XXIII

RESTIVENESS

Mothers and sons are rarely very personal in their intimacy after the son has taken to himself a wife. Apart from certain moments not appropriate to piazza teas, Paul and his mother were perhaps as comfortable together as the relation averages. It was much that they never talked emotionally. Private judgments which we have refrained from putting into words may die unfruitful and many a bitter crop be spared.

"This is Paul's apology for being happy in spite of himself—and of us!" Moya teased, as she admired the beautifully drawn plans for the quarrymen's club-house.

"It doesn't need any apology; it's a very good thing," said Mrs. Bogardus, ignoring double meanings. No caps that were flying around ever fitted her head. Paul's dreams and his mother's practical experience had met once more on a common ground of philanthropy. This time it was a workingmen's club in which the interests of social and mental improvement were conjoined with facilities for outdoor sport. Up to date philanthropy is an expensive toy. Paul, though now a landowner, was far from rich in his own right. His mother financed this as she had many another scheme for him. She was more openhanded than heretofore, but all was done with that ennuyed air which she ever wore as of an older child who has outgrown the game. It was in Moya and Moya's prospective maternity that her pride reinstated itself. Her own history and generation she trod underfoot. Mistakes, humiliations, whichever way she turned. Paul had never satisfied her entirely in anything he did until he chose this girl for the mother of his children. Now their house might come to something. Moya moved before her eyes crowned in the light of the future. And that this noble and innocent girl, with her perfect intuitions, should turn to her now with such impetuous affection was perhaps the sweetest pain the blighted woman had ever known. She lay awake many a night thinking mute blessings on the mother and the child to be. Yet she resisted that generous initiative so dear to herself, aware with a subtle agony of the pain it gave her son.

One day she said to Paul (they were driving home together through a bit of woodland, the horses stepping softly on the mould of fallen leaves)—"I don't expect you to account for every dollar of mine you spend in helping those who can be helped that way. You have a free hand."

"I understand," said Paul. "I have used your money freely—for a purpose that I never have accounted for."

"Don't you need more?"

"No; there is no need now."

"Why is there not?"

Paul was silent. "I cannot go into particulars. It is a long story."

"Does the purpose still exist?" his mother asked sharply.

"It does; but not as a claim—for that sort of help."

"Let me know if such a claim should ever return."

"I will, mother," said Paul.

* * * * *

There came a day when mother and son reaped the reward of their mutual forbearance. There was a night and a day when Paul became a boy again in his mother's hands, and she took the place that was hers in Nature. She was the priestess acquainted with mysteries. He followed her, and hung upon her words. The expression of her face meant life and death to him. The dreadful consciousness passed out of his eyes; tears washed it out as he rose from his knees by Moya's bed, and his mother kissed him, and laid his son in his arms.

The following summer saw the club-house and all its affiliations in working order. The beneficiaries took to it most kindly, but were disposed to manage it in their own way: not in all respects the way of the founder's intention.

"To make a gift complete, you must keep yourself out of it," Mrs. Bogardus advised. "You have done your part; now let them have it and run it themselves."

Paul was not hungry for leadership, but he had hoped that his interest in the men's amusements would bring him closer to them and equalize the difference between the Hill and the quarry.

"You have never worked with them; how can you expect to play with them?" was another of his mother's cool aphorisms. Alas! Paul, the son of the poor man, had no work, and hence no play.

It was time to be making winter plans again. Mrs. Bogardus knew that her son's young family was now complete without her presence. Moya had gained confidence in the care of her child; she no longer brought every new symptom to the grandmother. Yet Mrs. Bogardus put off discussing the change, dreading to expose her own isolation, a point on which she was as sensitive as if it were a crime. Paul was never entirely frank with her: she knew he would not be frank in this. They never expressed their wills or their won'ts to each other with the careless rudeness of a sound family faith, and always she felt the burden of his unrelenting pity. She began to take long drives alone, coming in late and excusing herself for dinner. At such times she would send for her grandson in his nurse's arms to bid him good-night. The mother would put off her own good-night, not to intrude at these sessions. One evening, going up later to kiss her little son, she found his crib empty, the nurse gone to her dinner. He was fast asleep in his grandmother's arms, where she had held him for an hour in front of the open fire in her bedroom. She looked up guiltily. "He was so comfortable! And his crib is cold. Will he take cold when Ellen puts him back?"

"I am sure he won't," Moya whispered, gathering up the rosy sleeper. But she was disturbed by the breach of bedtime rules.

In the drawing-room a few nights later she said energetically to Paul.

"One might as well be dead as to live with a grudge."

"A good grudge?"

"There are no good grudges."

"There are some honest ones—honestly come by."

"I don't care how they are come by. Grudges 'is p'ison.'" She laughed, but her cheeks were hot.

"Do you know that Christine has been at death's door? Your mother heard of it—through Mrs. Bowen! Was that why you didn't show me her letter?"

"It was not in my letter from Mrs. Bowen."

"I think she has known it some time," said Moya, "and kept it to herself."

"Mrs. Bowen!"

"Your mother. Isn't it terrible? Think how Chrissy must have needed her. They need each other so! Christine was her constant thought. How can all that change in one year! But she cannot go to Banks Bowen's house without an invitation. We must go to New York and make her come with us—we must open the way."

"Yes," said Paul, "I have seen it was coming. In the end we always do the thing we have forsworn."

"I was the one. I take it back. Your work is there. I know it calls you. Was not Mrs. Bowen's letter an appeal?"

Paul was silent.

"She must think you a deserter. And there is bigger work for you, too! Here is a great political fight on, and my husband is not in it. Every man must slay his dragon. There is a whole city of dragons!"

"Yes," smiled Paul; "I see. You want me to put my legs under the same cloth with Banks and ask him about his golf score."

"If you want to fight him, have it out on public grounds; fight him in politics."

"We are on the same side!"

Moya laughed, but she looked a little dashed.

"Banks comes of gentlemen. He inherited his opinions," said Paul.

"He may have inherited a few other things, if we could have patience with him."

"Are you sorry for Banks?"

"I shall be sorry for him—when he meets you. He has been spared that too long."

"Dispenser of destinies, I bow as I always do!"

"You will speak to your mother at once?"

"I will."

"And do it beautifully?"

"As well as I know how."

"Ah, you have had such practice! How good it would be if we could only dare to quarrel in this family! You and I—of course!"

"We quarrel, of course!" laughed Paul.

"I love to quarrel with you!"

"You do it beautifully. You have had such practice!"

"I am so happy! It is clear to me now that we shall live down this misery. Christine will love to see me again; I know she will. A wife is a very different thing from a girl—a haughty girl!"

"I should think the wife of Banks Bowen might be."

"And we'll part with our ancient and honorable grudge! We are getting too big for it. We are parents!"

Paul made the proposition to his mother and she agreed to it in every particular save the one. She would remain at Stone Ridge. It was impossible to move her. Moya was in despair. She had cultivated an overweening conscience in her relations with Mrs. Bogardus. It turned upon her now and showed her the true state of her own mind at the thought of being Two once more and alone with the child God had given them. Mrs. Bogardus appeared to see nothing but her own interests in the matter. She had made up her mind. And in spite of the conscientious scruples on all sides, the hedging and pleading and explaining, all were happier in the end for her decision. She herself was softened by it, and she yielded one point in return. Paul had steadily opposed his mother's plan of housekeeping, alone with one maid and a man who slept at the stables. The Dunlops, as it happened, were childless for the winter, young Chauncey attending a "commercial college" in a neighboring town. After many interviews and a good deal of self-importance on Cerissa's part, the pair were persuaded to close the old house and occupy the servants' wing on the Hill, as a distinct family, yet at hand in case of need. It was late autumn before all these arrangements could be made. Paul and Moya, leaving the young scion aged nineteen months in the care of his nurse and his grandmother, went down the river to open the New York house.



XXIV

INDIAN SUMMER

The upper fields of Stone Ridge, so the farmers said, were infested that autumn by a shy and solitary vagrant, who never could be met with face to face, but numbers of times had been seen across the width of a lot, climbing the bars, or closing a gate, or vanishing up some crooked lane that quickly shut him from view.

"I would look after that old chap if I was you, Chauncey. He'll be smoking in your hay barns, and burn you out some o' these cold nights."

Chauncey took these neighborly warnings with good-humored indifference. "I haven't seen no signs of his doin' any harm," he said. "Anybody's at liberty to walk in the fields if there ain't a 'No Trespass' posted. I rather guess he makes his bed among the corn stouks. I see prints of someone's feet, goin' and comin'."

Mrs. Bogardus was more herself in those days than she had been at any time since the great North-western wilderness sent her its second message of fear. Old memories were losing their sting. She could bear to review her decision with a certain shrinking hardihood. Had the choice been given her to repeat, her action had been the same. In so far as she had perjured herself for the sake of peace in the family, she owned the sacrifice was vain; but her own personality was the true reason for what she had done. She was free in her unimpeachable widowhood—a mother who had never been at heart a wife. She feared no ghosts this keen autumn weather, at the summit of her conscious powers. Her dark eye unsheathed its glance of authority. It was an eye that went everywhere, and everywhere was met with signs that praised its oversight. Here was an out-worn inheritance which one woman, in less than a third of her lifetime, had developed into a competence for her son. He could afford to dream dreams of beneficence with his mother to make them good. Yes, he needed her still. His child was in her keeping; and, though brief the lease, that trust was no accident. It was the surest proof he could have given her of his vital allegiance. In the step which Paul and Moya were taking, she saw the first promise of that wisdom she had despaired of in her son. In the course of years he would understand her. And Christine? She rested bitterly secure in her daughter's inevitable physical need of her. Christine was a born parasite. She had no true pride; she was capable merely of pique which would wear itself out and pass into other forms of selfishness.

This woman had been governed all her life by a habit of decision, and a strong personality rooted in the powers of nature. Therefore she was seldom mistaken in her conclusions when they dealt with material results. Occasionally she left out the spirit; but the spirit leaves out no one.

Her long dark skirts were sweeping the autumn grass at sunset as she paced back and forth under the red-gold tents of the maples. It was a row of young trees she had planted to grace a certain turf walk at the top of the low wall that divided, by a drop of a few feet, the west lawn at Stone Ridge from the meadow where the beautiful Alderneys were pastured. The maples turned purple as the light faded out of their tops and struck flat across the meadow, making the grass vivid as in spring. Two spots of color moved across it slowly—a young woman capped and aproned, urging along a little trotting child. Down the path of their united shadows they came, and the shadows had reached already the dividing wall. The waiting smile was sweet upon the grandmother's features; her face was transformed like the meadow into a memory of spring. The child saw her, and waved to her with something scarlet which he held in his free hand. She admired the stride of his brown legs above their crumpled socks, the imperishable look of health on his broad, sweet glowing face. She lifted him high in her embrace and bore him up the hill, his dusty shoes dangling against her silk front breadths, his knees pressed tight against her waist, and over her shoulder he flourished the scarlet cardinal flower.

"Where have you been with him so long?" she asked the nursemaid.

"Only up in the lane, as far as the three gates, ma'am."

"Then where did he get this flower?"

"Oh," said the pretty Irish girl, half scared by her tone, and tempted to prevaricate. "Why—he must have picked it, I guess."

"Not in the lane. It's a swamp-flower. It doesn't grow anywhere within four miles of the lane!"

"It must have been the old man gev it him then," said the maid. "Is it unhealthy, ma'am? I tried to get it from him, but he screamed and fussed so."

"What old man do you mean?"

"Why, him that was passin' up the lane. I didn't see him till he was clean by—and Middy had the flower. I don't know where in the world he could have got it, else, for we wasn't one step out of the lane, was we, Middy! That's the very truth."

"But where were you when strangers were giving him flowers?"

"Why, sure, ma'am, I was only just a step away be the fence, having a word with one o' the boys. I was lookin' in the field, speakin' to him and he was lookin' at me with me back to the lane. 'There's the old man again,' he says, shiftin' his eye. I turned me round and there, so he was, but he was by and walkin' on up the lane. And Middy had the flower. He wouldn't be parted from it and squeezed it so tight I thought the juice might be bad on his hands, and he promised he'd not put it to his mouth. I kep' my eye on him. Ah, the nasty, na-asty flower! Give it here to Katy till I throw it!"

"There's no harm in the flower. But there is harm in strangers making up to him when your back is turned. Don't you know the dreadful things we read in the papers?"

Mrs. Bogardus said no more. It was Middy's supper-time. But later she questioned Katy particularly concerning this old man who was spoken of quite as if his appearance were taken for granted in the heart of the farm. Katy recalled one other day when she had seen him asleep as she thought in a corner of the fence by the big chestnut tree when she and the boy were nutting. They had moved away to the other side of the tree, but while she was busy hunting for nuts Middy had strayed off a bit and foregathered with the old man, who was not asleep at all, but stood with his back to her pouring a handful of big fat chestnuts into the child's little skirt, which he held up. She called to him and the old man had stepped back, and the nuts were spilled. Middy had cried and made her pick them up, and when that was done the stranger was gone quite out of sight.

Chauncey, too, was questioned, and testified that the old man of the fields was no myth. But he deprecated all this exaggerated alarm. The stranger was some simple-minded old work-house candidate putting off the evil day. In a few weeks he would have to make for shelter in one of the neighboring towns. Chauncey could not see what legal hold they had upon him even if they could catch him. He hardly came under the vagrancy law, since he had neither begged, nor helped himself appreciably to the means of subsistence.

"That is just the point," Mrs. Bogardus insisted. "He has the means—from somewhere—to lurk around here and make friends with that child. There may be a gang of kidnappers behind him. He is the harmless looking decoy. I insist that you keep a sharp lookout, Chauncey. There shall be a hold upon him, law or no law, if we catch him on our ground."

A cold rain set in. Paul and Moya wrote of delays in the house preparations, and hoped the grandmother was not growing tired of her charge. On the last of the rainy days, in a burst of dubious sunshine, came a young girl on horseback to have tea with Mrs. Bogardus. She was one of that lady's discoverers, so she claimed, Miss Sallie Remsen, very pretty and full of fantastic little affectations founded on her intense appreciation of the picturesque. She called Mrs. Bogardus "Madam," and likened her to various female personages in history more celebrated for strength of purpose than for the Christian virtues. Mrs. Bogardus, in her restful ignorance of such futilities, went no deeper into these allusions than their intention, which she took to be complimentary. Miss Sallie hugged herself with joy when the rain came down in torrents for a clear-up shower. Her groom was sent home with a note to inform her mother that Mrs. Bogardus wished to keep her overnight. All the mothers were flattered when Mrs. Bogardus took notice of their daughters,—even much grander dames than she herself could pretend to be.

They had a charming little dinner by themselves to the tune of the rain outside, and were having their coffee by the drawing-room fire; and Miss Sallie was thinking by what phrase one could do justice to the massive, crass ugliness of that self-satisfied apartment, furnished in the hideous sixties, when the word was sent in that Mrs. Dunlop wished to speak with Mrs. Bogardus. Something of Cerissa's injured importance survived the transmission of the message, causing Mrs. Bogardus to smile to herself as she rose. Cerissa was waiting in the dining-room. She kept her seat as Mrs. Bogardus entered. Her eyes did not rise higher than the lady's dress, which she examined with a fierce intentness of comparison while she opened her errand.

"I thought you'd like to know you've got a strange lodger down to the old house. I don't seem to ever get moved!" she enlarged. "I'm always runnin' down there after first one thing 'n' another we've forgot. This morning 't was my stone batter-pot. Chauncey said he thought it was getting cold enough for buckwheat cakes. I don't suppose you want to have stray tramps in there in the old house, building fires in the loom-room, where, if a spark got loose, it would blaze up them draughty stairs, and the whole house would go in a minute." Cerissa stopped to gain breath.

"Making fires? Are you sure of that? Has any smoke been seen coming out of that chimney?"

"Why, it's been raining so! And the trees have got so tall! But I could show you the shucks an' shells he's left there. I know how we left it!"

"You had better speak—No; I will see Chauncey in the morning." Mrs. Bogardus never, if she could avoid it, gave an order through a third person.

"Well, I thought I'd just step in. Chauncey said 't was no use disturbing you to-night, but he's just that way—so easy about everything! I thought you wouldn't want to be harboring tramps this wet weather when most anybody would be tempted to build a fire. I'm more concerned about what goes on down there now we're out of the house! I seem to have it on my mind the whole time. A house is just like a child: the more you don't see it the more you worry about it."

"I'm glad you have such a home feeling about the place," said Mrs. Bogardus, avoiding the onset of words. "Well, good-evening, Cerissa. Thank you for your trouble. I will see about it in the morning."

Mrs. Bogardus mentioned what she had just heard to Miss Sallie, who remarked, with her keen sense of antithesis, what a contrast that fireside must be to this.

"Which fireside?"

"Oh, your lodger upon the cold ground,—making his little bit of a stolen blaze in that cavern of a chimney in the midst of the wet trees! What a nice thing to have an unwatched place like that where a poor bird of passage can creep in and make his nest, and not trouble any one. Think what Jean Valjeans one might shelter"—

"Who?"

"What 'angels unawares.'"

"It will be unawares, my dear,—very much unawares,—when I shelter any angels of that sort."

"Oh, you wouldn't turn him out, such weather as this?"

"The house is not mine, in the first place," Mrs. Bogardus explained as to a child. "I can't entertain tramps or even angels on my son's premises, when he's away."

"Oh, he! He would build the fires himself, and make up their beds," laughed Miss Sallie. "If he were here, I believe he would start down there now, and stock the place with everything you've got in the house to eat."

"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"—

On his way down the river the doctor continued to muse upon the dignity, the amazingly beautiful behavior of this rising family in whose somewhat commonplace city fortunes he had taken a friendly interest for years. He owned that he had sounded them with too short a line.

* * * * *

Watching with the dying man hours when she was with him alone, Emily Bogardus continued to test his resolution. He never retracted by a look—faithful to the word she had spoken which made them strangers.

It was the slightest shell of mortality that ever detained a soul on earth. The face, small like the face of an old, old child, waxed finer and more spiritual, yet ever more startlingly did it bear the stamp of that individuality which the spirit had held so cheap—the earthly so impenetrated with the spiritual part that the face had become a sublimation. As one sees a sheet of paper covered with writing wither in flame and become a quivering ash, yet to the last attenuation of its fibre the human characters will stand forth, till all is blown up chimney to the stars.

Still, peaceful, implacable in its peace, settling down for the silence of eternity. Still no sign.

The younger ones came and went. The little boy stole in alone and pushed against his grandmother's knee,—she seated always by the bed,—gazed, puzzled, at the strange, still face, and whispered obediently, "Gran'faver." There was no response. Once she took the boy and drew him close and placed his little tender hand within the dry, crumpled husk extended on the bedclothes. The eyes unclosed and rested long and earnestly on the face of the child, who yawned as if hypnotized and flung his head back on the grandmother's breast. She bent suddenly and laid her own hand where the child's had been. The eyes turned inward and shut again, but a sigh, so deep it seemed that another breath might never come, was all her answer.

Past midnight of the fourth night's watch Paul was awakened by a light in his room. His mother stood beside him, white and worn. "He is going," she said. It was the final rally of the body's resistance. A few moments' expenditure, and that stubborn vitality would loose its hold.—The strength of the soil!

The wife stood aside and gave up her place to the children. Her expression was noble, like a queen rebuked before her people. There was comfort in that, too. A great, solemn, mutual understanding drew this death-bed group together. Within the sickle's compass so they stood: the woman God gave this man to found a home; the son who inherited his father's gentleness and purity of purpose; the fair flower of the generations that father's sacrifice had helped him win; the bud of promise on the topmost bough. Those astonished eyes shed their last earthly light on this human group, turned and rested in the eyes of the woman, faded, and the light went out. He died, blessing her in one whispered word. Her name.

Before daybreak on the morning of the funeral, Paul awoke under pressure of disturbing dreams. There were sounds of hushed movements in the house. He traced them to the door of the room below stairs where his father lay. Some one had softly unlocked that door, and entered. He knew who that one must be. His place was there alone with his mother, before they were called together as a family, and the mask of decency resumed for those ironic rites in the presence of the unaccusing dead.

The windows had been lowered behind closed curtains, and the air of the death chamber, as he entered, was like the touch of chilled iron to the warm pulse of sleep. Without, a still dark night of November had frosted the dead grass.

The unappeasable curiosity of the living concerning the Great Transition, for the moment appeared to have swept all that was personal out of the watcher's gaze, as she bent above the straightened body. And something of the peace there dawning on the cold, still face was reflected in her own.

"You have never seen your father before. There he is." She drew a deep sigh, as if she had been too intent to breathe naturally. All her self-consciousness suddenly was gone. And Paul remembered his dream, that had goaded him out of sleep, and vanished with the shock of waking. It gave him the key to this long-expected moment of confidence.

"The old likeness has come back," his mother repeated, with that new quietness which restored her to herself.

"I dreamed of that likeness," said Paul, "only it was much stronger—startling—so that the room was full of whispers and exclamations as the neighbors—there were hundreds of them—filed past. And you stood there, mother, flushed, and talking to each person who passed and looked at him and then at you; you said—you"—

Mrs. Bogardus raised her head. "I know! I have been thinking all night. Am I to do that? Is that what you wish me to do? Don't hesitate—to spare me."

"Mother! I could not imagine you doing such a thing. It was like insanity. I wanted to tell you how horrible, how unseemly it was, because I was sure you had been dwelling on some form—some outward"—

"No," she said. "I know how I should face this if it were left to me. But you are my only earthly judge, my son. Judge now between us two. Ask of me anything you think is due to him. As to outsiders, what do they matter! I will do anything you say."

"I say! Oh, mother! Every hand he loved was against him—bruising his gentle will. Each one of us has cast a stone upon his grave. But you took the brunt of it. You spoke out plain the denial that was in my coward's heart from the first. And I judged you! I—who uncovered my father's soul to ease my own conscience, and put him to shame and torture, and you to a trial worse than death. Now let us think of the whole of his life. I have much to tell you. You could not listen before; but now he is listening. I speak for him. This is how he loved us!"

In hard, brief words Paul told the story of his father's sin and self-judgment; his abdication in the flesh; what he esteemed the rights to be of a woman placed as he had placed his wife; how carefully he had guarded her in those rights, and perjured himself at the last to leave her free in peace and honor with her children. She listened, not weeping, but with her great eyes shining in her pallid face.

"All that came after," said Paul, taking her cold hands in his—"after his last solemn recantation does not touch the true spirit of his sacrifice. It was finished. My father died to us then as he meant to die. The body remained—to serve out its time, as he said. But his brain was tired. I do not think he connected the past very clearly with the present. I think you should forget what has happened here. It was a hideous net of circumstance that did it."

"There is no such thing as circumstance," said Mrs. Bogardus with loftiness. Her face was calm and sweet in its exaltation. "I cannot say things as you can, but this is what I mean. I was the wife of his body—sworn flesh of his flesh. In the flesh that made us one I denied him, and caused his death. And if I could believe as I used to about punishment, I would lock myself in that room, and for every hour he suffered there, I would suffer two. And no one should prevent me, or hasten the end. And the feet of the young men that carried out my husband who lied to save me, should wait there for me who lied to save myself. All lies are death. But what is a made-up punishment to me! I shall take it as it comes—drop by drop—slowly."

"Mother—my mother! The fashion of this world does not last; but one thing does. Is it nothing to you, mother?"

"Have I my son—after all?" she said as one dreaming.

The night lamp expired in smoke that tainted the cold air. Paul drew back the curtains one by one, and let in the new-born day.

"'Peace to this house,'" he said; "'not as the world giveth,'" his thought concluded.

THE END