The Desert and The Sown
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Mary Hallock Foote >> The Desert and The Sown
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"I hope he'd leave us a little something for breakfast," said Mrs.
Bogardus a trifle coldly. But she did not mention the cause of her
uneasiness about this particular visitor. She never defended herself.
Miss Sallie was delighted with her callousness to the sentimental rebuke
which had been rather rubbed in. It was so unmodern; one got so weary of
fashionable philanthropy, women who talked of their social sympathies and
their principles in life. She almost hoped that Mrs. Bogardus had neither.
Certainly she never mentioned them.
"What did she say? Did she tell you what I said to her last night?"
Cerissa questioned her husband feverishly after his interview with Mrs.
Bogardus.
"She didn't mention your name," Chauncey took some pleasure in stating.
"If you hadn't told me yourself, I shouldn't have known you'd meddled in
it at all."
"What's she going to do about it?"
"How crazy you women are! 'Cause some poor old Sooner-die-than-work warms
his bones by a bit of fire that wouldn't scare a chimbly swaller out of
its nest! Don't you s'pose if there'd been any fire there to speak of, I'd
'a' seen it? What am I here for? Now I've got to drop everything, and git
a padlock on that door, and lock it up every night, and search the whole
place from top to bottom for fear there's some one in there hidin' in a
rathole!"
"Chauncey! If you've got to do that I don't want you to go in there alone.
You take one of the men with you; and you better have a pistol or one of
the dogs anyhow. Suppose you was to ketch some one in there, and corner
him! He might turn on you, and shoot you!"
"I wish you wouldn't work yourself up so about nothin' at all! Want me to
make a blame jackass of myself raisin' the whole place about a potato-peel
or a bacon-rind!"
"I think you might have some little regard for my feelings," Cerissa
whimpered. "If you ain't afraid, I'm afraid for you; and I don't see
anything to be ashamed of either. I wish you _wouldn't_ go _alone_
searching through that spooky old place. It just puts me beside myself to
think of it!"
"Well, well! That's enough about it anyhow. I ain't going to do anything
foolish, and you needn't think no more about it."
Whether it was the effect of his wife's fears, or his promise to her, or
the inhospitable nature of his errand founded on suspicion, certainly
Chauncey showed no spirit of rashness in conducting his search. He knocked
the mud off his boots loudly on the doorsill before proceeding to attach
the padlock to the outer door. He searched the loom-room, lighting a
candle and peering into all its cobwebbed corners. He examined the rooms
lately inhabited, unlocking and locking doors behind him noisily with
increasing confidence in the good old house's emptiness. Still, in the
fireplace in the loom-room there were signs of furtive cooking which a
housekeeper's eye would infallibly detect. He saw that the search must
proceed. It was not all a question of his wife's fears, as he opened the
stair-door cautiously and tramped slowly up towards the tower bedroom. He
could not remember who had gone out last, on the day the old secretary was
moved down. There had been four men up there, and--yes, the key was still
in the lock outside. He clutched it and it fell rattling on the steps. He
swung the door open and stared into the further darkness beyond his range
of vision. He waved his candle as far as his arm would reach. "Anybody
_in_ here?" he shouted. The silence made his flesh prick. "I'm goin' to
lock up now. Better show up. It's the last chance." He waited while one
could count ten. "Anybody in here that wants to be let free? Nobody's
goin' to hurt ye."
To his anxious relief there was no reply. But as he listened, he heard the
loud, measured tick, tick, of the old clock, appalling in the darkness, on
the silence of that empty room. Chauncey could not have told just how he
got the door to, nor where he found strength to lock it and drag his feet
downstairs, but the hand that held the key was moist with cold
perspiration as he reached the open air.
"Well, if that's rain I'd like to know where it comes from!" He looked up
at the moon breaking through drifting clouds. The night was keen and
clear.
"If I was to tell that to Cerissa she'd never go within a mile o' that
house again! Maybe I was mistaken--but I ain't goin' back to see!"
Next morning on calmer reflection he changed his mind about removing the
lawn-mower and other hand-tools from the loom-room as he had determined
overnight should be done. The place continued to be used as a storeroom,
open by day.
At night it was Chauncey's business to lock it up, and he was careful to
repeat his search--as far as the stair-door. Never did the silent room
above give forth a protest, a sound of human restraint or occupation. He
reported to the mistress that all was snug at the old house, and nobody
anywhere about the place.
XXV
THE FELL FROST
After the rain came milder days. The still white mornings slowly
brightened into hazy afternoons. The old moon like a sleep walker stood
exposed in the morning sky. The roads to Stone Ridge were deep in fallen
leaves. Soft-tired wheels rustled up the avenue and horses' feet fell
light, as the last of the summer neighbors came to say good-by.
It was a party of four--Miss Sallie and a good-looking youth of the
football cult on horseback, her mother and an elder sister, the delicate
Miss Remsen, in a hired carriage. Their own traps had been sent to town.
Tea was served promptly, as the visitors had a long road home before their
dinner-hour. In the reduced state of the establishment it was Katy who
brought the tea while Cerissa looked after her little charge. Cerissa sat
on the kitchen porch sewing and expanding under the deep attention of the
cook; they could see Middy a little way off on the tennis-court wiping the
mud gravely from a truant ball he had found among the nasturtiums. All was
as peaceful as the time of day and the season of the year.
"Yes," said Cerissa solemnly. "Old Abraham Van Elten was too much cumbered
up with this world to get quit of it as easy as some. If his spirit is
burdened with a message to anybody it's to _her_. He died unreconciled to
her, and she inherited all this place in spite of him, as you may say.
I've come as near believin' in such things since the goings on up there in
that room"--
"She wants Middy fetched in to see the comp'ny," cried Katy, bursting into
the sentence. "Where is he, till I clean him? And she wants some more
bread and butter as quick as ye can spread it."
"Well, Katy!" said Cerissa slowly, with severe emphasis. "When I was a
girl, my mother used to tell me it wasn't manners to"--
"I haven't got time to hear about yer mother," said Katy rudely. "What
have ye done with me boy?" The tennis-court lay vacant on the terrace in
the sun; the steep lawn sloped away and dipped into the trees.
"Don't call," said the cook warily. "It'll only scare her. He was there
only a minute ago. Run, Katy, and see if he's at the stables."
It was not noticed, except by Mrs. Bogardus, that no Katy, and no boy, and
no bread and butter, had appeared. Possibly the last deficiency had
attracted a little playful attention from the young horseback riders, who
were accusing each other of eating more than their respective shares.
At length Miss Sallie perceived there was something on her hostess's mind.
"Where is John Middleton?" she whispered. "Katy is dressing him all over,
from head to foot, isn't she? I hope she isn't curling his hair. John
Middleton has such wonderful hair! I refuse to go back to New York till I
have introduced you to John Middleton Bogardus," she announced to the
young man, who laughed at everything she said. Mrs. Bogardus smiled
vacantly and glanced at the door.
"Let me go find Katy," cried Miss Sally. Katy entered as she spoke, and
said a few words to the mistress. "Excuse me." Mrs. Bogardus rose hastily.
She asked Miss Sallie to take her place at the tea-tray.
"What is it?"
"The boy--they cannot find him. Don't say anything." She had turned ashy
white, and Katy's pretty flushed face had a wild expression.
In five minutes the search had begun. Mrs. Bogardus was at the telephone,
calling up the quarry, for she was short of men. One order followed
another quickly. Her voice was harsh and deep. She had frankly forgotten
her guests. Embarrassed by their own uselessness, yet unable to take
leave, they lingered and discussed the mystery of this sudden, acute
alarm.
"It is the sore spot," said Miss Sally sentimentally. "You know her
husband was missing for years before she gave him up; and then that
dreadful time, three years ago, when they were so frightened about Paul."
Having spread the alarm, Mrs. Bogardus took the field in person. Her head
was bare in the keen, sunset light. She moved with strong, fleet steps,
but a look of sudden age stamped her face.
"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 grass might have stepped out of an
illustration 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 threshing 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. 'Nobody 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.
"He's alive now, but doctor don't know how long he'll last. There he comes
now. I must go and git his horse."
The doctor, who seemed nervous,--he was a young local practitioner,--asked
to speak with Miss Sallie's hero apart.
"Did Mrs. Bogardus say anything when she first saw that man? Did you
notice what she said?--how she took it?"
The hero, who was also a gentleman, looked at the doctor coolly.
"It was not a nice thing," he said. "I saw just as little as I could."
"You don't understand me," said the doctor. "I want to know if Mrs.
Bogardus appeared to you to have made any discovery--received any shock
not to be accounted for by--by what you both saw?"
"I shouldn't attempt to answer such a question," said the youngster
bluntly. "I never saw Mrs. Bogardus in my life before to-day."
The doctor colored. "Mrs. Bogardus has given me a telegram to send, and I
don't know whether to send it or not. It's going to make a whole lot of
talk. I am not much acquainted with Mrs. Bogardus myself, except by
hearsay. That's partly what surprises me. It looks a little reckless to
send out such a message as that, by the first hand that comes along.
Hadn't we better give her time to think it over?" He opened the telegram
for the other to read. "The man himself can't speak. But he just pants for
breath every time she comes near him: he tries to hide his face. He acts
like a criminal afraid of being caught."
"He didn't look that way to me--what was left of him. Not in the least
like a criminal."
"Well, no; that's a fact, too. Now they've got him laid out clean and
neat, he looks as if he might have been a very decent sort of man. But
_that_, you know--that's incredible. If she knows him, why doesn't he know
her? Why won't he own her? He's afraid of her. His eyes are ready to burst
out of his head whenever she comes near him."
"Did Mrs. Bogardus write that telegram herself?"
"She did."
"And what did she tell you to do with it?"
"Send it to her son."
"Then why don't you send it?"
This was the disputed message: "Come. Your father has been found. Bring
Doctor Gainsworth."
In the local man's opinion, the writer of that dispatch was Doctor
Gainsworth's true patient. What could induce a woman in Mrs. Bogardus's
position to give such hasty publicity to this shocking disclosure,
allowing it were true? The more he dwelt on it the less he liked the
responsibility he was taking. He discussed it openly; and, with the best
intentions, this much-impressed young man gave out his own counter-theory
of the case, hoping to forestall whatever mischief might have been done.
He put himself in the place of Mr. Paul Bogardus, whom he liked extremely,
and tried to imagine that young gentleman's state of mind when he should
look upon this new-found parent, and learn the manner of his resurrection.
This was the explanation he boldly set forth in behalf of those most
nearly concerned. [He was getting up his diagnosis for an interesting half
hour with the great doctor who had been called in consultation.] The shock
of that awful discovery in the locked chamber, he attested, had put Mrs.
Bogardus temporarily beside herself. Outwardly composed, her nerves were
ripped and torn by the terrible sight that met her eyes. She was the prey
of an hallucination founded on memories of former suffering, which had
worn a channel for every fresh fear to seek. There was something truly
noble and loyal and pathetic in the nature of her possession. It threw a
softened light upon her past. How must she have brooded, all these years,
for that one thought to have ploughed so deep! It was quite commonly known
in the neighborhood that she had come back from the West years ago without
her husband, yet with no proof of his death. But who could have believed
she would cling for half a lifetime to this forlorn expectancy, depicting
her own loss in every sad hulk of humanity cast upon her prosperous
shores!
Every one believed she was deceiving herself, but great honor was hers
among the neighbors for the plain truth and courage of her astonishing
avowal. They had thought her proud, exclusive, hard in the security of
wealth. Here she stood by a pauper's bed in the name of simple constancy,
stripping herself of all earthly surplusage, exposing her deepest wound,
proclaiming the bond--herself its only witness--between her and this
speechless wreck, drifting out on the tide of death. She had but to let
him go. It was the wild word she had spoken in the name of truth and
deathless love that fired the imagination of that slow countryside. It was
the touch beyond nature that appeals to the higher sense of a community,
and there is no community without a soul.
The straight demands of justice are frequently hard to meet, but its
ironies are crushing. Mrs. Bogardus had fallen back on the line of a
mother's duty since that moment of personal accountability. She read the
unspoken reverence in the eyes of all around her, but she put in no
disclaimer. Her past was not her own. She could not sin alone. Only those
who have been honest are privileged under all conditions to remain so.
On his arrival with the doctor, Paul endeavored first to see his mother
alone. For some reason she would not have it so. She took the unspeakable
situation as it came. He was shown into the room where she sat, and by her
orders Doctor Gainsworth was with him.
She rose quietly and came to meet them. Placing her hand in her son's arm,
and looking towards the bed, she said:--
"Doctor--my husband."
"Madam!" said Doctor Gainsworth. He had been Mrs. Bogardus's family
physician for many years.
"My husband," she repeated.
The doctor appeared to accept the statement. As the three approached the
bed Mrs. Bogardus leaned heavily upon her son. Paul released his arm and
placed it firmly around her. He felt her shudder. "Mother," he said to her
with an indescribable accent that tore her heart.
The doctor began his examination. He addressed his patient as "Mr.
Bogardus."
"Mistake," said a low, husky voice from the bed. "This ain't the man."
Doctor Gainsworth pursued his investigations. "What is your name?" he
asked the patient suddenly.
The hunted eyes turned with ghastly appeal upon the faces around him.
"Paul, speak to him! Own your father," Mrs. Bogardus whispered
passionately.
"It is for him to speak now," said Paul. "When he is well, Doctor," he
added aloud, "he will know his own name."
"This man will never be well," the doctor answered. "If there is anything
to prove, for or against the identity you claim for him, it will have to
be done within a very few days."
Doctor Gainsworth rose and held out his hand. He was a man of delicate
perceptions. His respect at that moment for Mrs. Bogardus, though founded
on blindest conjecture, was an emotion which the mask of his professional
manner could barely conceal. "As a friend, Mrs. Bogardus, I hope you will
command me--but you need no doctor here."
"As a friend I ask you to believe me," she said. "This man _is_ my
husband. He came back here because this was his home. I cannot tell you
any more, but this we expect you and every one who knows"--
The dissenting voice from the bed closed her assertion with a hoarse "No!
Not the man."
"Good-by, Mrs. Bogardus," said the doctor. "Don't trouble to explain. You
and I have lived too long and seen too much of life not to recognize its
fatalities: the mysterious trend in the actions of men and women that
cannot be comprised in--in the locking of a door."
"It is of little consequence--what was done, compared to what was not
done." This was all the room for truth she could give herself to turn in.
The doctor did not try to understand her: yet she had snatched a little
comfort from merely uttering the words.
Paul and the doctor dined together, Mrs. Bogardus excusing herself.
"There seems to be an impression here," said the doctor, examining the
initials on his fish-fork, "that your mother is indulging an overstrained
fancy in this melancholy resemblance she has traced. It does not appear to
have made much headway as a fact, which rather surprises me in a country
neighborhood. Possibly your doctor here, who seems a very good fellow, has
wished to spare the family any unnecessary explanations. If you'll let me
advise you, Paul, I would leave it as it is,--open to conjecture. But, in
whatever shape this impression may reach you from outside, I hope you
won't let it disturb you in the least, so far as it describes your
mother's condition. She is one of the few well-balanced women I have had
the honor to know."
Paul did not take advantage of the doctor's period. He went on.
"Not that I do know her. Possibly you may not yourself feel that you
altogether understand your mother? She has had many demands upon her
powers of adaptation. I should imagine her not one who would adapt herself
easily, yet, once she had recognized a necessity of that sort, I believe
she would fit herself to its conditions with an exacting thoroughness
which in time would become almost, one might say, a second, an external
self. The 'lendings' we must all of us wear."
"There will be no explanations," said Paul, not coldly, but helplessly.
"Much the best way," said the doctor relieved, and glad to be done with a
difficult undertaking. "If we are ever understood in this world, it is not
through our own explanations, but in spite of them. My daughters hope to
see a good deal of your charming wife this winter. I hear great pleasure
expressed at your coming back to town."
"Thank you, Doctor. She will be up this evening. We shall stay here with
my mother for a time. It will be her desire to carry out
this--recognition--to the end. We must honor her wishes in the matter."
The talk then fell upon the patient's condition. The doctor left certain
directions and took shelter in professional platitudes, but his eyes
rested with candid kindness upon the young man, and his farewell
hand-clasp was a second prolonged.
He went away in a state of simple wonderment, deeply marveling at Paul's
serenity.
"Extraordinary poise! Where does it come from? No: the boy is happy! He
hides it; but it is the one change in him. He has experienced a great
relief. Is it possible"--
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