Part 10

"Yes," she said slowly. "I had thought, nevertheless, that you might like it."

"Like it?" he echoed. "That's the trouble. I wish I weren't so full of the meaning of it all. Can you fancy how a monk might feel, who'd been away on a vacation, just getting back to his cell? _Like_ it? I can't help liking it. It's my proper setting; I see that fast enough. But I've come back to find how inexorable and harsh and catechismical it is, and naturally I resent being what I am. Oh--" he broke off, suddenly realizing the folly of his harangue, and after another moment he added: "It's delightful, Julia dear, really. If only all the Westerners could come to New England and revive it--and all the New-Englanders move West and revive themselves!"

They went on from room to room.

"You Westerners," Hastings reiterated--"oh, I don't just know what the difference is, for you're New England, too. Only you've got so much else mixed up with it. You've become free-lances; your more recent, less bigoted adventures have made you forget."

"What?" asked Julia, indignantly.

But he was at a loss, as he looked about him, to explain, however much each new survey of the scene convinced him. "Here," he muttered, "everything has been steeping so long in the attenuated resolutions that drove us to come; everything is still conscientiously soaked--saturated--in the barren memory of it."

"_You're_ not," said Julia, testily, to draw him out. "Precious little of it _you've_ had! Two years at a school! You're more foreign than you are New England. Remember--your--"

"Yes. I don't forget I've one foreign ancestor to boast of, and bless Heaven for it! How my great-grandmother ever happened to marry--see this!" Hastings went on, incoherently catching her arm and waving his other over the exquisite array of her "colonial" chamber. "Now, this, to you, is--well--it's as 'amusing' as if you'd tried to furnish a room to imitate one in Cinderella's palace, as 'interesting' as if you'd done it Louis Sixteenth, or--or--its meaning is hardly more personal to you than the room you furnished in Munich that winter."--She blushed admiringly at memory of their first meeting.--"The problem appealed to you, and you made it charming. But to me--"

"You really hate it," said Julia, determined to face the facts.

"I really love it," he retorted sadly, "the way you couldn't help loving a parent, even though you mightn't believe in him."

"Jack," she characteristically cried out to him again, "there is one thing more that I hardly dare show you then. You'll think me such a fool. I--"

A servant appeared to announce that luncheon was ready.

"Don't say anything to _them_ against it," she told him on the way down.

That wasn't, however, what made him silent during the meal. He took little part in the conversation except when Mr. and Mrs. Elliott plied him with questions, which he then found himself answering with only unsatisfactory vagueness--answers that he could do nothing, not even when Julia flew tenderly to his rescue, to make any better. Yes, he liked the house, he said gravely. It was a nice old house. And he thought how murky, despite its new coats of cleaning, was that far corner up near the ceiling. No, he wasn't sorry, he responded, that he had left the École des Beaux Arts to devote all his time to painting; it was the one thing he was suited for. Yes, his foreign great-grandfather had been a portrait-painter. He couldn't remember what his name was. Tremaine? Henry Tremaine. That was it. Julia was looking hard at him. She was gazing down at her plate. He knew he had eaten nothing. He could not eat. No, he wasn't at all hungry. Why was it so chilly? he thought. Doubtless he had picked up a germ. The house, he muttered to himself, was on his nerves. It was so everlastingly gloomy! Julia had reinhabited it too authentically. "Eberdeen Manor"--"Mr. Eberdeen's House." What names!

An hour afterward he told Julia he was dead sleepy and that, contrary to all his habits, he was going up-stairs to take a nap. Dinner was at seven? All right, he would be in better shape by then. He felt wretchedly, but he didn't say so.

Out in the hall he paused a moment at the foot of the wide lower staircase. The ticking of a good many clocks came to him from different parts of the house; they seemed to focus their monotonous activity especially on his hearing. Extraordinary recollections swept him. He remembered having heard an old nurse, Sarah Teale, describe how her aunt once rushed out the back door right in the midst of frying doughnuts, and was instantly stricken with paralysis on account of it. There was a low groaning; a moan floated to him from somewhere above. Bravely he forced himself to climb the stairs toward it. He turned the knob. The door stuck. He shook it again, and it yielded.

II

It was nearly dark when he awoke. A late, a very late, an unnaturally late, afternoon dusk shadowed in streaks across the floor. He could hardly breathe. The windows were close shut. The striped shades were drawn down to the sills. But he could see the yellowed print of Da Vinci's "Last Supper"--the one he had bought at Milan--hanging on the panel above the empty hearth. There was the sand-shaker on his maple desk. That old lithograph of the two kittens over beside the bureau was crooked. He must remember to straighten it. The wall-paper was getting dingy.

He stretched himself. A sharp pain was going through his head. But it was late; he must get up and dress, or he wouldn't be ready in time.

The clothes he had just taken off lay across an arm of the painted chair by his bed. He lifted the coat, and let it fall from his grasp. He moved over to the wash-stand. The Chinese pitcher was as light as if filled with air when he turned its nose to the basin. The hat-tub stood on end between the wash-stand and the closet door. He reached for the battered old red tassel of the bell-rope and pulled it. It was so late,--it was getting later,--he must hurry, whether Simpkins came or not. He could manage. And he opened the closet door, sighing at the bothersome prospect of getting into his togs. He ran his hand over his hair. Where was the mirror? And, damme! he had no light!

The shoes were a trifle hard to draw on, too small for him; the breeches were badly in need of pressing; the coat was stiff. He began opening drawers in the bureau, delving through piles of neatly folded linen and silk. At last he chose a shirt and put it on over his head. He laid aside the purple satin waistcoat until he should have arranged his stock, which he found tight, and difficult to make meet in the back. But he finally got it adjusted; he brought the thick, wide ends around in front, tied them in a huge bow while he walked over to the window and gazed out. Fine night. The mist had gone, the stars were dimly appearing. He turned back for his waistcoat and jacket. By mistake he opened the closet door again instead of the one which led into the hall.

"I knew you would come!" she said, approaching so near to him from out the somber blackness of the garments which draped the walls that he could see her quite plainly by the light of the candle in her hand. She wasn't a day over twenty. If she was pale, it was more the pallor of fright than of ill health, or perhaps only because her skin showed so white, lighted by the faint glare, in contrast to her deep eyes and to the thick, glossy braids bound round and round above her forehead. "John, John, won't you speak to me?"

He took a step forward, faltering. At that moment there was a brusque movement beside him, and he turned to behold there a young man, dressed in knee-breeches, wearing a purple waistcoat and velvet coat, as like unto himself as his own image.

"Duty bade me come," the stranger answered stiffly, as if it was for his ears that her words had been intended.

Hastings' gaze flew to meet hers, which he was astonished to find still directed on him instead of on the speaker. He felt himself melted to pity by her frailness and beauty and charm, so that he turned almost angrily toward the intruder, who, at that moment, however, began to address her in tones Hastings could but admire:

"To you!" cried out the young stranger--"you, for whom duty knows no promptings!"

At that, Hastings turned to her again, his heart rent by the plea she uttered.

"But you love me? You love me? Oh, say it to me!" And she was looking not at his counterpart; she was imploring _him_, she was stretching her arms out to _him_, she was veritably making her plea to _him_, as if he were the one who had elicited it.

"I will do anything for you--anything!" he would have promised her had not the threat of the stranger so like unto himself interrupted.

"Don't mock my patience, Lydia," Hastings heard as once more he shifted his eyes to the speaker.

It was maddening how from one to the other of them his sympathies veered. The sepulchral voice of the man seemed to express Hastings' own thoughts; yet her sweet appeal awoke resentful fury for what words he dared say to her. If only Hastings might explain, when she stared so reproachfully, that it was only he who had spoken!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She stopped stock-still.

"Is he dead?" she demanded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She had gone. The room was in darkness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

"Dear boy--you feel better?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But, having a half-attentive interest in what she read, he would look fixedly at her and try to piece together his jumbled recollections. Partly from lack of strength, mostly because he was loath to admit to anybody that his brain wasn't normally clear, he let the questions which rose to his lips pass unuttered. Once he exclaimed irrelevantly:

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

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

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

III

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

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

She became irritatingly absorbed in her work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hastings smiled at her thoroughness.

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

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

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

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

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