Chapter 14

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.