Part 78 (1/2)
”Say,” she called out, ”get in here. I'll take you home--just as soon as not.”
”Thank you,” replied Charlotte. ”I have an errand. I am not going home just yet.”
”All right,” replied Bessy, touching her horse. ”I'd just as soon have taken you as not, if you'd been going home.”
”Thank you,” Charlotte said, again.
”I declare, she looked as if she was just ready to cry,” said Bessy to Eastman, as they drove up the street.
She was quite right. Charlotte was horribly frightened by her father's non-arrival on the train. He had never come on a later train than that since the others had gone. The thought of returning alone to her solitary home was more than she could bear. She remembered that there was another train a half-hour later, and she resolved to remain down for that. She thought that she would go to Mr. Anderson's store and purchase some cereal for breakfast, that she might have that charged. She was conscious, but she tried to stifle the consciousness, of a hope that Mr. Anderson would be there, and she might tell him that her father had not arrived on that train, and he would rea.s.sure her. But Mr. Anderson had naturally gone straight home from the post-office to supper. Charlotte ordered her cereal, and also a few eggs. Then she went back to the station. It was nearly twenty minutes before the train was due. She walked up and down the platform, which extended east and west. The new moon was just rising, a slender crescent of light, and off one upper horn burned a great star. It was a wonderful night, cold, with a calmness and hush of all the winds of heaven which was like the hush of peace itself.
Charlotte noticed everything, the calm night and the crescent moon, but she came between herself and her own knowledge of it. Her mind was fixed upon the train and the terrible possibility that her father might not arrive on that. It seemed to her that if he did not arrive on that it was simply beyond bearing. The possibility was too terrible to be contemplated with reason, and yet she could not have told just why she was in such a panic of fear. A thousand things might happen to keep any business-man in the City later than he had expected. He had often been so kept while the others were home; but now she was alone, and she felt that he would certainly come unless something most serious had detained him. Charlotte had naturally a somewhat pessimistic turn of mind, and her imagination was active.
She imagined many things; she even imagined the actual cause of Carroll's detention, among others, that he had slipped on the ice and injured himself. The falling of the boy on her way to the six-o'clock train had directly swerved her fancy in that direction. But she imagined everything. That was only one of many casualties. The train was a little late. She stood staring down the track at the unswerving signal-lights, watching for the head-light of the locomotive, and it seemed to her quite certain that there had been an accident on that train. A thought struck her, and she went into the waiting-room and asked the ticket-agent if the train was very late. The agent was quite a young man, and he looked at her with a covert masculine coquettishness as he replied, but she was oblivious of that. All she thought of was that, if there had been an accident on the line and the train was late on that account, he would surely be apt to know.
Her heart was beating so fast that she trembled; but he said ten minutes, and said nothing about an accident, and she was rea.s.sured.
She turned to go, after thanking him, and he volunteered further information.
”There is a freight ahead delaying the train,” he said.
”Oh, thank you,” replied Charlotte. Then she went out on the platform again and watched for the head-light of the locomotive, staring down the track past the twinkle of the signal-lights. Suddenly it flashed into sight far off, but she saw it. She waited. Soon she heard the train. A gateman crossed the tracks from the in-station, padlocking the gates carefully after him. A baggage-master drew a trunk to the edge of the platform. A few pa.s.sengers came out of the waiting-room.
Charlotte waited, and the train came majestically around the curve below the station. She moved along as it came up, keeping her eyes on the cars. She seemed to have eyes with facets like a cut diamond. It was really as if she saw all the car doors at once. But she moved with a strange stiffness, and could not feel her hands nor feet; her heart beat so fast and thick that it shook her like the pulse of an engine. She moved along, and she saw every pa.s.senger who alighted.
Then the train steamed out of the station with slowly gathering speed, and her father had not come on it.
Charlotte, when she actually realized the fact, the possibility of which had seemed incredible, gained a little strength. It was like the endurance of disaster which is sometimes more feasible than the contemplation of it. She thought at once what to do. In the event of her father having been delayed by some unforeseen business he would surely telegraph. She at once crossed the slope from the station and went to Andrew Drake's drug-store, where the telegraph-office was.
She asked if a telegram had come for her, if one had been sent to the house. When the boy in charge answered no, she felt as if she had received a stunning blow. She had then no doubt whatever that something had happened to her father, some accident. The boy, who was young and pleasant-faced, watched her with a vague sympathy. In a moment she recovered herself. He might have sent a telegram which had not arrived. It might come any moment. The boy directly had the same thought. ”The minute the telegram comes I'll get it up to you,” he said, earnestly. ”I expect Mr. Drake back every minute, and I can leave.”
”Thank you,” said Charlotte.
It was an hour and a half before the next train. She went out of the store and walked miserably along the street to her deserted home.
Chapter x.x.xVIII
There is, to a human being of Charlotte Carroll's type, something unutterably terrifying about entering, especially at nightfall, an entirely empty house. The worst of it is it does not seem to be empty. In reality, the emptiness of it is the last thing which is comprehended. It is full to overflowing with terrors, with spiritual ent.i.ties which are much more palpable, when one is in a certain mood, than actual physical presences. Charlotte approaching the house, saw, first, glimmers of light on the windows, which were merely reflections ostensibly from the electric light in the street, not so ostensibly from other lights.
”Oh, there is some one in there,” Charlotte thought to herself, and again that horrible, pulsing, vibrating motion of her heart overcame her. ”Who is there?” she asked herself. She remembered that terrible tramp whom she had seen asleep in the woods that day. He might have been riding on some freight-train which had stopped at Banbridge, and stolen across and entered the vacant house. She stood still, staring at the cold glimmers on the windows. Then gradually she became convinced that they were merely reflections which she saw. Aside from her imagination, Charlotte was not entirely devoid of a certain bravery, or, rather, of a certain reason which came to her rescue.
”What a little goose I am!” she told herself. ”Those are only reflections. They are the reflections of the light in the street.” As she studied it more closely she saw that the light, being intercepted by the branches of the trees on the lawn, swaying in a light wind, produced some of the strange effects at the windows which had seemed like people moving back and forth in the rooms. Then all at once she saw another glimmer of light on the front window of her father's room which she could not account for at all. She moved in front of a long, fan-shaped ray cast by the electric light in the street, and, looking at the window, the reflection was still there. She could not account for that at all, unless it was produced by a light from a house window--which was probably the case. At all events, it disquieted her. Still, she overcame her disinclination to enter the house because of that. She reasoned from a.n.a.logy. ”All the other lights are reflections,” she told herself, ”and of course that must be.”
However, the main cause of her terror remained: the unfounded, world-old conviction of presences behind closed doors, the almost impossibility for a very imaginative person to conceive of an entirely empty room or house--that is, empty of sentient life. She had hidden the front-door key under the mat before the front door; she had lived long enough in the country to acquire that absurdly innocent habit. She groped for it, thought for a second, with a gasp of horror, that it was not there. Then she felt it with her gloved hand, fitted it in the lock, opened the door, and went in, and the inner darkness smote her like a hostile crowd.
It was actually to the child as if she were pa.s.sing through a thick group of mysterious, inimical things concealed by the darkness. It was as if she heard whispers of conspiracy; it was even as if she smelled odors of strange garments and bodies. Every sense in her was on the alert. She even tasted something bitter in her mouth. It was all absurd. She reiterated in her ears that it was all absurd, but she had now pa.s.sed the point wherein reason can support. She had come through an unusually active imagination into the unknown quant.i.ties and sequences of life. She put out her hands and groped her way through the darkness of the hall, and the fear lest she should touch some one, some terrible thing, was as bad as the reality could have been. She knew best where to find matches in the dining-room, so she went through the hall, with a sort of mad rush in spite of her blindness, and she gained the dining-room and felt along the shelf for a little hammered-bra.s.s bowl where matches were usually kept. In it she felt only two. The mantel-shelf was the old-fas.h.i.+oned marble monstrosity, the perpetuation of a false taste in domestic architecture, but it was excellent as to its facilities for scratching matches. She rubbed one of the two matches under the shelf on the rough surface, but it did not ignite. It evidently was a half-burned match. She took the other. It seemed to her that if that failed her, if she had to grope about the kitchen for more in this thick blackness--for even the street-light did not reach this room--she should die. She rubbed the last match against the marble, and it blazed directly. She s.h.i.+elded it carefully with her hand from the door draught, and succeeded in lighting a candle in one of a pair of bra.s.s candlesticks which stood on the shelf. She then held the flaring light aloft and looked fearfully around the room. Everything was as usual, but, strangely enough, it did not rea.s.sure her. The solitariness continued to hold terrible possibilities for her as well as the darkness, and with the light also returned what had been for a few minutes in abeyance before her purely selfish fear, the anxiety over her father. She moved about the house with the candle, going from room to room. It seemed to her that she could not remain one minute if she did not do so. Every time before entering a room she felt sure that it was occupied. Every time after leaving it she felt sure that something unknown was left there. She went into the kitchen, and saw her miserable little dinner drying up in the shelf of the range, and then for the first time self-pity a.s.serted itself.
She sat down and sobbed and sobbed.
”There, I got that nice dinner, that beautiful dinner,” she said to herself, quite aloud in a pitiful wail like a baby's, ”and perhaps poor papa will never even taste it. Oh dear! Oh dear!”
She rocked herself back and forth in the kitchen-chair, weeping. She had set the candle on the table, and a draught of wind from some unknown quarter struck it and the strangest lights and shadows flared and flickered over the room and ceiling. Presently, Charlotte, looking at them, became diverted again from her grief. She looked about fearfully. Then she made a tremendous effort, rose, and lighted a lamp. With that the room was not so frightful, yet it was still not normal. The familiar homely articles of furniture a.s.sumed strange appearances. She saw something on the range, a little object which filled her with such unreasoning horror that it was almost sheer insanity. It was simply because she could not for the moment imagine what the little object, which had nothing in the least frightful about it, could be. Finally she rose and looked, and it was only a little iron spoon which she must have dropped there. She removed it, but still the horror was over her. She lifted the cover from the dish of meat, and again the tears came.
”Poor papa! poor papa!” she said.
Then she carried the lamp into the dining-room, and went into the parlor. She had made herself quite satisfied that there was in reality nothing menacing in the house except her own fears. She would sit beside one of the front windows in the parlor, in the dark, in order that she might not be seen, and she would watch for her father, and she would also watch for any one who might approach the house with any harmful intent.
Charlotte curled herself up in a large chair beside the window which commanded the best view of the grounds and the drive. With the light of the young moon there was really no possibility that anything could approach unseen by her, unless by way of the fields from the back.
But that she did not think of. Her mind became again concentrated upon her father and the possibility of either his return on the next train or a telegram explaining his absence. She knew that the next train from New York was due in Banbridge at a few minutes after eight. She had no time-table, but she remembered Major Arms arriving once, and she was quite certain that the train was due at eight-seventeen. It might, of course, be late. She reflected, with a sense of solid comfort, that the trains were rather more apt to be late than not. She need not give up hope of her father's arriving on this train until even nine o'clock, for besides the possibility of the lateness there was also that of his walking rather than taking a carriage from the station. In fact, he would probably walk, since he was still in Samson Rawdy's debt. She might allow at least twenty minutes for the walk from the station. She might allow more even than that. She sat at the window, and waited, peering out. There was a singular half-dusk rather than half-light from the new moon. The moon itself was not visible from where she sat, for the window faced north, but she could see over everything the sweet influence of it.