The Desert and the Sown Part 25

"He would always be there," Cerissa whispered.

"Who?"

"Your father. If anybody wanted to see him after he shut himself in there for the night, they had to stand to be questioned through that wall-slit before he opened the door. Yes, ma'am! He was on the watch in there the whole time like a thing in a trap."

"Are you afraid to go back alone?" Mrs. Bogardus spoke with chilling irony.

Cerissa backed away in silence, her heart thumping. "She's putting it on," she said to herself. "I never see her turn so pale. Don't tell _me_ she ain't afraid!"

There was a hanging shelf against the chimney on which a bundle of dry herbs had been left to turn into dust. Old Becky might have put them there the autumn before she died; or some successor of hers in the years that were blank to the daughter of the house. As she pushed open the door a sighing draught swept past her and seemed to draw her inward.

It shook the sere bundle. Its skeleton leaves, dissolving into motes, flickered an instant athwart the light. They sifted down like ashes on the woman's dark head as she pa.s.sed in. Her color had faded, but not through fear of ghost clocks. It was the searing process she had to face. And any room where she sat alone with certain memories of her youth was to her a torture chamber.

"She's been up there an awful long time. I wouldn't wonder if she's fainted away."

"What would she faint at? I guess it's pretty cold, though. Give me some more tea; put plenty of milk so I can drink it quick."

Chauncey's matter of fact tone always comforted Cerissa when she was nervous. She did not mind that he jeered or that his words were often rude; no man of her acquaintance could say things nicely to women, or ever tried. A certain amount of roughness pa.s.sed for household wit.

Chauncey put the screw-driver in his pocket, his wife and son watching him with respectful anxiety. He thought rather well of his own courage privately. But the familiar details of the loom-room cheered him on his way, the homely tools of his every-day work were like friendly faces nodding at him. He knocked loudly on the door above, and was answered by Mrs. Bogardus in her natural voice.

"Bosh--every bit of it bosh!" he repeated courageously.

She was seated by the window in the chair with the green cushions. Her face was turned towards the view outside. "What a pity those cherries were not picked before the rain," she observed. "The fruit is bursting ripe; I'm afraid you'll lose the crop."

Chauncey moved forward awkwardly without answering.

"Stop there one moment, will you?" Mrs. Bogardus rose and demonstrated.

"You notice those two boards are loose. Now, I put this chair here,"--she laid her hand on the back to still its motion. "Step this way. You see? The chair rocks of itself. So would any chair with a spring board under it. That accounts for _that_, I think. Now come over here." Chauncey placed himself as she directed in front of the high mantel with the clock above it. She stood at his side and they listened in silence to that sound which Mary Hornbeck, deceased, had deemed a spiritual warning.

"Would you call that a 'ticking'? Is that like any sound an insect could make?" the mistress asked.

"I should call it more like a 'ting,'" said Chauncey. "It comes kind o'

m.u.f.fled like through the chimbly--a person might be mistaken if they was upset in their nerves considerable."

"What old people call the 'death-watch' is supposed to be an insect that lives in the walls of old houses, isn't it? and gives warning with a ticking sound when somebody is going to be called away? Now to me that sounds like a soft blow struck regularly on a piece of hollow iron--say the end of a stove-pipe sticking in the chimney. When I first came up here, there was only a steady murmur of wind and rain. Then the clouds thinned and the sun came out and drops began to fall--distinctly. Your wife says the ticking was heard on a day like this, broken and showery.

Now, if you will unscrew that clock, I think you will find there's a stove-pipe hole behind it; and a piece of pipe shoved into the chimney just far enough to catch the drops as they gather and fall."

Chauncey went to work. He sweated in the airless room. The powerful screws blunted the lips of his tool but would not start.

"I guess I'll have to give it up for to-day. The screws are rusted in solid. Want I should pry her out of the woodwork?"

"No, don't do that," said Mrs. Bogardus. "Why should we spoil the panel?

This seems a very comfortable room. My son is right. It would be foolish to tear it down. Such a place as this might be very useful if you people would get over your notions about it."

"I never had no notions," Chauncey a.s.serted. "When the women git talkin'

they like to make out a good story, and whichever one sees the most and hears the most makes the biggest sensation."

Mrs. Bogardus waited till he had finished without appearing to have heard what he was saying.

"Where is the key to this door?" she laid her hand over a k.n.o.b to the right of the stairs.

"I guess if there is one it's on the other side. Yes, it's in the key-hole." Chauncey turned the k.n.o.b and shoved and lifted. The door yielded to his full strength, and he allowed Mrs. Bogardus to precede him. She stepped into a room hardly bigger than a closet with one window, barred like those in the outer room. It was fitted up with toilet conveniences according to the best advices of its day. Over all the neat personal arrangements there was the slur of neglect, a sad squalor which even a king's palace wears with time.

Chauncey tested the plumbing with a noise that was plainly offensive to his companion, but she bore with it--also with his reminiscences gathered from neighborhood gossip. "He wa'n't fond of spending money, but he didn't spare it here: this was his ship cabin when he started on his last voyage. It looked funny--a man with all his land and houses cooped up in a place like this; but he wanted to be independent of the women. He hated to have 'em fussin' around him. He had a woman to come and cook up stuff for him to help himself to; but she wouldn't stay here overnight, nor he wouldn't let her. As for a man in the house,--most men were thieves, he thought, or waiting their chance to be. It was real pitiful the way he made his end."

"Open that window and shut the door when you come out," said Mrs.

Bogardus. "I will send some one to help you down with that secretary.

Cerissa knows about it. It is to be sent up on the Hill."

XXII

THE CASE STRIKES IN

Christine's marriage took place while Paul and Moya were lingering in the Bruneau, for Paul's health ostensibly. Banks and Horace had been left to the smiling irony of justice. They never had a straight chance to define their conduct in the woods; for no one accused them. No awkward questions were asked in the city drawing-rooms or at the clubs.

For a tough half hour or so at Fort Lemhi they had realized how they stood in the eyes of those unbiased military judges. The shock had a bracing effect for a time. Both boys were said to be much improved by their Western trip and by the hardships of that frightful homeward march.

Mrs. Bogardus had matched her gift of Stone Ridge to her son, which was a gift of sentiment, with one of more substantial value to her daughter,--the income from certain securities settled upon her and her heirs. Banks was carefully unprovided for. The big house in town was full of ghosts--the ghosts that haunt such homes, made desolate by a breach of hearts. The city itself was crowded with opportunities for giving and receiving pain between mother and daughter. Christine had developed all the latent hardness of her mother's race with a sickly frivolity of her own. She made a great show of faith in her marriage venture. She boomed it in her occasional letters, which were full of scarce concealed bravado as graceful as snapping her fingers in her mother's face.

Mrs. Bogardus leased her house in town, and retired before the ghosts, but not escaping them; Stone Ridge must be put in order for its new master and mistress, and Stone Ridge had its own ghosts. She informed her absentees that, before their return, she should have left for Southern California to look after some investments which she had neglected there of late. It was then she spoke of her plan for restoring the old house by pulling down that addition which disfigured it; and Paul had objected to this erasure. It would take from the house's veracity, he said. The words carried their unintentional sting.

But it was Moya's six lines at the bottom of his page that changed and softened everything. Moya--always blessed when she took the initiative--contrived, as swiftly as she could set them down, to say the very words that made the home-coming a coming home indeed.

"Will Madam Bogardus be pleased to keep her place as the head of her son's house?" she wrote. "This foolish person he has married wants to be anything rather than the mistress of Stone Ridge. She wants to be always out of doors, and she needs to be. Oh, must you go away now--now when we need you so much? It cannot be said here on paper how much _I_ need you!

Am I not your motherless daughter? Please be there when we come, and please stay there!"

"For a little while then," said the lonely woman, smiling at the image of that sweet, foolish person in her thoughts. "For a little while, till she learns her mistake." Such mistakes are the cornerstone of family friendship.

It was an uneventful summer on the Hill, but one of rather wearing intensity in the inner relations of the household, one with another; for nothing could be quite natural with a pit of concealment to be avoided by all, and an air of unconsciousness to be carefully preserved in avoiding it. Moya's success in this way was so remarkable that Paul half hated it. How was it possible for her to speak to his mother so lightly; never the least apparent premeditation or fear of tripping; how look at her with such sweet surface looks that never questioned or saw beneath?

He could not meet his mother's eyes at all when they were alone together, or endure a silence in her company.

Both women were of the type called elemental. They understood each other without knowing why. Moya felt the desperate truth contained in the mother's falsehood, and broke forth into pa.s.sionate defense of her as against her husband's silence.

He answered her one day by looking up a little green book of fairy tales and reading aloud this fragment of "The Golden Key."

"'I never tell lies, even in fun.' (The mysterious Grandmother speaks.)

"'How good of you!' (says the Child in the Wood.)

"'I couldn't if I tried. It would come true if I said it, and then I should be punished enough.'"

Moya's eyes narrowed reflectively.