Part 11

Momentarily at a loss, she put the candle down on a little shelf. She rubbed her hands one about the other as if her doing so might lessen the affront which she had now somehow to meet. When at last she spoke, her calm, even tones were like the loveliness of primroses; her eyes were brimming with simple trustfulness.

"You own me, O my husband," she said, "heart--heart, body, and soul. Do with me what you will."

Why should she be so abject? But when Hastings heard the voice of that other, he was again awed by it.

"Think not that I haven't avenged myself!" the voice sneeringly proclaimed.

Hastings looked. For the first time he noticed that the stranger's arm was in a sling; there was a mole on the cheek near the corner of those tightly compressed lips.

She shook like a leaf in a gale. For dread minutes she faced Hastings tremblingly. Coming nearer to him she murmured:

"Are you badly hurt, my--my husband?"

Hastings glanced down at his own arm, on which her eyes seemed to rest; then he suddenly beheld, almost as one beholds one's self in a mirror, his counterpart recoil from her reach while he exclaimed scornfully:

"Don't--don't touch me! Nor pray think that your wiles will ever win from me any forgiveness."

She stopped stock-still.

"Is he dead?" she demanded.

"Ah, then, you do admit, do you, that you love him?" the other flung at her. "Say it to me! say it to me!" he charged, and he half closed his eyes; "or--by Heaven! I will--"

Hastings felt the justice of this accusation, and turned doubtingly back to the girl for her answer. She stared at him, waiting.

"What is the use?" she asked in despair. "Would you believe me?"

"If you _confess_ I will believe you," stated the stranger.

It seemed to Hastings that she grew visibly taller; her face underwent a spasm of pain; and apparently unable longer to remain silent, she cried out to him:

"Can it be that for you a confession is more to be believed than aught which has not to be confessed?" And Hastings could feel the touch of her hand cold on his wrist.

But the other insisted so convincingly that Hastings looked at him once more with confidence.

"The truth," she said sadly, "is only for those who have faith; you--you prefer the sinner, whom you may crush into a penitent. Your egotism demands the power to forgive; you have not the courage to love."

The stranger took a step nearer her, but she was looking at Hastings.

"He is the only one who is worthy to believe me--he, whom you blame me for loving. I do love him, then, but with a love no codes of yours can understand. For I am innocent, to use the word by which you forgivingly call the unjustly accused."

Hastings quailed beneath the bitterness of her irony; he saw, too, how the man who so resembled him fell back against an old calico bag, stuffed with remnants probably, that hung on a hook right behind where he had been standing; but when he faced her once more, he marveled at the change in her appearance.

Her brows were raised, contracted gently, resolutely; her eyes were yearningly fixed on Hastings; her lips were parted tenderly for the generous appeal she had at last found the need to make to him.

"Forgive me, O my husband!" she begged. "Nothing can come between us, nothing shall. But I could not love you as I do if I loved not others--if, for the chance love that came my way, I should give in exchange no thanks. You understand me? You would not have me avoid what I was made to love? You would not have me disregard the sunlight and the sea and the stars in the sky? Yes, it is true, my husband, I loved him. He said that my fingers on the spinet made into harmony all the discords of the day; he said that I wove them away, with the notes of birds and the sound of running brooks and the sighing of the wind, into patterns, as in the long winter evenings I could spin flax at my wheel. It made me happy to have him love me. It filled me with strength. It taught me many new things I could do for you. John, John, say that you forgive me?"

Though Hastings wanted to take her in his arms, he was impelled to turn away from her and to view that silent figure still leaning against the calico bag, whose head was lifted haughtily in deference to her supplication.

"He loved you, too," she continued to Hastings, "because you loved me. He did not mean to kiss me." She just raised her hands, as if involuntarily, and let them fall at her sides. "You thought that he was stealing me from you. He couldn't; he can't; and nobody can--now, nor ever. His kiss was as pure as the perfume of lilies, pressed close to breathe; it but made sweeter your love and mine, your life and mine."

"Adulteress! With my curses go to him, then, forever!"

The cry brought Hastings round to that other whose presence he had forgotten. But next moment she was down before him; Hastings felt her arms tight clasped about his knees.

"My husband, listen to me!" she implored. "I--we--there is somebody else to be considered." Hastings shuddered. "We--you and I--shall be the parents of a child! I have not told you. For the sake of our child, from you, that child's father, I must ask forgiveness!"

She bowed her head sobbingly against Hastings. He put his hand on her hair and was drawing her up to him when the stranger rushed forward to tear her fiercely away.

"Lies! lies!" the stranger ranted. "Go to him, I tell you! _His_ child--his mistress shall not dishonor my house. Go to him, for he isn't dead, and he needs you--you who are not needed here."

"Don't! don't!" she screamed out to Hastings. "I am your wife, the mother of your--!"

Hastings sprang toward her. He saw that her hands were raised straight up in the air. Just as he was about to reach forth to her, the stranger plunged before him, caught the gray chiffon from her shoulders, and pressed it madly on her throat. Hastings leaped upon him, pulled him away, pinned him to the floor, rolled over him.

She had gone. The room was in darkness.

Hastings felt for the door. It yielded. He opened another door, and stepped through it.

His head swam in the midst of the lights outside. He slunk back like one who hesitates to confront the unknown. The stairs were there before him; he began to descend, his right hand held forth, his eyes fastened in horror upon it. Then, as he heard the distant hum of voices below, once more pompous and erect he swung down the last broad treads between the landing and the floor.

A servant who passed uttered a cry and vanished; but that did not deter him. With long strides he boldly rounded the familiar corner to the dining-room door and entered.

He flourished his right hand wildly in the air. He saw that it was bleeding.

"See, see!" he called to them. "At last he is dead. I have killed him! I have killed him!"

The room seemed to recede in the distance. Something snapped inside his brain. Everything was different. Mr. and Mrs. Elliott, with shrieks of terror, were moving to the pantry-door far at the other end. Confusedly he saw Julia try to force herself toward him; saw her half come, heard his name on her lips. He wanted to smile, he wanted to bend down over her affectionately; but when he sought to reach her with his bloody hand, she shrank back, turned, and fled with the others. He shouted to them; but he stumbled, and thought he might fall. He caught hold of the table. After that all was blackness.

* * * * *

He awoke amid the appointments of the chamber which Julia had called his room. A quick flood of memories, some clear and accurate, others vague and troublesome, inundated his tired consciousness. Gradually he became aware of a thick, muddy pain rolling in dreadful rhythmic waves through his head. He looked toward the clock on the mantelpiece to see if it wasn't time to get up. He met the eyes of Mrs. Elliott. He lifted himself, falling back on the pillow. The pillow was as cold as ice. She came over to him.

"Dear boy--you feel better?"

"Better? Better?" he echoed. "Why are you here?"

"Your head is cooler. You've been--you--my dear child, you may as well know it--you fainted last night--yesterday. You were worn out; you caught cold, and had--a chill. You hadn't eaten anything since--not since--" She fondled the bed-clothes. "You'll be all right now. Your head--struck something. The doctor said you weren't to talk--"

It hurt him to move his eyes. The sockets ached. He tried hard to realize what she had told him, repeating snatches of it feverishly over to himself.

"Is it dangerous?" he finally got to the point of asking.

"No; a slight--just a very slight concussion."

"Concussion?" He floundered in the ominous meaning of it until Julia came in. Every time he spoke they begged him not to. She looked so real to him, so natural, so tangibly alive! When she put her face down by his he trembled, and burst out crying like a child. He was afraid she would go away. She sat on the edge of the bed, her hands about one of his. The other hand lay bandaged on the counterpane.

The next day he was better, but he wasn't allowed to get up; and he was secretly not sorry not to have to try. The weakness which followed the first shock had made him submissive to the situation; he began to be used to the fact that he was ill; even the nurse's presence he philosophically accepted, so resigned was he to the necessity. He asked questions concerning his pulse and temperature, wanted to know if the bags of ice could be dispensed with soon. Julia read aloud to him for an hour every morning.

But, having a half-attentive interest in what she read, he would look fixedly at her and try to piece together his jumbled recollections.

## Partly from lack of strength, mostly because he was loath to admit to

anybody that his brain wasn't normally clear, he let the questions which rose to his lips pass unuttered. Once he exclaimed irrelevantly:

"Where, Julia, did that portrait come from?" And when he caught the intensity of her stare, he looked around the walls, and, smiling bashfully, concealed his embarrassment by saying, "I'm really listening, but I must have dozed for a second." At times he would gaze wonderingly at the ceiling, lose himself following the lines of the panels, or counting the little square panes in the window-sashes. He sometimes slept, but not quite soundly; half his somnolence was busy with irrational calculations beyond his control.

A musty smell elusively kept fading as soon as he was aware of breathing it; a dim room, in which the windows were shut close and the shades pulled down, drifted through his quick fancy into darkness; he would find himself deliriously sorting many strange garments into piles, counting them, opening drawers to take others out, until the accumulations drove him to despair. His right hand throbbed under the tight bandage; he kept fingering the bandage and pressing on the sore spots. Everything about him would seem suddenly definite and real as compared with the dismal bewilderment of his dreamings. Perhaps the doctor would enter, with professional cheerfulness. But then, right in the middle of answering some question, Hastings would be blinded by a great rush of bright light through the opened door.

A day came when all this phantasmagoria ceased to bother him; with returning vigor he had to make less and less effort to forget it, until at last it altogether went. The joy of new health swept over him, filling the gaps and low, miasmic areas of his mentality, as the rising tide fills the empty pools of the shore.

III

It was a month after the day of John Hastings's arrival at Rockface. Unlike that day, the weather was sunny and mild; big cumulus clouds moved languidly through the sky, as if it were midsummer instead of late October. Julia was crocheting, and he was watching her. They were sitting in front of the house on a leaf-strewn grass-plot near the avenue between the lines of larches that, now calm in the windless forenoon, stretched diagonally from the street to the corners of the bland old façade.

"But if you knew all along," he, with his habitual freshness of wonder, put to her, "that it was, that it _is_, really Mr. Eberdeen's house, why in the name of things didn't you tell me _then_?"

She became irritatingly absorbed in her work.

"I thought," she at length said, "that you were pretending not to know, and I wanted, in that case, to discover what other--what else you might be holding back from me."

"Holding back from you? What _else_?" he echoed. "What else was there?"

"I wasn't sure, you see. Nothing that I knew," she affirmed frankly, laughing away the sudden rigor of sadness on his face. "There was another reason, though. There was something which I had been saving for the very last moment to show you. But I was rather ashamed of wanting to so much, and, after the way you had taken the rest of the house, I hesitated. Just as I finally was going to, lunch was ready--remember?"

Hastings awkwardly withdrew his right hand, which had been resting palm downward on his knee, and thrust it into his pocket.

"Julia," he cried out, in characteristic disregard of all context, "suppose Mr. Eberdeen should turn out to have been--well--a relative, or something? It might account, you know, for my asking that question, and--and for how everything here"--he looked inclusively round him--"for how this all impressed me so."

She waited, hopeful of the time having at last come when he might wish to confide in her whatever it was--if, indeed, he knew--that had happened; but he only ingenuously continued to hold out to her the possibility of his new idea.

"No," she told him, with a disappointment which she couldn't conceal, "he wasn't. I've looked up his entire history. He died right here, and he had no children. _Your_ pedigree I know by heart."

Hastings smiled at her thoroughness.

"What," he exclaimed, "if some unrecorded forebear of mine has eluded you? Somebody," he dreamily improvised, "who knew this house, who was familiar with every turn of the road, every habit of the mist. It's just such a smug little, old, weather-worn town like Rockface, where any New Englander is likely to find traces of forgotten ancestors."

The sound of footsteps made them both look toward the gate.

"Who is it? Why is he coming here?" Julia demanded half-indignantly under her breath.

"The same old man I met, but so much older!" whispered Hastings, unexpectedly puzzled whether to welcome or dread this intrusion.

"I have searched the streets through for him ever since," she remonstrated; "I have asked everybody I saw, and no one in the whole place could tell me of any old man answering his description."

They watched his slow, difficult approach over the gravel. He came forward without making the slightest recognition of their presence. Stopping full in front of them, he took off his hat, applied a straggling red handkerchief uncertainly to his face, and stared up at the house-front.

"They tell me," he muttered, not once looking at either of his interlocutors, "that yer've been and sold it. So yer couldn't stand it, eh, after all? It's what Al Makepeace said 'u'd be the case. Looks innocent, though, as herself did, now, don't it?"

"We've sold it," Julia protested, "only because--because we can't stay here. Jack--Mr. Hastings--and I are going to be married. We are going to live in Europe. My father and mother didn't want--"

"Yer can't make a new dog out of an old dog, ner learn an old dog new tricks," he went on disregardingly; "and I guess it's the same fur's houses be concerned."

"Who are you, anyway?" Hastings asked, getting up to offer the old man a chair.

"Who am I?" the old man echoed, suddenly attentive. "Dear me, dear me! Whose father was it as planted--and I had his own word fer it--all these 'ere tam'rack trees, and dug the well by the south door? And seen the lady of the house herself, mind yer, go out 'tween them stone posts fer the last time--and darker than pitch it was, too--on her way that night she went to meet Henry--"

At this point the old man was seized by a fit of coughing. When he recovered from it, he just stood there, gazing ahead of him, shaken with the palsy of years, so that he failed to heed the questions they thrice repeated to him.

"No wonder yer couldn't sleep in it, with her curse on the big empty halls! When the crops themselves died the night afterward, without a sign of a frost comin' down to touch them! It was the devil's own guilt in her that did it, Al says. Poor man! poor man! And yer tried ter dress it all up like a corpse, as if yer thought it was dead; but it came to life on yer, did it?" he mumbled, laughing incomprehensibly to himself. "When yer leavin'? To-morrer? Sooner the better fer yer, I guess. Good-day." With which imprecation the old man turned, feebly put on his hat, and dragged himself back down the avenue whence he had come.

They saw the last vestige of him disappear forever.

"He's like a broken spirit brooding over the neighborhood," Hastings said, shivering despite himself.

Julia began to crochet again, nervously absorbed in what she was doing.

"His scattered, crazy words are like the last gasp of the little village. How he epitomizes all the cramped, pent-up emotions of the starved inhabitants who have gone--all the passions that must have so drearily burnt themselves out here, with nothing to note but the shifting of the winds or the digging of some well! They who were obliged, from sheer ennui, to create dramas out of their Puritan prejudices. Can't you breathe contagion in the very atmosphere? Julia, I've had enough of it; I'm glad we're going. If I stayed here a month longer, I should get to feel as indigenous as that gnarled old apple-tree; the ghosts of the soil would claim me."

She stood up and walked away from him across the gravel avenue, as if doing so might help her to seize this occasion for what she had decided at last to tell him. She realized that she must be quick, that in another hour her parents' return might end this one good opportunity for which she had longed and waited.

"Jack dear," she said, moving back toward him, seeing how her own excitement was reflected in the way he, too, had arisen and taken a few steps towards her, "to-morrow is our last day, and there's something that we must talk about before we go."

His head was bowed, his eyes focused tensely up at hers, his arms hanging beside him; the sensitive smile hovered more and more dimly on his lips; his whole body swayed imperceptibly, like the beating of a pulse.

"Jack," she got out, going still closer to him, "I want to show you--Mrs. Eberdeen's room."

He would never quite realize the fullness of the shock it gave him; no deliberate attack could have been so vulnerably aimed, and the completeness of the blow was the greater for being one which he had been unwittingly preparing all along to receive. The house looked miles away; far over it three ducks flew southward.

On the landing above the broad part of the staircase they paused a moment. Instead of going up the left branch, which led to Jack's door, she took him to the right, where, at the head of the stairs, there was another door directly opposite his. As soon as he saw it he went forward quickly and turned the knob. It stuck; it was locked; and rather timorously he stepped back to meet Julia's searching look as she handed him a rusty old key.

The musty smell poured out on them like the damp from an opened vault.

She took his hand. They stepped across the threshold.

He saw the lithograph of the two kittens, age-worn and time-blurred, still crooked on the wall beside the bureau; there was the sand-shaker on the maple desk; there hung the yellowed print of the "Last Supper" above the fireplace--all stark and ghostly in that uncannily late afternoon light, which not even the morning sun could dispel.

He clutched her hand. He looked at the bed, which hadn't been smoothed or touched since he had lain in it a month ago. He remembered it as uncomprehendingly as one remembers mislaying a lost object in a forgotten place. He remembered waking. But the rest he had done was lost in the shadows.

"So this is where it happened--_here!_ How have I ever been in this room before?"

"_What_ happened?" she asked him eagerly, firmly.

"I fainted--before I was sick. But why--why here?" he begged.

She had prepared her answer; she had many times rehearsed it; but the words now served inadequately.

"You hadn't eaten anything," she stated softly. "You hadn't slept. You had a fever, and your brain was so tired from--from everything that when you started for _your_ room,--the one opposite, which I had shown to you,--you carelessly turned to the right, and came into this room instead, which I hadn't had a chance yet to tell you about. Haven't you ever known, _since_, that you did it?"

He shook his head.

"This was Mrs. Eberdeen's room," she went on. "It has always been just like this,--at least I think it has,--always, since the house was built. I kept it as a curiosity. I called it Mrs. Eberdeen's room because the natives said she was wicked and had brought ruin to the house. I reasoned that this was why nobody had taken these things away or changed them--the wall-paper, I mean, the bed, the carpet, the pictures. And there's precisely one thing," she impetuously concluded, as if she couldn't postpone longer telling him, "that I myself have added."

Hastings smiled wanly at her. She guided him round to the wall at the side of the door in front of which they had been standing; she started to speak again before she saw what it was to which she had referred; and so her own words prevented her from hearing the smothered sound of his recognition.

"I found this," she said, trying to speak carelessly and forcing herself steadfastly to regard it, "in an old shop twelve miles down the Poochuck Road. Isn't it quaint? I got it--because, Jack, it looked like you, and--and because it exactly fitted this panel!"