The Desert and The Sown

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"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.

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