The Reckoning Part 42

"Oh, I can remember that," he said drily.

For a few moments I sat brooding, head between my hands; then, of a sudden impulse, I swung around and laid my heart bare to him--told him everything in a breath--trembling, as a thousand new-born fears seized me, chilling my blood.

"Good G.o.d!" I stammered, "it is not for myself I care now, Colonel! But the thought of him--of her--together--I can not endure. I tell you, the dread of this man has entered my very soul; there is terror at a hint of him. Can I not stay, Colonel? Is there no way for me to stay? She is so young, so alone----"

Hope died as I met his eye. I set my teeth and crushed speech into silence.

"The welfare of a nation comes first," he said slowly.

"I know--I know--but----"

"All must sacrifice to that principle, Carus. Have not the men of New York stood for it? Have not the men of Tryon given their all? I tell you, the army shall eat, but the bread they munch is made from blood-wet grain; and for every loaf they bake a life has been offered.

Where is the New Yorker who has not faced what you are facing? At the crack of the ambushed rifle our people drop at the plow, and their dying eyes look upon wife and children falling under knife and hatchet.

It must be so if the army is to eat and liberty live in this country we dare call our own. And when the call sounds, we New Yorkers must go, Carus. Our women know it, even our toddling children know it, G.o.d bless them!--and they proudly take their chances--nay, they demand the chances of a war that spares neither the aged nor the weak, neither mother nor cradled babe, nor the hound at the door, nor the cattle, nor any living thing in this red fury of destruction!"

He had risen, eyes glittering, face hardened into stone. "Go to your betrothed and say good-by. You do not know her yet, I think."

"She is Canadienne," I said.

"She is what the man she loves is--if she honors him. His cause is hers, his country hers, his G.o.d is her G.o.d!"

"Her heart is with neither side----"

"Her heart is with you! Shame to doubt her--if I read her eyes! Read them, Carus!"

I wheeled, speechless; Elsin Grey stood before me, deadly pale.

After a moment she moved forward, laying her hand on my shoulder and facing Colonel Willett with a smile. All color had fled from her face, but neither lip nor voice quivered as she spoke:

"I think you do understand, sir. We Canadiennes yield nothing in devotion to the women of New York. Where we love, we honor. What matters it where the alarm sounds? We understand our lovers; we can give them to the cause of freedom as well here in Tryon County as on the plains of Abraham--can we not, my betrothed?" she said, looking into my face; but her smile was heart-breaking.

"Child, child," said Willett, taking her free hand in both of his, "you speak a silent language with your eyes that no man can fail to understand."

"I failed," I said bitterly, as Willett kissed her hand, placed it in mine, and, turning, entered the open door.

"And what blame, Carus?" she whispered. "What have I been to you but a symbol of unbridled selfishness, asking all, giving nothing? How could you know I loved you so dearly that I could stand aside to let you pa.s.s? First I loved you selfishly, shamelessly; then I begged your guilty love, offering mine in the pa.s.sion of my ignorance and bewilderment."

Her arm fell from my shoulder and nestled in mine, and we turned away together under the brilliant autumn glory of the trees.

"That storm that tore me--ah, Carus--I had been wrecked without your strong arm to bear me up!"

"It was you who bore me up, Elsin. How can I leave you now!"

"Why, Carus, our honor is involved."

"_Our_ honor!"

"Yes, dear, ours."

"You--you bid me go, Elsin?"

"If I bid you stay, what would avail except to prove me faithless to you? How could I truly love you and counsel dishonor?"

White as a flower, the fixed smile never left her lips, nor did her steady pace beside me falter, or knee tremble, or a finger quiver of the little hand that lay within my own.

And then we fell silent, walking to and fro under the painted maple-trees in Johnstown streets, seeing no one, heeding no one, until the bell at the fort struck the hour. It meant the end.

We kissed each other once. I could not speak. My horse, led by Jack Mount, appeared from the tavern stables; and we walked back to the inn together.

Once more I took her in my arms; then she gently drew away and entered the open door, hands outstretched as though blinded, feeling her way--that was the last I saw of her, feeling her dark way alone into the house.

Senses swimming, dumb, deafened by the raging, beating pulses hammering in my brain, I reeled at a gallop into the sunny street, north, then west, then north once more, tearing out into the Butlersbury road. A gate halted me; I dismounted and dragged it open, then to horse again, then another gate, then on again, hailed and halted by riflemen at the cross-roads, which necessitated the summoning of my wits at last before they would let me go.

Now riding through the gra.s.sy cart-road, my shoulders swept by the fringing willows, I came at length to the Danascara, shining in the sunlight, and followed its banks--the same banks from which so often in happier days I had fished. At times I traveled the Tribes Hill road, at times used shorter cuts, knowing every forest-trail as I did, and presently entered the wood-road that leads from Caughnawaga church to Johnstown. I was in Butlersbury; there was the slope, there the Tribes Hill trail, there the stony road leading to that accursed house from which the Butlers, father and son, some five years since, had gone forth to eternal infamy.

And now, set in a circle of cleared land and ringed by the ancient forests of the north, I saw the gray, weather-beaten walls of the house. The lawns were overgrown; the great well-sweep shattered; the locust-trees covered with grapevines--the cherry- and apple-trees to the south broken and neglected. Weeds smothered the flower-gardens, where here and there a dull-red poppy peered at me through withering tangles; lilac and locust had already shed foliage too early blighted, but the huge and forbidding maples were all aflame in their blood-red autumn robes. Here the year had already begun to die; in the clear air a faint whiff of decay came from the rotting heaps of leaves--decay, ruin, and the taint of death; and, in the sad autumn stillness, something ominous, something secret and sly--something of malice.

Seeing no sign of my Oneida, I walked my horse across the lawn and up to the desolate row of windows. The shutters had been ripped off their hinges; all within was bare and dark; dimly I made out the shadowy walls of a hallway which divided the house into halves. By the light which filtered through the soiled windows I examined room after room from the outside, then, noiselessly, tried the door, but found it bolted from within as well as locked from without. Either the Butlers or the commissioners of sequestration must have crawled through a window to do this. I prowled on, looking for the window they had used as exit, examining the old house with a fascinated repugnance. The clapboards were a foot wide, evidently fashioned with care and beaded on the edges. The outside doors all opened outward; and I noted, with a shudder of contempt, the "witch's half-moon," or lunette, in the bottom of each door, which betrays the cowardly superst.i.tion of the man who lived there. Such cat-holes are fashioned for haunted houses; the specter is believed to crawl out through these openings, and then to be kept out with a tarred rag stuffed into the hole--ghosts being unable to endure tar. Faugh! If specters walk, the accursed house must be alive with them--ghosts of the victims of old John Butler, wraiths dripping red from Cherry Valley--children with throats cut; women with bleeding heads and butchered bodies, stabbed through and through--and perhaps the awful specter of Lieutenant Boyd, with eyes and nails plucked out, and tongue cut off, bound to the stake and slowly roasting to death, while Walter Butler watched the agony curiously, interested and surprised to see a disemboweled man live so long!

Oh, yes, there might well be phantoms in this ghastly mansion; but they had nothing to do with me; only the absent master of the house was any concern of mine; and, finding at last the window I sought for, I shoved it open and climbed to the sill, landing upon the floor inside, my moccasined feet making no more sound than the padded toes of a tree-cat.

Then to prowl and mouse, stepping cautiously, stooping warily to examine dusty sc.r.a.ps lying on the bare boards--a dirty newspaper, an old shoe with buckle missing, a broken pewter spoon--all the sordid trifles that accent desolation. Once or twice I thought to make out moccasin tracks in the dust, as though some furtive prowler had antic.i.p.ated me here, but the light filtering through the crusted panes was meager and uncertain, and, after all, it mattered nothing to me.

The house was divided by a hallway; there were two rooms on either side, all bare and empty save for sc.r.a.ps here and there, and in one room the collapsed and dusty carca.s.s of a rat. On the walls there was nothing except a nail driven into the clay, which was crumbling between the facing of whitewashed brick. From the heavy oaken timbers of the wooden ceilings hung s.m.u.tty banners of ancient cobwebs, stirring above me as I moved. It was the very abomination of sinister desolation.

Some vague idea of finding something that might aid me--some sc.r.a.p of evidence I might chance on to kindle hope with--some neglected trifle to d.a.m.n him and proclaim this monstrous marriage void--it was this instinct that led me into a house abhorred. Nothing I found, save, on one foul window-pane, names, diamond-cut, scrawled again and again: "Lyn," and "Cherry-Maid," repeated a score of times.

And long I lingered, pondering who had written it, and what it might mean, and who was "Lyn." As for "Cherry-Maid," the name was used in the False Faces rites; and at that terrific orgy held on the Kennyetto before the battle of Oriskany, where the first split came in the walls of the Long House, and where that hag-sorceress, Catrine Montour, had failed to pledge the Oneidas to the war-post, the Cherry-Maid had taken part. Indeed, some said that she was a daughter of the Huron witch; but Jack Mount, who saw the rite, swore that the Cherry-Maid was but a beautiful child, painted from brow to ankle----

Suddenly I thought of the hag's daughter as Carolyn. Carolyn? Lyn! By heaven, the Cherry-Maid was Carolyn Montour, mistress of Walter Butler!

Here in bygone days she had scrawled her name--here her t.i.tle. And Walter Butler had been present at that frantic debauch where the False Faces cringed to their prophetess, Magdalen Brant. Perhaps it was there that this man had met his match in the lithe young animal whelped by the Toad-Woman--this slim, lawless, depraved child, who had led the False Faces in their gruesome rites and sacrifice!

I stared at the diamond scrawl; and before my eyes I seemed to see the three fires burning, the clattering rows of wooden masks, the white blankets of the sachems, the tawny, naked form of the Cherry-Maid, seated between samphire and hazel, her pointed fingers on her hips, her heavy hair veiling a laughing face, over which the infernal fire shadow played.

Ah, it was well! Beast linked to beast--what need of priest in the fierce mating of such creatures of the dusk? He was hers, and she his by all laws of nature, and in the eternal fitness of things vast and savage. They must live and breed in the half-light of forests; they must perish as the sun follows the falling trees, creeping ever inexorably westward.

Somberly brooding, I turned and descended into the cellar. There was little light here, and I cared not to strike flint. Groping about I touched with my foot remains of bottles of earthenware, then made my way to the door again and began to ascend.

The stairway seemed steeper and more tortuous to me. As I climbed I became uneasy at its length. Then, in a second, it flashed on me that I had blundered upon a secret stairway[1] leading upward from the cellar.

At this same instant my head brushed the ceiling; I gave a gentle push, and a trap-door lifted, admitting me to another flight of stairs, up which I warily felt my way. This must end in another trap-door on the second floor--I understood that--and began to reach upward, feeling about blindly until my hands fell on a bolt. This I drew; it was not rusty, and did not creak, and, as I slid it back, to my astonishment my fingers grew wet and greasy. The bolt had been _recently oiled_!

[1] Evidences of this stairway still exist in the ancient house of Walter Butler.

Now all alert as a gray wolf sniffing a strange trail that cuts his own, I warily lifted the trap to a finger's breadth. The crack of light dazzled me; gradually my blurred sight grew clearer; I saw a low, oblong window under the eaves of the steep, pointed roof; and, through it, the sunlight falling on the bare floor of a room all littered with papers, torn letters, and tape-bound doc.u.ments of every description.

Could these be the Butler papers? I had heard that all doc.u.ments had been seized by the commissioners after the father and son had fled. But the honorable commissioners of sequestration had evidently never suspected this stairway.

In spite of myself I started! _How_ had I, then, entered it? Somebody must have mounted it before me, leaving the secret door open in the cellar, and I, groping about, had chanced upon it. But whoever left it open must have been acquainted with the house--an intimate here, if not one of the family!