Part 29 (2/2)
”Go back, all of you!” she said to the women, who crowded on her heels.
”There are plenty of places to look.” Her stern eyes resisted their frightened sympathy. She was not ready to yield to the consciousness of her own fears.
To the old house she went, by some sure instinct that told her the road to trouble. But her trouble stood off from her, and spared her for one moment of exquisite relief; as if the child of Paul and Moya had no part in what was waiting for her. The door at the foot of the stairs stood open. She heard a soft, repeated thud. Panting, she climbed the stairs; and as she rounded the shoulder of the chimney, there, on the top step above her, stood the fair-haired child, making the only light in the place. He was knocking, with his foolish ball, on the door of the chamber of fear. Three generations of the living and the dead were brought together in this coil of fate, and the child, in his happy innocence, had joined the knot.
The woman crouching on the stairs could barely whisper, ”Middy!” lest if she startled him he might turn and fall. He looked down at her, unsurprised, and paused in his knocking. ”Man--in there--won't 'peak to Middy!” he said.
She crept towards him and sat below him, coaxing him into her lap. The strange motions of her breast, as she pressed his head against her, kept the boy quiet, and in that silence she heard an inner sound--the awful pulse of the old clock beating steadily, calling her, demanding the evidence of her senses,--she who feared no ghosts,--beating out the hours of an agony she was there to witness. And she was yet in time. The hapless creature entrapped within that room dragged its weight slowly across the floor. The clock, sole witness and companion of its sufferings, ticked on impartially. Neither is this any new thing, it seemed to say. A life was starved in here before--not for lack of food, but love,--love,--love!
She carried the child out into the air, and he ran before her like a breeze. The women who met them stared at her sick and desperate face.
She made herself quickly understood, and as each listener drained her meaning the horror spread. There was but one man left on the place, within call, he with the boyish face and clean brown hands, who had ridden across the fields for an afternoon's idle pleasure. He stepped to her side and took the key out of her hand. ”You ought not to do this,”
he said gently, as their eyes met.
”Wednesday, Thursday, Friday,” she counted mechanically. ”He has been in there six days and seven nights by my orders.” She looked straight before her, seeing no one, as she gave her commands to the women: fire and hot water and stimulants, in the kitchen of the old house at once, and another man, if one could be found to follow her.
The two figures moving across the gra.s.s might have stepped out of an ill.u.s.tration in the pages of some current magazine. In their thoughts they had already unlocked the door of that living death and were face to face with the insupportable facts of nature.
The morbid, sickening, prison odor met them at the door--humanity's helpless protest against bolts and bars. Again the young man begged his companion not to enter. She took one deep breath of the pure outside air and stepped before him. They searched the emptiness of the barely furnished room. The clock ticked on to itself. Mrs. Bogardus's companion stood irresolute, not knowing the place. The fetid air confused his senses. But she went past him through the inner door, guided by remembrance of the sounds she had heard.
She had seen it. She approached it cautiously, stooping for a better view, and closing in upon it warily, as one cuts off the retreat of a creature in the last agonies of flight. Her companion heard her say: ”Show me your face!--Uncover his face,” she repeated, not moving her eyes as he stepped behind her. ”He will not let me near him. Uncover it.”
The thing in the corner had some time been a man. There was still enough manhood left to feel her eyes and to shrink as an earthworm from the spade. He had crawled close to the baseboard of the room. An old man's ashen beard straggled through the brown claws wrapped about the face. As the dust of the thres.h.i.+ng floor to the summer grain, so was his likeness to one she remembered.
”I must see that man's face!” she panted. ”He will die if I touch him.
Take away his hands.” It was done, with set teeth, and the face of the football hero was bathed in sweat. He breathed through tense nostrils, and a sickly whiteness spread backward from his lips. Suddenly he loosed his burden. It fell, doubling in a ghastly heap, and he rushed for the open air.
Mrs. Bogardus groaned. She raised herself up slowly, stretching back her head. Her face was like the terrible tortured mask of the Medusa. She had but a moment in which to recover herself. Deliberately she spoke when her companion returned and stood beside her.
”That was my husband. If he lives I am still his wife. You are not to forget this. It is no secret. Are you able to help me now? Get a blanket from the women. I hear some one coming.”
She waited, with head erect and eyes closed and rigid tortured lips apart, till the feet were heard at the door.
XXVI
PEACE TO THIS HOUSE
Mrs. Remsen and her delicate daughter had driven away to avoid excitement and the night air.
Chauncey hovered round the piazza steps, talking, with but little encouragement, to Miss Sallie and the young man who had become the centre of all eyes.
”I don't see how anybody on the face of the earth could blame her, nor me either!” Chauncey protested. ”If the critter wanted to git out, why couldn't he say so? I stood there holdin' the door open much as five minutes. 'Who's in there?' I says. I called it loud enough to wake the dead. 'n.o.body wants to hurt ye,' says I. There want nothing to be afraid of. He hadn't done nothing anyway. It's the strangest case ever I heard tell of. And the doctor don't think he was much crazy either.”
”Can he live?” asked Miss Sallie.
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