The Desert and the Sown Part 24

"Well, to be sure! They've been traveling a long time, haven't they? And how is his health now?"

"Oh, he is very well indeed. You will be glad not to have the trouble of those carpenters, Cerissa? Pulling down old houses is dirty work."

"Oh, dear! I wouldn't mind the dirt. Anything to get rid of that old rat's nest on top of the kitchen chamber. I hate to have such out of the way places on my mind. I can't get around to do every single thing, and it's years--years, Mrs. Bogardus, since I could get a woman to do a half-day's cleaning up there in broad daylight!"

Mrs. Bogardus stared. What was the woman talking about!

"I call it a regular eyesore on the looks of the house besides. And it keeps all the old stories alive."

"What stories?"

"Why, of course your father wasn't out of his head--we all know that--when he built that upstairs room and slep' there and locked himself in every night of his life. It was only on one point he was a little warped: the fear of bein' robbed. A natural fear, too,--an old man over eighty livin' in such a lonesome place and known to be well off. But--you'll excuse my repeating the talk--but the story goes now that he re'ly went insane and was confined up there all the last years of his life. And that's why the windows have got bars acrost them.

Everybody notices it, and they ask questions. It's real embarra.s.sin', for of course I don't want to discuss the family."

"Who asks questions?" Mrs. Bogardus's eyes were hard to meet when her voice took that tone.

"Why, the city folks out driving. They often drive in the big gate and make the circle through the grounds, and they're always struck when they see that tower bedroom with windows like a prison. They say, 'What's the story about that room, up there?'"

"When people ask you questions about the house, you can say you did not live here in the owner's time and you don't know. That's perfectly simple, isn't it?"

"But I do know! Everybody knows," said Cerissa hotly. "It was the talk of the whole neighborhood when that room was put up; and I remember how scared I used to be when mother sent me over here of an errand."

Mrs. Bogardus rose and shook out her skirts. "Will Chauncey bring my horse when it stops raining? By the way, did you get the furniture down that was in that room, Cerissa?--the old secretary? I am going to have it put in order for Mr. Paul's room. Old furniture is the fas.h.i.+on now, you know."

Cerissa caught her breath nervously. "Mrs. Bogardus--I couldn't do a thing about it! I wanted Chauncey to tell you. All last week I tried to get a woman, or a man, to come and help me clear out that place, but just as soon as they find out what's wanted--'You'll have to get somebody else for that job,' they say."

"What is the matter with them?"

"It's the room, Mrs. Bogardus; if I was you--I'm doing now just as I'd be done by--I would not take Mrs. Paul Bogardus up into that room--not even in broad daylight; not if it was my son's wife, in the third month of her being a wife."

"Well, upon my word!" said Mrs. Bogardus, smiling coldly. "Do you mean to say these women are afraid to go up there?"

"It was old Mary Hornbeck who started the talk. She got what she called her 'warning' up there. And the fact is, she was a corpse within six months from that day. Chauncey and me, we used to hear noises, but old houses are full of noises. We never thought much about it; only, I must say I never had any use for that part of the house. Chauncey keeps his seeds and tools in the lower room, and some of the winter vegetables, and we store the parlor stove in there in summer."

"Well, about this 'warning'?" Mrs. Bogardus interrupted.

"Yes! It was three years ago in May, and I remember it was some such a day as this--showery and broken overhead, and Mary disappointed me; but she came about noon, and said she'd put in half a day anyhow. She got her pail and house-cloths; but she wasn't gone not half an hour when down she come white as a sheet, and her mouth as dry as chalk. She set down all of a shake, and I give her a drink of tea, and she said: 'I wouldn't go up there again, not for a thousand dollars.' She unlocked the door, she said, and stepped inside without thinkin'. Your father's old rocker with the green moreen cus.h.i.+ons stood over by the east window, where he used to sit. She heard a creak like a heavy step on the floor, and that empty chair across the room, as far as from here to the window, begun to rock as if somebody had just rose up from them cus.h.i.+ons. She watched it till it stopped. Then she took another step, and the step she couldn't see answered her, and the chair begun to rock again."

"Was that all?"

"No, ma'am; that wasn't all. I don't know if you remember an old wall clock with a bra.s.s ball on top and bra.s.s scrolls down the sides and a painted gla.s.s door in front of the pendulum with a picture of a castle and a lake? The paint's been wore off the gla.s.s with cleaning, so the pendulum shows plain. That clock has not been wound since we come to live here. I don't believe a hand has touched it since the night he was carried feet foremost out of that room. But Mary said she could count the strokes go tick, tick, tick! She listened till she could have counted fifty, for she was struck dumb, and just as plain as the clock before her face she could see the minute-hand and the pendulum, both of 'em dead still. Now, how do you account for that!

"I told Chauncey about it, and he said it was all foolishness. Do all I could he would go up there himself, that same evening. But he come down again after a while, and he was almost as white as Mary. 'Did you see anything?' I says. 'I saw what Mary said she saw,' says he, 'and I heard what she heard.' But no one can make Chauncey own up that he believes it was anything supernatural. 'There is a reason for everything,' he says.

'The miracles and ghosts of one generation are just school-book learning to the next; and more of a miracle than the miracles themselves.'"

"Chauncey shows his sense," Mrs. Bogardus observed.

"He was real disturbed, though, I could see; and he told me particular not to make any talk about it. I never have opened the subject to a living soul. But when Mary died, within six months, folks repeated what she had been saying about her 'warning.' The 'death watch' she called it. We can't all of us control our feelings about such things, and she was a lonely widow woman."

"Well, do you believe that ticking is going on up there now?" asked Mrs.

Bogardus.

Cerissa looked uneasy.

"Is the door locked?"

"I re'ly couldn't say," she confessed.

"Do you mean to say that all you sensible people in this house have avoided that room for three years? And you don't even know if the door is locked?"

"I--I don't use that part for anything, and cleaning is wasted on a place that's never used, and I can't _get_ anybody"--

"I am not criticising your housekeeping. Will you go up there with me now, Cerissa? I want to understand about this."

"What, just now, do you mean? I'm afraid I haven't got the time this morning, Mrs. Bogardus. Dinner's at half-past twelve. It's a quarter to eleven"--

"Very well. You think the door is not locked?"

"If it is, the key must be in the door. Oh, don't go, please, Mrs.

Bogardus. Wait till Chauncey conies in"--

"I wish you'd send Chauncey up when he does come in. Ask him to bring a screw-driver." Mrs. Bogardus rose and examined her jacket. It was still damp. She asked for a cape, or some sort of wrap, as her waist was thin, and the rain had chilled the morning air.

For the sake of decency, Cerissa escorted her visitor across the hall pa.s.sage into the loom-room--a loom-room in name only for upwards of three generations. Becky had devoted it to the rough work of the house, and to certain special uses, such as the care of the butchering products, the making of soft soap and root beer. Here the churning was done, by hand, with a wooden dasher, which spread a circle of white drops, later to become grease-spots. The floor of the loom-room was laid in large brick tiles, more or less loose in their sockets, with an occasional earthy depression marking the grave of a missing tile.

Becky's method of cleaning was to sluice it out and scrub it with an old broom. The seepage of generations before her time had thus added their constant quota to the old well's sum of iniquity.

Mrs. Bogardus had not visited this part of the old house for many years.

After her father's death she had shrunk from its painful a.s.sociations.

Later she grew indifferent; but as she pa.s.sed now into the gloomy place--doubly dark with the deep foliage of June on a rainy morning--she was afraid of her own thoughts. Henceforth she was a woman with a diseased consciousness. "What can't be cured must be _seared_," flashed over her as she set her face to the stairway.

These stairs, leading up into the back attic or "kitchen chamber," being somewhat crowded for s.p.a.ce, advanced two steps into the room below. As the stair door opened outward, and the stairs were exceedingly steep and dark, every child of the house, in turn, had suffered a bad fall in consequence; but the arrangement remained in all its natural depravity, for "children must learn."

Little Emmy of the old days had loved to sit upon these steps, a trifle raised above the kitchen traffic, yet cognizant of all that was going on, and ready to descend promptly if she smelled fresh crullers frying, or baked sweet apples steaming hot from the oven. If Becky's foot were heard upon the stairs above, she would jump quick enough; but if the step had a clumping, boyish precipitancy, she sat still and laughed, and planted her back against the door. Often she had teased Adam in this way, keeping him prisoner from his duties, helpless in his good nature either to scold her or push her off. But once he circ.u.mvented her, slipping off his shoes and creeping up the stairs again, and making his escape by the roof and the boughs of the old maple. Then it was Emmy who was teased, who sat a foolish half hour on the stairs alone and missed a beautiful ride to the wood lot; but she would not speak to Adam for two days afterward.

Becky's had been the larger of the two bedrooms in the attic, Adam's the smaller--tucked low under the eaves, and entered by crawling around the big chimney that came bulking up to the light like a great tree caught between house walls. The stairs hugged the chimney and made use of its support. Adam would warm his hands upon it coming down on bitter mornings. From force of habit, Emily Bogardus laid her smooth white hand upon the clammy bricks. No tombstone could be colder than that heart of house warmth now.

The roof of the kitchen chamber had been raised a story higher, and the chimney as it went up contracted to quite a modern size. This elevation gave room for the incongruous tower bedroom that had hurt the symmetry of the old house, spoiled its n.o.ble sweep of roof, and given rise to so much unpleasant conjecture as to its use. It was this excrescence, the record of those last unloved and unloving years of her father's life, which Mrs. Bogardus would have removed, but was prevented by her son.

"You go back now, Cerissa," she said to the panting woman behind her. "I see the key is in the lock. You may send Chauncey after a while; there is no hurry."

"Oh!" gasped Cerissa. "Do you see _that!_"

"What?"

"I thought there was something--something behind that slit."

"There isn't. Step this way. There, can't you see the light?"

Mrs. Bogardus grasped Cerissa by the shoulders and held her firmly in front of a narrow loophole that pierced the part.i.tion close beside the door. Light from the room within showed plainly; but it gave an unpleasantly human expression to the entrance, like a furtive eye on the watch.