Local Color Part 11

Be this as it may, that was what happened. The Major came out in the spring of the year. He was pus.h.i.+ng fifty then, a fine upstanding figure of a man--what women, for lack of a better name, call distinguished looking. He had been a lieutenant in the Mexican War and a major in the Civil War--on the Confederate side, of course, seeing that he came from the seaboard side and not from the mountainous flank of Virginia.

You get some notion of what manner of man he was when I tell you that in all the years he lived in this city, which was a fair-sized city, only one man ever called him by his first name. Behind his back he was to others The Major, sometimes The Old Major, and rarely Major; but to his face people always hailed him, properly, as Major Foxmaster. And, despite the role he was to play in the community, he never acquired a nickname; and that was not so strange, either. You give nicknames to geysers, but not to glaciers.

This man's manner was icily formal toward those he deemed his inferiors, icily polite toward those whom he acknowledged his equals. He had no code for his intercourse with superiors because he never met anybody whom he regarded as his social superior. He looked upon the world with a bleak, chill eye, and to it he showed a bleak, chill face. It was a mask really--a mask of flesh held in such fine and rigid control that it gave no hint, ever, of what went on in the cool brain behind it. A professional poker player would have traded five years out of his life to be the owner of such a face.

Well, the Major came. He had money, he had family, he had a military record; likewise he had the poise and the pose which, lacking all the other things, still would have given him consideration and a place in town life. His status in the financial world became fixed when he deposited in the largest bank a drawing account of such size as instantly to win the cuddling admiration of the president of the bank.

He had established himself in rooms at the Gaunt House--then, and for many years thereafter, the princ.i.p.al hotel. Before fall he was proposed for members.h.i.+p in the exclusive Kenilworth Club, that was the unattainable Mecca toward which many men turned wistful eyes. Judge Sherwan, who was afterward to be his only close friend, sponsored his candidacy and he was elected promptly. Very soon his life fell into the grooves that always thenceforward it was to follow.

The Major did not go into any business. Opportunities to go into this or that were in due season presented to him. He listened with his air of congealed courtesy, but declined them all, explaining that his present investments were entirely satisfactory and yielded him a satisfactory income. Like many men of his breed and generation, he liked a good horse so well that it was more than a liking--with him it was a love.

Afternoons he frequently drove one: a ramping bay mare with a fractious temper and a set of gifted heels. He was fond of cards, and in the evenings generally played cards with certain of his fellow club members in a private room at the Kenilworth Club.

These men, though, never became his friends, but were merely the men with whom he played cards. If of a morning after breakfast he went for a walk, as sometimes happened, he went alone, except on those infrequent occasions when Judge Sherwan accompanied him. At the beginning he was asked to affairs at the homes of influential people; but, since he never accepted these invitations--any of them--people presently quit asking him. Among a hundred thousand human beings he became, or rather he remained, so far as interchange of thought, or of affection, or of confidence, or of intimacy was concerned, a social Crusoe upon a desert island set in an empty sea, with no Man Friday to bear him company in his loneliness--unless it might be said that old Sherwan qualified, after a fas.h.i.+on, for the Man-Friday job.

You see, the Major knew all along that--sooner or later--the woman would be coming. For these few months he had played the truant from his destiny, or his Nemesis, or his fate, or by whatever fancy name you might choose to call it; but there was no chance of his having escaped it altogether. Through strength of will power he could in silence continue to endure it as he had in silence endured it through the years that stretched-backward between young-manhood and middle age. Through pride he would involve no other person, however remotely, in the sorry web of his own weaving. Mentally he manoeuvred to stand apart from his kind; to render himself as inaccessible, as aloof, as unknowable by them as the core of an iceberg.

Nevertheless, it was inevitable that the channels of his outer life, no matter how narrowly they ran or how coldly they coursed, would be disturbed and set awry by her coming. A cultivated and well-sustained indifference to popular opinion is all well enough, but gossip is a corrosive that eats through the calluses until it finds quick flesh underneath. The Major might arm himself against showing what he felt, but he could not armour himself against feeling what he felt. He knew it--and she knew it. Perhaps that was why she, this one time, delayed her coming until he had ample opportunity for becoming, in a measure, fixed in the community and identified with it.

She came. One morning in the young spring of the year following the year when this narrative begins, Major Foxmaster stepped out from between the tall pillars of the Gaunt House doorway to find her waiting for him upon the sidewalk. She stood close to the curbing, a tall and straight figure, swathed all in dead and dreary black, with black skirts hiding her feet and trailing on the bricks behind her; with black gloves upon her clasped hands; with a long, thick veil of black crepe hiding her face and the shape of her head, and descending, front and back, almost to her waist--a striking figure and one to catch the eye.

After the first glance he gave no heed to her at all, nor she to him--except that when he had descended the short flight of stone steps and set off down the street at his usual brisk, soldierly gait, she followed, ten paces in his rear. By reason of her skirts, which swept the ground round her, and by reason, too, that her shoes had soles of felt or of rubber, she seemed almost to float along the pavement behind him, without apparent effort--certainly without sound.

Two blocks down the street he entered a business house. She waited outside, as silent as a mute and as funereal as a pall. In a few minutes he reappeared; she fell in behind him. He crossed over to the other side; she crossed, too, maintaining the distance between them. Crossing, his heels. .h.i.t hard upon the rutted cobbles of the roadway; but she glided over them noiselessly and smoothly, almost like one who walked on water. He went into the Kenilworth Club and for an hour or two sat in the reading room behind a newspaper. Had he raised his eyes he might have seen, through the window, the woman waiting on the curb. He ate his luncheon there in the club at a table in a corner of the dining room, alone, as was his way. It was two o'clock and after before he left to go to the livery stable where he kept his mare. She followed, to wait outside the livery stable until he had driven away in his gig, bound for the trotting track where the city's horse fanciers exercised their harness stock.

For a s.p.a.ce, then, she disappeared. Having returned the rig to its quarters and having dined at the Gaunt House, the Major came forth once more at eight-thirty o'clock to return to the Kenilworth for a bout at the cards. He was spruced and for the second time that day he had shaved. Plainly his measured and customary habit of life was to go on just as it had gone on before the woman came--or, rather, it might be said that it was only now rea.s.suming the routine which, with breaks in between, it had pursued through so many years. Major Foxmaster came down the steps, drawing on his gloves. From the deeper darkness beyond a patch of yellowish glow where a gas lamppost stood the woman emerged, appearing now as an uncertain, wavering shape in her black swathings.

Again she followed him, at a distance of a few paces, to the Kenilworth Club; again she waited in the shadows cast by its old-fas.h.i.+oned portico while he played his game and, at its end, cashed in his winnings--for the Major won that night, as very often he did; again she followed him homeward at midnight through the silent and empty street. Without a word or a sign or a backward glance he ascended the steps and pa.s.sed within the doors of the Gaunt House. Without a word or a sign she lingered until he had disappeared; then she turned off the pavement into the road and vanished, swimming away upright, as it were, without visible motion of her limbs or her body, into a stilled and waveless sea of darkness.

I have here set down the story of this day with such detail because, with occasional small variations, it was to be the story of an uncounted number of other days coming after it.

Inside of twenty-four hours the whole city knew the tale, and buzzed and hummed with it. Inside of forty-eight hours the woman, by common consent, had been given the names she was ever thereafter to wear. She was, to some, The Woman in Black; to others, Foxmaster's Shadow. Inside of a week or two the town was to know, by word of mouth pa.s.sed on from this person to that, and by that person to another, all that it was ever to know of her.

She came from the same place whence he came--a small Virginia town somewhere near the coast. As the current reports ran, the Foxmaster plantation and the plantation of her family adjoined; as children--remember, I am still quoting the account that was generally accepted--they had played together; as young man and young woman they had been sweethearts. He wronged her and then denied her marriage. Her father was dead; she had no brothers and no near male relatives to exact, at the smaller end of a pistol, satisfaction from the seducer. So she dedicated her days and nights to the task of haunting him with the constant reminder of his crime and her wrongs. She clad herself in black, with a veil before her face to hide it, as one in mourning for a dead life; and she set herself to following him wherever he might go.

She never spoke to him; she never, so far as the world at large knew, wrote to him nor meddled in any fas.h.i.+on whatsoever with him or his affairs--but she followed him.

The war, coming on, broke for four years the continuity of her implacable plan of vengeance. When the war was over, and he came back home, she took it up again. He left the town where he had been reared and moved to Richmond, and then after a time from Richmond to Baltimore; in due season she followed after. Finally he had moved to this more westerly city, lying on the border between the North and the South. And now here she was too.

Through an agent in Virginia she had leased, ready furnished, the old Gresham place, diagonally across the way from the front entrance of the Gaunt House; that fact speedily came out, proving that, like him, she also had means of her own. Through this same agent the taxes were thereafter paid. Presumably she moved in under cover of night, for she was a figure that, once seen, was not to be forgotten; and most certainly no one could remember having seen her before that fine spring morning when Major Foxmaster came out of the Gaunt House to find her waiting for him.

She had brought her servants with her--a middle-aged mulatto man and his wife, a tall, young, coal-black negro woman; both of them as close-mouthed as only some negroes can be, when they are the exceptions to prove the rule of a garrulous race. The mulatto man was a combination of butler and gardener. It was he who did the marketing, dealing with the tradespeople and paying all the bills. The negro woman was the cook, presumably. Pa.s.sers-by rarely saw her. These two, with their mistress, composed the household.

For such a mistress and such a household the old Gresham place made a most fit abiding place. It was one of those houses that seemed builded for the breeding of mysteries and the harbouring of tragedies--the kind of house that cannot stand vacant long without vaguely acquiring the reputation of being haunted. It was a big, foursquare house of greyish stone, placed in the exact centre of a narrow, treeless lot, which extended through for the full depth of the city block. In front of it was a high picketed fence and a deep, bare gra.s.splot; behind it was a garden of sorts, with a few stunted and illy-nourished berry bushes; and on each side of it was a brick wall, so high that the suns.h.i.+ne never fell on the earth at the side of the house toward the north; and even in the hottest summer weather the foundation stones there were slick and sweaty with the damp, and big snails crawled on the brick wall that ran in the shadow of the wall, leaving trails of a luminous slime across the slick greenish mould which covered the bricks.

The woman took this house, with its gear and garnis.h.i.+ngs, just as the last of the Greshams had left it when he died. During the months and years it remained tenantless all the upper windows had been tightly shuttered; she left them so. In the two lower front windows, which flanked the deeply recessed front door and which lacked blinds, were stiff, heavy shades of a dull silver colour, drawn down until only a gla.s.sed s.p.a.ce of inches showed between their unfringed ends and the stone copings. These, too, were left as they had been. They accorded well with the blank, cold house itself; they matched in with its drear old face; they made you think of coins on a dead man's eyes.

This house, as I have said, stood almost opposite the Gaunt House. What went on within it no outsider ever knew, for no outsider ever crossed its threshold--to this good day no outsider ever has known; but every day its door opened to let out its draped and veiled mistress, setting forth on her business, which was to follow Major Foxmaster; and every night, when that day's business was done, it opened again to let her back in. In time the town grew used to the sight; it never grew tired of talking about it.

As for Major Foxmaster, he would dodge about the country no more; for, in the long run or the short, dodging availed him nothing. The years behind him proved that. He would bide where he was until death, which was the supreme handicapper, named the winner of this, the last heat of their strange match. He would outlive her and be free; else she would outlive him, to see her long-famished hatred sated. And he wondered whether, if he died first, she, in her black mourning, would dog his dead body to the grave as she had dogged his living steps! It was a morbid fancy and, perhaps because it was morbid, it found a lodgment in the Major's mind, recurring to him again and again. The existence that he--and she--had willed him to lead was not conducive to an entirely healthy mental aspect.

Whatever his thoughts were, he betrayed none of them to the rest of creation. Exactly as before she appeared, so he continued to deport himself. His behaviour showed no change. He took his walks, drove his bay filly, played his cards at the Kenilworth. He carried his head as high as ever; he snapped his military heels down as firmly as ever on the stones of the street and the bricks of the sidewalk. With a pair of eyes that were as inscrutable and yet as clear as two bits of hard blue ice, and with a face like a square of chipped flint, he went his daily and his hourly way, outwardly oblivious to the stares of acquaintance and stranger alike, seeming not to know that ten paces in his rear, or twelve, came drifting this erect veiled shape which was clad all in dead black--as black as sin, as black as his sin had been, as black as her misery had been--the incarnate embodiment of her shame and his.

In fair weather as in foul, in blistering midsummer and blizzardy midwinter, daytime and nighttime, she followed him. If she lost the trail she waited in all patience until he reappeared. She seemed tireless and hungerless. Wet or cold or heat seemed not to affect her.

In her grim pursuit of him her spirit rose triumphant above the calls of the flesh. At midnight, after a long vigil outside the Kenilworth, she moved behind him with the same swift, noiseless, floating motion that marked her in the morning. And so it went with these two.

If he did not notice her presence, neither did he seek ever to elude her. If he never spoke to her, neither did he speak of her to others. As for the woman, she never spoke to any one at all. Outside the walls of the house where she lived her voice was never heard and her face was never seen. Only one person ever dared speak to the Major of her.

Old Sherwan himself did not dare. Of all human beings he stood nearest to the Major. If the Major might be said to have an intimate Judge Sherwan was the one. Moreover, he, Sherwan, was by way of being a he-gossip, which of all the created breeds of gossips is the most persistent and the most consistent, the most prying and, therefore, the most dangerous. He yearned for the smell of impropriety as a drug-fiend yearns for his drug. His was a brackish old soul and from its soured depths he dearly loved to spew up the bilge waters of scandal. The pumps leading to that fouled hold were always in good order. Give him the inch of fact and he would guarantee to provide the ell of surmise and innuendo. Grown too old to sin actually he craved to sin vicariously--to balance always on the edge of indiscretion, since he no longer plunged into it bodily.

Wherefore, after the woman came and the first shock of her coming wore off, he made a point of being seen in Major Foxmaster's company as much as possible. The share of notoriety the a.s.sociation brought him was dear to his withered, slack-valved old heart. In his manner and his look, in the very way he c.o.c.ked his hat and waggled his stiffened legs, you discerned that he wished to divide with his friend the responsibility for the presence of his friend's trailing shadow.

But, for all this and all that, he did not dare ever to speak of her to Major Foxmaster. Joel Bosler dared to, though, he being one of the meagre-minded breed proverbially reputed to go rus.h.i.+ng in where angels fear to tread. This Joel Bosler was a policeman; his beat included the Gaunt House corner and both sides of the street upon which the Gaunt House fronted. He was a kindly enough creature; a long slab-pole of a man, with the face of an old buck sheep. For some reason--which he least of all could fathom--Joel Bosler had contracted a vague sort of attachment for the Major. They met occasionally on the sidewalk outside the hotel; and, since the Major always responded with iced and ceremonial politeness to the policeman's salute, it may have been that this, to Bosler's limited mind, was proof of a friendly understanding existing between them.

One day, about a month after the woman moved into the old Gresham place, Bosler, having first scratched his head a.s.siduously for a s.p.a.ce of minutes to stimulate the thought, was moved to invade the Gaunt House lobby and send his name upstairs to the Major's rooms. A negro bell boy brought word back that the Major would be very glad to see Policeman Bosler, and Policeman Bosler accordingly went up. The Major was in the sitting room of his suite of rooms on the second floor. Bosler, bowing, came in and shut the door behind him with an elaborate carefulness.

"Good morning, sir?" said Major Foxmaster formally, with the note of polite interrogation in his tone; and then, as Bosler stood fingering his blue cap and shuffling his feet: "Well, sir; well?"

"Major Foxmaster, suh," began Bosler, "I--er--I kinder wanted to say somethin' to you privatelike."

He halted lamely. Before the daunting focus of those frigid blue eyes his speech, carefully rehea.r.s.ed beforehand, was slipping away from him.

"Except for ourselves, there is no one within hearing," stated the Major. "Kindly proceed--if you will be so good."

"Well, suh," faltered Bosler, fumbling his words out--"well, suh, Major Foxmaster, it's this-a-way: I've been--been a-thinkin' it over; and if this here lady--this woman that wears black all the time--the one that's moved into the old Gresham place acrost the street--if she pesters you any by follerin' you round every wheres, the way she does--I thought I'd be very glad--if you said the word--to warn her to quit it, else I'd--I'd have to take steps agin her by law or somethin'. And so--and so----" He stopped altogether. He had been chilled at the moment of his entrance; now he was frozen mentally to below the zero point.

The Major spoke, and his syllables battered on Joel Bosler's unprotected head like hailstones.

"Have you ever observed that the person to whom you refer has spoken to me?" he demanded.

"No, suh; but----"

"Or ever molested me in any way?"

"Oh, no, suh; but, you see----"

"Have you ever observed that I spoke to her?"

"No, suh; but----"

"Have you any reason for believing, of your own knowledge, that she knows me?"

"Well, suh, I----"

"Or that I am acquainted with her?"

"Well, I----"

"Then, sir, since she is minding her own business and I am minding my own business, I suggest that you take pattern by such examples and cultivate the habit of minding your own business. Kindly do not address me hereafter upon this subject--or any other. I find your conversation singularly unattractive. Good day, sir!"

Policeman Joel Bosler had no recollection afterward of having withdrawn himself. He presently found himself downstairs in the lobby, and, a little later on, outside the hotel, upon his regular beat. How he got there or how long it took him to get there he could not, with any degree of certainty, say.

Presently, though, he saw the Major issue forth from the Gaunt House door. And as the Major's foot descended upon the first step of the flight leading down to the street level, the gate of the old Gresham place across the way clicked, and here came the cloaked, veiled woman, floating noiselessly across the road to follow him.