Local Color Part 12

Joel Bosler, still in a state of intellectual numbness, watched them as they pa.s.sed down the street--the Major striding on ahead, the gliding woman ten paces behind him. He had witnessed the same sight perhaps thirty times before. In days to come he was to witness it hundreds of times more; but always he watched it and never grew weary of watching it. Nor did the eyes of the rest of the town weary of watching it.

And so the thing went on.

The years went by. Five of them went by. Ten of them went by. A new generation was growing up, coming into manhood and womanhood. An old generation was thinning out and dying off. The Gaunt House was no longer the best hotel in the city. It was the second best and, before very long, was to be the third best. Tall business houses--six, seven, eight, nine stories tall--shouldered up close to it; and they dwarfed it, making it seem squatty and insignificant, whereas before it had loomed ma.s.sive and monument-high, dominating the corner and the rest of the block. Once the cobbled road before its doors had clinked to the heel-taps of smart carriage horses. Now it thundered clamorously beneath the broad iron-shod tires of dray and vans.

The old Gresham place, diagonally across the way, looked much as it had always looked; indeed, there was not much about it, exteriorly speaking, to undergo change. Maybe the green mould in the damp, slick walk at its northern side was a little bit greener and a little bit thicker; and maybe, in summer, the promenading snails were a trifle more numerous there. The iron gate, set in the middle breadth of the iron fence, lolled inward upon one rusted hinge, after the fas.h.i.+on of a broken wing.

The close-drawn shades in the two lower front windows had faded from a tarnished silver colour to a dulled leaden colour; and one of them--the one on the right-hand side--had pulled away and awry from its fastenings above and was looped down, hanging at a skewed angle behind the dirtied and crusted panes, as though one of the coins had slipped halfway off the dead man's eyelids. People persistently called it the old Gresham place, naming it so when they pointed it out to strangers and told them the tale of its veiled chatelaine and her earthly mission.

For, you know, Major Foxmaster's shadow still followed after Major Foxmaster. Long before, these two had been accepted as verities; it might now be said of them that they had become inst.i.tutional--inevitable fixtures, with orbits permanent and a.s.sured in the swing of community life. In the presence of this pair some took a degree of pride, bragging when away from home that they came from the town where so strange a sight might forever be seen, and when at home bringing visitors and chance acquaintances to this corner of the town in order to show it to these others.

Along with this morbid pride in a living tragedy ran a sort of undercurrent of sympathy for its actors. From the beginning there had been pity for the woman who, the better everlastingly to parade her shame, hid her face eternally from the light of day; and in possibly a more limited circle there had been abundant pity for the man as well.

Settling down to watch the issue out, the town, from the outset, had respected the unbendable, unbreakable fort.i.tude of the man, and respected, also, the indomitable persistency of the woman.

For a variety of very self-evident reasons no one had ever or would ever meddle in the personal affairs of Major Foxmaster. For reasons that were equally good, though perhaps not so easy to define in words, none meddled with her either. Street gamins feared to jeer her as she pa.s.sed, without knowing exactly why they feared.

In these ten years the breaks in the strange relations.h.i.+p had been few and short. Once a year, on an average, the Major made short trips back to Virginia, presumably upon business pertaining to his estate and his investments. Such times the woman was not seen abroad. Once, in '79, for a week, and once again, just following the great blizzard of '81, she was missed for a few days; and people wondered whether she was ailing or housebound, or what. For those days the Major walked without his shadow.

Then the swathed figure reappeared, tracking him about as before.

Time undeniably was working its changed with Major Foxmaster, as with his surroundings. He must be about sixty now; but, seeing him for the first time, you might have been pardoned for setting him down as a man of seventy or thereabouts--he looked it. His shoulders, which formerly he carried squared back so splendidly, were beginning to fold in upon the casing of his ribs. His hair used to be black, shot with white hairs; it was now white, shot with a few black hairs. His back had had a hollow in it; there was a curve in it yet, but the curve was outward instead of inward. When a man's figure develops convex lines where there used to be concavities, that man is getting on; and the Major plainly was getting on pretty fast. His eyes, which remained dignifiedly and defiantly scornful of all the world, and of all the world might think and might say, nevertheless were filmed over the least bit, so that they lost something of their icy blue keenness. His face, though, with the jaws sinking in upon the shrunken gums and the brows growing s.h.a.ggier, was as much of a mask as it had ever been.

What was true of Major Foxmaster was seemingly not true of her who followed him. Within the flapping shapelessness of her disguise her figure showed as straight and supple as in the beginning, and her noiseless step was as nimble and quick as ever it had been. And that was a mighty strange thing too. It was as though her shroud of wrappings, which kept the suns.h.i.+ne and the wind off her, kept off age too.

This very same thought came at length into Major Foxmaster's head. It took lodgment there and sprouted, sending out roots into all the odd corners of his mind. It is not for me to tell why or how he got this notion, or exactly when. It is for me merely to narrate as briefly as may be the progress of the obsession and its consequences.

Another five years pa.s.sed, and then three, making eight more on top of the first ten. Major Foxmaster was crowding seventy; he looked eighty.

Men and women who had been children when he moved out from Virginia were themselves almost face to face with impending middle age and had children of their own growing up, who, in their turn, would hear the story of Major Foxmaster's shadow and bear it forward into yet another generation. The stone copings above the Gaunt House door were sooty black with the accretions of decades; for this was a soft-coal town, and factories, with tall chimneys that constantly vomited out greasy black smoke, had crept up, taking the old hotel by flank and by rear. The broken shade in the right-hand lower front window of the old Gresham place, across the way, was gone altogether, having parted its rotted fabric from its decayed fastenings; so the bleak, bare face of the house winked with one dead eye and stared with the other.

The crotchety bay mare was long gone to the bone yard. Her hide was chair bottoms and her gristles were glue; and out on the trotting track wealthy young bloods of the town exercised her get and her skittish grand-get. The Major did not drive a harness nag any more--he had a palsy of the hands and a stoop of the spine; but in most regards he adhered to the old habits. He took his daily const.i.tutionals--sometimes alone--except, of course, for the tagging black shape behind him--oftener with the octogenarian Sherwan; and of evenings he played his poker games at the Kenilworth Club, which, after the way of ultraconservative clubs, stood fast on its original site, even though the neighbourhood about it was so distressfully altered. His heels had quit ringing against the sidewalk; instead, his legs lifted tremulously and his feet felt for a purchase on the earth when he set them down.

His face was no longer chipped grey flint; it was a chalk-white, with deep lines in it. The gold-headed cane of ebony wood, which he carried always, had ceased to be an ornament to his gait and had become a necessary prop to his step. His jaws sagged in until there were deep recesses at the corners of his mouth; and there, in those little hollow places, the spittle would acc.u.mulate in tiny patches. Possibly, by reason of the bleary casts that had overspread them, his eyes--still the faithfully inscrutable peepholes of his brain--gave no betrayal of the racking thoughts behind them. They were racking thoughts too. The delusion was a mania now--a besetting mania, feeding on silence and isolation, colouring and tincturing all the processes of his intellect.

By years--so he reasoned it out with himself in every waking hour--by years, she who bided within that shuttered house over the way was his age, or near it. By rights, her draped form should be as shrunken and warped as his own. By rights, the face behind that thick black veil should be as old as his, and bleached, moreover, to a corpsey paleness.

Yet the furtive glances he stole over his shoulder told him that the figure behind him moved as alertly erect as ever it had; that its movements had the same sure and silent swiftness.

So that, after a while, Major Foxmaster began to think things that no entirely sane man has any business thinking. He began to say to himself that now he had solved the secret which, all these years, had been kept from his ken. A curse had been put upon him--that was it; that must be it! Behind that veil was no face old and sunken and wasted as his was, but, instead, a young, plump face, with luminous grey eyes set in it, and a sweet, full mouth, and about it wavings of l.u.s.trous, rich brown hair--the face of the girl he once loved as she looked in the days before he quit loving her.

He held up his own hands before his watery eyes. They were trembly, wrinkled hands, gnarled in their knuckles, corded on their backs. They were the colour of scorched leather--the texture of it too. But hers must be the plump little white hands he remembered, with rosy-pink palms and bright, pointed nails. Before a long mirror in his dressing room he studied himself--studied his bowed back and his hunching shoulders and his shaky shanks--and all. Her figure, inside its flapping black draperies, was straight as an arrow; her head poised itself firmly upright on her shoulders. That much at least he knew; so if that much were true, why was not the rest of it true too?

It was not fair! According to his lights he had fought out the fight with only such weapons as Nature and his own will gave him; but the Supreme Handicapper had stacked the cards against him. He was bound to lose the long, long race. He could not last much longer. He could feel age tugging at every flabby muscle; infirmity was forever fingering his tissues, seeking the most vulnerable spot at which to strike in at him.

He would lie down and die. And not until then--not until the last rattle of breath had scaped out of his collapsing windpipe; not until she, still triumphantly active and alert and youthful, still cloaked and gloved and hooded, had followed his sapped, empty sh.e.l.l to the graveyard--would she surrender and shrivel into her rightful semblance, growing old and feeble in an hour or in a day. It was not fair--this conjury business! From the beginning he never had a chance to win. All the days of his manhood he had walked with a living nightmare. Why, in dying, should he be doomed to point the moral of a living ghost tale?

First he told himself it could not be true; that it was a hideous imagination born of his broodings. This was the f.a.g-end of the nineteenth century in which he lived, when supernatural events did not happen. Then he told himself it must be true--the testimony before his eyes proved the fact of what he could not see. Then something happened which, as far as Major Foxmaster was concerned, settled the issue.

On a winter night, after rough weather, the Major came feebly out of the Kenilworth Club, groping his way and muttering to himself. This habit of muttering to himself was one that had come on him just lately.

There were patches of ice upon the sidewalk, and the wind, like a lazy housewife, had dusted the snow back into corners and under projections.

Between the porticoes of the doorway his foot slipped on one of these little ice patches. He threw out his gloved left hand to catch at some support and his fingers closed on her black-clad arm, where she had drawn herself into the shelter and shadow of the door-arch to await his appearance.

For the first time in nearly fifty years he touched her.

He jerked his hand back and fled away at a staggering, crippling run; and, as he ran to hide himself within his rooms, in panting gulps he blasphemed the name of his Maker; for to his feel her flesh, through the thick cloth sleeve on her arm, had seemed to him to be as firm and plump as it had felt when he was twenty-two and she was twenty. The evidence was complete.

All through the next day he kept himself behind closed doors, wrestling with his torments; but in the evening old Sherwan came for him and he dressed himself. They started out together, a doddering, tottering twain; suggesting, when they halted for a moment to rest at the foot of the office stairs, a pair of grey locust husks from which age, spider-fas.h.i.+on, had sucked out all the rich juices of health and strength; suggesting, when they went on again, a pair of crawling sick beetles which, though sick, still could crawl a little.

Side by side they crossed the tarnished, shabby old lobby, with its clumpings of dingy grey pillars and its red-plush sofa seats, and, in the centre, its rotunda mounting to the roof, up floor by floor, in spiral rings that in perspective graduated smaller and smaller, like an inverted funnel; and side by side they issued forth from beneath the morguelike copings of the outer door and descended the Gaunt House steps--Major Foxmaster feeling ahead of him with his cane, and Judge Sherwan patting his left breast with his open hand--just as Policeman Joel Bosler, now dead and gone, had seen them do upon many another such evening as this. Promptly and inevitably befell another thing, then, which likewise the late deceased Bosler had witnessed times without number.

From the darker s.p.a.ce beyond the corner lamp-post, out into the ga.s.sy yellow circle of radiance, appeared the straight, gliding black form, advancing on silent, padded feet and without visible effort, relentlessly to follow after them wheresoever they might choose to go.

So, then, at sight of the familiar apparition the icy sh.e.l.l of half a century thawed and broke to bits and was washed away in a freshet of agony; and to his one friend, for one moment, Major Foxmaster bared his wrung and tortured soul. He threw down his cane and threw up his arms.

"Sherwan," he shrieked out, "I can't stand it any longer--I can't stand it! It's killing me! I must look at the face--I must know!"

With a sudden frenzied energy he darted at the cloaked shape. It hesitated, shrinking back from his onward rush as though daunted; but he fixed his clutching fingers in the crepe veil and tore it in twisted rags from the front of its wearer, and the light shone full on the face revealed beneath the close black hood of the bonnet. ... He gave one blubbery, s...o...b..red, hideous yell and fell flat at the base of the lamp-post.

Old Sherwan saw the face too. Swollen and strengthened with senile rage, he seized the figure by both its arms and shook it.

"You hussy! You wench! You Jezebel! You she-devil!" he howled at the top of his cracked voice, and rocked his prisoner to and fro. "What's this?

What does this mean, you h.e.l.l sp.a.w.n?"

A dart of pain nipped at his diseased heart then, and closed his throat.

For a moment, without words, they struggled together. With a heave of her supple arms she broke his hold. She shoved him off from her and reared back on her heels, breathing hard--a full-blooded negress, with chalky popeyes and thick, purplish lips that curled away in a wide snarl from the white teeth, and a skin that was blacker than sin.

"Whut does. .h.i.t mean?" she answered; and, through stress of fear and mounting hope and exultation, her voice rose to a camp-meeting shout:

"I tells you whut hit means: Hit means Ise Minnie Brownell, Ole Miss'

cook. Hit means Ole Miss is been daid 'mos' fo'teen years--ever sence she taken down sick endurin' de big blizzard. Hit means dat w'en she lay a-dyin' she put de promise onto me to bury her in secret; an' den to put on her clo'es an' to foller, walkin' behine dat man, daytime an'

nighttime, twell he died. Dat's whut hit means!"

She sought to peer past him and her tone sharpened down, fine and keen:

"Is he daid? Oh, bless de good Lawd A'mighty! Is he daid? 'Cause, ef he's daid, me an' Hennery, w'ich is my lawful wedded husban', we kin go back to Furginia an' claim de prop'ty dat Ole Miss lef in trust to come to me w'en I kin prove he's daid. Oh, look, please, suh, mister, and see ef he ain't dead?"

Old Sherwan ran to the lamp-post and dropped down on both his knees, and shook his friend by the shoulders.

"Foxmaster!" he called. "Foxmaster, you're free! You're free! I tell you, you're free! Foxmaster, look at me! Foxmaster, do you hear me?

You're free, I tell you!"

But the Major did not hear him. The Major was flat on his back, with his arms outstretched and the fingers of both his hands gripped in the rags of a black crepe veil; and at the corners of his mouth the little patches of spittle bubbles were drying up. The Major would never hear anything again in this world.