into the dining-room!"

"When I came--" he repeated at a loss.

"Yes. It wasn't here, in this room, that you fainted. You went outside, down the stairs. Elizabeth saw you. You pushed open the dining-room door. Mother, father, I--we all saw you come in, wearing clothes like _these_," she pointed.

"Yes, yes, yes. I remember; I did put them on."

"But you didn't, you couldn't have! O Jack, don't you understand me? You weren't _really_ wearing them!"

All at once he felt something crunch beneath his feet, and he looked down, then back up at the portrait. The large square of gla.s.s which apparently once covered it had been shattered; there were a few triangles still sticking in the edge of the frame; the rest was in smaller bits on the floor. Instinctively he brought his right hand to a level with his face, and saw the scar upon it.

"It's a mystery, Jack dear. Can't you see it is? And it is so much more interesting never to explain it," she essayed fearfully, feigning a laugh of regained naturalness. "We shall never, never find out who he was, by whom it was painted, or what made you break it, or why--"

"Ah," he shouted eagerly, defying, as the memories came crowding into his brain, the doubts which had freshly a.s.sailed him. "I told you it might be possible! And he did have, after all--for that man was the father of her child!"

"Whose child?" Julia gasped.

But love and pity for her whom he could not name kept him from answering. And in the drift of his silence the vision capriciously failed him. He looked at Julia. He looked back at the wall. It was nothing but a funny old picture which hung there confronting them.

The commonplaceness, beside it, of Julia's long-drawn expression made him snicker, until, as a result of this accidental reaction, they were both actually giggling aloud.

He turned away from her. She watched him cross to the bureau. He pulled out each one of the drawers in turn. He peered blankly into them, where there was only the smell of mold and whirring dust to greet his pains.

He persistently scanned the room again. What had become of the hat-tub?