Chapter VI: Part 6

“What you want to pester me about this money for!” The old man was weary. “I didn't come here, lookin' for money, and I don't expect to take none away with me. So I'll say good-night to ye.”

“Hol' on, hol' on! Don' git mad. What time you goin' off in the morning?”

“Before you do, I shouldn't wonder.”

“But hol'! One fine idea--blazin' good idea--just hit me now in the head! Wan' to come on to Chicago wis me? I drop this fellah at Felton. He take the team back, and I get some one to help me on the treep. Why not you? Ever tek' care of stock?”

“Some consid'able years ago I used to look after stock. Guess I'd know an ox from a heifer.”

“Ever handle 'em on cattle-car?”

“Never.”

“Well, all there is, you feed 'em, and water 'em, and keep 'em on their feets. If one fall down, all the others they have too much play. They rock”--Bonny exhibited--“and fall over and pile up in heap. I like to do one turn for you. We goin' the same way--you bring me the good luck, like a bird in the han'. This is my clean-up, you understand. You bring me the beautiful luck. You turn me up right bower first slap. Now it's goin' be my deal. I like to do by you!”

The packer turned over and looked up at the cool sky, pricked through with early stars. He was silent a long time. His pale old face was like a fine bit of carving in the dusk.

“What you think?” asked Moppin, almost tenderly. “I thing you better come wis me. You too hold a man to go like so--alone.”

“I'll have to think about it first;--let you know in the morning.”

XXI

INJURIOUS REPORTS CONCERNING AN OLD HOUSE

A Rush of wheels and a spatter of hoofs coming up the drive sent Mrs. Dunlop to the sitting-room window. She tried to see out through streaming showers that darkened the panes.

“Isn't that Mrs. Bogardus? Why, it is! Put on your shoes, Chauncey, quick! Help her in 'n' take her horse to the shed. Take an umbrella with you.” Chauncey the younger, meekly drying his shoes by the kitchen fire, put them on, not stopping to lace them, and slumped down the porch steps, pursued by his mother's orders. She watched him a moment struggling with a cranky umbrella, and then turned her attention to herself and the room.

Mrs. Bogardus made her calls in the morning, and always plainly on business. She had not seen the inside of Cerissa's parlor for ten years. This was a grievance which Cerissa referred to spasmodically, being seized with it when she was otherwise low in her mind.

“My sakes! Can't I remember my mother telling how _her_ mother used to drive over and spend the afternoon, and bring her sewing and the baby--whichever one was the baby. They called each other Chrissy and Angevine, and now she don't even speak of her own children to us by their first names. It's 'Mrs. Bowen' and 'Mr. Paul;' just as if she was talking to her servants.”

“What's that to us? We've got a good home here for as long as we want to stay. She's easy to work for, if you do what she says.”

Chauncey respected Mrs. Bogardus's judgment and her straightforward business habits. Other matters he left alone. But Cerissa was ambitious and emotional, and she stayed indoors, doing little things and thinking small thoughts. She resented her commanding neighbor's casual manners. There was something puzzling and difficult to meet in her plainness of speech, which excluded the personal relation. It was like the cut and finish of her clothes--mysterious in their simplicity, and not to be imitated cheaply.

When the two met, Cerissa was immediately reduced to a state of flimsy apology which she made up for by being particularly hot and self-assertive in speaking of the lady afterward.

“There is the parlor, in perfect order,” she fretted, as she stood waiting to open the front door; “but of course she wouldn't let me take her in there--that would be too much like visiting.”

The next moment she had corrected her facial expression, and was offering smiling condolences to Mrs. Bogardus on the state of her attire.

“It is only my jacket. You might put that somewhere to dry,” said the lady curtly. Raindrops sparkled on the wave of thick iron-gray hair that lifted itself, with a slight turn to one side, from her square low brow. Her eyes shone dark against the fresh wind color in her cheeks. She had the straight, hard, ophidian line concealing the eyelid, which gives such a peculiar strength to the direct gaze of a pair of dark eyes. If one suspects the least touch of tenderness, possibly of pain, behind that iron fold, it lends a fascination equal to the strength. There was some excitement in Mrs. Bogardus's manner, but Cerissa did not know her well enough to perceive it. She merely thought her looking handsomer, and, if possible, more formidable than usual.

She sat by the fire, folding her skirts across her knees, and showing the edges of the most discouragingly beautiful petticoats,--a taste perhaps inherited from her wide-hipped Dutch progenitresses. Mrs. Bogardus reveled in costly petticoats, and had an unnecessary number of them.

“How nice it is in here!” she said, looking about her. Cerissa, with the usual apologies, had taken her into the kitchen to dry her skirts. There was a slight taint of steaming shoe leather, left by Chauncey when driven forth. Otherwise the kitchen was perfection,--the family room of an old Dutch farmhouse, built when stone and hardwood lumber were cheap,--thick walls; deep, low window-seats; beams showing on the ceiling; a modern cooking-stove, where Emily Bogardus could remember the wrought brass andirons and iron backlog, for this room had been her father's dining-room. The brick tiled hearth remained, and the color of those century and a half old bricks made a pitiful thing of Cerissa's new oil-cloth. The woodwork had been painted--by Mrs. Bogardus's orders, and much to Cerissa's disgust--a dark kitchen green,--not that she liked the color herself, but it was the artistic demand of the moment,--and the place was filled with a green golden light from the cherry-trees close to the window, which a break in the clouds had suddenly illumined.

“You keep it beautifully,” said Mrs. Bogardus, her eyes shedding compliments as she looked around. “I should not dare go in my own kitchen at this time of day. There are no women nowadays who know how to work in the way ladies used to work. If I could have such a housekeeper as you, Cerissa.”

Cerissa flushed and bridled. “What would Chauncey do!”

“I don't expect you to be my housekeeper,” Mrs. Bogardus smiled. “But I envy Chauncey.”

“She has come to ask a favor,” thought Cerissa. “I never knew her so pleasant, for nothing. She wants me to do up her fruit, I guess.” Cerissa was mistaken. Mrs. Bogardus simply was happy--or almost happy--and deeply stirred over a piece of news which had come to her in that morning's mail.

“I have telephoned Bradley not to send his men over on Monday. My son is bringing his wife home. They may be here all summer. The place belongs to them now. Did Chauncey tell you? Mr. Paul writes that he has some building plans of his own, and he wishes everything left as it is for the present, especially this house. He wants his wife to see it first just as it is.”

“Well, to be sure! They've been traveling a long time, haven't they? And how is his health now?”

“Oh, he is very well indeed. You will be glad not to have the trouble of those carpenters, Cerissa? Pulling down old houses is dirty work.”

“Oh, dear! I wouldn't mind the dirt. Anything to get rid of that old rat's nest on top of the kitchen chamber. I hate to have such out of the way places on my mind. I can't get around to do every single thing, and it's years--years, Mrs. Bogardus, since I could get a woman to do a half-day's cleaning up there in broad daylight!”

Mrs. Bogardus stared. What was the woman talking about!

“I call it a regular eyesore on the looks of the house besides. And it keeps all the old stories alive.”

“What stories?”

“Why, of course your father wasn't out of his head--we all know that--when he built that upstairs room and slep' there and locked himself in every night of his life. It was only on one point he was a little warped: the fear of bein' robbed. A natural fear, too,--an old man over eighty livin' in such a lonesome place and known to be well off. But--you'll excuse my repeating the talk--but the story goes now that he re'ly went insane and was confined up there all the last years of his life. And that's why the windows have got bars acrost them. Everybody notices it, and they ask questions. It's real embarrassin', for of course I don't want to discuss the family.”

“Who asks questions?” Mrs. Bogardus's eyes were hard to meet when her voice took that tone.

“Why, the city folks out driving. They often drive in the big gate and make the circle through the grounds, and they're always struck when they see that tower bedroom with windows like a prison. They say, 'What's the story about that room, up there?'”

“When people ask you questions about the house, you can say you did not live here in the owner's time and you don't know. That's perfectly simple, isn't it?”

“But I do know! Everybody knows,” said Cerissa hotly. “It was the talk of the whole neighborhood when that room was put up; and I remember how scared I used to be when mother sent me over here of an errand.”

Mrs. Bogardus rose and shook out her skirts. “Will Chauncey bring my horse when it stops raining? By the way, did you get the furniture down that was in that room, Cerissa?--the old secretary? I am going to have it put in order for Mr. Paul's room. Old furniture is the fashion now, you know.”

Cerissa caught her breath nervously. “Mrs. Bogardus--I couldn't do a thing about it! I wanted Chauncey to tell you. All last week I tried to get a woman, or a man, to come and help me clear out that place, but just as soon as they find out what's wanted--'You'll have to get somebody else for that job,' they say.”

“What is the matter with them?”

“It's the room, Mrs. Bogardus; if I was you--I'm doing now just as I'd be done by--I would not take Mrs. Paul Bogardus up into that room--not even in broad daylight; not if it was my son's wife, in the third month of her being a wife.”

“Well, upon my word!” said Mrs. Bogardus, smiling coldly. “Do you mean to say these women are afraid to go up there?”

“It was old Mary Hornbeck who started the talk. She got what she called her 'warning' up there. And the fact is, she was a corpse within six months from that day. Chauncey and me, we used to hear noises, but old houses are full of noises. We never thought much about it; only, I must say I never had any use for that part of the house. Chauncey keeps his seeds and tools in the lower room, and some of the winter vegetables, and we store the parlor stove in there in summer.”

“Well, about this 'warning'?” Mrs. Bogardus interrupted.

“Yes! It was three years ago in May, and I remember it was some such a day as this--showery and broken overhead, and Mary disappointed me; but she came about noon, and said she'd put in half a day anyhow. She got her pail and house-cloths; but she wasn't gone not half an hour when down she come white as a sheet, and her mouth as dry as chalk. She set down all of a shake, and I give her a drink of tea, and she said: 'I wouldn't go up there again, not for a thousand dollars.' She unlocked the door, she said, and stepped inside without thinkin'. Your father's old rocker with the green moreen cushions stood over by the east window, where he used to sit. She heard a creak like a heavy step on the floor, and that empty chair across the room, as far as from here to the window, begun to rock as if somebody had just rose up from them cushions. She watched it till it stopped. Then she took another step, and the step she couldn't see answered her, and the chair begun to rock again.”

“Was that all?”

“No, ma'am; that wasn't all. I don't know if you remember an old wall clock with a brass ball on top and brass scrolls down the sides and a painted glass door in front of the pendulum with a picture of a castle and a lake? The paint's been wore off the glass with cleaning, so the pendulum shows plain. That clock has not been wound since we come to live here. I don't believe a hand has touched it since the night he was carried feet foremost out of that room. But Mary said she could count the strokes go tick, tick, tick! She listened till she could have counted fifty, for she was struck dumb, and just as plain as the clock before her face she could see the minute-hand and the pendulum, both of 'em dead still. Now, how do you account for that!

“I told Chauncey about it, and he said it was all foolishness. Do all I could he would go up there himself, that same evening. But he come down again after a while, and he was almost as white as Mary. 'Did you see anything?' I says. 'I saw what Mary said she saw,' says he, 'and I heard what she heard.' But no one can make Chauncey own up that he believes it was anything supernatural. 'There is a reason for everything,' he says. 'The miracles and ghosts of one generation are just school-book learning to the next; and more of a miracle than the miracles themselves.'”

“Chauncey shows his sense,” Mrs. Bogardus observed.

“He was real disturbed, though, I could see; and he told me particular not to make any talk about it. I never have opened the subject to a living soul. But when Mary died, within six months, folks repeated what she had been saying about her 'warning.' The 'death watch' she called it. We can't all of us control our feelings about such things, and she was a lonely widow woman.”

“Well, do you believe that ticking is going on up there now?” asked Mrs. Bogardus.

Cerissa looked uneasy.

“Is the door locked?”

“I re'ly couldn't say,” she confessed.

“Do you mean to say that all you sensible people in this house have avoided that room for three years? And you don't even know if the door is locked?”

“I--I don't use that part for anything, and cleaning is wasted on a place that's never used, and I can't _get_ anybody”--

“I am not criticising your housekeeping. Will you go up there with me now, Cerissa? I want to understand about this.”

“What, just now, do you mean? I'm afraid I haven't got the time this morning, Mrs. Bogardus. Dinner's at half-past twelve. It's a quarter to eleven”--

“Very well. You think the door is not locked?”

“If it is, the key must be in the door. Oh, don't go, please, Mrs. Bogardus. Wait till Chauncey conies in”--

“I wish you'd send Chauncey up when he does come in. Ask him to bring a screw-driver.” Mrs. Bogardus rose and examined her jacket. It was still damp. She asked for a cape, or some sort of wrap, as her waist was thin, and the rain had chilled the morning air.

For the sake of decency, Cerissa escorted her visitor across the hall passage into the loom-room--a loom-room in name only for upwards of three generations. Becky had devoted it to the rough work of the house, and to certain special uses, such as the care of the butchering products, the making of soft soap and root beer. Here the churning was done, by hand, with a wooden dasher, which spread a circle of white drops, later to become grease-spots. The floor of the loom-room was laid in large brick tiles, more or less loose in their sockets, with an occasional earthy depression marking the grave of a missing tile. Becky's method of cleaning was to sluice it out and scrub it with an old broom. The seepage of generations before her time had thus added their constant quota to the old well's sum of iniquity.

Mrs. Bogardus had not visited this part of the old house for many years. After her father's death she had shrunk from its painful associations. Later she grew indifferent; but as she passed now into the gloomy place--doubly dark with the deep foliage of June on a rainy morning--she was afraid of her own thoughts. Henceforth she was a woman with a diseased consciousness. “What can't be cured must be _seared_,” flashed over her as she set her face to the stairway.

These stairs, leading up into the back attic or “kitchen chamber,” being somewhat crowded for space, advanced two steps into the room below. As the stair door opened outward, and the stairs were exceedingly steep and dark, every child of the house, in turn, had suffered a bad fall in consequence; but the arrangement remained in all its natural depravity, for “children must learn.”

Little Emmy of the old days had loved to sit upon these steps, a trifle raised above the kitchen traffic, yet cognizant of all that was going on, and ready to descend promptly if she smelled fresh crullers frying, or baked sweet apples steaming hot from the oven. If Becky's foot were heard upon the stairs above, she would jump quick enough; but if the step had a clumping, boyish precipitancy, she sat still and laughed, and planted her back against the door. Often she had teased Adam in this way, keeping him prisoner from his duties, helpless in his good nature either to scold her or push her off. But once he circumvented her, slipping off his shoes and creeping up the stairs again, and making his escape by the roof and the boughs of the old maple. Then it was Emmy who was teased, who sat a foolish half hour on the stairs alone and missed a beautiful ride to the wood lot; but she would not speak to Adam for two days afterward.

Becky's had been the larger of the two bedrooms in the attic, Adam's the smaller--tucked low under the eaves, and entered by crawling around the big chimney that came bulking up to the light like a great tree caught between house walls. The stairs hugged the chimney and made use of its support. Adam would warm his hands upon it coming down on bitter mornings. From force of habit, Emily Bogardus laid her smooth white hand upon the clammy bricks. No tombstone could be colder than that heart of house warmth now.

The roof of the kitchen chamber had been raised a story higher, and the chimney as it went up contracted to quite a modern size. This elevation gave room for the incongruous tower bedroom that had hurt the symmetry of the old house, spoiled its noble sweep of roof, and given rise to so much unpleasant conjecture as to its use. It was this excrescence, the record of those last unloved and unloving years of her father's life, which Mrs. Bogardus would have removed, but was prevented by her son.

“You go back now, Cerissa,” she said to the panting woman behind her. “I see the key is in the lock. You may send Chauncey after a while; there is no hurry.”

“Oh!” gasped Cerissa. “Do you see _that!_”

“What?”

“I thought there was something--something behind that slit.”

“There isn't. Step this way. There, can't you see the light?”

Mrs. Bogardus grasped Cerissa by the shoulders and held her firmly in front of a narrow loophole that pierced the partition close beside the door. Light from the room within showed plainly; but it gave an unpleasantly human expression to the entrance, like a furtive eye on the watch.

“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 passed 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 passed 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' muffled 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 asserted. “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 knob 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 knob 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 passionate 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.

“How constantly you are thinking of this! I think of it only when I am with you. As if a woman like your mother, who has done _one thing_, should be all that thing, and nothing more to us, her children!”

Moya was giving herself up, almost immorally, Paul sometimes thought, to the fascination Mrs. Bogardus's personality had for her. In a keenly susceptible state herself, at that time, there was something calming and strengthening in the older woman's perfected beauty, her physical poise, and the fitness of everything she did and said and wore to the given occasion. As a dark woman she was particularly striking in summer clothing. Her white effects were tremendous. She did not pretend to study these matters herself, but in years of experience, with money to spend, she had learned well in whom to confide. When women are shut up together in country houses for the summer, they can irritate each other in the most foolish ways. Mrs. Bogardus never got upon your nerves.

But, for Paul, there was a poison in his mother's beauty, a dread in her influence over his impressionable young wife, thrilled with the awakening forces of her consonant being. Moya would drink deep of every cup that life presented. Motherhood was her lesson for the day. “She is a queen of mothers!” she would exclaim with an abandon that was painful to Paul; he saw deformity where Moya was ready to kneel. “I love her perfect love for you--for me, even! She is above all jealousy. She doesn't even ask to be understood.”

Paul was silent.

“And oh, she knows, she knows! She has been through it all--in such despair and misery--all that is before me, with everything in the world to make it easy and all the beautiful care she gives me. She is the supreme mother. And I never had a mother to speak to before. Don't, don't, please, keep putting that dreadful thing between us now!”

So Paul took the dreadful thing away with him and was alone with it, and knew that his mother saw it in his eyes when their eyes met and avoided. When, after a brief household absence, he would see her again he wondered, “Has she been alone with it? Has it passed into another phase?”--as of an incurable disease that must take its time and course.

Mrs. Bogardus did not spare her conscience in social ways all this time. It was a part of her life to remember that she had neighbors--certain neighbors. She included Paul without particularly consulting him whenever it was proper for him to support her in her introduction of his wife to the country-house folk, many of whom they knew in town.

All his mother's friends liked Paul and supposed him to be very clever, but they had never taken him seriously. “Now, at last,” they said, “he has done something like other people. He is coming out.” Experienced matrons were pleased to flatter him on his choice of a bride. The daughters studied Moya, and decided that she was “different,” but “all right.” She had a careless distinction of her own. Some of her “things” were surprisingly lovely--probably heirlooms; and army women are so clever about clothes.

Would they spend the winter in town?

Paul replied absently: they had not decided. Probably they would not go down till after the holidays.

What an attractive plan? What an ideal family Christmas they would have all together in the country! Christine had not been up all summer, had she? Here Moya came to her husband's relief, through a wife's dual consciousness in company, and covered his want of spirits with a flood of foolish chatter.

The smiling way in which women the most sincere can posture and prance on the brink of dissimulation was particularly sickening to Paul at this time. Why need they put themselves in situations where it was required? The situations were of his mother's creation. He imagined she must suffer, but had little sympathy with that side of her martyrdom. Moya seemed a trifle feverish in her acceptance of these affairs of which she was naturally the life and centre. A day of entertaining often faded into an evening of subtle sadness.

Paul would take her out into the moonlight of that deep inland country. The trees were dark with leaves and brooded close above them; old water-fences and milldams cast inky shadows on the still, shallow ponds clasped in wooded hills. No region could have offered a more striking contrast to the empty plains. Moya felt shut in with old histories. The very ground was but moulding sand in which generations of human lives had been poured, and the sand swept over to be reshaped for them.

“We are not living our own life yet,” Paul would say; not adding, “We are protecting her.” Here was the beginning of punishment helplessly meted out to this proud woman whose sole desire was towards her children--to give, and not to receive.

“But this is our Garden?” Moya would muse. “We are as nearly two alone as any two could be.”

“If you include the Snake. We can't leave out the Snake, you know.”

“Snake or Seraph--I don't believe I know the difference. Paul, I cannot have you thinking things.”

“I?--what do I think?”

“You are thinking it is bad for me to be so much with her. You, as a man and a husband, resent what she, as a woman and a wife, has dared to do. And I, as another woman and wife, I say she could do nothing else and be true. For, don't you see? She never loved him. The wifehood in her has never been reached. She was a girl, then a mother, then a widow. How could she”--

“Do you think he would have claimed her as his wife? Oh, you do not know him;--she has never known him. If we could be brave and face our duty to the whole truth, and leave the rest to those sequences, never dreamed of, that wait upon great acts. Such surprises come straight from God. Now we can never know how he would have risen to meet a nobler choice in her. He had not far to rise! Well, we have our share of blessings, including piazza teas; but as a family we have missed one of the greatest spiritual opportunities,--such as come but once in a lifetime.”

“Ah, if she was not ready for it, it was not _her_ opportunity. God is very patient with us, I believe.”

XXIII

RESTIVENESS

Mothers and sons are rarely very personal in their intimacy after the son has taken to himself a wife. Apart from certain moments not appropriate to piazza teas, Paul and his mother were perhaps as comfortable together as the relation averages. It was much that they never talked emotionally. Private judgments which we have refrained from putting into words may die unfruitful and many a bitter crop be spared.

“This is Paul's apology for being happy in spite of himself--and of us!” Moya teased, as she admired the beautifully drawn plans for the quarrymen's club-house.

“It doesn't need any apology; it's a very good thing,” said Mrs. Bogardus, ignoring double meanings. No caps that were flying around ever fitted her head. Paul's dreams and his mother's practical experience had met once more on a common ground of philanthropy. This time it was a workingmen's club in which the interests of social and mental improvement were conjoined with facilities for outdoor sport. Up to date philanthropy is an expensive toy. Paul, though now a landowner, was far from rich in his own right. His mother financed this as she had many another scheme for him. She was more openhanded than heretofore, but all was done with that ennuyéd air which she ever wore as of an older child who has outgrown the game. It was in Moya and Moya's prospective maternity that her pride reinstated itself. Her own history and generation she trod underfoot. Mistakes, humiliations, whichever way she turned. Paul had never satisfied her entirely in anything he did until he chose this girl for the mother of his children. Now their house might come to something. Moya moved before her eyes crowned in the light of the future. And that this noble and innocent girl, with her perfect intuitions, should turn to _her_ now with such impetuous affection was perhaps the sweetest pain the blighted woman had ever known. She lay awake many a night thinking mute blessings on the mother and the child to be. Yet she resisted that generous initiative so dear to herself, aware with a subtle agony of the pain it gave her son.

One day she said to Paul (they were driving home together through a bit of woodland, the horses stepping softly on the mould of fallen leaves)--“I don't expect you to account for every dollar of mine you spend in helping those who can be helped that way. You have a free hand.”

“I understand,” said Paul. “I have used your money freely--for a purpose that I never have accounted for.”

“Don't you need more?”

“No; there is no need now.”

“Why is there not?”

Paul was silent. “I cannot go into particulars. It is a long story.”

“Does the purpose still exist?” his mother asked sharply.

“It does; but not as a claim--for that sort of help.”

“Let me know if such a claim should ever return.”

“I will, mother,” said Paul.

* * * * *

There came a day when mother and son reaped the reward of their mutual forbearance. There was a night and a day when Paul became a boy again in his mother's hands, and she took the place that was hers in Nature. She was the priestess acquainted with mysteries. He followed her, and hung upon her words. The expression of her face meant life and death to him. The dreadful consciousness passed out of his eyes; tears washed it out as he rose from his knees by Moya's bed, and his mother kissed him, and laid his son in his arms.

The following summer saw the club-house and all its affiliations in working order. The beneficiaries took to it most kindly, but were disposed to manage it in their own way: not in all respects the way of the founder's intention.

“To make a gift complete, you must keep yourself out of it,” Mrs. Bogardus advised. “You have done your part; now let them have it and run it themselves.”

Paul was not hungry for leadership, but he had hoped that his interest in the men's amusements would bring him closer to them and equalize the difference between the Hill and the quarry.

“You have never worked with them; how can you expect to play with them?” was another of his mother's cool aphorisms. Alas! Paul, the son of the poor man, had no work, and hence no play.

It was time to be making winter plans again. Mrs. Bogardus knew that her son's young family was now complete without her presence. Moya had gained confidence in the care of her child; she no longer brought every new symptom to the grandmother. Yet Mrs. Bogardus put off discussing the change, dreading to expose her own isolation, a point on which she was as sensitive as if it were a crime. Paul was never entirely frank with her: she knew he would not be frank in this. They never expressed their wills or their won'ts to each other with the careless rudeness of a sound family faith, and always she felt the burden of his unrelenting pity. She began to take long drives alone, coming in late and excusing herself for dinner. At such times she would send for her grandson in his nurse's arms to bid him good-night. The mother would put off her own good-night, not to intrude at these sessions. One evening, going up later to kiss her little son, she found his crib empty, the nurse gone to her dinner. He was fast asleep in his grandmother's arms, where she had held him for an hour in front of the open fire in her bedroom. She looked up guiltily. “He was so comfortable! And his crib is cold. Will he take cold when Ellen puts him back?”

“I am sure he won't,” Moya whispered, gathering up the rosy sleeper. But she was disturbed by the breach of bedtime rules.

In the drawing-room a few nights later she said energetically to Paul.

“One might as well be dead as to live with a grudge.”

“A good grudge?”

“There are no good grudges.”

“There are some honest ones--honestly come by.”

“I don't care how they are come by. Grudges 'is p'ison.'” She laughed, but her cheeks were hot.

“Do you know that Christine has been at death's door? Your mother heard of it--through Mrs. Bowen! Was that why you didn't show me her letter?”

“It was not in my letter from Mrs. Bowen.”

“I think she has known it some time,” said Moya, “and kept it to herself.”

“Mrs. Bowen!”

“Your mother. Isn't it terrible? Think how Chrissy must have needed her. They need each other so! Christine was her constant thought. How can all that change in one year! But she cannot go to Banks Bowen's house without an invitation. We must go to New York and make her come with us--we must open the way.”

“Yes,” said Paul, “I have seen it was coming. In the end we always do the thing we have forsworn.”

“_I_ was the one. I take it back. Your work is there. I know it calls you. Was not Mrs. Bowen's letter an appeal?”

Paul was silent.

“She must think you a deserter. And there is bigger work for you, too! Here is a great political fight on, and my husband is not in it. Every man must slay his dragon. There is a whole city of dragons!”

“Yes,” smiled Paul; “I see. You want me to put my legs under the same cloth with Banks and ask him about his golf score.”

“If you want to fight him, have it out on public grounds; fight him in politics.”

“We are on the same side!”

Moya laughed, but she looked a little dashed.

“Banks comes of gentlemen. He inherited his opinions,” said Paul.

“He may have inherited a few other things, if we could have patience with him.”

“Are you sorry for Banks?”

“I shall be sorry for him--when he meets you. He has been spared that too long.”

“Dispenser of destinies, I bow as I always do!”

“You will speak to your mother at once?”

“I will.”

“And do it beautifully?”

“As well as I know how.”

“Ah, you have had such practice! How good it would be if we could only dare to quarrel in this family! You and I--of course!”

“_We_ quarrel, of course!” laughed Paul.

“I _love_ to quarrel with you!”

“You do it beautifully. You have had such practice!”

“I am so happy! It is clear to me now that we shall live down this misery. Christine will love to see me again; I know she will. A wife is a very different thing from a girl--a haughty girl!”

“I should think the wife of Banks Bowen might be.”

“And we'll part with our ancient and honorable grudge! We are getting too big for it. _We_ are parents!”

Paul made the proposition to his mother and she agreed to it in every particular save the one. She would remain at Stone Ridge. It was impossible to move her. Moya was in despair. She had cultivated an overweening conscience in her relations with Mrs. Bogardus. It turned upon her now and showed her the true state of her own mind at the thought of being Two once more and alone with the child God had given them. Mrs. Bogardus appeared to see nothing but her own interests in the matter. She had made up her mind. And in spite of the conscientious scruples on all sides, the hedging and pleading and explaining, all were happier in the end for her decision. She herself was softened by it, and she yielded one point in return. Paul had steadily opposed his mother's plan of housekeeping, alone with one maid and a man who slept at the stables. The Dunlops, as it happened, were childless for the winter, young Chauncey attending a “commercial college” in a neighboring town. After many interviews and a good deal of self-importance on Cerissa's part, the pair were persuaded to close the old house and occupy the servants' wing on the Hill, as a distinct family, yet at hand in case of need. It was late autumn before all these arrangements could be made. Paul and Moya, leaving the young scion aged nineteen months in the care of his nurse and his grandmother, went down the river to open the New York house.

XXIV

INDIAN SUMMER

The upper fields of Stone Ridge, so the farmers said, were infested that autumn by a shy and solitary vagrant, who never could be met with face to face, but numbers of times had been seen across the width of a lot, climbing the bars, or closing a gate, or vanishing up some crooked lane that quickly shut him from view.

“I would look after that old chap if I was you, Chauncey. He'll be smoking in your hay barns, and burn you out some o' these cold nights.”

Chauncey took these neighborly warnings with good-humored indifference. “I haven't seen no signs of his doin' any harm,” he said. “Anybody's at liberty to walk in the fields if there ain't a 'No Trespass' posted. I rather guess he makes his bed among the corn stouks. I see prints of someone's feet, goin' and comin'.”

Mrs. Bogardus was more herself in those days than she had been at any time since the great North-western wilderness sent her its second message of fear. Old memories were losing their sting. She could bear to review her decision with a certain shrinking hardihood. Had the choice been given her to repeat, her action had been the same. In so far as she had perjured herself for the sake of peace in the family, she owned the sacrifice was vain; but her own personality was the true reason for what she had done. She was free in her unimpeachable widowhood--a mother who had never been at heart a wife. She feared no ghosts this keen autumn weather, at the summit of her conscious powers. Her dark eye unsheathed its glance of authority. It was an eye that went everywhere, and everywhere was met with signs that praised its oversight. Here was an out-worn inheritance which one woman, in less than a third of her lifetime, had developed into a competence for her son. He could afford to dream dreams of beneficence with his mother to make them good. Yes, he needed her still. His child was in her keeping; and, though brief the lease, that trust was no accident. It was the surest proof he could have given her of his vital allegiance. In the step which Paul and Moya were taking, she saw the first promise of that wisdom she had despaired of in her son. In the course of years he would understand her. And Christine? She rested bitterly secure in her daughter's inevitable physical need of her. Christine was a born parasite. She had no true pride; she was capable merely of pique which would wear itself out and pass into other forms of selfishness.

This woman had been governed all her life by a habit of decision, and a strong personality rooted in the powers of nature. Therefore she was seldom mistaken in her conclusions when they dealt with material results. Occasionally she left out the spirit; but the spirit leaves out no one.

Her long dark skirts were sweeping the autumn grass at sunset as she paced back and forth under the red-gold tents of the maples. It was a row of young trees she had planted to grace a certain turf walk at the top of the low wall that divided, by a drop of a few feet, the west lawn at Stone Ridge from the meadow where the beautiful Alderneys were pastured. The maples turned purple as the light faded out of their tops and struck flat across the meadow, making the grass vivid as in spring. Two spots of color moved across it slowly--a young woman capped and aproned, urging along a little trotting child. Down the path of their united shadows they came, and the shadows had reached already the dividing wall. The waiting smile was sweet upon the grandmother's features; her face was transformed like the meadow into a memory of spring. The child saw her, and waved to her with something scarlet which he held in his free hand. She admired the stride of his brown legs above their crumpled socks, the imperishable look of health on his broad, sweet glowing face. She lifted him high in her embrace and bore him up the hill, his dusty shoes dangling against her silk front breadths, his knees pressed tight against her waist, and over her shoulder he flourished the scarlet cardinal flower.