FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES




  FIVE NIGHTS AT THE
  FIVE PINES

  BY
  AVERY GAUL

  [Illustration]

  NEW YORK
  THE CENTURY CO.
  1922




  Copyright, 1922, by
  THE CENTURY CO.

  PRINTED IN U. S. A.




  To
  MARY FENOLLOSA




CONTENTS


  CHAPTER                                  PAGE

      I THE HOUSE OF THE FIVE PINES           3

     II MATTIE “CHARLES T. SMITH”            24

    III THE WINKLE-MAN AND THE WILL          41

     IV THE BOYCOTT                          51

      V “THE SHOALS OF YESTERDAY”            65

     VI LOBSTER-POTS                         76

    VII THE FIRST NIGHT AT FIVE PINES        89

   VIII A MESSAGE FROM MATTIE               103

     IX THE SECOND NIGHT                    118

      X THE CAT OR THE CAPTAIN              134

     XI THE THIRD NIGHT                     149

    XII THE LITTLE COFFIN                   162

   XIII THE SÉANCE OF HORNS                 178

    XIV THE FOURTH NIGHT                    191

     XV BEACH-PLUMS                         207

    XVI THE FIFTH NIGHT                     225

   XVII DAWN                                231

  XVIII THE DISAPPEARANCE OF MRS. DOVE      247

    XIX I HIDE THE GHOST                    260

     XX JEZEBEL                             273




FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES




FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES




CHAPTER I

THE HOUSE OF THE FIVE PINES


A sea of yellow sand rose, wave on wave, around us. High hills,
carved by the bitter salt winds into tawny breakers, reared towering
heads, peak upon peak. Like combers that never burst into spray,
their static curves remained suspended above us, their tops bent back
upon the leeward side, menacing, but never engulfing, the deep pools
of purple shadows that lay beneath them. The sand was mauve in the
hollows, and black upon white were the cupped dunes hung over their
own heights. They were like water that did not move, or mountains with
no vegetation. They did not support as much life upon their surface
as that which crawls upon the floor of the ocean. They were naked and
unashamed as the day when they were tossed up out of the bed of the
sea. Only tufts of sharp green grass clung to some of the slopes, their
silhouettes flattened out before them like the pin-feathers of a young
bird, inadequate and scant, accentuating the barrenness of the saffron
sand.

Centuries ago some gigantic upheaval of Neptune had forced this long
ridge out of the shielding water, to lie prone in the sight of the sun,
like a prehistoric sea-monster forever drying its hide. More isolated
than an island, the head of the cape, with the town in its jaws, fought
the encroaching sea, which thundered upon it in constant endeavor to
separate it from the tail, extending a hundred miles to the mainland.
From the height on which we stood, the line of ocean far away was dark
blue, following in a frothy scallop the indentations of the coast. The
sound of the surf came to us like a repeated threat. It could bend
the cape, but never break it, twist and turn it, change the currents
and the sand-bars, and toss back upon its shore the wreckage of such
vessels as men essayed to sail in, but the sand-dunes continued to bask
blandly. Sometimes they shifted, but so silently and gradually that
they seemed not so much to move as to vanish. To-day there would be a
dune in the way of our path to the sea, so steep as to make a barrier,
impossible to scale. To-morrow the force of the wind upon its surface,
and the strength of the far-away tide which continually seeped its
roots, would have leveled it. The very footsteps one followed, trying
to trace a track across the waste, would have melted away.

On this desert each traveler must be his own guide and climb to some
eminence which topped all others, to get his bearings from the strip
of deep blue that marked the ocean’s rim. Nor could he say to himself,
securely, “Here is east,” although he looked out on the Atlantic. Land
played a trick upon the wayfarer who trusted it, and turned its back
upon the sea, and curled up like a snail, so that the inside of the
cape, where the town lay behind us in its green verdure, faced south,
and the outside sea, where the sun set, curved west and north. The
glory of light in the afternoon struck first upon the hills and was
reflected back from the sheltered bay to the little fishing-village.

The path from the woods, by which you entered the dunes, lost itself
to sight under the foliage of the scrub-oak trees, and unless you
had tied a white rag to the last branch, marking the point where you
climbed up out of the forest, you would never find it again. There were
many foot-paths through the thicket which separated the hamlet on the
inside of the horn from the immense dry sea-bed, but none of them were
visible, once you had left them. By day you must mark the entrance to
the desert of your own footsteps, by night it was useless to look for
them.

This must have been the place, I thought, where Dorothy Bradford was
lost. Brave as the Pilgrim Fathers were, they had not loitered here
after dark to look for William’s young wife! They had conscientiously
attended to their laundry work, on that first November day when the
_Mayflower_ landed, and, having finished their domestic duties, waited
no longer for any scatterbrain of the party who had been foolish enough
to venture from the fold, but weighed anchor without finding her and
put off for Plymouth Rock!

As I looked about me at the profound grandeur of space, it seemed to
me that I understood why Dorothy had not hurried back to the boat. She
had embarked upon the _Mayflower_, a bride, strange to the ways of
men and of marriage, and for sixty-three days the stern-faced Puritans
had been her only companions and the rolling sea her entire horizon.
Her quarters must have become a prison to her before the voyage was
over. When at last this finger of land, reaching into the Atlantic, had
beckoned to the mariners, her heart must have sung like a caged canary,
even as mine responded when first I saw the cape. Did she linger
with the other virtuous housewives at the first spring, to wash her
husband’s dirty linen? Not she! I liked to think that in glad escape
she ran from all those stuff gowns and starched kerchiefs, through the
woods, chasing the scarlet-winged blackbirds on and on, picking the
wintergreen berries and ravenously eating them, gathering her arms
full of bright autumn leaves, feeding her hungry eyes on the vivid
color of growing things and her starved soul, at last, upon the dunes.
It was not the Indians who prevented Dorothy Bradford from returning
to the ship; it was her own heart. If Indians saw her, they must have
fallen on their red knees in the sand and worshiped her for a sprite
of limitless space, running past them with gay branches clasped to her
gray dress and a wreath of waxy bayberries on her fair young head.
It was her wayward feet that forbade her from following further the
fortunes of the Pilgrims. No doubt, from some high point on the dunes
she watched them sail away, and laughed, taking off her shoes upon the
sand and dancing, fleeing further. That is what I would have done.
That is what I wanted to do now. Something starving in my heart found
food here; a hardness that had been growing within me for two years
dissolved, as my mind relaxed, and the troubles that had driven me here
appeared insignificant. The tired spirit of hope that had been driven
deeper and deeper down beneath the weight of disillusion began to
bubble up. There might be a way of regaining the nice balance of life,
after all, if one could weigh it every afternoon upon the sand-dunes!

Ruth and I were sitting on a pyramid, where we had brought a picnic
lunch, and were watching her children play in the hollows.

“Do people get lost here nowadays?” I asked her.

“The natives never come here,” she answered; “at least, not for fun.
They only follow the wagon-track to the coast-guard station on ‘the
outside,’ and that is about all the summer people do. It is three miles
across the soft sand to the sea, and most people get discouraged and
turn back before they reach the further shore. But enough children
and strangers have been lost here in recent years to scare away the
others! The townspeople say the dunes are haunted, and that at night
strange shapes flit across the sand, spirits of those who have never
been found. They will not come near the white fields at moonlight, when
they are wrapped in mystery. The landmarks are not permanent. Every
storm changes them, just as it changes the shoals on ‘the outside.’ The
sailors are more afraid of this neck of land than any one else. Do you
see how far distant the big steamers keep?” She pointed out to me a
thin line of smoke on the horizon. “Hundreds of ships have run aground
off here in less than that many years. There are lighthouses at every
point now, but the bed of the sea moves constantly. That is why they
call this coast the ‘Graveyard of the Cape.’”

“Have there been any wrecks since you have lived here?”

Ruth’s eyes darkened. “A year ago a fleet of fishing-vessels were
caught in a sudden tempest and half of them were lost. Eleven men were
drowned, all from this town! Star Harbor raises her sons upon the sandy
flats of the bay at her doorway, and when they grow old enough they
sail away from her, and she knows that one day, sooner or later, they
will fail to return. In the meantime the mothers do not bring their
boys out here on the dunes to play, as we do our children from the
cities. It is too much like dancing on their own graves! They try to
forget the dunes are here, and walk up and down the front street of the
village.”

“I do not want to forget them,” said I. “They mean something to me,
Ruth, something that I have needed for a long time.”

Ruth smiled at me fondly, without replying. We had known each other for
a long time.

“It is like the touch of a hand on the heart,” I tried to explain, “or
like a song heard outside a window in the dark--or a flaming embroidery
on a stucco wall.”

The sun shone down upon the tawny sand, illuminating the dunes with
so blinding a radiance that description was futile. The effect of so
much heat and light was soothing and restful, and at the same time
stimulating. The body drank up enough electricity, through contact with
the sand, to renew its youth and send the worn years reeling backward.
The children were shouting and sliding down the inside of a crater
below us, transposing their winter sports to the summertime, climbing
up the opposite slope, only to shoot down again on the seats of their
rompers, laughing and crawling up, and repeating the game, in ecstasy
of abandonment.

“I would like to do that, too,” said I.

Ruth smiled. “You would get sand in your sneakers.”

“Sneakers!” I scoffed.

“And wear holes in your silk stockings.”

“Silk stockings! No one should wear stockings out here. They should run
barefoot before the wind, and leap from peak to peak. It is absurd, in
the face of this vast emptiness, to wear clothes at all!”

“So many people feel that way,” said Ruth, dryly.

But I refused to be rebuffed.

“We need it, Ruth,” I cried. “We, who are cooped up in cities, are
starving for this very thing--space and sunlight, air and warmth. Not
the suffocating heat of the area-ways, but the glow that glances off
the sun-kissed sand. Our eyes are blind with gray pavements and white
asphalt, stone and cement, nothing but colors as hard as the substance
we tread on. We hunger for blue and for purple, for the sea and the
seacoast shadows, for green that is brighter than burnt sod, and for
living red and yellow. The craving for earth under our feet is still
natural to us. It is what has made possible the barefoot cult of the
people who choose to get up in the morning and run around in the dew,
and the ‘back to all fours’ cult of those who put their hands down
on the floor and prance like a trained bear. And the ‘stand on your
head’ cult, who pick out a cushion which best suits their psychic
soul and balance themselves with their feet in the air for hours at
a time. Perhaps it is true that it is stimulating to the brain. But
Ruth, joking aside, there must be a fundamental reason for all of
this ‘simple life’ movement--the elemental need for relaxation, which
is what this sort of exercise gives to the worn human machine. I am
going to give up my apartment in New York and pitch a tent on the
sand-dunes!”

Ruth laughed.

I thought that probably she would point out to me how impractical I
was. But she did not. She seemed to be weighing the matter, taking me
more seriously than I took myself. Ruth had a penetrating quality of
sympathy with another’s trouble that made of it an immediate problem
for her to solve and for the sufferer to relinquish. I had come up here
a week ago, for no other reason than that life had reached the stage
with me where I had to run away from the confusion of my own ménage.
I needed another line of vision, another angle from which to approach
it, and I considered it worth taking the long dull journey up the cape
to get my friend’s point of view. All that quiet August afternoon,
while we had watched her children playing on the sand-dunes, we had
been talking over life and our place in it as only two women can who
had known each other since childhood and have managed to keep friends,
although both of them are married. Our conversation had been mostly
about New York, from which I was escaping, and that offshoot of society
which has its roots among actors and producers and its branches in the
motion-picture studios. Ruth was far removed from this forcing frame,
spending her winters, more happily, in Charleston, and her summers on
Cape Cod, so that I thought I could get from her the calm point of view
and the fresh focus that I needed.

“Well, if you want to live here and get back to nature by way of the
sand-dunes, by all means do so,” she was saying dispassionately; “that
would be saner than running on all fours and standing on your head in
the city. But don’t pitch a tent out here! It has been demonstrated
that hurricanes have an antipathy for canvas. Buy a house in town, and
at least have shingles over your head and running water in the kitchen.
Even the birds refuse to drink from the rank pools in this desert.
There is alkali on the surface and quicksands along the edges of the
ponds. I’ll show you a house in Star Harbor that has been waiting for
years for some one like you to come along and take a chance on moving
into it.”

She stood up and, giving a long “Woo-ooh!” through her hands to the
turbulent young ones, led me back over the dunes to the green edge of
the woods.

“There,” she said, pointing over the tree-tops to the town that
nestled at the edge of the encircled bay, “do you see five pine-trees
standing up higher than all the others? That is the place.”

I saw below me a mass of scrubby oaks and stunted pines, which wore
out to a thin edge on the shore where the fishing-village huddled. The
bright white paint of the cottages, with the sun at their backs, picked
them out distinctly from the blue bay beyond them, and one house,
larger than any of the others, thrust its sloping roof into prominence
beside a row of pines.

“That!” I exclaimed. “But how large it is--for only my husband and
myself! We would rattle around in it. We haven’t enough furniture!”

I was alarmed at the expansive turn of Ruth’s imagination. Even if you
have put yourself in the power of a friend’s advice, or perhaps just
because of that, you are not ready to admit that she, with one slash of
unprejudiced judgment, has cut the knot which you have been patiently
trying to untangle.

“Furniture!” scoffed Ruth. “If that is all that is worrying you--There
is more furniture in that house than any other house on Cape Cod. That
is a captain’s place, old Captain Jeremiah Hawes, and he brought home
fine mahogany from wherever he dropped anchor. In his day they sailed
to England for their Chippendale and to China for a set of dishes.”

“What good would that do me?”

“You don’t seem to understand,” Ruth explained patiently; “it all goes
together. There is hardly a house sold in Star Harbor but what the
furniture is included in the deal. You get whatever the house contains,
when you buy it.”

We were retracing the path through the woods by which we had entered
the dunes earlier in the day. The children ran before us, playing
wood-tag from tree to tree, exploring “fairy circles,” and stopping
from time to time to let us catch up with them, when they would drop
completely out of sight among the blueberry-bushes. These grew so thick
at our feet that you could pull the berries off by the handful and
munch them as you strolled along.

“Tell me more about the house,” I begged. My mouth was full of
blueberries, but my mind was full of plans.

“It was built over a hundred years ago, by ships’ carpenters who came
down here all the way from Boston. They don’t know how to do that kind
of cabinet-work any more. The soil in the yard was hauled here by the
wagon-load from ten miles down the cape to make the garden--no sea sand
left there to sprout burrs! The Old Captain knew what he wanted and
where to get it. He made what was, in those days, a fortune. He was
master of a fleet of fishing-vessels, and used to make yearly voyages
to the banks of Newfoundland for cod and to Iceland for sperm-oil
whales. A pair of his big iron testing-kettles are still down in his
wharf-shed, and the house is full of valuable maps and charts. Not that
any one has ever seen them.”

“Why not? How long has it been vacant?”

“It has never been vacant at all! That’s the trouble. After old Captain
Hawes and his wife died, their son, whom every one calls the ‘New
Captain,’ lived on there in the house for years, along with the same
woman who had always been a servant to his mother. He died after we
came here, five years ago, under peculiar circumstances, but she still
lives on, behind closed shutters.”

“Is the house for sale?”

“It’s been for sale ever since the New Captain died, but the old woman
who lives in it won’t let any one inside the door to look at it.”

“I’d take it without seeing it, if it’s all you say it is,” I answered.
“Why don’t they put the old woman out?”

Ruth shrugged, as one who would suggest that no outsider could hope to
understand how business was managed on the cape.

“Let’s go and see it on our way home,” I suggested.

“All right; we can send the children on.”

They were scampering through the brush ahead of us, chasing limp-winged
yellow butterflies and spilling their precious garnered blueberries
as they ran. Their bare legs, covered with sand from the dunes and
scratched by the briers of the woods, stood the strain of the long walk
better than ours, in their flimsy stockings and hot rubber-soled shoes.
I wanted to sit on a log in the shady woods and rest, but no one else
seemed tired and the thought of the old house lured me on to hurry to
its doorstep.

It needed only that difficulty of getting possession to make me sure
that this was the very house for which I had been waiting all my life.
I knew, too, that the romance of the situation would be the deciding
point in any opposition that I might well expect to meet from my
husband, who was still in New York. Jasper was a fiction-writer, at
present aspiring to be a playwright, and it was true that he needed for
his work an atmosphere that he could people with the phantoms of his
own mind, rather than the disturbing congestion of the apartment where
we now lived. In setting out to follow Ruth’s advice and buy a house
on Cape Cod, I felt that I was doing my best not only for myself and
the sort of family life that I felt would naturally follow, but for my
husband and his exacting career. I realized that it would be for both
of us a solution of the philosophy of living. Jasper had reached that
stage in the beginning of success when it seemed to his friends that he
was working too hard and playing too hard, squandering his talents upon
Carthaginian gods who would only burn him up in the end.

I had been following Ruth in silence, for the way through the wood was
hard, but now we came into the outskirts of the fishing-village and,
crossing the single railroad track that ran the length of the cape,
struck the easy tread of the boardwalks. There were only two streets
in Star Harbor, front and back, and, sending the children on to Ruth’s
house by the back way, their pockets oozing with blueberries, we
emerged to the front street and faced the bay, just as the Pond-Lily
Man was passing.

He was returning from his day’s work, peddling pond-lilies up and down
the cape on his bicycle, a great basket of them dripping from his arm
now, their luscious white heads closed, although not wilted; and he
offered them all to Ruth hopefully, to get rid of them.

“Pond-lilies,” he repeated automatically, as he saw us coming into
sight. “Pond-lilies. Five cents a bunch!”

He was a thin little man with a tired face, apologetic, but stubborn
about his trade, selling his flowers with a mildness and a persistence
that was deceptive.

Ruth bought them all, only asking if he would, as a favor, carry them
up to her cottage.

“As a favor,” he replied; “this time!”

“Pond-lilies! Pond-lilies!” he called again, as he started off, seeming
to forget that we had purchased the entire stock.

“Poor thing,” said Ruth; “that cry is a habit with him. He must do it
in his sleep. He used to be a parson of some sort, but his ‘health
failed him’ and that’s the way he supports his family. They say his
children all get out in a flat-bottomed boat on Pink Pond, down the
cape, and pick them for him every morning before it is light.”

“They work hard up here,” said I, feeling rather inadequate to the
occasion, which was so tremendously local.

“They do,” replied Ruth, with her usual sympathy and few words.

We paused to rest a moment by the bay. The water sparkled happily,
with none of the menace that shrouded the deep blue of the ocean which
we had left on “the outside” beyond the dunes. Here were merry little
white-caps, as innocent as the children who played upon the flats, and
before us the fishing-boats, riding at anchor, had no more flavor of
adventure than so many rocking-horses. The sunlight, mirrored from
the bright waves, shone upon houses at the water’s edge with a glow
that turned the glass of the windows into flame and burnished the brass
knockers on the doors. The white paint glistened as if it had been
varnished that very afternoon, and the green blinds and the red roses
climbing on the cottages were raised in tone to the height of the color
of ornaments on a Christmas-tree. The whole village had the aspect of
a gaily painted toy. The dust of the road was rose-tinted. The leaves
of the trees looked as if they had been scrubbed and polished, and
the sails of the vessels on the bay were as white as the clouds that
skipped across the bright blue sky.

It was the contrast between this radiant shimmer of sea and cloud, this
flicker of sunshine and dazzle of window-pane, this green of the short
trimmed grass and crimson of the flowers, that caused my amazement when
I first saw the house that was to be mine. I was bewildered by its drab
melancholy, and I would have turned away, had not an inner courage
urged me on. For it seemed to me, that August afternoon, that I had
come to a crossroads in my married life, and it was in the mood of a
weary traveler approaching a wayside shrine that I turned through the
hedge at last and beheld the House of the Five Pines.




CHAPTER II

MATTIE “CHARLES T. SMITH”


The old mansion stood back from the road along the bay in a field of
high, burnt grass. Drooping dahlias and faded old-fashioned pinks and
poppies bordered the half-obscured flagstones which led to a fan-topped
door. It was so long since the house had been painted that it had
the appearance of having turned white with age, or something more,
some terror that had struck it overnight. Wooden blinds, blanched
by the salt wind to a dull peacock-blue, hung disjointedly from the
great square-paned windows. A low roof sloped forward to the eaves of
the first story, its austere expanse interrupted by a pointed gable
above the kitchen. Beneath the dormer-window was a second closed and
shuttered door.

At some period, already lost in obscurity, a wing had been thrust back
into the neglected garden behind the house, and over its gray shingles
stood the five pine-trees which we had seen from the sand-dunes. Old
Captain Jeremiah Hawes had planted them for a wind-break, and during a
century they had raised their gaunt necks, waiting to be guillotined by
the winter storms. Faithfully trying to protect their trust from the
ravages of wind-driven spray and stinging sand, they extended their
tattered arms in sighing protest above the worn old house.

We went wonderingly up the flagging and knocked at the small door of
the “porch.” There was no answer. We knocked again, staring, as is the
way of strangers, to each side of us and endeavoring to peer through
the green shutter. We had to jerk ourselves back and look quickly
upward when the dormer-window over our heads went rattling up and an
old woman craned her neck out.

“That’s Mattie,” whispered Ruth, “Mattie ‘Charles T. Smith’!”

Gray wisps of hair framed a face thin and brown as a stalk of seaweed,
with sharp eyes, like those of a hungry cat, above a narrow mouth.
The creature did not ask us what we wanted; she knew. Her perception
was clairvoyant. Long experience in dealing with house-hunters made
her understand what we had come for without the formality of any
explanation. We brushed straight past the first half of what would
ordinarily have been the procedure of conversation, and I came to the
gist of what was uppermost in my mind and Mattie’s.

“Why won’t you let any one in?” I asked, bluntly.

Ruth looked at me in some surprise.

Mattie put up a long thin arm to keep the window from falling on her
shoulders. “I dunno as I need to say,” she answered me, directly.

“What?” said Ruth. My friend, being complacent-minded, had not followed
the argument so fast.

But Mattie did not repeat herself. She and I understood each other.
She kept on gazing straight at me in that piercing way which I knew
instinctively had driven many a purchaser from her inscrutable doorway.

“Will you let me in if I get a permit from the agent?” I insisted.

“That depends,” replied Mattie.

Her lean body withdrew from the frame of the upper gable, her eyes
still holding mine, until her face gradually disappeared into the
gloom of the room behind her. The last thing I saw were two veined
hands gradually lowering the sash, and the last sound was a little
click as it shut.

Ruth, having brought me to see the house, was murmuring words of
apologetic responsibility. But I did not feel daunted.

“I think I will take it, anyway,” I said, “just for the view.”

From the doorstep of the House of the Five Pines we faced the bay
across the road, where many little fishing-boats were anchored,
and white sails, rounding the lighthouse-point, made a home-coming
procession into Star Harbor. Remembering Mattie “Charles T. Smith” at
her upper window, I wondered if she, too, saw the picture as I did and
loved it the same way. But Mattie would have seen far more--not only
what lay before us, but the ships that “used to be” and the wharf of
old Captain Jeremiah Hawes, the piles of which were left on the beach
now, like teeth of some buried sea-monster protruding from the sand.
She would have counted the drying-frames hung with salt cod in pungent
rows upon the bank of the shore lot, and she would have seen the burly
fishermen themselves, who used to tramp back from the flats to the “Big
House” for their breakfast. She had been a part of that former life
which was gone, and now, like an old hull on the flats, she was waiting
for that last great storm that was to sweep her out to sea. Sympathy
for her made me almost wish to abandon my own project before it was
begun, and yet it seemed to me that her life was almost over and that
the House of the Five Pines needed the youth that we could bring it as
much as we needed the shelter it could offer us. I brushed aside the
thought of Mattie as if it were a cobweb that clung to my face in the
woods.

“Take me to the trustee, or whoever controls the place,” I begged my
friend; “let’s see what can be done!”

“Now?” asked Ruth.

We had turned reluctantly through the hedge into the road.

“Why not?” I answered. “I’m going back to New York to-morrow.”

“You can’t do things so quickly around here.”

She must have noticed my disappointment, for she added, “There are no
telephones or street-cars, and whenever you go to see people, the
first three times you call they always happen to be out.”

“Don’t be lazy,” I urged, so full of my own enthusiasm that I had no
mercy on plump and pretty Ruth. “How far is it to this man’s office?”

“Office? He doesn’t have any office. His house is at the other end of
town.”

_Clang-kilang! Clang-kilang!_

The clamor of bell-ringing finished our argument.

Down the boardwalk, to meet us, hobbled a strange figure. Supporting
a great copper bell, which he swung with a short stroke of his stumpy
right arm, was a stodgy man dressed in a tight, faded, sailor’s suit,
a straw hat on his bald head, fringed with red hair, and a florid face
that at present was all open mouth and teeth and tongue. He was the
town crier.

In front of the deserted House of the Five Pines he stopped and,
holding a printed dodger high in the air, read off it, in stentorian
tones, “Hi Yi, Gu Jay, Be Boom Bee Boy!”

“Whatever in the world is he trying to say?” I gasped.

“I don’t know,” said Ruth. “Nobody ever knows. You can’t understand
him.”

“But what does he do that for?”

“Why,” smiled Ruth, “that’s the way we get the news around. If there is
a meeting in the town hall, you give the town crier a dollar, and he
goes up and down the boardwalk and rings his bell.”

“But if no one can understand him?”

“Oh, they ask each other afterward. The man who sends the crier out
always knows. He tells some one, who tells the next, so that often
the news travels faster than the crier does and you know what it is
beforehand.”

“It’s well you do!”

“Yes,” Ruth agreed, “because for the most part he gives out the notices
in front of a vacant lot. And if you ask him to repeat, he is furious
with you. I’ll show you. O Dave,” she called after him, “what is the
news?”

The town crier turned upon the sweet-mannered city woman like an angry
child on his partner in a game of croquet who has not obeyed the rules.
He clanged down his bell insolently, and kept on clanging it up and
down as he turned on his heel and strode away.

Ruth laughed. “You see!” she said.

“I see.”

“He is the last town crier in America. We are very proud of him!”

“I should think you would be,” I replied. It seemed to me that I
understood why the race had become extinct. I would have traded him for
a telephone.

We walked slowly down the village street. To the right of us the
fishermen’s cottages, behind their white picket-fences and green,
well-tended squares of lawn, made patches of paint as gay as the quilts
that hung airing on their clothes-lines. They looked as if each one
had been done over with what was left in the bottom of the can after
their owners had finished painting their boats. On the side of the
street toward the bay freshly tarred nets were spread to dry upon
low bushes, dories were dragged up and turned over, and straggling
wharves, with their long line of storm-bent buildings, stretched their
necks out into the flats. We passed a great, ugly cold-storage house,
which had superseded the private industry of the old days, the company
which owned it controlling all of the seines in the bay, for whom the
fishermen rose at four to pull up the nets which had once been theirs.

“You can’t buy fresh fish in Star Harbor now,” Ruth was saying; “it all
goes to Boston on ice and comes back again on the train.”

Down the steep roadways beside the wharves one caught sight of
tall-masted schooners, anchored to unload, and the dead herring thrown
from the packing-houses to the beach, rotting in the stale tidewater,
made an unwholesome stench. In front of the fish-houses swarthy
Portuguese sat drowsing in the sun. Their day’s work had begun with the
trip to the seines at dawn and had ended with their big breakfast at
noon. Their children swarmed about them in the streets, quarreling over
ice-cream cones, which they shared, lick for lick, with their dogs. On
the corner near the government wharf we had to turn into the road to
avoid a crowd of noisy middies who were taking up all the sidewalk,
laughing like schoolboys at recess, enjoying their two hours’ leave
from the big destroyer anchored in the harbor. They had no contact
with the town except through mild flirtation with the girls, and no
festivity while on shore greater than eating pop-corn on the curb, but
they seemed to feel satisfied that they were “seeing the world” and
were quite hilarious about it. They were as much a part of the port as
the Portuguese sailors, and more vital to it than the stray artists
whom we had seen, absorbed each in his own canvas, which he had pitched
in some picturesque--and cool--spot along the water-front.

Passing through a neighborhood where the little shops filled their
fly-specked windows with shell souvenirs for visitors, we turned up
an alleyway and entered the yard of a house built squarely behind the
row of front store buildings. In this neighborhood they did not mind
because they had no view of the sea. They were tired of looking at
it and were more than glad to be shut off from its sharp wind in the
winter.

Judge Bell was sitting on the open porch that ran around three sides of
his pink house like the deck of a ship. He was perfectly content with
the location.

“We have come to see you,” I began, “about buying the House of the Five
Pines.”

The judge marked the book he was reading and laid it down, looking at
us mildly, without surprise.

“I’ll do all I can for you,” he replied, with what seemed to me undue
emphasis on the “can.” “Won’t you come up and set down? We might talk
it over, anyway.”

“Talk it over!” I repeated impatiently, rocking violently in one of his
big chairs. “How much is it, and how soon can I get it?”

I felt Ruth and the judge exchanging glances over my head.

“It ain’t quite so simple as that,” he said quietly, weighing me, as
all these Cape Cod people do, with unveiled, appraising eyes. “Two
thousand dollars is all I’m asking for it now, as trustee--”

“I thought it was three!” Ruth could not help exclaiming. “I was told
you were holding it for three.”

“I’m holding it,”--his big leathery face broke into the lines of a
smile--“for Mattie ‘Charles T. Smith’ to move out. That’s all I’m
holding it for. I could ’a’ sold it five times a year in the last
five years, if it hadn’t been for her. And it’s gettin’ a name now.
I’d be glad to be rid of it.” He passed his heavy hand over his face
speculatively, and held his lower jaw down as he weighed me once more.
“I’d be real glad to get shet with the whole deal!”

“I’ll take it,” said I.

Even Ruth looked startled. She remembered what I did not, in my sudden
enthusiasm; that I had yet to get my husband’s consent to living
here--and the money. But it seemed so ridiculously cheap that I was
already in that cold real-estate sweat which breaks out on the novice
in his first venture for fear that some one else, between night and
morning or while he goes for his lunch, will get the treasure that he
has set his heart on.

“How soon can you get Mattie ‘Charles T. Smith’ out?” I asked nervously.

The judge’s lower jaw went up with a snap.

“I don’t know,” he said, tapping the arms of his chair with his
hammerhead fingers, “as I can ever get her out.”

“You mean as long as she lives?”

“As long as she lives, certainly--and after that, maybe never.”

He got up and spit over the porch-rail.

As he did so I picked up the book that he had knocked to the
floor--“Brewster’s Natural Magic,” edited in London in 1838. It was
full of diagrams of necromancy and open at a chapter on phantom ships.
I showed the title to Ruth surreptitiously. She nodded.

“They are all that way up here,” she said.

But the shrewd old judge had heard her.

“I’ll let you read that book,” he said, “if you can understand it.”

“I’d like to,” I answered, to cover my embarrassment. “But I do
understand you. You mean that her influence would remain.”

“I mean more than that.”

I would have liked nothing better than to have started the judge
talking on “natural magic,” but just for this one afternoon it seemed
as if we ought to keep to real estate. If I lived here, I could come
back and talk to him again on psychic subjects.

“You think, then, that Mattie has some claim on the place?”

“No legal claim, no. But there is claims and claims. The claims on
parents that children have, and the claims on children that parents
have. And the claims of them that are not the true children of their
parents, but adopted. Maybe not legally; but morally, yes. If people
take children and bring them up, like Captain Jeremiah Hawes done,
that makes them have some obligation toward them, doesn’t it? And
then there are the claims that married people have on each other, and
the people that ain’t married, and I sometimes think that the people
that ain’t legally married have more claim on each other than people
who are, just on account of that. It puts it up to the individual.
And if the individual fails, it is more of a moral breakdown than if
the law fails. For the law is only responsible to man, but man, he is
responsible to God. Do you follow me?”

“All the way,” I said.

The judge got up and spit over the rail of the porch again.

“As I was sayin’, Mattie ain’t got no legal claim to the House of the
Five Pines, and I could put her out in a minute if I was a mind to. I
expect I could have done it five years ago, when the New Captain died,
only it seemed the town would have to take care of her all the rest of
her natural days. We’ve saved five years’ board on her at the poor-farm
now, and it looks as if she might live quite a while longer. Plenty of
’em get to be a hundred around here, and she ain’t over seventy; not
any older than I am, likely. At least, she didn’t used to be when she
was young!” He sighed, as if suddenly feeling the weight of his days.
“And the town, as a town, don’t hanker after the responsibility of
taking on Mattie ‘Charles T. Smith.’”

“Why do they call her that?” interrupted Ruth. “Is that her name?”

“That’s as good a name as any for a person who ain’t got one of her
own. _Charles T. Smith_ was the vessel old Captain Hawes was sailin’
in, the time he picked her up out of the sea.”

“Picked her up out of the sea!” we both exclaimed.

“Didn’t you ever hear about that?” he asked. “Well it’s so common known
around here there’s no need in my concealing it from you.

“Captain Hawes was up on the Grand Banks fishing, along in the fifties,
and had all his small boats out from the ship when a hurricane struck
him. The sea was standing right up on its legs. Just as he was trying
to get back his men, and letting all the cod go to do it, too, there
he see a big sloop right on top of him, almost riding over him, on the
crest of a wave as high as that dune back there. High and solid like
that, and yellow. But instead of comin’ over on him, like he fully
expected an’ was praying against, the vessel slipped back. By the time
he rode the crest, there she was diving stern down into the bottom
of the trough. And she never come up again. The only thing that come
up was this here Mattie. Sebastian Sikes, he was out in a small boat
still, and he leaned over and grabbed her up, a little girl, tied to a
life-preserver. The captain was for letting her go adrift again when
he come ashore, but Mis’ Hawes wouldn’t let him. She said as long as
Mattie was the only thing he salvaged out of the whole voyage, the Lord
He meant they should keep her.

“The child couldn’t even speak the language at first. They thought it
must be Portuguese she was jabberin’, but the sailors they said no,
they wouldn’t claim it neither. So they come to think afterward it
might have been French, her being picked up there off Newfoundland,
and all them French sailors coming out that way from Quebec. But by
the time somebody had thought of that, she had forgot how to speak it,
anyway. She was only about five. The missis had her baptized ‘Matilda,’
after a black slave her father had brought home to Maine when she
was a girl herself, up to Wiscasset. But ‘Mattie’ it came to be, and
‘Charles T. Smith,’ after the ship that saved her.”

“And didn’t he leave her anything in his will, after all that?”

“Neither Jeremiah Hawes nor his wife left any will,” replied Judge
Bell. “The only will there is is the one the New Captain made. It’s up
to Caleb Snow’s place.”

“Can I see it?”

“You can if he ain’t out winkling.” The judge picked up his “Natural
Magic” as if he hoped that we were going.

“What’s ‘winkling’?” I whispered to Ruth, as we turned away.

“Oh, nothing important--something the children do out on the flats,
gathering little shell-fish they use for bait.”

“He’ll be in if the tide ain’t out,” the judge called after us.




CHAPTER III

THE WINKLE-MAN AND THE WILL


We found the man who gathers winkles sitting on the floor of the
sail-loft. Caleb Snow combined the resources of real estate with
the independence of a fisherman, and sent his daughter to the State
normal-school on the proceeds. When one can go out on the flats at low
tide and pick up a living with a pronged stick, why worry about rents?
Judge Bell, himself too busy attending séances to give the matter his
best thought, had persuaded Caleb Snow to handle the House of the Five
Pines. We wondered if the Winkle-Man would take any interest in either
it or us.

“Judge Bell told us that we might ask you to show us the will of the
late Captain Hawes,” I began.

“You mean the New Captain.”

Caleb went on with the deft mending of the great tarred net, in the
center of which he was bent like some old spider. He was a little man,
and he made us feel even taller than we were as he peered up at us in
the dusk of the low-beamed room, shadowed by the hanging sails and
paraphernalia of ships which obscured the lights from the dusty windows.

“It’s up in the loft,” he said wiping his greasy hands on the seat of
his overalls.

“Can’t we go up there?”

“Can ye?” he answered. He walked slowly over to a steep ladder that led
up into a black hole and began to mount. Near the top he turned around
and called down to us:

“I ain’t a-goin’ to bring it below, not for no one!”

I started after him.

“Isn’t there any light up there?” asked Ruth cravenly, from the bottom
rung.

For answer he swung open a pair of double doors, and the glory of the
afternoon sunshine streamed in upon us. Gold and bronze the water fell
in the long lines of the incoming tide. Deep blue shadows pooled the
mirrored surface beneath the boats that were anchored along the shore.
The radiance of the bay filled the dark corners of the sail-loft like a
blessing.

Caleb Snow bent over an old safe under the eaves and presently lifted
out a manuscript in a long envelope.

“I don’t show this to many folks,” he said; “it wouldn’t do.”

“Will you read it to us?”

“Oh, no.” He thrust it into my hands so quickly that I wondered if he
were afraid of it, or if it was that he simply could not read.

Ruth and I sat down on the lid of an old sea-chest and carefully
examined the document. First there were the usual unintelligible legal
clauses, and then the sum of the whole text--that the New Captain
bequeathed the proceeds of his entire estate to found a home for stray
animals, especially cats.

“Why cats?” I turned to Caleb.

“Well, she allus had ’em,” he explained, “Mattie ‘Charles T. Smith.’
She used to take ’em in when the summer people went away and left ’em
on the beach. Wild like, they get, and dangerous. She had him taught to
notice ’em. That’s why.”

Poor Mattie! Her example had trained his only virtue to her own
detriment. There was not a word about the New Captain’s leaving any of
his money to her, nor even a stick of furniture. I read further.

“It is my wish that Mattie ‘Charles T. Smith’ sit in the room with my
body for a week after I die, thereby fulfilling a last solemn trust.”

“Why did he say that?” I gasped.

Caleb Snow was sitting in the upper doorway, with his legs hanging out,
whittling at a piece of wood.

“Well, you see, he died once before and come to life again, and this
time he didn’t want to disappoint nobody.”

“_What?_”

“He simply stretched out dead one day, like he had heart-failure, and
after Mattie had got the old crape out of the chest and tacked it on
the door, and the undertaker was there going about his business, the
New Captain come to again. It was the coffin turned the trick. He
wouldn’t let ’em put him into it. He had an awful hate towards coffins
after that. Said coffin-makers was a low form of life. He took up some
foreign religion and read books to prove it by. Claimed undertakers
would be caterpillars in their next life, crawling on their bellies
and never coming out of their own cocoons. I bet he don’t stay in his,
neither!”

“Nonsense,” said I; “those things don’t happen twice.”

“If things happen once that hadn’t ought to happen at all, they got a
right to happen twice,” said Caleb doggedly, “or three or four times,
for that matter!”

“But he was cataleptic.”

“Call him anything you like.” Caleb went on whittling. “All I know is,
he was so scairt he would be buried alive, he made Mattie promise she
would watch him for a week.”

“And did she do it?”

“Yep. It was two years after the first time that he died the second
time, and they had it all planned out. She sat there in the back room,
with the shutters closed, and never took her eyes off him. Folks would
go in and out and offer her a cup of tea once in a while, but she let
on as how she didn’t know them. She never was a hand to speak to any
one before that, and after that she never has spoke to any one at all.
If you ask her anything, like I’m obliged to, strictly business, she
looks as if she didn’t have it on her mind what you was talking about.
Nor on anything else, for that matter. It turned her.”

“I should think it would!” said Ruth and I together.

“Yep,” Caleb continued, “he was dead all right when they took him out.
Leastwise, as dead as he will ever get. I didn’t see him; nobody went
to the funeral except Judge Bell, but he O. K.’d it. An’ if Mattie
decided he was beyond recall, why he was; that settles it. For if he
had been only halfway, like the other time, she would ’a’ fetched him
back herself.”

He gave us a look profoundly mysterious.

“You think, then, that Mattie has the power to raise people from the
dead?”

“Well, I wouldn’t go so far as to have it said I _say_ so,” he evaded.
“Not humans, maybe, but cats! I’ve seen her take a dead cat up off the
beach in her apron, drowned or starved, no difference to her, and the
next day there it would be, lapping up milk on the doorstep.” He paused
a minute to let us weigh this, and then he added, “An’ cats ain’t the
only things that has nine lives.”

Ruth and I stared blankly at him and at each other, and back to the
faded ink-written pages of the New Captain’s will.

“Did Mattie ever show this--power--in any other way?”

“I don’t know,” replied Caleb testily. “I don’t know her at all. Nobody
does. She don’t go around where folks are.”

“Didn’t she ever attend church?”

“Not her! She’s got a system of her own. Her and the New Captain got it
up together. The Old Captain and his wife was regular members, but down
to the public library Mis’ Katy says the New Captain used to ask for
books that a Christian would ’a’ been ashamed to be seen carrying up
the street under his arm.”

“Occultism, probably.”

“The judge can tell you. He understands them things.”

“Is he a spiritualist?”

“Not precisely, but leanin’. Goes to the First Baptist on Sunday
mornings, and all over the cape week-days, to parlor meetings. It was
the New Captain started him off, too. The judge, he thinks if he keeps
after it, he’ll get a message from him, and he’s real worried, waitin’.
But Mattie--she goes around in the yard, even, talking out loud to the
cap’n, as if he was right there, diggin’ in the garden.”

“Lots of people talk to themselves.”

“To _themselves_, yes! I know they do. But Turtle’s boy--he takes the
groceries, and he is the only one that will go in there now--he says
sometimes it’s more than he can stand. He jest puts the stuff down
on the step and runs away. She gets that cross-eyed girl next door
to go on errands for her. All that family is--” he tapped his head
significantly, “and don’t know the difference.”

“You mean that Mattie is crazy?” I asked indignantly. “She’s no more
crazy than you or me.”

Ruth smiled then at the look Caleb gave me. It was as much as to say
that he had suspected I was right along, and that now I had admitted it.

“She only appears to us to act,” my friend defended me, “as any one
might who had always lived in one place and felt she had a right
to stay there. Especially, because she is out of contact with life
and does not know any longer how to take it up. There is nothing
weak-minded in the course she is pursuing.”

“No mind at all,” Caleb contradicted her.

But there was something important that I wanted to find out.

“Why,” I asked, “didn’t the New Captain leave Mattie anything in his
will?”

Caleb cocked one eye at the thing that he was whittling.

“He was past the place.”

“You mean that there was a time when he would have left her his money?”

“There was a time when he would have married her--only his mother
wouldn’t let him.”

Somehow the idea of the rugged Captain Hawes, a sailor in his youth and
a terrifying figure in his old age, a recluse around whom strange tales
had been woven by his townspeople, did not seem like a man who could
have been prevented by his mother from marrying an orphan girl.

“You can laugh,” Caleb scolded us; “you never saw her!”

“Old Jeremiah Hawes’ wife?”

“Her!” Caleb jabbed with his jack-knife as he spoke, as if he wished
that it was the old lady he had under his blade.

“But I don’t see why the New Captain could not have married Mattie
after his mother died. They must have lived a long time together in
the House of the Five Pines after that.”

“Forty years is all. Same reason that he didn’t leave her nothin’. He
was past the place where he wanted to.”

Caleb had finished what he was whittling now, and, as if he knew that
Ruth carried all such things home to her children, he handed it to her
with an apologetic smile. It was the hull of a little fishing-boat,
with two masts and a rudder all in place.

We thanked him and backed out down the ladder.

Looking at the toy in the sunlight, Ruth exclaimed. The name of that
fatal ship which had brought the little half-drowned French child to
the sterile land of her adoption had been carved by the Winkle-Man upon
this tiny model--_Charles T. Smith_.

“It must have looked just like that!” I cried.

“It’s like Caleb,” said Ruth, with her slow, fond smile.




CHAPTER IV

THE BOYCOTT


“I’m going home to-day,” I announced to Ruth after breakfast the next
morning, “to secure Jasper’s consent to buying the House of the Five
Pines. I’ll go round on the back street now, while you are busy, and
get my washing from Mrs. Dove, so that I can pack it.”

As I passed the big old house it looked so innocent that I scoffed
at the stories that it had gathered to itself, as a ship gathers
barnacles. “All I need to do is to have it painted,” I thought, “and I
will have the finest place on the cape. I’ll see how much it will cost
to have a few things done.”

I turned into Turtle’s store, and after a search found the proprietor
out in the back room making himself an ice-cream cone. I asked him if
he knew any one whom I could get to paint a house.

“What house?” he parried, as if it made all the difference in the world.

“The House of the Five Pines.”

“What do you want to paint that for?”

I tried to keep my temper. “I’m going to buy it.”

“Well, you’ll probably never move in,” was his reply. “I wouldn’t waste
no paint on it.”

As I turned out of his hostile door I bumped into a man coming in with
open pails of white lead in each hand.

“Can you give me an estimate on a house--the House of the Five Pines?”

He looked from me to Mr. Turtle. “Why, I don’t do no painting,” he
replied.

“What’s that?” I pointed to the evidence he had forgotten he was
carrying.

“Well, _hardly_ any,” he corrected; “just a little now and then to
oblige a friend, when I ain’t busy.”

Ruth had warned me of this. The independent son of the Puritan Fathers
on Cape Cod will only work as a favor, and out of kindness charges you
more than if he were drawing union wages.

“What do you do when you _are_ busy?”

“Oh,--boats.”

“Wouldn’t you have time in the fall?”

“In the fall I won’t be here,” he answered, with a relieved sigh.

Mr. Turtle gave a guffaw, but when I looked at him sharply he was
methodically cutting a piece of cheese. “Will you have a sample?” he
asked me, holding a sliver out to me on the end of a knife.

I slammed the screen-door.

As soon as I arrived in the hospitable back-yard of Mrs. Dove, I asked
her what was wrong with them, or with me, that they should rebuff me
so. Stout and red-faced with exertion, she was laboriously washing
on a bench under the trees and kept on splashing the suds. Being the
only laundry in town, she could not waste time on explanations. Mrs.
Dove contracted to do the summer people’s clothing by the dozen, and,
counting almost everything that was given her as not rightfully within
that dozen, supplied herself with sufficient funds to hibernate for
the winter. During the dull season she prepared for the next year’s
trade by making rag-rugs and mats with button-eyed cats, the patterns
for which had traditionally been brought back from Newfoundland by the
sailors. After she had listened to my story and hung up the stockings,
she took the clothes-pins out of her mouth long enough to answer.

“You’ll have a hard time all right, getting any one to go near the
place. They’re all against it.”

“But why?”

“Well, it has a bad name around here.”

That was what the judge had said. That was the reason he was willing to
sell it cheap.

“Do you mean it is haunted?”

Mrs. Dove held a child’s rompers up to the sunlight, soaped a spot on
the seat, and rubbed hard again.

“Well, not ghosts, precisely, but there’s always been strange goings-on
there, things a person could not understand and that never has been
explained. All the men is down on it, because the New Captain didn’t
hire none of them to work on the wing he built.”

“But that was years ago!”

“Fifty, maybe. The house was put up in the first place by ships’
carpenters from Boston, and there’s some is still jealous of that.
Still, when the New Captain added to it, seems as if he might have
hired folks around here. Instead of that he was so stingy that he
built it all himself, him and Mattie. He had her working around there
just like a man. Pretty near killed her carrying lumber. I’d ’a’ seen
myself hammerin’ and climbing up and down ladders for any of them
Haweses!”

“Did she really do that?”

“She did anything he said. Anything at all! From the time that he used
to chase her barefooted in and out of the drying-frames on the shore
lot where the cod was spread, she just worshiped him. And what good did
it do her? Mis’ Hawes was so set against her that she made her life a
torment, trying to keep her busy and away from him.”

“Why wouldn’t she let him marry her?”

“How did you know about that? Oh, you seen Caleb Snow! People that talk
all the time has to say something. I bet the judge didn’t mention it!”

“He said that Mattie was picked up out of the sea.”

“Oh, as for that!”

“And that Mrs. Hawes came from Maine.”

“Did he? Well, she did, then. And she always thought there was nothing
good enough for her in Star Harbor. There was hardly a family on Cape
Cod that she would associate with. Her father was one of them old
sea-captains, pirates, I call them, who took slaves up there in his own
vessels, and she just naturally had it in her to make Mattie into a
slave of her own. She would no more have let her son marry that orphan
girl than if she was a nigger. I was a child then myself, and I used to
hear her hollerin’ at Mattie. She was bedridden the last six years, and
she used to lie by the window, downstairs in the front room, and call
out to people passing in the street. Stone deaf, Mis’ Hawes was, and
so as she could hear the sound of her own voice she used to shout loud
enough to call the hands in off the ships in the harbor. Yes, ma’am,
her lightest whisper could be heard all over the bay.”

“Did she live longer than her husband?”

“Oh, years and years! He went down with the _White Wren_--they got his
body off the point. It was after that she had the stroke and was so
mean to Mattie and the New Captain. They was young people then, and
just the age. She wouldn’t let him have a penny of the Old Captain’s
fortune. I suppose it was because she wouldn’t give him any cash to
do it with that he had to build the new wing himself. She was dead set
against it. But it served her right. Mattie got so wore out with it
that she had to go to a hospital in Boston and get laid up for a while.
Some say she fell off the roof, but I used to be right around there
watchin’ them half the time and I never see her fall off any roof. And
Mis’ Hawes, she had a miserable time of it while Mattie was gone. Once
you get depending on any one, it’s them that is the masters.

“I don’t believe Mattie ever would ’a’ come back after that, she was
so long away, only one day the New Captain hitched up his horse and
went and fetched her. His mother simply couldn’t do without her another
minute. It was winter and there was no ships plying. The harbor was
ice from here way over to the lighthouse-point; I remember it. And we
didn’t have trains clear down the cape in those times. So what did the
New Captain do but drive all the way down to Boston and back in his
square box-buggy. He was gone days and days. I saw them coming home
that night, the horse’s coat all roughed up and sweaty and his breath
steaming into the cold, like smoke, the side-curtains drawn tight shut
and the lamps lit. I was bringing back our cow, and I drew to one side
of the road to let them pass, and I could hear her whimpering-like
inside. He must have thought a powerful sight of Mattie to have made
that journey for her.”

“Were they happy after that?”

“Not that anybody knows of. There was old Mis’ Hawes so set against
his marrying her that she would fly into a passion if she saw you was
even so much as thinking of such a thing; and yet, what could she do
about it? Or what did she even know about it, shut up in one room?
Yes, ma’am, there’s been strange goings-on in that house, and there is
still. That’s why the men they won’t go near it. When the New Captain
wanted the roof shingled or the pipes mended from time to time, he had
to do it himself.”

“Well, I’m not going to paint the house myself,” I said. “After I get
in and have it all opened up, they will feel differently about it.” I
held up my chin defiantly.

“That is, if you ever get in,” rejoined Mrs. Dove.

I walked on down the back street with my clean white skirts, that she
had washed, over my arm, and thought things over.

To every house, as to every human being, is granted two sorts of life,
physical and spiritual. These wear out. To renew the physical life, all
that is needed is a few shingles and a can of white lead and a thorough
overhauling of the drains. The regeneration of the spiritual is more
complex, requiring a change of occupant. The deterioration of a family
within the walls of a house leaves an aroma of decay that only the
complete relinquishment of the last surviving occupant can dissipate.
Even then, the new tenant, in order to be exempt from the influence of
past psychological experiences, must be unaware of them. I was learning
too much about the House of the Five Pines. I determined that I would
inquire no further, but brush these revelations from my mind and make a
clean beginning. I would go back to New York now, remembering the house
only in its external aspect, impressing that alone upon my husband and
forestalling his reaction to the side of the situation that lent itself
to fiction, which was his profession, by not telling him all of these
legends that I had recently unearthed. Jasper was more sensitive to
such suggestions than myself, and I felt that if he knew what I did we
should have no peace. To protect myself from exhaustive argument and
speculation, it would be wiser to repeat nothing.

The road where I was walking led across the rear of the premises of
the House of the Five Pines, which extended a block, from what was
always called the “Front Street” to the “Back Street.” From here one
had a view of the garden and the four-foot brick walls that held up the
precious earth hauled from such a distance. The century’s growth of
the five pine-trees had burst open the wall along one side, and their
roots, extending into the next yard, had been ruthlessly chopped off.
I hoped that these new neighbors would not extend their animosity to
me. The land sloped gradually down from the house until it rose again
in a wooded hill on the further side of Back Street. This incline had
necessitated the placing of piles, topped with inverted tin pans, as
they are in country corn-bins, to hold up the rear of the captain’s
wing. The space thus formed beneath the house, called the “under,” was
filled with the rubbish of years. There were no doors at the back of
the house, nor did this one-story addition have any entrance. There was
a big chimney in the center of the end-wall and windows on either side.
No barns or outbuildings fringed the road. The needs of seafaring folk
demanded that they keep their properties in sheds upon their wharves.

At first there was no sign of Mattie, but as I lingered in Back Street,
lost in speculation, a little old woman came around the side of the
mysterious house. She was dragging two heavy oars behind her which she
propped against a tree, and, setting down a wicker fish-basket beside
them, lifted out a live green lobster.

She wore a yellow oilskin hat, with the brim bent down around her
withered face, and a dirty sailor’s middy over a bedraggled skirt.
Holding her freshly-caught lobster in a way that would have been
precarious to most people, she talked to it like a pet, and as I
continued to watch her, fascinated, she carried it tenderly away. I
wondered if she would drop it into boiling water, which was its natural
destiny, or take it into the kitchen and feed it a saucer of milk. She
did not appear again, but realizing that from behind some shutter she
might be observing me, I became self-conscious and moved on.

Judge Bell was leaning against the door of the Winkle-Man’s loft and
greeted me like an old friend as I passed. I knew that he had strolled
up there this morning to find out what had transpired after I left him
the day before.

“Are you going to take the house?” he asked.

“I hope so. I’m going back home this afternoon and tell my husband
about it.”

“Oh, ye’ve got a husband, have ye?” said Caleb, appearing with his
winkle-fork in his hand.

“What would I want that big house for if I didn’t have any husband?”

“Give it up! What do you want it for anyway? The judge and me have give
up wondering what summer people wants anything for, ain’t we, judge?”

Judge Bell would not answer; he was afraid Caleb was going to spoil the
sale.

“They always pick out the worst ramshackle down-at-the-heels places
that they can get for nothin’, and talks about the ‘possibilities’ of
’em, like a revivalist prayin’ over a sinner, until you would think the
blessed old rat-trap was something!”

“The House of the Five Pines isn’t a rat-trap,” said the judge,
touchily.

“No, it ain’t,” grinned Caleb, shouldering his long fork and picking up
his bait-bucket. “It’s a man-trap!”

He slouched off down the bank.

“Don’t you worry,” I reassured the judge, who was looking sour. “I’ll
take the house if I possibly can. You put your mind on getting Mattie
moved out of it, and I’ll write you.”

I told Ruth about my interviews when I reached the cottage. “You’ve
found out more about that house in the last twenty-four hours,” she
replied in her leisurely way, “than I’ve ever heard in the five years
I’ve lived here. I only pray you will take it now. The town-people
won’t like it if you don’t; you’ve got their hopes aroused.”

“I have my own aroused,” I replied. “I have more hope now for the
future than I have had for the last six months.”

Ruth saw me off cheerfully on the afternoon train, but I knew that in
her kind heart were forebodings as to what might happen in my life
before she could see me again. Her whole family would migrate soon now,
and our winters would be spent in cities too far apart for us to help
each other. If she could have known how much I was going to need her,
she would never have left Star Harbor.




CHAPTER V

“THE SHOALS OF YESTERDAY”


After I had been back in New York for a month I had about decided that
Mrs. Dove was right.

Jasper had greeted my idea about buying the house with enthusiasm, but,
when it came to details, with a stubborn refusal to face the facts and
sign a check. To my entreaties that he go down and look at it, or write
to Judge Bell about it, or arrange to move there soon, I was constantly
met with, “Wait till after the play.”

We lived in four rooms in the old arcade near Columbus Circle which we
had originally chosen because artists lived there, and at that time I
had thought of myself as an artist. I did, in truth, have some _flair_
for it, and a little education, which had been laboriously acquired at
the School of Design associated with the Carnegie Technical Schools.
Two years of marriage had seen the dwindling away of my aspirations
by attrition. The one room that we had which possessed a window facing
north, which by any stretch of good-will might have been called a
studio, had been given up for our common sleeping-room, and Jasper,
because of the constant necessity of his profession to keep late hours,
was never out of bed until long after the sun had slid around to the
court. I bore fate no grudge because of this. It was quite true, as he
often pointed out to me, that I could paint out-of-doors or in some
one else’s studio, but the day that I felt free to do this never came.
When, after two years of married life, our finances still necessitated
the curtailment of every extravagance, paints and canvas seemed one of
the most plausible things to do without. It was only when prompted by
the exhibition of some woman painter, who had evidently managed these
things better, my husband would ask me why I did not paint any more,
that I suffered momentarily. For the rest of the time his own work
seemed to me much more important.

This was the night at last that my husband’s play was to go on, the
plot of which he had developed from a mystery that I had suggested
one morning a year ago, when I used to wake up so happily, full of
ideas. I did not rise as exuberantly now. I hated to get up at all. Our
studio was crowded with things and with people that we did not want
from morning until night, and from night until morning again. It had
become my chief duty to sort out all the component parts of our ménage,
producing just the influences that would further the work of my husband
and suppressing all others. To-day I had been answering questions
constantly on the telephone, from complaints about the box-office,
with which I had nothing at all to do, to reproaches from the ingénue
because she could not find the author. It seemed to me, thinking it
over while pressing out the dress I was going to wear, that Myrtle was
spending altogether too much time looking for my husband. Just because
he wrote the play and she was acting in it was no reason that I could
see why she should lunch with him every day. I sometimes wished that
all of these young girls who thought it was part of their education to
flirt with him could have the pleasure of getting him his breakfast
every day, as I did, and of waiting up for him for a thousand and one
nights.

I did not reproach Jasper; I loved him too much for that. When one is
jealous it is the contortions of a member of his own sex, of whom he is
suspicious, not the dear one upon whom he is dependent for happiness.
A woman will drop her best friend to save her husband, without letting
him know she has done so.

I blamed the city in which we worked for most of the confusion. Had
we lived in some other place, it would have been in a saner way. And
Jasper could have lived anywhere he chose; he carried his earning
capacity in his imagination. Nowhere are conditions so mad as in New
York, so enticingly witless. In this arcade building, cut up in its old
age into so-called living apartments, with rickety bridges connecting
passages that had no architectural relation to each other, whispers
followed one in bleak corridors and intrigue loafed on the stairs.
We had outgrown unconventional (which is the same as inconvenient)
housekeeping. Jasper was getting bored and I was becoming querulous
before our married life had been given any opportunity to expand. Dogs
were not allowed in our arcade; children would have been a scandal.

Thinking of the big rooms in that cool, quiet house on the cape during
the hot month of September, I could not help longing to be there, and
I had written several times to the judge. Thus I knew that Mattie
“Charles T. Smith” had once more refused to vacate, and unless we were
coming up there immediately, the judge would not evict her before
spring.

“We ought to decide something,” I was saying to myself, when I heard
my husband coming down the hall, and my heart forgot forebodings.
I hurried to hide the ironing-board, there still being a pretense
between us that it was not necessary to do these things, and put on the
tea-kettle.

Jasper was tall and angular, with wispy light hair always in disorder
above a high forehead and gray eyes wide open in happy excitement. He
looked straight into life, eager to understand it, and never seemed to
know when it came back at him, hitting him in the face. He had that
fortunate quality of making people take him seriously, even his jokes.
In a world eager to give him what he wanted, I was proud that he still
chose me, and prayed that he might continue.

He was pathetically glad to get some hot tea, assuring me that the play
was rotten, that the manager was a pig, and that none of the actors
knew their business. He had been with them all day.

“Jasper,” I said, after I had given him all the telephone messages, to
which he paid no heed at all, “have you any idea of taking that house
on Cape Cod this fall?”

Jasper went on looking through his papers as if he had not heard me.

“Where is that correction I made last night for Myrtle?” he asked.

“I’m sure I don’t know.”

“Well, what--” he began impatiently, and then, turning on me, he read
in my face, I suppose, how much the House of the Five Pines had come to
mean to me.

“Now, see here,” he finished more kindly, “I can’t think about houses
to-day; you know I can’t. Ask me to-morrow.”

“All right, dear; I’ll ask you to-morrow. Have you got my seat for
to-night?”

“Seat?”

“Yes, a ticket to get in with. I suppose I’ll have to have a pass of
some sort, won’t I? I don’t want to stand up behind the stage.”

“Why, I’m sorry; I never thought of it. I’ll run up to the theater
before I come back and get you something.”

“You won’t have time; you’re going out for dinner, aren’t you?”

“I was.”

“Well, go ahead. I’ll see about the ticket somehow. Don’t bother.”

I smiled a little ruefully after he had gone. Why did I think I had
to have any more child than just him? I had always supposed that when
a man’s play was produced his wife had a box and all her friends
gathered around her with congratulations, and that the wives of the
actors were all arrayed, family style, to see them come on. But it did
not develop that way among the members of “the profession” as I knew
them. The wives were mostly staying at home with the children, or lived
outside the city and couldn’t afford to come in, or frankly had another
engagement. They were “not expected.”

It was raining when I crowded my way into the foyer and begged a seat
for “The Shoals of Yesterday” from the man at the window. He gave
me the best he had, without any comment, and I took off my rubbers
and laid down my umbrella in the balcony. From this point I was as
interested as if I did not know every line that was to be said--almost
every gesture. After the first act I relaxed and enjoyed it.

The play went of its own volition, developing an amazing independent
vitality which withstood the surprising shocks administered to it by
the actors. I smiled benignly when the audience sat tense, and wept
when I saw them burst into laughter.

Jasper’s hurried hand-pressure, when he found me, and his whispered “Is
everything all right out here, dear?” made me feel that I, too, had
some part in it, outside of its original conception, which of course
every one had forgotten. As a watcher of the first performance, alert
to catch any criticism that might be useful, I sat up all night with
the play that I had tended from infancy. When the curtain went up upon
“The Shoals of Yesterday,” it was a manuscript from our apartment; when
the asbestos went down, it was upon a Broadway success.

I found my way back to the dressing-rooms and met Jasper coming
along with a crowd of actors, Myrtle crowding close. She wore an
orange-feathered toque, which set off her light hair like a flame, and
a sealskin wrap, drawn tight around her slim, lightly clothed body.
She was one of those competent blond girls who know not only how to
make their own clothes but how to get some one to buy them, so that
they will not have to, and how to wear them after they get them. It
is vanity which forces them into bizarre conquests. I could not tell
whether her absorption of Jasper’s time had in it elements that would
ever come to hurt me, or whether she was simply using him to further
her own advancement. Probably she did not know herself.

“Isn’t he a bright little boy?” She petted him and hung upon his neck.
“We’re going to take him out and buy him a supper, so we are; him’s
hungry.”

I knew perfectly well that it would be Jasper who would pay for the
supper, but at that moment I could not bear any one ill-will. I even
recognized that, for Myrtle, this was generosity. It would have been
more like her to have spoken of the play in terms of herself.

“It went awfully well,” I said to him over their heads. I thought he
would be waiting for some word from me.

But he did not reply. He was laughing and talking with the whole group.
In that intimate moment he was not aware of me in the way that I was of
him. Something inside me withdrew, so that I saw myself standing there,
waiting. I became embarrassed.

“Shall I go on home?” I asked.

Jasper looked relieved.

“I’ll be right along,” he assured me.

I went out with my umbrella and tried to call a taxi. But there were
not enough; there never are when it rains, and a single woman has no
chance at all. Men were running up the street a block and jumping into
them and driving down to the awning with the door half-open looking for
their girls or their wives along the sidewalk. I wished that some one
was looking for me. A hand closed over mine where I held the handle of
the umbrella and a pleasant voice said:

“Can I take you home?”

I looked up into the eyes of a bald-headed man I had never seen before,
who was smiling at me as if he had known me something more than all my
life. I jerked away and hurried down the street. After that I somehow
did not dare even to take a car; I walked home; in fact, I ran. And all
the way I kept thinking: “Why doesn’t Jasper take any better care of
me? Why doesn’t he care what happens to me? That’s it; he doesn’t care.”

It is a dangerous thing to pity oneself when one’s husband is out with
another woman.

“All I can have to eat is what is left over in the ice-box,” I said,
raising the lid and holding the lettuce in one hand while I felt around
in the dark for the bottle of milk. But there was no milk. And I had to
laugh at myself then or cry, and so I laughed, a very little, and went
to bed.

When Jasper came in it was so late that I pretended that I did not hear
him.




CHAPTER VI

LOBSTER-POTS


Getting up and out of the apartment before my husband was awake, I
bought all the morning papers at the nearest kiosk and carried them
back to my breakfast-table. At least I would know first, for my
wakefulness, what the edict of the critics was. I hated to read what
I knew in my heart to be their immature and sometimes even silly
opinions, but such is the power of the press over the theaters that
I could not wait for my coffee to boil before I unfolded the first
sheet. These sophisticated young writers, many of whom I knew and whose
opinions I respected less on that account, wielded the power of life
or death over their subjects, the playwrights, who struggled in the
arena of life for their approval and were never safe from their august
“thumbs down.” Sometimes I thought the older men, who should have known
better, were the most irresponsible. Bored out of all possibility of
forming any constructive opinion of a first night, they waited only to
see that every actor came on as advertised, and then scuttled back to
their typewriters to pound off something, anything that would leave
them free for half an hour’s game in the back of the newspaper office
before going home. What had they done to us and to our play, to the
cross-section of life which we had labored over all summer?

They were better than I had expected--probably because it was in
September and the dramatic critics were not yet jaded. Possibly,
fresh from the mountains, with the sunburn not yet worn off, they had
actually been to see the play and had had a good time meeting one
another in the lobby and comparing mileage. At any rate, their remarks
were universally good-natured, if not profound, and their intentions
beyond cavil. They had one criticism in common--they did not like our
ingénue, and I could not blame them any for that.

Will Turnball, on the “Gazette,” said that Myrtle Manners had done
all she could to ruin it, but fortunately the play did not depend
upon her for its success. He was not aware that it was the playwright
who was himself dependent upon her, who put her interests above any
one else’s in the cast. I remembered that Turnball knew the girl, and
wondered if he had said that deliberately and perhaps on my account.
One never knows where an obscure sense of chivalry is going to crop out
in a modern knight. We were old friends. He had read “The Shoals of
Yesterday” beforehand, one happy day in the middle of last summer, when
we were all down at ’Sconset together over a Sunday. And, at the time,
he had objected to Myrtle Manners taking that part. He had said she was
a trouble-maker, but Jasper, having only recently secured his contract
with Burton, who was going to produce the play, did not feel like
stepping in and dictating the cast. I had stupidly sustained him. And
now Turnball, knowing that what he said could not fail to make Myrtle
angry, had nevertheless gone out of his way to say it. I smiled at the
reaction I knew would follow, and picked up the next paper.

I was surprised to find that the man on the “Tribune” agreed with him.
I did not know this critic at all. And the “Globe” said:

“‘The Shoals of Yesterday,’ the new play by Jasper Curdy, well-known
short-story writer, opened last night at the Lyric with great
success.... When so many girls are out of work this fall, why hire
Myrtle Manners?”

I finished my breakfast with the feeling that I had been revenged.

Jasper had not chosen her, I came to his defense. The manager picked
her out, Burton himself, for no better reason than that her father
played baseball with him on the high-school team back in Plainfield,
New Jersey, and she had come to him with a letter and a sob-story and
a pair of blue eyes. She was ambitious, she had told him, and she
wanted to work hard. Well, she understood herself; she was all of
ambitious, but who was to do the hard work was more doubtful. She was
never up at the hour of the day when most of the hard work is done. To
do Jasper justice, he had not seen the girl until the first rehearsal,
although she had hardly been out of his sight since. Discontented with
the part as it was originally written, Myrtle had insisted on changes
in it until the whole fabric of the play was endangered. The part of
ingénue was not originally important, but her insistence, and Jasper’s
willingness to please her, had altered it until it threatened the lead.
Therefore it had come about that Gaya Jones, who was creating the
difficult part of a society crook, was herself becoming restless. There
was no need of antagonizing Gaya. She had started out at the beginning
of the rehearsals with all the good-will in the world, and worked up
her character with her usual dependable artistry. If she had her lines
cut and Myrtle Manners had hers made increasingly important, there was
going to be grave trouble. I had looked for Gaya in vain in the crowd
who were going out for supper last night. Probably, like myself, she
had gone home alone. I wished her better luck in her ice-box than I had
found in mine.

Now that the play had been launched I wondered if these two women, upon
whose acting it depended, would become reconciled to each other.

The telephone interrupted my foreboding with a new fear.

“O Mrs. Curdy? Myrtle talking. Have you seen the papers? Is Jasper
up? _Isn’t_ he? Why, he went home awfully early. He always does,
doesn’t he? Broke up the party; _so_ sorry you couldn’t go along! I
suppose you’ve read what the papers say about me? I got up to find
out; might as well go back to bed again! Some of them were grand, but
the ‘Tribune’--Wait till Jasper reads what that awful man said in the
‘Tribune.’ And the ‘Gazette’! I don’t believe they sent any one over
at all! That must have been written at the desk by the office-boy!
The ‘Globe’ was grouchy, too, but I know why that was; that Jones who
writes their stuff is married, you know, and he’s sore at me. Last
night, when we were all having supper, it was this way--”

I put my hand over the receiver so that I would not have to listen to
her story about the supper. I knew perfectly well that dramatic critics
were not loitering around restaurants after plays; they had to get
their reviews written before twelve o’clock.

“No, Jasper isn’t up yet,” I replied, taking my hand away just in time
to hear her insistent question. “All right.”

But the sunshine had been taken out of the room for me, as if a blind
had been drawn. Was this what we had been working for--this? Failure
might have drawn us together, might have made us need each other
more--or did I not mean that it would have made my husband need me
just a little? But now he was forever a part of a production--as long
as “The Shoals of Yesterday” should live, its slave and its nurse. Nor
did I want it to die precisely, nor quarrel with my bread and butter,
but, like many another, wanted success without the price of success,
and fame without the penalty. If, after the production, Jasper had to
spend all of his time mollifying this girl, if he had to get right up
out of bed to answer her demands, what had he gained? I was so tired of
the whole circle of my life! Tired of plays and of writers, of actors
and of stages, of newspapers and of telephones. The list ran on in my
mind like a stanza of Walt Whitman. I could think of just as many nouns
as he could, and of all of them I was tired. The thought of leaving New
York altogether was to my mind like a fresh breeze on a sultry noon.
There was nothing more to detain Jasper. Why not go?

I looked about the room where I was sitting with eyes suddenly grown
cold to it. There was a hinge loose on the gate-legged table that had
once been our pride, so that a wing would go down if one kicked it.
The leather cushion on the big davenport in the windows was worn white.
The curtains were half-dirty and stuck to the screen. The silver needed
cleaning. The painted chairs, which furnished that intimate “arty”
touch, were like a woman who has slept in her rouge without washing her
face and needed touching up. The living-room was too near. I wanted
rooms where to leave one was not to look back into it continually,
rooms from which there was some escape, that did not merge into one
another. Particularly desirable to me at that moment was a separate
kitchen, incorrigibly isolated. I felt that I would not care if it were
in the basement or in another building, if only I did not have to see
the grapefruit rinds on the kitchen sink while I was eating my egg.

That house on the cape! Two thousand dollars! The price of a car, and
Jasper had said he was going to get a car--to take Myrtle out in,
probably. I decided right then that if he bought a car, instead of a
house, I would never ride in it. (But I knew that I lied, even as I did
so.) It seemed to me that our life here was ended. More real was the
House of the Five Pines, the sand-dunes and the sea, the little road
and the vessels in the harbor. They were enduring; they had been there
before us and would indifferently outlast our brief sojourn, if we
lived with them the rest of our lives. They were the sum of the hopes
of simple men and the fabric of their dreams. I could hear the voices
of the children who would run around in that great yard, if it were
ever mine, and smell the hollyhocks that again would bloom in orderly
rows against the freshly painted house.

I took the mail in from the janitor--a letter from Star Harbor.

  Dear Madam:

  Mattie “Charles T. Smith” was drowned yesterday while taking up her
  lobster-pots. I know that you will feel sorry for her demise, but
  Providence has now made clear the way for you to have the house you
  wanted. Please advise, as I would like to close the deal.

                                                       Yours truly,
                                                              JOHN BELL.

I sat quite still, with the letter trembling in my hand.

Mattie had gone back to the sea, back to that ancient mother of hers
out of whose arms she had been taken.

I knew the place where the lobster-pots were put out. A long row
from Mattie’s wharf, over in one shallow pool of the bay behind the
stone breakwater, where children played on the flats at low tide and
the horseshoe-crabs held carnival. No cottages were near this spot,
no fishermen’s houses stood up on the bank, for deep-pooled marshes
stretched behind it and to one side and beyond the breakwater was
nothing but sand and mosquitoes. The breakwater itself was too lonely a
walk for any one but lovers, who have the nocturnal habits of the cat,
but who do not patrol distant beaches to see the sunrise. And no other
person would ever have been in shouting distance of the place where
Mattie must have been drowned. I could see it all as it must have been.
An early morning; fiery clouds veiling the rising sun, turning the
whole bay to heliotrope and silver; fishing-vessels at anchor, their
crews still asleep; sea-gulls flapping up lazily to roost again on pile
tops, each one a gargoyle in the morning mist; and a little old woman
rowing a heavy boat to her traps, standing to tug at the slippery line.
An extra pull that drew her over the edge; a stagger to recover her
balance as she floundered; a cry that no one heard on those desolate
flats; a boat left rocking, half-full of water; and an old withered
body, found when the tide went out, caught fast in the lobster-pots.

Mattie “Charles T. Smith”! Cast upon the mercy of these hard
fisher-folk and in the end snatched back by the sea, which always
claims its own! At least, and I was glad for it, she had been spared
the ignominy of being turned out of her home by me or any of my kind.
The manner of her going was like the way of her living--an accident of
fate, a silence, and a mystery.

Jasper startled me, coming into the room in his bath-robe, asking for
coffee. “Oh, let’s see the papers.”

I had forgotten the papers. I pushed them all toward him and went out
to make fresh toast.

The letter lay there. I did not know whether to show it to him or
not. For the first time in our married life I was afraid. I wanted so
passionately to have him go away with me, to have a place in which to
be together alone, a home, and yet at the same time I knew that he
would have to choose it for himself or the project would be futile. I
hated to be refused, and I would not force a decision. Had he risen on
this morning of his great success thinking only of that little actress
and what it would mean to her, or had he, after all, created this thing
for our own future--for me?

“You’re burning it!” called Jasper.

I hurried in with the toast.

“What are you crying for?”

“I’m not.”

“You’re up too early. Nerves. You ought to take more rest.”

I watched him miserably while he ate and looked through all the
newspapers.

“That’s fine,” he said. “That settles that! The old boys certainly were
nice to me!--Better than I deserve! Looks as if we were going to have
money in the bank!”

Then he picked up the letter.

“Read it,” I whispered. But I could not bear to see him, and I got up
and would have run away. He caught me in the doorway and, his arms
around me, kissed away my fears.

“I’m glad the old woman’s drowned!” he cried.

“Oh no, don’t say that!”

“Aren’t you?”

“But don’t put it that way!”

“What way? What’s the difference what way we put it, so long as she’s
out of it and we can get the house!”

“Shall we get it?”

“Do you want it?”

I broke down then and wept upon his shoulder.

“Don’t cry,” he kept saying, “don’t cry. All you need is sleep. We’ll
go up there and get rested. That’s the best news this morning. Why
didn’t you tell me right away?”

“I didn’t know whether you’d be interested.”

Jasper laughed, and, through my tears, I laughed, too.

“Don’t get any funny ideas in your head,” he said. “You know very well
that--”

It was too hard to say. I spared him.

“What I need is not sleep, Jasper,” I whispered; “it’s just--you.”

He looked at me quickly, with his chin thrown up, and did not smile.
Then he gathered me close to him, as if he had not seen me for a long,
long time.

“If that is all you want,” he said; “if that is all you want!”

And that was all I wanted.




CHAPTER VII

THE FIRST NIGHT AT FIVE PINES


It was only a matter of two weeks before we rounded up our affairs
in New York, packed the furniture that had sufficed us in the studio
in the arcade, and took the long ride down the cape on the afternoon
train from Boston. It was early October, and traffic was all going the
other way. Hardly a passenger was left on the sooty little local when,
after dark, it panted in exhausted and threw us out with the mail-bags,
covered with sand and dust.

In August when I had been at Star Harbor many people had met the
train, summer boarders and jeering natives had made of this an
evening’s diversion; but now only the baggage-master was on duty. The
ticket-office was closed, and the conductor picked up a lantern and
walked away up the dark road. No one jumped to take our bags or to
force upon us a ride in either a station-barge or a jitney, and after
standing on the platform until we realized that we might wait there all
night without any interference, we picked up our things and sought the
front street.

If we had arrived only a little earlier, by daylight, I would have
insisted on going right up to the House of the Five Pines, but now
supper was an immediate necessity. No one can wax enthusiastic about
even his first home on an empty stomach.

The “Sailor’s Rest” was lighted up, although the doors were shut and
there were no longer any chairs out on the sidewalk. It was not the
custom here for the hotel to hang expectant on the arrival of the
train. At this season of the year only the townspeople came and went
on the accommodation, and they hurried home to eat with their own
families. If we had been a schooner, now, putting in at Long Wharf, our
host might have laid a couple of extra plates for the captain and the
mate. He was deeply engrossed in his winter’s occupation of cataloguing
stamps, which he had spread out all over the desk.

“Can we get something to eat here?” asked Jasper.

“I don’t know,” replied Alf, without looking at us. Then he got up
slowly, as if annoyed at the interruption, and tiptoed out from behind
his barricade.

“Don’t breathe on them,” he warned us, and went out through a swinging
door.

The room we were in was big and clean, with hanging oil-lamps, a new
linoleum, and shining brass spittoons. We shook the cinders off our
coats carefully, so as not to blow away any of the postage-stamps,
and sank down in two chairs. I had expected Jasper to say something
caustic, but his writer’s sense had begun to reassert itself and he was
sniffing the air like a hound. I saw that I had been right in bringing
him up here.

“Supper’s all over,” said Alf, “and the girls is gone home, but you can
have some clams and some coffee, if that will help you out any.”

We couldn’t drink the coffee, but the steamed clams and a big loaf
of Portuguese bread as full of holes as a Swiss cheese were devoured
before we spoke another word. By that time our host had put away his
stamp collection and had joined us in the empty dining-room. He showed
symptoms of a hesitant curiosity as to whether we were expecting to
stay all night.

“We are going up to the House of the Five Pines,” I informed him.
“We’re the people who bought it.”

“Are you?” His relief at our not wanting a bed at his “Sailor’s Rest”
was mingled with skepticism. “To-night?”

I was very firm about to-night. Jasper did not say anything. I think
he would have preferred to stay where he was, but did not like to say
so. As the two men were silent, and rather sententiously smoked their
pipes, I continued, “I want to sleep under my own roof.”

“If you _can_ sleep!” said Alf.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, it’s none of my business, but if I was just picking out a place
to get a good night’s rest, it wouldn’t be the House of the Five Pines.”

“You think there is something wrong with it?”

“I know gosh-darn well there is! Pardon me. Wrong as rain. Of course
I’m just telling you this out of friendliness.”

“You haven’t told us anything yet,” reminded Jasper.

“I ain’t got anything much to tell.”

“Then we might as well be going.”

This was only a bluff, and I thought that Jasper had misjudged his
man. I was exasperated because, without any pretense of being able to
understand anybody, I knew that I could have had the whole story out of
him.

“Ghosts are everywhere,” I remarked expansively. “We have them where we
came from. I’m used to them.”

“I suppose you’re used to people dying two or three times and coming to
life again, ain’t you?”

“Why? Do you think the old captain is still alive?”

“The ‘New Captain’!” he contradicted me; it seems as if I never could
learn this title. “Well, if it ain’t him, who is it that’s sliding
right through the house, vanishing into a blank wall that has no doors?
People that’s been abroad at midnight has seen some one turning in off
the back street, cutting across the lawn, but never coming out on the
front.”

“Who’s seen him doing that?”

“Brown’s boy. Not that I say he seen him; but I say he _says_ he seen
him! Of course I know that all them Browns ain’t reliable; too much
fish eating, it makes them that way!”

“Does it?” asked Jasper, all interest.

Alf would not answer him, but went on directing his conversation to
me. “Put ’em back on meat and they come around all right. The ‘town
home’ over on the back street is full of crazy people the only thing
that’s the matter with is too much herring. Scientifically speaking, it
overkeys up the brain.”

Having explained, he relapsed into silence, allowing us to sift the
evidence.

“But did this Brown boy see a ghost while Mattie was alive?”

“I don’t know as he did, but if he did he wouldn’t have been likely to
circulate it around. He ain’t so foolish as all that!”

“Poor Mattie! Every one was afraid of her.”

“Not of her exactly, but if you was to say of her _power_, I’d partly
agree. Suppose, as happened, a boy was to come out from swimming
under her wharf, by mistake--Lord knows he wouldn’t ’a’ come up there
on purpose--and she was to look at him through a knot-hole in the
floor--just look, mind you, and not say a word--and he was to go home
and die of a chill, what would you think?”

“I’d think he caught cold in his bathing-suit.”

“Bathing-suit!” Alf scorned the word, as if the probability that the
boy did not have one on refuted my suggestion.

“But,” I insisted, “she was drowned, in the end, naturally enough, like
anybody else.”

“Was she?”

“Why not?”

“Well, would any one else that was raised around here and could row a
boat out to the lighthouse-point and swim two miles back, as easy as
you could walk across the street, upset in ten feet of water and get
drowned, if they didn’t want to?”

“You think Mattie ‘Charles T. Smith’ drowned herself?” I exclaimed in
horror. The thought, freighted with terrible responsibility, was too
dreadful to accept.

“She was going to get turned out of her house, wasn’t she? And she
wasn’t on speaking terms with a town that she would have to accept the
crust of charity from. There’s some as says she was crazy, and that was
why she fell out of her boat, but me, I claim it was the most sensible
thing she ever done.”

The subject had become so depressing that I was more than ready to
discontinue it. Jasper was restlessly picking up our bags.

“Let’s go,” said he. “How about the key?”

“We’ll have to go to Judge Bell and get it,” I was beginning, but Alf
interrupted me.

“Oh, it ain’t locked! Don’t worry, nobody would steal anything out
of that house; they wouldn’t go near it.” He wished us good-night in
a tone that suggested that it was nothing to him if we chose to be
murdered in our beds, but kindly insisted on lending us matches and
candles and a can of kerosene.

We went happily up the boardwalk, arm in arm, and in five minutes
turned into our own yard and opened the front door.

Jasper threw his electric flash on the white paneling of a narrow hall,
with stairs running up between the walls. As he did so, something
rushed past us through the entry and out into the dark.

I shrank back against the wall and pointed after it. A starving “miau”
came floating back. It was a cat that had been shut up in the House of
the Five Pines ever since Mattie’s death.

We laughed, remembering how, in his will, the New Captain had desired
to found a home for stray animals, but we were both a little shaken. We
lit all the lamps that we could find and, with the aid of their bright
circle, looked into the shadows to discover what we could about the
house that we had purchased without entering. Never having been inside
the door, it would have been a just rebuke to our ignorance if we had
been badly disappointed. But fate had been capriciously kind. The
bargain was better than we had dared to dream.

Each room was large and high, with white woodwork and panels beneath
the square-paned windows, and the furniture was of the period of the
house, a hundred years old, much of it mahogany. We would have to wait
until morning to justify an impression of it. The household belongings
were all just as Mattie had left them--curtains and rugs, dishes and
kitchen-utensils, even food. I knew that I would never eat any of the
food.

Some of the rooms were in the sort of disorder that comes through
disuse, but the kitchen looked as if Mattie had lived there, and gave
us an uncomfortable sense of intruding. Nothing remained of her now
in the house where she had spent so many years but her feeling that
she ought to continue there, and that permeated the place like a live
presence, a protest in every room. She seemed not only at war with
us, but in a surer and more subtle way fighting against some other
presence, also unseen, but strongly felt. It made us aware that we had
allied ourselves with her enemy and that the captain gloated over our
arrival. I could not pretend to understand this antagonism, because I
knew that they were held to have been lovers, but I felt that it was
antecedent to his death and to his will--to be, in fact, the cause of
that cryptic document. I began to fear that the peace which we had come
so far to find was not waiting us. We would have to introduce that note
ourselves into the symphony of the House of the Five Pines.

Jasper was thinking of architecture.

“Have you noticed,” he asked, “that none of the rooms are in their
right places?”

I saw what he meant. The kitchen was to the right of the hall, in the
part of the house called the “porch,” and behind it had been built the
“captain’s wing,” which was simply a large living-room, one story high,
hardly pretentious enough to have caused so much jealousy. To the left
of the hall, the front room was a bedroom, the same room, doubtless,
from which the bedridden “Old Mis’ Hawes” used to shout at passers-by
on the street. Behind the bedroom was the dining-room, evidently seldom
used, for it had no access to the kitchen except through the front
hall. Upstairs the rooms in the main part of the house were divided as
if a child had laid them out with blocks, each one leading into the
next. To the right of the stairs was the room over the kitchen, with
its dormer-window facing the sea, the very window from which Mattie had
leaned on the only occasion that I had ever seen her. This room was
habitable, and here we decided to spend the night.

“Nothing can keep me awake,” yawned Jasper, and we both thought of
Alf’s pessimism when we had left him at the Sailor’s Rest.

I was sorry that what my husband said would undoubtedly be true. I
have always found that in the more elusive moments of life the male
partner escapes much responsibility and untold anxiety by simply being
asleep.

We stood at the dormer-window and looked out on the dark bay, where the
little boats, at anchor, were rocking so gently and so unaware, until
we had won a measure of that quiet which we had been searching for, and
then we said a thankful and a wishful prayer for our new life in this
house before we blew out the candle. We thought that it was the most
intimate spot that any one had ever chosen for a home and that this
was the first of many evenings that we would stand there in the window
together, looking out to star-rise on the sea.

As a matter of fact, we never stood there together again.

Jasper was so exhausted that he went to sleep without turning over, but
I was too tired to shut my eyes. I stared into the darkness until it
became vivid, and when the cold October moonlight checkered the walls,
through the small-paned windows, the little room was alive again.

There were five doors. The walls had been painted a dark blue, and
each of these doors shot out into significance like the white marble
slabs of a tomb. None of them would stay shut. Their iron latches
clicked with every stray gust of the night, and first one and then
another would swing gently open. I gave up trying to close them and
let them bang as they would. They had rattled for a hundred years;
why not one night more? On the inside of the room two doors marked
either side of a blind white chimney-shelf, one of them opening into
the upper hall and the other into a small hall bedroom. On the outer
wall opposite, two small doors opened into closets under the eaves,
and between them a third topped the kitchen-stairs, which pitched down
steeply, like a ship’s companionway. The wooden bed, with high painted
headboard decorated with a medallion of carnations, stood against the
back wall, facing the dormer-window. The bureau and the wash-stand
matched its faded blue, and the chair-backs held gold spread-eagles,
half obliterated. In one corner was an old sea-chest with rope handles.
I got up out of bed to see what was in it. There was nothing.

All of the stories of the sea that I had ever heard came drifting back
to me, borne in upon the waves of moonlight. Things half heard and
never understood became more true than reality. A clock far away struck
a long hour.

I was looking at the five white doors and the bright window and
thinking that the wall at the head of the bed was the only blank wall
in the room, when I felt as if I were being pushed. Or as if the
headboard were gradually bending. Certainly, the bed was coming down on
me!

I sat up quickly and watched. The high wooden headboard bulged. As I
looked it sprang back into place again. This was repeated.

I tried to call out.

The headboard bowed once more. I sprang up and pushed it back with my
bare hands and beat upon it.

“Jasper!”

My throat was paralyzed with terror and made no sound.




CHAPTER VIII

A MESSAGE FROM MATTIE


With my frantic demonstration of human antagonism, the pressure on
the headboard was removed. Whatever had caused it ceased its malign
exertion. The menace had withdrawn.

In the morning I woke up numb and cold at the foot of the bed, where I
must have crawled for safety, although I could remember nothing about
it.

Jasper said it was the best night’s sleep he ever had had.

I tried to tell him what had happened. “What I had dreamed,” he called
it, and I could not make him take the matter seriously. He had awakened
refreshed and full of enthusiasm, only complaining that there was no
shower and seriously considering taking a plunge into the ocean, until
I had to give up my megrims to enter into an argument about the chances
there were for and against pneumonia for one who was not accustomed
to swimming in October. I persuaded him to go around and examine the
furniture while I found something to eat, and while I was trying to
accomplish this I realized ruefully that I had succeeded too well in
sparing my husband the psychic reaction that I had been subjected to
during the night. He had not been prepared for it, and my fright had
no significance to him. Consequently, I received no sympathy. This
was what I had wanted, to guard against our both falling prey to
hallucinations, but I had not foreseen in how defenceless a position it
was going to place me. I determined that if anything like the night’s
performance ever happened again, I would explain to Jasper every detail
that had led up to the phenomenon and let him solve it as he would. Two
heads would be immeasurably better than one, if we had to smoke out the
ghost. I would sooner have found rats in that house, as the Winkle-Man
had suggested, than a bending wall.

Jasper had discovered a Chippendale chair in the old lady’s bedroom,
and a three-cornered cupboard in the room behind it, full of Canton
china, and he would speak of nothing else.

“A regular gold mine!” he kept saying. “Gee! I wish Thompson could see
this!” (Thompson was a collector he knew in New York.) And then, later,
when the full force of the value of his possessions had come to him: “I
wouldn’t let Thompson see this for anything.”

We had known that whatever was in the house went with it, but we had
not expected much. No one had been inside the door for so many years
that it had no reputation for containing antiques, as had so many of
the old houses of Star Harbor, and it had escaped the weeding out and
selling off that leaves to most of them in this generation only the
mid-Victorian walnut and the modern white iron bed. The House of the
Five Pines still held its original Colonial furniture--great horse-hair
sofas and mahogany chests of drawers, hand-made chairs and rope-strung
beds, and chests full of homespun linen and intricately patched quilts.
It would take weeks to inventory all of it. As a before-breakfast
sport, it had to be abandoned. We were so pleased with ourselves for
our foresight, as we chose to term it, in acquiring a house with such
unspoiled plunder that we almost forgot to eat. But finally our
appetites could withstand the zest of the salt air no longer.

We laid out the breakfast on the clean red cloth of the kitchen-table,
under the window next the shuttered door, and were babbling like happy
children when our celebration was cut short by the arrival of a boy on
a bicycle.

He knocked timidly at the porch door, and held out a telegram at arm’s
length.

“I’ve got to go back to New York,” said Jasper, reading it; “they want
me for the play.”

“But you can’t!” I cried; “we’ve just come!”

“I know.” Jasper was absently folding the paper up into a tiny yellow
square, without looking at me.

“They told you they were all through with you.”

“I know it.”

“Who signed the telegram?”

“Why,--Tyrrell Burton.” He handed it to me.

  Trouble again. Have fired M. M. Must change part or Gaya walks out on
  us. For God’s sake come and help me.
                                                                TYRRELL.

Tyrrell Burton was the manager. It was all perfectly evident; it might
even have been foreseen. Myrtle Manners and Gaya Jones had jumped at
each other’s throat the second Jasper had left the city, and Tyrrell
was trying to keep the better of the two. He knew that Myrtle’s part
must be rewritten--it had become so top-heavy in her favor--and a new
actress would want to start fresh, with the rôle more as it was first
written. I was ashamed. My first thought had been that Myrtle had
telegraphed for Jasper and that he was folding up the telegram so that
I could not see it. I hoped he had not read my thoughts.

“Well?” he asked, impatiently.

In reaction, the tears had sprung into my eyes, and I stood there on
the doorstep of our house and the threshold of our new life that was to
be lived in it, crying. I had not yet had a chance to drink a cup of
coffee and I had been up for hours.

Why is it that, no matter how bravely we face the future, how we
seemingly have forgotten and, by every effort of the will and mind,
have forgiven, still the thing we dread lies smoldering deep within us,
a subdued but never an extinguished fire, ready at the first suspicion
to leap into devouring flame? I had failed myself and my own faith more
than Jasper.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

He did not more than half understand me. He had not been thinking of me
and my relationship to him; his mind had been racing to the problem of
what in the world to do next with “The Shoals of Yesterday.”

“Well, if that is the way you feel about it,” he began, “I won’t go.”

“You must.”

The boy, tired of listening, swung his leg over the bicycle.

“Any answer?”

“Yes, wait. There is only one train, Jasper. Take it. Write out an
answer for the boy. I’ll get you started.”

There it was. I had to force Jasper to answer this urgent summons, had
to pack his bag and hurry him off and appear glad to see him go, when
all the time I was furious with the fate that took him and the power
there was in material circumstances to keep us separated. Once in a
year or so comes a glad day to each of us when he can control destiny,
when the thing that he has set his heart on doing is accomplished
between sunrise and sunset and his spiritual house is set in order, as
it habitually pretends to be. This was not one of the days.

After he had gone I set myself to finding out what was the matter with
the headboard. I went up to the little bedroom over the kitchen, where
we had spent the night, and prepared to move the furniture. There never
was a house in which one tenant can follow another without changing
every stick in it, and I had a particularly urgent reason for beginning
on the bed.

Subconsciously, perhaps, I was looking for it; at least, I was not
surprised when I found it. Behind the headboard was another door.

This door was little and low, and had a hand-made brass latch that
sprang open when I tried it. Stooping down, I found myself in a long
blind closet under the eaves, where the roof of the ell that made the
big room behind the kitchen was fastened to the old house. We had not
supposed there was a room above the one below, which was the one that
the New Captain had added for his own uses, but now I began to see,
coming out of the darkness, the outlines of another door in a second
wall, from which one would draw the conclusion that it must open on
an attic-chamber. I tried it, but the latch would not lift up; it was
fastened on the inside.

I listened. There was no sound within. But suddenly there swept over
me the remembrance of the night before. As vividly as if it were
again occurring, I felt the pressure that had been thrown against
my headboard, and I knew that it had been directed by some force
struggling to get out of this room into mine. Overcome by horror, but
with feet so fascinated by an uncanny attraction that they almost
refused to carry me away, I crept out of the cubbyhole and fled down
the stairs, out into the sunlight.

My first thought was of Ruth. If Ruth were only here! But in the six
weeks that I had been in New York she had packed her trunks and gone.
There was no use in asking sympathy of the Winkle-Man, or Alf, or any
of those townsmen who had so generously, and so thoroughly, insisted on
warning me not to move in. My troubles were most peculiarly my own. And
Jasper had gone.

The thought of Jasper and the cold October sunshine revived my courage.
Jasper would have laughed. I could see the way he would have opened
the door and made copy of it for future use in fiction. It would mean
a great deal to him, the little doorway under the eaves; he would be
glad we had it. To his observation that none of the rooms were in
their right places, he could now add the fact that there was one room
which did not belong to the house at all. It would be depriving him of
a pleasure for me to have the first delight of opening the door and
discovering what lay beyond. I would save it until he came back--a day
or two, at most--and we would lift up the latch together.

I walked around to the back of the house and looked up. Now I could
see clearly how the roof of the captain’s wing had been built. It was
quite high enough to admit of a loft beneath the ridge-pole and was
lighted by a skylight. I noticed, too, while I was in the yard, the
accumulation of cast-off lumber that filled the “under.” Everything
that had been thrown out in the last fifty years had been left here,
instead of being taken to the “town dump” on the sand-dunes. There were
rungless chairs and stepless ladders, oil-stoves and a spinning-wheel,
two rowboats and half a dozen mattresses. I determined to have them
removed that day. There might be no cellar and no attic to the House of
the Five Pines, but that was no reason why the family refuse should lie
out in plain sight under the house.

A high two-wheeled cart was going down the back street, and in my
innocence I thought that this would be just the thing to secure for
hauling away the rubbish.

I do not know to this day what those blue wagons are used for. The
ones that I have seen have always been empty, with an insolent driver
in a flannel shirt staring at the people he passes like an emperor in
a Roman chariot. I would like to ride in one some time; it would be a
restoring experience to get that superior attitude toward pedestrians.
A chauffeur in a Rolls-Royce in a traffic jam does not achieve such
aplomb. There is a superstition on Cape Cod that these carts are built
for the sand roads over the dunes, but the only vehicles that I have
ever met on those desolate tracks are the buggies of the life-saving
crew, amiably plodding back and forth.

I called out to the driver:

“Yoo-hoo! Wait a minute!”

He looked at me, but kept on driving past.

“Yoo-hoo!”

Even if he were one of the Portuguese, he could not have misunderstood
the meaning of that call; the children of every continent have hailed
each other by that syllable since before speech was invented.

But my stoical friend never hesitated. In fact, as I started to run
after him, he picked up his whip and, standing up in the sand-wagon,
laid such a blow on the horse’s back that he jumped up and down without
making any headway. I could hear the fellow swearing at him, urging
him by all the saints to hurry. He must have thought that I was the
reincarnation of Mattie, or was warned by his guiding angel to have no
traffic with any woman queer enough to live in the House of the Five
Pines.

In the village I had no better luck. People were too used to a display
of skeletons in their own yards to take any interest in mine or, having
disposed of theirs, felt no further civic responsibility. Money could
not hire any native of the cape to crawl under the house and drag out
that heavy stuff. They only worked “for a friend” or out of curiosity,
which I failed to arouse. By noon I began to think of Mrs. Dove’s
ominous prediction that I never would get any one to help me at the
House of the Five Pines, and saw that this was going to resolve itself
into another little job for Jasper on his return. I had promised to
have everything in order for him, but if my settling was going to be
limited to what I could do with my own hands, the agreement was nil. It
is difficult enough anywhere to begin housekeeping after a move. One
always finds he has the trunks, but not the keys, and a dozen eggs,
without any frying-pan; but an efficiency expert would have quailed at
my undertaking. I had to arrange not only my own belongings, when by
the grace of the baggagemen’s strike and the cape train they should
have arrived, but the offscourings of a family which had tenanted an
eight-room house for generations. New Englanders never throw away
anything! This I had to do without any means of locomotion except my
own legs, carrying everything from a tack-hammer to a can of beans,
cooking without any gas, washing without any hot water, and, for
candle-power, using wax instead of electricity.

I stopped at the Sailor’s Rest for lunch, remembering to shut the door
quietly so as not to disturb the stamps. As I came in, Alf was saying,

“Nicaragua, four, six, and eight--pink--eighty-four.” It sounded like
the echo of a football game.

“Did you sleep well?” he asked.

“Fine,” I lied.

“Go right in to dinner.” He waved his hand. “It’s better than what you
got here last night--_beef_!”

I hoped he hadn’t ordered it on my account.

“Alf,” said I, interrupting him between the Chile greens and yellows,
“Is there any attic to that house of mine?”

“Nope,” he replied, “they ain’t. They never was. They don’t have ’em
around here.”

That was what I wanted to find out. The room over the captain’s wing
had never been heard of by the townspeople.

“They don’t build the roofs that high,” he explained, anxious to defend
the architecture of the cape from ignorant criticism, “on account of
the wind. It would rip ’em right off, take a big tempest.”

“What do they do with their old furniture, then?”

“Use it.”

“Or throw it under the house?”

“Don’t you go worrying about what’s under the house,” said Alf. “You
got enough to worry about with what’s _in_ it.”

I did not like to hear him say that. By this time I had come to realize
that what the natives thought about the house was probably more than
true. I wished that they would stop talking about it and putting curses
on it. I ate my boiled beef in chastened silence and wandered on home.

This seemed as good a time as any to unpack Jasper’s books and papers
and get ready for his return, because I knew that he would begin on
a new manuscript before he paused to cut the grass. I would have his
things in order, at least. There was a high bookcase over a desk that
looked as if it would be useful if I cleaned off some of the shelves. I
stood on a chair and began taking down the old books.

From the first volume that I held in my hand fluttered a letter. I
might have absently dropped it into the scrap-basket, but leaning down
to get it, the address arrested my attention:

TO THE NEW MISSUS.

That might be me.

I opened it, and, on a piece of ruled pad-paper, read:

  I would a been here yet if it hadn’t a been for you.

It did not take any signature to make me know that this cryptic message
was left by Mattie.

Alf was right; I had enough to worry about with what was in the house.




CHAPTER IX

THE SECOND NIGHT


So Mattie had committed suicide.

The knowledge changed the day for me, altered the whole circumstance
of our moving in, made a mist of what had before been as clear as
sunlight, forced me from the relationship of a buyer into the moral
position of a murderer. It seemed hardly possible that one could, with
no intent of evil, be the sole cause of such a tragedy! And we had
been frankly glad, had almost laughed, when we had found that she was
dead! Never was I further from hilarity than that second evening in our
new home, when I stood at the great window looking at the bit of sea
through the pine-trees, the note from Mattie crumpled in my hand.

The sun had set behind the sand-dunes and the bay was liquid red with
the reflection. It had lost the quality of water and had become blood.
So must it have looked to Mattie, not once but many times during the
years that she had tended the terrible “Mis’ Hawes,” after she had
grown out of being the barefoot girl whom the boy had chased through
the drying-frames. There was no cod spread out to the salt winds now.
The whole industry had vanished as completely as the owners of it, and,
to take the place of these persons indigenous to the sea, was only
myself, a stranger sleeping in their beds, one who could only guess out
their histories and who knew nothing of their thwarted ambitions and
their dreams.

  Tell me your dreams!... But your dream is you.
  We are our dreams--and the dream is all!

What had Mattie’s reveries been during all those twilights when
she must have stood at this same window with the New Captain and,
after him, alone? However dreary, they could not have included the
possibility of being driven forth. It had been left for me, in my
presumptuous selfishness, to add that cataclysm. Now I was the one to
be alone here. Was it to be the lot of some woman always to be left at
this window at sunset, to face the growing shadows in solitude? Would
it be that way with me, too?

Some Puritanical instinct in me, deeper-rooted than the casual
conscience of the Middle West where I had been born, tracing back to
forefathers whose stern necessities of doctrine were related to this
atmosphere, made me wonder if the justice which ought to be meted out
to me, the murderer of Mattie, would be that, for some reason still
obscure, my husband would never return and fate would force me to
change places with the woman whose house I had usurped and leave me
stranded there.

I checked myself. This was no mood with which to meet the night. That
life had stripped Mattie at last even of her dwelling, leaving her
body as bereft as her soul, was no precedent for me to follow, or I
would end, as she had, in the bottom of the bay. I was grateful to
her that she had not chosen the house for her act of renunciation.
If her revenge upon me had taken the form of hanging herself, so
that I would have unexpectedly come upon her body, swinging from the
kitchen-rafters, in the dark--I put that thought away, too, and tried
to occupy myself.

The sunset, flaming through the windows that faced the west, now made
a red light everywhere that touched into form the tall bookcase where
I had found the message from Mattie, burnished the gold in a Chinese
cabinet brought back by some seafarer, and fell softly upon the ivory
mantel at the end of the room. I made a fire with driftwood which lay
piled in a rough box, had my tea in front of it, and then began again
on the books. There was no likelihood that more notes would tumble
out of them, unless it should be a will, or maybe an old tintype or a
valentine. I shook each volume carefully.

There are people who can straighten up a library or turn a
vacuum-cleaner on a bookcase in a hurry, but to me it is a labor
that time forgets. There is always a clipping to be cut from a
stale newspaper, or a review that has not been read before, or old
acquaintances among long-closed volumes that lure one on, page by page.
It takes me hours to go over a five-foot bookshelf with a dust-rag. And
to-night was no exception. Particularly fascinating were the books of
the New Captain on esoteric philosophy. There was no getting away from
them; here was the “foreign religion” he and Mattie had embraced and
the “books to prove it by.”

There was nothing modern. One great tome was Madame Blavatsky’s “Isis
Unveiled,” Eastern theosophy set forth in defiant terms to a skeptical
audience of 1875. Luckily, I had read it before, or I should have been
reading it yet. I was already informed as to the writings on the Temple
of Karnac that were identical with those on the walls of a ruin in
Yucatan, proving that the religious rites of Asia and America were the
same in the days before the Pyramids, when Atlantis was a continent
in the middle of the ocean and the British Isles were under the sea.
I wished that the New Captain had heard a certain lecture that I had
recently heard delivered by a savant, who claimed that the secret of
how to cut a canal from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean was
well understood by the Magi of the Orient and that it was only due
to international politics that it had never been attempted. Because,
forsooth, it would incidentally cause the Sahara to be partially
inundated and to “bloom like a rose,” but that the redistribution of
the waters of the world would engulf all of England. Poor England! As
if she, like myself, did not have enough trouble with what was _in_
her house, without being swamped by what was under it! However, this
erudite lecturer had just been released from a sanitarium, we learned
afterward, and to it he was shortly returned, the Mecca of most of
those who follow worlds too far.

Blavatsky’s story of the ball of fire which turned itself into a cat
and frisked around the room, before floating up the chimney, was
marked. It could have happened in this very room. There was a white
sheet of paper pinned to the wall opposite me, with a round black
disk on it, that might have been there when she wished to go into a
trance. I felt that if I looked at it long enough I might see means by
which Mattie aided concentration a ball of fire turning into a cat.
I wondered what they would have thought of Hudson’s drummer, who,
although locked up in a cell, played upon his drum which was left
behind in his lodging-house to keep awake the enemies who had thrown
him into jail? Or of Conan Doyle’s poltergeists who threw pebbles at
the man seeking shelter in a bomb-cellar? But they had manifestations
of their own, no doubt, and perhaps I should come across some record
of them, although they had worked out their philosophy before the
days when one could simply seize a pencil and write upon a roll of
wall-paper facts dictated by one’s “control.”

Mattie and the New Captain had had no opportunity to be influenced by
the great mass of post-war spiritualistic literature. The fragments
from which they formed their code were bits of gold for which they
had to wash many cold streams of Calvinistic thought. They must have
gloated over each discovery like misers. I could see them sitting here
in this room on a winter evening, the shutters closed, the lean fire
crackling, the two heads bent beneath the oil-lamp, exclaiming over
some nugget of wisdom which would corroborate their own experiences.
Those were the times when “old Mis’ Hawes” must have called and
bellowed and pounded on the floor without getting Mattie to answer any
summons to the front bedroom on the other side of the house.

Mattie and the New Captain may not have known anything about
photographing fairies, or the S. P. R., or the S. P. C. A., for that
matter, but cats they knew. I had found the saucers of seven of them in
the kitchen and strings on all the chairs, as if Mattie had sometimes
tied them up. There was a book on the shelves about a cat: “The World
of Wonders, or Divers Developments Showing the Thorough Triumph of
Animal Magnetism in New England, Illustrated by the Power of Prevision
in Matilda Fox,” published in Boston in 1838. It was enlivened with
pen-and-ink drawings showing Mrs. Matilda Fox being hypnotized by a
feather, with the cat in her lap, which, according to the text, licked
her neck until it sent her spirit soaring from her body in aërial
journeys to distant lands. As far as I had time to read I could not
ascertain whether the author was in earnest or whether he was trying to
ridicule animal magnetism, but I could not help wondering if the book
had not had some influence on the legacy in favor of a home for cats,
which had defrauded Mattie. If any one could be put in a trance by the
manipulation of the tongue of a cat, perhaps she had not been entirely
altruistic in her harboring of the creatures. Certainly, the one who
had rushed wildly out of the house as we came in was glad to make its
escape. Where were the rest of the cats that belonged to the saucers?
Catching fish on the beach in the moonlight, possibly, and hypnotizing
sand-pipers.

The books that told of cataleptic sleep were all well worn. The New
Captain lived in the days when the subject of a wandering mesmerist
would allow himself to be stretched out in a village drugstore window,
remaining inert between two chairs for days at a time, while the
curious glued their eyes to the glass and tried to stay there long
enough to see him move or catch a confederate sneaking in to feed him.
But this sleep was only the imperfect imitation of the somnambulance
which the East Indians had practised for centuries. Theirs was true
life-in-death, when the heart ceased to beat and the body grew cold,
and yet, to a disciple of the occult, there was a way of reviving
it. The theory of vampires rose from this phenomenon, and that of
catalepsy, for if a tomb were opened and the corpse found without decay
it was easy enough to ascribe the wilting of a child, in the meantime,
to the thirst of the absent spirit for blood to satisfy its coffined
body. More persons would have lived for longer periods if, instead of
making sure of death by driving a stake through the possessed one’s
heart, they had made sure of life by breathing into his mouth and
unwinding the tight shroud. The ancient Orientals understood this.
The holy fakirs permitted themselves to be buried and dug up again,
to the glory of God, only making sure beforehand that their bodies
were not interred in ground infested with white ants. But the New
Captain had the Puritan’s respect for life and death. He dreaded that
he would come to life again in an iron-bound box, or he would not have
despised undertakers or written into the will which we had seen at the
Winkle-Man’s the clause about Mattie spending a week beside his body.
He must have thought it was only due to her that he had been called
back before from the first of the seven planes, and that his celestial
passport was spurious unless she signed it. Poor Mattie! No one had sat
beside her after her tired spirit had freed itself.

I picked up another book.

French, this time. It was called “Les Secrets du Petit Albert,” and
dealt with necromancy of the eighteenth century. There was also a
French book on astrology, illustrated with crude drawings of the
sacred signs of the zodiac and diagrams of potent numbers. Another
one, “Le Dragon Rouge, ou L’Art de Commander les Esprits Célestes,” was
not more than three by four inches, and half an inch thick. Its brittle
yellow pages were bound in worn calfskin, and gave explicit directions
how to conjure up the devil and how to send him back to his own kingdom
when one had done with him. My scant school French could barely master
the archaic forms, but I gave Mattie full credit for being able to read
all the volumes stored on her top shelf. Her ancestry was traditionally
French, according to the judge’s story, for she had been picked up from
a ship just off Quebec, and the grooves of her mind would run easily
to the mother-tongue. A recluse will master a foreign language for the
mental exercise it affords. Perhaps in some other nook of the house I
should find her French grammar, but here, indeed, were books that some
one must have been able to read,--a significant part of their highly
specialized library.

I began reading aloud from “Le Dragon Rouge”:

“Je te conjure, O Esprit! Deparoitre dans la minute par la force du
grand Adonay, par Eloim, par Ariel, par Jehovam, par Agla, Tagla,
Mathon, Oarios, Almouzin, Arios, Menbrot, Varios, Pithona, Magots,
Silphae, Cabost, Salamandre, Tabots, Gnomus Terrae, Coelis, Godens,
Aqua, Gingua, Janua, Etituamus, Zariatnatmik, A. E. A. J. A. T. M. O.
A. A. M. V. P. M. S. C. T. G. T. C. G. A. J. E. Z.”

[“I conjure thee, O Spirit, to appear instantly through the will of the
great Adonay”--etc.]

The little magic book then went on to say that if this were repeated
twice, Lucifer would appear immediately. I thought perhaps it would be
just as well to discontinue reading.

Had they actually attempted materialization up here in this very room
in the old house on the tip end of the cape? There was nothing against
it. If it were possible anywhere to conjure up the shades of the dead,
or the devils themselves, this was as apt a place as any--a hamlet at
the tip of a barren cape that extended into the ocean a hundred and
forty miles, a house separated from that hamlet by its bad repute, as
well as its location, a room cut off from the rest of the house, and
two people in it who had no contact with realities, to whom each was
the other’s world and this world not all. If any one was able to cut
through the opaque cloud of dogma surrounding metaphysical subjects
to a glimpse of realities beyond, I believed that Mattie had done so.
And then, I realized that I had come by a circuitous path of my own to
the very same conclusion that all the townspeople had long since come
to--that Mattie was clairvoyant.

Would that help her now? Did she know where her spirit would dwell
more accurately than those who were orthodox? Could she return the
more easily from Stygian shores? Or was that power of prevision only a
mortal faculty that passed with her passing and that, while it was able
to call up others from the further world, could not bring back itself?

There was a story of an old nurse of mine that I wished I had
forgotten--how she was once governess in a house where a strange
foreign gentleman had intercourse with spirits; how he used to talk to
them as he walked about the rooms--and was happy in their friendship
and sullen when they would not appear.

“That was all right for him,” she used to say; “but after he left, the
spirits that he had called up to amuse him still hung around. That they
did, and I could never get rid of them. Try as I would,--paint, paper,
or insect-powder,--every dark night when I was alone one or the other
of them would brush up against me and stay just where I could never
quite see it until dawn.”

It was a dark night and I was alone. I sincerely hoped that whatever
had been conjured up by Mattie would not brush past me. At any rate, I
had no mind to sleep upstairs again in that little gabled room. I did
not argue with myself about the headboard; it was too late at night for
that. I opened up a folding sofa in the room that I was in, where the
New Captain must have slept many times, and lay down. The sound of the
full tide on the rising, answering the questioning of the Five Pines
trees, made a lullaby.

It was with a shock and the feeling that I had been asleep a long
time that I woke up, hearing some one coming down the stairs. The
little kitchen-stairs, it must be, that pitched down from the upper
room like a ladder, for the main stairs were too far away for me to
have heard any footfall on them. And this was not the clumping step
of a full-sized man. This was the stealthy, soundless tread of a body
without weight. But still it was unmistakable.

I sat up in chilled terror, gathering the bed-clothes around me with
that involuntary gesture known to all women surprised in their sleep,
and waited for whoever it was to come through the kitchen into my room.

But no one entered my room.

At the foot of the stairs some one tried a door, rattled a latch, and
went back up again. For a brave second I thought I would leap out of
bed and run and push the bolt on the kitchen door, but before I managed
to start I heard the footsteps coming down upon me. This time they
would keep on, I thought; but again slowly, laboriously, they went
back up, and every time they lost themselves upstairs it seemed as if
I heard the weight of a person thrown against a door. Or did it go
through the door and then throw its weight against it? I strained to
listen. Then the steps would come down again. The inside door of the
eaves closet upstairs was locked. I had left it the way I had found it,
but the steps seemed not to be within that secret room to-night, but
without, as if last night a presence had been struggling to get through
the closet into my room and now was trying to get back. Tortured,
restless footsteps going up and down the stairs, up and down, up and
down.

Every time they reached the bottom and tried the kitchen door, I
swooned with terror. When they rattled the latch and went back up again
I clutched my knees and did not breathe till they returned.

At cockcrow they ceased of their own volition, and, my will released,
my body fell exhausted.




CHAPTER X

THE CAT OR THE CAPTAIN


When I awoke the sun was shining in the windows on both sides of the
study where I had gone to bed, the neighbor’s chickens were clucking
through my back-yard, and the boats on the bay were putting up their
sails. The past night seemed unreal.

The door at the foot of the kitchen companionway was not only wide
open, but fastened back with a brick. I had forgotten that. Then how
could I have heard some one trying the latch? And upstairs the little
room was just as I had left it, not a thing disturbed. No one could
have thrown himself against the small eaves-closet door from this side,
because the bed was still in front of it, and no one could have been
shut in on the other side and at the same time be pacing up and down
steps. I went into the upper hall and looked at the big main stairs.
Had any one been climbing them? But if any one had, I should have
hardly been able to hear him, away off in the wing behind the kitchen.
Perhaps I could persuade the judge to come to the house and practise
going up and down the flight of stairs, while I listened from the study.

I had been reading too much last night in the old vellum-bound books of
occult sciences. Without understanding the manner of doing so, I had
evidently hypnotized myself into the condition in which the thing that
I thought probable seemed to be true. I had made up my mind that Mattie
was a clairvoyant and could materialize spirits and that those spirits
might still linger in the house; thereupon I myself had materialized
one, unconsciously. The first night I had half-expected to hear or see
something uncanny, and it had followed that I had. These manifestations
were due to the influence upon me of what I had heard about the House
of the Five Pines, and to nothing else. Jasper had not known all the
harrowing stories that were in circulation, and so he had not seen
the moving headboard. If he had been with me on the second night he
doubtless would not have heard footsteps. It was all perfectly simple
when you understand psychology; that was it, to keep a firm hold on
yourself, not to be carried away by imaginings.

And then I defended myself that any one left alone in a big house
like that would be hearing things at night and that I was no more
weak-minded than the rest.

After breakfast I began again upon the settling.

One of the features of the House of the Five Pines was that everything
in it was included in the sale. Perhaps because there were no heirs,
or because Judge Bell, as the trustee, was not grasping; perhaps, and
most probable of all, because the townspeople had such a dread of it
that they would take nothing from it. The family linen still was packed
away in the big sea-chest--homespun sheets and thin yellow blankets,
pillow-cases with crocheted lace. The family china remained in the
cupboard behind the front hall--firestone pitchers and teapots, in
pink and faded purple, luster bowls, and white plates as heavy as dumb
bells, each with a gold leaf in the center; and in a corner cupboard
in the dining-room was almost a full set of willow-ware, with all
the lids unbroken on the little rice-cups. The big mahogany bureaus,
and there were at least two in each room, four drawers below and
three little ones above, contained the clothing of two generations of
Haweses. This meant more in the Old Captain’s family than the usual
sixty years; it meant a hundred, for two more generations could easily
have been born in the old homestead if “Mis’ Hawes” had not been so set
against the New Captain’s marriage. Her brass-handled high-boy held
calico dresses and muslin underwear, yellow and stiff with starch, that
Mattie had neither disposed of nor used. Upstairs there was apparel
that must have dated back past the era of the New Captain into that of
his father, Jeremiah. In Mattie’s room was less than in the others. She
had found herself at the end of her life with barely a change of linen.

In the study two doors at either side of the finely carved mantel
opened into closets. One was filled with shelves on which were papers
and magazines that had been stored for twenty years. The other was
filled with the out-of-door clothes of the New Captain--a worn cardigan
jacket, and a thick blue coat with brass buttons, two felt hats, and a
yellow oilskin. A red shawl hung on a hook at the end of the closet.
I took it down to see if there were moths in it, then dropped it and
backed away. The hook that I had lifted the shawl from was an old iron
latch. The whole end of the closet was a wall-paper covered door.

I was afraid. The flat sealed door might open on the latch, or it might
not. It might be fastened on the other side. I could not tell. But I
did not want to know what was on the other side. I did not want to stay
here any longer.

I fled out to the sunlight and around to the back of the house. There
was nothing visible; I had known that all the time. The wall-paper
covered door inside must lead either up or down. Down, there was
nothing but space beneath the house, the “under,” filled with rubbish.
Up--?

I remembered the footsteps of the night before and knew now why the
kitchen door and the little one in the upper room had looked so
unmolested. Those steps that I had heard had been traveling not the
kitchen companionway nor the main front stairway, but secret stairs
built in this wall behind the chimney, connecting with the room above.
That was where the restless spirit had been promenading, just as it had
been the first night, and that was where it still must be.

I could not wait for Jasper to return from New York to solve this
mystery. Neither did I dare to face it alone nor put it off longer. I
would go and get Judge Bell, and together we would hurry back and find
out who or what was living in my house.

But the Judge was not at home. Dropping down on his front porch I
thought of what Ruth had said to me last summer, that the first three
times you attempted to call on any one that person was always out!
Well, I could wait. I was in no rush to return to the House of the Five
Pines. I could stay here all day, if necessary.

At noon Judge Bell’s Portuguese cook came out and looked me over.

“The judge he won’t be back,” she volunteered.

“Why not?”

She only smirked without replying.

“Why not? Doesn’t he come for lunch?”

She stuck her second finger in the roof of her mouth and looked away.

“Not always, he don’t. Not to-day, anyhow.”

“Where is he?” I intended to follow him to his lair, wherever it was,
but Isabella seemed to think I was prying.

“I ain’t to say where he went,” she answered, twisting one bare foot
over the other. “He says if anybody asts me I don’ know.”

“And don’t you?” I could not resist.

But she only stuck her finger further into her mouth until I was afraid
that she would choke. I saw that I was tempting her to be unfaithful to
a trust, and dropped the matter. The judge must have gone off down the
cape to a séance, leaving orders with Isabella to uphold the majesty of
the law.

My next stop was the Sailor’s Rest.

I hoped to find Alf there. He would not be so stanch an ally as the
judge in this emergency, because he believed in ghosts himself and
could scarcely be convincing in his reassurances. But he might be
persuaded to break open those doors for me, and I would repay him by
promising to look over all the antique correspondence tucked away in
the pigeonholes of the desk for stamps. There might well be some rare
ones left at the House of the Five Pines. I opened the office door
carefully this time, remembering not to raise a draft that would blow
his collection away.

Behind the ledger sat a strange girl in a georgette waist, dressed to
take tickets at a motion-picture window, who informed me firmly that
“Mr. Alfred had gone to Boston.”

To Boston! It was then that I realized how dear Alf was to me.

I turned sadly into the dining-room and tried to eat the beef-hash.
One could follow the developments of the hotel’s cuisine by lunching
there daily. First the roast and then the stew, then the hash, and then
the soup--just like home. And fresh clams every day,--unless they were
the same clams! After lunch I loitered around the lobby for an hour,
trying to pick out some one among the strangers who came in and out at
infrequent intervals who would be likely to go back to the House of the
Five Pines with me willingly, as a matter of course, without asking too
many pertinent questions. I planned what I would say and what the man
thus addressed would answer.

I would say, “There is a door at my house that is locked on the further
side of a secret closet behind the bed that I want to open, and
another one downstairs, in--” How absurd! If it were only one door it
might not sound so preposterous.

I might begin: “My husband is in New York, and I want you to come up to
my house and open a door of a secret room--” No, that was worse yet. To
a beginning like that a man would only say, “Indeed?” and walk off; or
he might reply, “Thanks awfully!”

There was no use in accosting any one. They all looked as if they
would turn and run. If only some summer people were here--adventurous
artists, or intrepid college boys, or those Herculean chauffeurs that
haunt the soda-fountains while their grande dames take a siesta! But
there was no one.

Finally I remembered the Winkle-Man, and hurried up there.

I was surprised to find outside that the wind had turned, the sun had
gone, and a storm was coming up--a “hurricane,” as they call it on
the cape. A fisherman knocked into me, hurrying down to the beach to
drag his dory up beyond the rising. Outside of the point, where the
lighthouse stood, one could see a procession of ships coming in, a
whole line of them. I counted seven sweeping up the tip of the cape,
like toys drawn by children along the nursery floor. They seemed to
ride the sand rather than the sea, their sails appearing above that
treacherous neck which lay between them and me. Their barometers must
have registered this storm hours ago, for they were converging from all
the far-off fishing-banks. The bay was black. Near shore the sailors
were stripping their canvas, letting out their anchors, or tying up
to the wharves. There was a bustle and a stir in the harbor like the
confusion of a house whose occupants run wildly into one another while
they slam the windows. I ought to go up to the House of the Five Pines
and shut mine.

The tide was far out. Beyond the half-mile of yellow beach it beat a
frothy, impatient tattoo upon the water-line. When it came in it would
sweep up with a rush, covering the green seaweed and the little rills
with white-capped waves, pounding far up against the breakwaters,
setting the ships rocking and straining at their ropes, carrying away
everything that it could pry loose. Now it was waiting, getting ready,
lashing itself into a fury of anticipation. There was a feeling of
suspense to the air itself, cold in an under-stratum that came across
the sea, hot above where it hung over the torpid land. It seemed as if
you could feel the wind on your face, but not a leaf stirred. People
were hastening into their homes, even as the boats were scurrying into
the harbor. No one wanted to be abroad when the storm struck.

The Winkle-Man’s loft was deserted. I saw him far out upon the flats,
still picking up his winkles with his pronged fork, hurrying to get
all he could before the tide covered them, knowing with the accuracy
of an alarm-clock when that would be. Should I wait for him? He might
not come back, for he did not live in this shack and where his home was
I did not know. I stood wondering what to do, when suddenly down the
street came a horse and wagon, the boy beating the beast to make it go
even faster, although it was galloping up and down in the shafts and
the stones were rattling out of the road. The dust flew into my face
when they flashed by. Then, as quickly, the whole fantastic equipage
stopped.

“Whoa!” yelled the boy. You could hear him up and down the street.

He jumped over the back of the seat and threw something--a great box,
as nearly as I could make out--into the road, and then, turning the
wagon on two wheels, came careening back again, still beating the horse
as he went past me, standing up and lashing it with the whip, cursing
like a sailor, and vanishing in his own cloud.

All this to get back before it rained?

I looked down the street to where the box lay in the middle of the
road, and then I saw that he had dropped it in front of my house.
It was my box he had delivered, and his hurry had not been entirely
because of the storm. I suppose I might expect to have all my packages
dropped in the road by fleeing rogues too craven to go near the
dwelling.

Vexed with him for being such a fool, knowing I could not leave my
belongings there in the street through a hurricane that might develop
into a three days’ storm, yet still having no one to help me, I ran
up the path as the first drops came down on my head and, getting an
old wheelbarrow out of the yard, hoisted the heavy thing into it and
pushed it up to the door. It was a box of books, packed in my husband’s
sketchy manner, with openings between the boards on top through which
newspapers showed. Not the sort of covering to withstand a northwest
storm! And it was very heavy. A bitter gust drove a flying handful of
straw up the street and whirled it round and round in the yard till it
caught in the tops of the pine-trees like a crow’s-nest. They bent and
swayed and squeaked under the high wind. A sheet of solid rain swept
across the bay like a curtain just as I succeeded in shoving the box of
books over the threshold and shut the door behind me.

Something had come in with me. It eyed me from under the stove. There
was the skinny cat that had bounded out of the house with our arrival
and had never been seen since! Tired with my futile trip, overwrought
with the approaching storm, angry over my struggles with the box, I
leaped upon the creature as if it was the cause of all my troubles.

“Get out! You can’t stay here! I don’t want you! Scat!”

But the cat thought otherwise.

It leaped past my clutch, scampering through the kitchen and on into
the study beyond. I followed fast. The room was half-dark with the
storm that beat around it; the rain made a cannonade upon the roof and
blinded the windows with a steady downpour. The whole house shook. The
five pine-trees outside bent beneath the onslaught as if they would
snap and crash down upon me. I knew that the old shingles must be
leaking, but first of all I must get that cat, I must put that horrible
beast out!

As if it knew my thoughts it jumped upon the mantel and raised its back
at me. Its eyes were green in its small head and its tail waved high
above it. It did not seem to be a cat at all, but the reincarnation
of some sinister spirit, tantalizing and defiant, aloof, and at the
same time inexorable. I was so excited that I picked up the poker and
would have struck it dead. But it dodged and leaped away--into the
coat-closet, and I after it. I made a lunge with the poker, missed the
cat, and struck the latch of the forbidden door. It flew open. The
cat sprang--and disappeared. I followed. As I found myself climbing
steep steps hand over hand in a black hole, I had time to think, like
a drowning man, that anyway I had the poker, and if it was the captain
hiding up there, he must be an old man and I could knock him down. I
did not want to be locked in the house in a hurricane with a black cat
and God knows what. I wanted to find out.

What I found was more of a shock than what I was ready to meet.




CHAPTER XI

THE THIRD NIGHT


This was a child’s room; there were playthings on the floor.

The rain fell heavily on the low roof, blanketing the skylight and
making the loft so dark that for a few seconds I could not see.

A sound came from a far corner. High-strung with terror, I thought
it was some witless creature who had been concealed up here for many
years, waiting for death to unburden it from a life that could never
grow old.

It moved--and I saw it was the cat.

Again I could have killed it, but instead I sank down on the floor and
began to laugh and cry.

“Come here, Cat! I won’t hurt you. We’re all mad together.”

But the cat mistrusted me. She slunk away, and for a while watched me
very carefully, until, deciding that I had lost interest in her, she
sat up and licked her tail. I wondered if this was her regular abode
and if it was she whom I had heard walking above me at night, and, if
so, how she managed an entrance when the doors were closed. Perhaps
she was feline by day and by night was psychic. But she was not a
confidential cat. Something fell coldly on my hand. I looked up. The
skylight was leaking.

I could distinguish the furniture in the loft now. I saw a wash-bowl
on a little stand, and put it under the loose-paned glass in the roof
beneath which a pool was spreading. There was a low bureau in the
room and a short turned bed, painted green, with a quilt thrown over
one end, two little hand-made chairs, and one of those solid wooden
rocking-horses, awesomely brave in the dusk. An open sea-chest held
picture-books and paints and bent lead soldiers, and strewn upon the
floor were quahaug-shells and a string of buoys. The room appeared as
if its owner had just stepped out, and once more I took a cautious look
around, behind me and in all the corners. Running my hand over the
quilt I found that the dust of years was thick upon it. This attic had
not been lived in recently. Its disturbed face was only the kind of
confusion that is left after some one has died whose belongings are too
precious to touch.

I opened one of the drawers of the cherry bureau and discovered that it
was full of the clothes of a little boy, of a period so long ago that
I could not fathom the mystery of who he might have been. Tears came
to my eyes as I unfolded the little ruffled shirts made by hand out of
faded anchor-printed calico, and picked up the knitted stockings. This
had been a real child; there were real holes in the stockings.

       *       *       *       *       *

My theory that it was the captain who was living up here was exploded.
Like a percussion-cap under a railroad train it had gone off when I
blundered into the room. Nothing remained of it now but a wan smile
and a sensation of relief. I only regretted that I had not broken open
both doors behind my bed after the first night and rid my mind of the
obsession at once. I walked across the room to the door at the far end
and found it was not locked after all, only that the rusty latch was
stuck. Forcing it up, I found myself, as I had expected, in the eaves
closet, where the little door ahead of me led into Mattie’s room. I
would have to go down the other way and move the bed in order to open
it, but I felt assured that no one had been before me and escaped by
retreating through here. I peered up and down the black length of the
closet, whose floor was the adjacent edge of the roof of the old part
of the house. Obviously no one was concealed. But from the rain that
filtered in and the shaking of the attic beneath the storm, I felt that
drafts alone might have caused the bending of the wall. Wind was sure
to be playing tag at midnight in this space between two partitions, and
a neurasthenic imagination could supply the rest.

I only wished that I had all those miserable hours back that I had
wasted during the day, wrestling with the mystery. The best theory that
I had evolved was that the New Captain had not died at all, but that
Mattie, watching him during that legendary week, had managed to raise
him out of his cataleptic sleep, and, although the townspeople thought
he had been buried, she had kept his life a secret for the last five
years. She could easily have hidden him in this unknown room. That
would explain why she was so loath to show the house to any one. It
would also explain why she refused to move out and why, in the end,
she committed suicide rather than do so. Not daring to abandon him and
have him discovered by the next occupant, an event which would end by
their both being incarcerated in the same poor-house, she had done
away with herself. The significance of this move would have been that
Mattie was no longer dependent on the New Captain nor enchained to him
by the spirit, as she was always reported to have been. Loving him,
she would never have deserted him. But thinking of him in the rôle
of a cataleptic old man, resuscitated after his second death, it was
plausible to suppose that he would be so loathsome as to have worn out
all her emotions, even faithfulness. He must have been no more than a
crazy man, shut up in that loft, and love, though as strong as Mattie’s
had been, cannot live forever on mere remembrance. So, according to
my solution, she had at last forsaken him, after having provisioned
him beforehand, as for a siege. It had been only the short length of a
month after her drowning that we had moved in, and during that time no
one else had been near the place. After my arrival, perhaps as before,
he had lain quiet all day. By night he had prowled around trying to get
out.

It was a grand theory--while it lasted. I did not analyse the flaws in
it, now I had given it up. Another night did that!

However, so many things had been solved by my heroic journey into the
unknown and the unknowable, and I was so interested in them, that I
forgot the rest. Here was the crux of the building of the captain’s
wing, the reason for not hiring workmen in the town, and why Mattie
alone had helped to carry lumber and worked until she fell exhausted
from her own roof. Without dwelling on the secret room that had become
a nursery, considering that room in its original aspect as part of
the passageway between Mattie’s room and the New Captain’s, here was
cause enough for not wanting any outside help. Mrs. Dove had been wrong
in her conclusion that because he had employed no village carpenters
they had afterward boycotted him. He would never have given them the
opportunity. Also, the architectural idiosyncrasies of that room were
her excuse for not showing the house when the judge had tried to sell
it. A person who would buy it as I had, without going inside the door,
was an exception. There were not many whose need was so urgent; most
house-shoppers would have poked behind her bed and pried into all the
closets before the deal was closed.

Mattie had managed to keep this room hidden all her life. Alf, at the
Sailor’s Rest, had told me squarely that there was no attic, and he
knew as much as any one else in the town about the House of the Five
Pines. Old Mis’ Hawes had died without knowing that after Mattie had
plumped up her pillows and thrust the brass warming-pan into her bed,
and taken her candle and gone upstairs, she was able to come down again
and spend the evening with the New Captain. I would keep the secret,
too, partly out of loyalty to Mattie, who had bequeathed it to me, and
partly because it would be a lark to have it known only to my dear one.
I could hear Jasper’s exclamation of pleased surprise when, some night
after he had tucked me in, I appeared again through his study-closet.
It would be a game for winter evenings.

I let myself down the steep steps behind the chimney and, going through
the study and the kitchen, came up into Mattie’s room. Shoving the
bed away from the little door in the eaves closet, I opened it and
walked straight back into the attic-chamber. That was the way of it--a
complete loop through the house!

Mattie’s room was to be mine for no other reason than its mysterious
means of egress. If I had any servants or any visiting relatives, I
would put them in the two big bedrooms on the other side of the upper
hall and turn the hall bedroom into a bath-room. But if I ever had any
babies, if _we_ ever had, I knew where I would put them. There was
a room next mine waiting for some child to play with the wall-eyed
rocking-horse and sleep in the little turned bed. Dormer-windows could
be cut on both sides and running water be brought up, and such a
nursery would bloom beneath the old roof that the art magazines would
send up representatives to take pictures of it. I could hardly restrain
my impatience to begin to make it ready, although as yet there was no
need for it. For the first time since we moved into the house I was
happy and contented.

I was in the mood to write Jasper a long and intimate letter, telling
him of my hopes for our life up here and how the House of the Five
Pines was all ready for us. Of my hallucinations about the attic I
said, “Nothing was locked in the room but my own fears.”

The tide had turned, and from my window at the big desk in the lower
room I watched the lines of foaming spray licking up the beach. There
was no longer any horizon between sea and sky. All was one blur of
moving gray water, picked out with breaking white-caps and roaring as
it fought to engulf the land. I thought, as I often had before: suppose
the tide does not pause at the crest and retreat into the ocean, but
keeps on creeping up and over, over the bank and over the road, over
the hedge and over the house. However, as always, it halted in its
race, pawed upon the stone breakwater, and I knew that by morning it
would have slunk out again, and that children would be wading where
waves had been, and Caleb Snow would be picking up winkles. Living was
like that; the tide of our passions turns. The New Captain had built
this double room for the great storm that had swept through his life,
bearing away the barricades of his traditions; but its force was spent
now, and the skeleton laid as bare as a fish-bone on the sandy flats
where strangers walked.

As I sat at the desk I smelled coffee cooking. The impression was so
strong that I went into the kitchen and walked over to the stove to
shove back the coffee-pot that I fancied had been left there since
morning. The fire must have caught on a smoldering coal and the grounds
were boiling up. But the coffee-pot was not on the stove. I found it
still on the shelf, and the coffee was safe in the can. The odor must
have come from out-of-doors.

I was too tired to figure the matter out, and ended by making some
for myself, and going to bed. This was my third night at the House of
the Five Pines, and I retired peacefully, in confidence, without any
disturbing inhibitions. Everything had been solved.

I had shut the door in the secret stairs in the study-closet and
fastened it with a piece of wire. In Mattie’s room I dropped down
on the bed where I had shoved it across the floor that afternoon.
Afterward I rose and pushed the bureau in front of the little door.
I do not know what subconscious motive impelled this, but a woman who
is living alone in a house with nine known rooms, none of which are in
their right places, and three stairs, front, back, and secret, ought to
be forgiven for locking up what she can.

Rain fell in wearied gusts; the worst was over. The wind, still high,
blew dense clouds across the face of the moon and carried them on again
over the sea, so that the waste was momentarily illumined. Whenever the
veils of mist were torn aside the oval mirror in its frame above my
bureau reflected the moonlight. I watched it for a long time on my way
to sleep.

At exactly twelve o’clock I found myself sitting up in bed.

There was moonlight in the room, that fell in quivering patches on the
bed-quilt and lightened up the dark walls, throwing into relief all the
five white doors. But there was also another light, on the ceiling,
that moved steadily up and down. Forcing my hypnotized glance away from
it, I turned to the haunted door and the bureau that I had placed in
front of it, and saw with sickening understanding that the mirror above
it was swaying on its hinges, swinging back and forth. This caused
the moonlight reflected from the water to dance like a sun-spot. The
glass turned as if it were being pushed and could not keep its balance.
I crawled over to it and put my hand out to steady it, and the whole
thing turned.

As I drew back, the pressure on the other side of the wall withdrew.
I could hear footsteps receding until they fell away down what I now
knew was the stairway at the other end of the secret room. I had heard
them the night before and I was sure. Whatever was in there had given
up trying to get out at this side and was going back to try and get out
of the door in the study-closet. I had wired that; the footsteps would
return.

There was no use in trying to convince myself for the third time that
this phenomenon was caused by the cat. I had put her out in the rain.
And if I were mistaken, if after all, I had locked her up in the loft,
could the weight of a cat shake a wall so that a mirror would swing on
its hinges? This was the footstep of something larger than a cat and,
Heaven help me, smaller than a man!

I heard it coming back, stealthily, walking softly, picking a
barefooted course across the upper chamber toward the thin partitions
that separated its room from mine. I knew that in a second more it
would try one door and then the other, and that the whole wall would
shake and give and the mirror I was clutching would tip again and throw
fantastic lights. I heard it lift the latch.




CHAPTER XII

THE LITTLE COFFIN


In the morning I was lying on the floor where I had fainted, between
the bureau and the bed.

Was it going to turn out that I could not live in the House of the Five
Pines after all, that I should never be at peace with it? Would there
be another manifestation the next night, and another the night after,
until my mind was gone? I felt that it was going now.

At midnight I could not help but think that what I heard was caused by
ghosts; by day I refused to accept anything supernatural and forced
myself to a material explanation.

Did I, or did I not, lock the cat inside the haunted room?

There was only one way to find out. I unwired the door and climbed up
again, and found in the sunlight that there was nothing more alive in
the attic than the rocking-horse. Opening the eaves closet, a shaft of
light disclosed a hole in one end large enough to admit a cat, granting
that she could climb to the roof by means of one of the pine-trees. But
cats do not prowl around in the rain.

Why had I been so certain that the New Captain had not preceded me
through the eaves closet the day before? While I was coming up the
stairs he could have pushed the little door wide enough open to crawl
out under the bed and put the bed back again. He might do it another
time, or half a dozen times a day, until I put a nail into it, playing
hide-and-seek up one stairway and down the other. He could have crept
up the secret stairs and been hiding in the attic at the very time that
I wired up the door at the foot.

This time I tried to make the fastening more secure, but found that
the flimsy partition had warped with the wet weather; and I ended by
locking the outside door of the coat-closet with a key that I managed
to fit to it after trying each one in the house. The two doors of the
eaves closet upstairs I nailed securely from my side.

“Now get out if you can,” I said aloud. I felt like some one who steps
up on the stage and ties the hands of the magician. At the same time I
realized perfectly that if whatever was not there in the attic when I
fastened it up could get in later, it could also get out.

I went back to the theory that I held yesterday.

One thing troubled me. Why, if the New Captain was living, had he
permitted his will to be found? He could have hidden it, or have had
Mattie dispose of it, so as to prevent its working against himself.
By the terms that he had drawn up the house was to be sold; nothing
could be more inconvenient to one who was trying to hide in it. Unless
he deliberately planned to have it sold for the malicious purpose of
driving out Mattie! He had bequeathed her nothing. If the house passed
into other hands, she would inevitably be forced out; while he, as long
as he lived furtively between two walls, was safe. Or perhaps he meant
to make himself manifest after she had gone. Perhaps that was what he
was trying to convey.

Why had he come to hate her? Yesterday I was sure that it was she who
had tired of him, wearied of a liaison with a daft person, glad to go;
to-day I was convinced that it was he who had grown restless under the
oppression of her management. In doubt that death would release him
from her spell, fearing to survive another cataleptic burial, he had
cunningly drawn up this document which would rid him of her.

To test this hypothesis would be to ascertain beyond a doubt whether
or not the New Captain was actually buried. There was a vault in the
cemetery in the Hawes name, but unless I investigated the interior I
would never feel sure that the old rogue was in it. I determined to
make the judge show me the New Captain’s coffin.

On my way through the town I sent a telegram to Jasper, paralleling my
letter and contradicting the substance of it:

  Don’t like house. May give it up.

That would prepare him, should I decide to leave.

The judge was at home, but “busy.” Would I wait? I would, I assured
Isabella.

The age of leisure has not vanished from the earth; it has taken the
“accommodation” train, gone down the cape, and stopped off at Star
Harbor. While my host finished washing his Ford, or whatever he was
loitering over, I had full time to recognize the oddity of my behavior.
Judge Bell himself was not so surprised to receive me as I was to be
there. And yet a canny sense of the value of silence kept me from
straightway breaking down and confessing the details of the sleepless
nights which had led up to my demand. I felt, self-consciously, that,
having bought the House of the Five Pines in spite of warnings, it
had become so much _my_ house and _my_ mystery that I had no right to
complain. If I confided in the judge, he would not try to help me.
He would take my ghosts to his bosom as just so much corroborative
evidence of his own pet psychic formulas. The time to explain was after
I had solved my problems.

So when my host finally appeared I only said that I wanted to be sure
the New Captain was in his coffin, and the judge replied that he could
not blame me much for that.

“Are you sorry you bought the place?” he asked, switching the late
asters with his cane as we crossed the downs.

“I’m sorry that we had to turn Mattie out.”

The message in the book I did not mention.

“Some one would have bought it,” the judge declared, speaking
officially, and then he added, as his own thought, “She was done with
life, anyway, long ago.”

The cemetery lay on one side of a low hill, behind the roof-tops of the
town. The gravestones were small, and sheep nibbled the grass between
them, so that as we approached it looked like nothing more than a
pasture sprinkled with boulders.

A late, traveling circus had pitched its tents at the foot of
the slope, and we were silent as we threaded our way through the
rough-looking professionals who were standing around in the sun,
trying to dry out after last night’s storm. Men were shaving, their
pocket-mirrors hung upon a tree; women were combing their hair or
sitting smoking, half-dressed, in the open. A charred fire showed where
their breakfast had been cooked, and the open flap of a tent exposed
their sleeping-quarters, with some of the ill-favored crew still under
the blankets.

The elephant, as large as a monument, had been led down to the brook.

“We’ll have to hurry or we won’t get back in time for the parade,” the
judge said. “I hear they are going to have a parade.”

He was as pleased as a child, and stopped and patted the elephant.

I could hear the caravan’s laughter behind us when we reached the old
Hawes tomb. From the edge of the graveyard the circus band was tuning
up. Grief was taking a holiday.

The judge unlocked the gate of the iron fence around the vault, and
then he unlocked the grating and we went down two steps into the
damp interior. The sunlight from the open door behind us flooded the
cellar-like aperture, making its contents crudely visible. The stone
walls gave out no hint of horror. Only an aroma of melancholy filled
the resting-place of this strange family who had once been a dynamic
force in their corner of the world and were now become a row of rusty
boxes.

I saw the coffin marked with the brass plate of old Captain Jeremiah
Hawes, and the coffin of “Mis’ Hawes,” his wife, and, on the lowest
tier, that of the New Captain.

“Where is Mattie?” I asked.

The judge waved his hand ambiguously toward the bay. I took it to
mean that she had not been honored with the sanctuary of the family
vault. In the end, she was not a Hawes. Without saying anything more,
it seemed as if we understood each other. Mattie had been buried in
unhallowed ground.

Not that the New Captain was ever anything more than an infidel. I was
indignant when I realized how much better he had fared than she. Some
one, probably the judge, had white-washed his soul in spite of his
preferences and given him a Christian burial. With Mattie things were
different, in death even as in life. I did not dare to inquire any
further for fear I would learn that they had taken her poor drowned
body and thrown it under a heap of stones at a crossroads. Customs of
the Old World and superstitions of the New lingered in this neck of
New England where, not too many years ago, forlorn old women had been
burned as witches.

The New Captain’s great iron box was strong and solid; it did not look
as if anything could get out of it or ever had. The judge and I stood
staring at it.

“I saw him myself,” the judge said, “before the lid was fastened down,
and he had been lying in that room a week then, like he asked to in
his will. He was dead all right; you didn’t need to look at him.”

“Was there a funeral service?”

“You bet there was. The Old Captain’s parson saw to that--Brother
Jimps--gone now, too. There was some talk against it. The new minister
he said he wouldn’t ’a’ done it, but I knew enough not to ask him.”

The judge chuckled over his grim recollections.

“Yes, I saw the thing was all done proper at the time; but I guess it
wouldn’t be going outside of my rights any if I was to open the coffin
now and set your mind at rest.”

“Please _don’t_!”

“I brought a chisel--”

“Stop! No wonder she was queer.”

“Who?”

“Mattie.”

“Oh, yes, she was queer all right. But then, she always was. You don’t
want me to open it?”

It struck me that there was a great deal of the inquisitive little boy
left in the old judge, but I did not have the courage to gratify him.

“Let’s go,” I answered. “I’ve seen everything I need.”

It was at this precise moment that I caught sight of a small coffin. It
did not lie in state on the stone shelves on each side of the vault,
but was pushed back into a dark corner.

“What’s that?” I asked sharply.

The old judge did not answer.

“Did the Old Captain have another child? Did the New Captain have a
brother--or a sister?”

The judge stood in the open doorway, his face turned toward the downs.
I could hardly hear his words when at length he answered.

“That is his son.”

Not understanding, I looked at him and then at the little coffin; and
then at him again.

“Whose?”

“The New Captain’s. He never had any brothers nor any sisters.”

“But,” I protested, “I did not know he had a child.”

“Nobody else knows it.”

He drew me outside and locked up the grating with his large, hand-made,
iron key.

We walked away in silence. But it was more than I could stand.

“Did he live in the house?” I asked, at last.

“I don’t know anything about it,” answered the judge unhappily. “I
was hoping you wouldn’t ask.” There was upon his face an oldness and
discouragement with life that I had never seen there before. “I was
his best friend, and his only friend at the end, and he never told me
anything about it. The day we buried his mother, old Mis’ Hawes, I saw
that little coffin in the vault, just like you did, only there weren’t
so much dust on it then. I was staring down at it, after the other
pallbearers had gone. The New Captain seen me.

“‘What are you looking at? Come on!’ said he. And I said, ‘Who is
that?’ and he said, ‘That’s my son; now you know who it is.’

“That’s all he ever said and all I ever asked him, and I never
mentioned it to any one since then.”

A great comprehension suddenly came to me, and I was dazed with what
was whirling through my mind. I would have acknowledged the finding of
the loft to him, except, from the way the judge had dealt with the
matter all these years, I realized that he preferred to be left in
ignorance. What he had never inquired into he did not want to know. I
did not attempt to intimate to him how much the discovery of the little
coffin meant to me. It was one secret more added to the burden of the
House of the Five Pines, but one mystery less.

After a while I asked, “How long ago was that, judge?”

And he answered, “Mis’ Hawes died in the early eighties.”

A whiff of vault-like air seemed to pass over my heart. I was back once
more in the dark loft, with the rain beating down on the roof. That was
the period when boys wore fluted calico shirts.

       *       *       *       *       *

The judge and I walked slowly down the slope between the headstones and
the crosses. On one grave was a carved stone lamb, and a stray live
one had lain down beside it. Milk-bottles blossoming with petunias and
lard-pails filled with earth in which bloomed yellow nasturtiums made
a brave display. Tall Lorraine crosses, with Portuguese names carved
in the weathered wood, were lettered in red and gold. The wreaths were
of beads, such as they use in the Western Islands, from which far lands
the fishers had brought the customs of their forefathers. Many little
mounds were enclosed with a low wooden fence, marked with a headboard
at one end, as if an open-bottomed crib had been set down on the grass.
Here and there an old musket stuck into the ground or a cheap flag,
faded since last Decoration Day, showed that from this village, too,
our country had taken toll in the fighting of its wars. Some of the
soldiers’ graves were dated 1777.

At one side of the hill, where the grass dwindled away into the
encroaching sand, was a sort of potters’ field, with unpainted pine
crosses of uniform size. Thinking that perhaps it was a military
section, I bent down and read the names.

_David Lester, Lost at sea, 1856_.... _Jo Lippa, aged 19. Lost on the
Veronica, off the Great Banks, 1890_.... _Capt. Miles Longsworth,
1790-1830. Drowned with six of his crew on an Iceland Voyage_....
_Samuel Polk, 1880-1915. Lost at Sea._

A group of them would bear the same dates, as if half a dozen had been
drowned in the same disaster.

“What does it mean?” I asked.

“They are all sailors,” replied the judge, gravely, “who were lost at
sea. When their bodies are not recovered, their families feel better if
they can give them a grave with the others on the hill. Sometimes we
have the funeral, too, if many have gone down together. Last year there
was eleven on one vessel.”

I remembered what Ruth had told me about wrecks and the “graveyard of
the cape.”

“But I would rather have my boy’s cross here,” I vowed, “than
there!”--with a gesture back toward the Hawes’s big vault. “Passers-by
at least may know what these sailors’ names are and that they once have
lived.”

The old judge bowed his head.

I put my hand in his rough hand and led him on. “I’m sorry,” I said.

He smiled at me a little in a far-off way, as if it were some one
else he were smiling at. I could not bear to watch his face. The
peculiarities that his isolated life had cultivated did not separate
us so much now. He seemed pathetically human and, like all of us,
needing sympathy, struggling forlornly against the obstacles that
his own limitations had created. It no longer seemed strange that
he was attempting divination and second sight, trying to wrest the
undiscoverable from the mute unknown. After all, he might be the only
one of us whose philosophy was right.

Materialism fell away from me in that sand-swept graveyard where only
the gray sheep moved among the symbols of the dead. Objectivity lost
its grip; the subjective was the only reality. I recalled what the
Hindus believed: that this world was an unnecessary torment, valuable
only for the acquiring of grace, which might as well be accomplished by
sitting upon a pillar; that the only truth was the life of the spirit,
which had begun with the spinning of the Wheel and would endure so long
as it revolved. The ascetics of all religions had preached nearly the
same thing, in terms understandable to their own generation and their
own race. The impulse of the soul, confined in its body’s prison, to
reach out to souls which had left theirs but which still hovered near,
was the only pastime worth an adult’s serious attention.

Out on the daisy-covered downs where the rain-washed sunlight blinded
one to the immediate vista, where the reluctant storm-clouds overhead
moved in white masses through the brilliant sky and banked themselves
upon the ocean’s rim, the strength of the judge’s spiritualism subdued
my worldliness. In a new meekness and dependence of will I did not want
to lose sight of him. And I had no impulse whatever to return to the
House of the Five Pines.

As we came near the circus grounds the line of skinny horses and the
tarnished animal-wagon, the weary clown and the dusty elephant, were
already winding their way to the village. The judge began to hurry.

“What are you going to do this afternoon?” I asked.

He looked as uncomfortable as his Isabella.

“Why, to tell the truth, I--I’m busy,” he stumbled.

“Judge, are you going to the circus?”

“No, I ain’t.”

“Well, whatever it is, I’m going to do it, too.”

“Do you mean that?” His eyes penetrated mine as a seer who would
probe the faith of a novitiate. “All right. Be around to my house at
two-thirty. I’ll take you to a séance.”




CHAPTER XIII

THE SÉANCE OF HORNS


Two-thirty found me on the porch of the judge’s house again, picking up
a modern magazine of the occultists which lay there on the table. This
time, because I would have liked to read it, the judge showed up on the
minute.

“You can take it home with you,” he said, noting my disappointment.

Was he glad of a proselyte, I wondered.

The townspeople stared when we appeared on the front street together,
but then, they always stared at me. I had not asked where we were
going--to one of the rickety store-buildings on the water-front, I
fancied, in some back room over tidewater.

Instead, we turned off at the railroad track and skirting the town
dump, where, on a briery height, the refuse of the entire population
was spread out to breed mosquitoes, took a little path through the
marshy woods at the base of the sand-dunes, and followed it two miles.
Blueberry-bushes at our feet grew green and high, rid of their prolific
harvest. Wintergreen berries were turning red, anticipating frost. The
leaves of the sumac were wine-colored, and the dark racemes hung like
tassels heavy with their glutinous ripened seeds. Goldenrod and purple
asters rioted along the path, and tiger-lilies bordered the black
ponds. Scarlet-winged blackbirds flitted through the low branches of
the oaks, and wild canaries dived from sight. Bayberry and sassafras
made the air sweet, and the brown pine-cones crunched under foot. The
October sunshine, released after yesterday’s storm, danced between the
interlacings of the wild grape-vine, which covered the undergrowth with
its mocking pattern.

The soil of the woods was shallow, and the trees, sending their roots
too quickly into sterile sea sand, shriveled and died before they had
reached maturity, so that the forest was half-new and half as dead as
if it had been burned. Growth here was quick and almost tropical, a
glad green and a fast sunset of color, and then stale brown stalks.
The dunes, bearing down upon the woods from the ocean on the far
side of the cape, spared nothing. Little by little they covered the
trees--first a soft pile of sand, no larger than a child would play
with, heaped upon the surface roots, then a half-hill, out of which
the fighting trunks protruded, and at last a hard plateau, with the
remnants of the highest branches thrusting futile twigs, barren of
leaves, up into the mocking sun. The sand suffocated the pines and
buried them, so that, climbing up out of the swampy valley into the
immensity of the yellow dunes, we walked upon buried forests.

“How far?” I asked the judge. I supposed that we would trudge on to the
sea.

“Not far,” he answered.

To my surprise, he turned to the right along the crest of the last
great dune above the tree-tops, then slid back, down an unbroken hill
into the woods once more, and I felt the roof of a hut under my feet.
Here was a hermitage, not on the path where wandering steps would ever
find it, but hidden in this spot accessible only to those who knew the
way.

The top of the low cabin hidden under the trees was half-buried in the
sand of the dune behind it. We slid down off the roof and knocked at
the front door. A colored man opened it cautiously, bowed gravely,
and let us in. We found ourselves in a darkened room with five other
persons, who were quietly waiting for us, sitting in a half-circle on
the bare floor.

A colored man on Cape Cod is as exotic a growth as mistletoe. Where
this one dark-skinned man had come from I could not guess; why he
stayed was easier to imagine. His power as the representative of
another race was as unquestioned as a white man’s is in an African
jungle or a Chinese in Alaska. He was not so old as to have lost the
use of his keenest faculties, nor so young as to under-estimate them.
He was small of stature, with an intellectual face and quick-moving
light-palmed hands. He wore a white tight-fitting jersey and
high-turned corduroy trousers. The great toes of his bare feet were
separated, like those of an ape. He seemed like a mixture of a cave-man
and the motion-picture conception of a cave-man; as if, knowing the
value of his picturesqueness, he not so much cultivated as accepted it.
There were no chairs or tables; the bunk was covered with boughs and
fastened to the wall, but there was a very capable-looking blue-flame
oil-stove and also a phonograph. The windows on either side were
shielded with curtains of yellow-batiked cheese-cloth that our host
must have purloined from an art-student.

“He’s educated,” whispered the judge, motioning me to join the circle
seated on the sandy floor.

“I can see that,” I answered.

The men who had met here were all matter-of-fact and uncompromisingly
solid. One was a captain of a fishing-vessel, another a “gob” off
one of our cruisers, a third I recognized as the proprietor of the
“Bee-hive” general store. The other two were Portuguese. The store
proprietor kept talking about having to get back at five to let “Will”
go home for supper. The captain was garrulously explaining about other
séances he had attended, better ones, which statement was heartily
argued by the sailor-boy, who claimed he had attended them from Maine
to Panama, and never found any one as good as this here colored
man. One of the Portuguese kept asking over and over again, “Do you
see anything new for me?” in a hopeless voice, and the other one
continually urged him to “shut up.”

The medium began to speak.

“This is very unusual,” he said, “to give a séance by daylight. I only
agreed to it to please our friend here of the navy, who has been an
inspiration to me in his enthusiasm and who was most anxious to get
into contact with his dear ones once more before he left us for foreign
waters. I trust all will go well, as usual. You will pardon me while I
darken the room.”

I was left gasping. He spoke with the accent of Harvard, in the manner
of an English drawing-room. I had half-expected some African voodoo
revelations. Now I did not know what to expect.

The judge smiled at me.

The medium went outside the hut and closed the wooden shutters.
Instantly we were plunged into impenetrable dark. I could just see the
circle of strained faces as he reëntered, closed the door, and bolted
it. I had not known that a séance would be like this. “Take hold of
hands,” he commanded, and I grasped that of the judge on my right and,
on my left, the horny palm of the sailor.

“Don’t be afraid, little girl,” whispered the “gob.” “This is going to
be good.”

Then the phonograph began to play, and to my overstrained nerves
the ordinary xylophone record, put on with a soft needle and some
attachment which made it repeat for half an hour, sounded like a
far-off echo of the jungle days which this son of the African tribes
was trying to reproduce. He had seated himself on a stool with his back
to the wall before us and half a dozen long megaphones at his feet.

“Watch the horns,” he drawled in a sing-song voice. “Ebenezer is a long
time coming.”

But I could not see them now; I could see nothing. Only a white blur
marked the place where his body might still be; I could not swear to
it. Then a voice began to sing with the phonograph, an unmistakable
negro voice, rising and wailing with a maudlin sentimental cadence,
without pause and without words. I wanted to scream out, “Stop singing!
Stop that music! I can’t think.” And then I had just wit enough left
to realize that that was precisely what he wanted--we were being
hypnotized. I felt my mind oozing out into the blackness and only
knew, because of the tightened grip on my hands of the judge and of
the sailor, that my body was left behind. Something touched me on the
shoulder.

“Look out, there’s the horn! Don’t you see it?” Some one whispered.

I strained my eyes above my head, but I could see nothing.

“There it goes!” This was the judge’s excited comment.

Still I could see nothing. The medium continued to sing.

“It’s flying around the room,” breathed the captain.

What did they mean was flying around the room? It was most aggravating.
Was it supposed to be the horn that was flying around the room?

“It’s stopped in front of you, judge,” whispered the sailor.

I felt the judge’s hand tighten on mine. “Is that you, Ebenezer?” he
asked, quaveringly.

And the voice, a throaty disguise of the voice of the medium, answered:
“This is Ebenezer. What can I do for you? How de do, how de do, folks!”
It seemed to come from all over the room at once, now above my head,
now across from me. “How de do, how de do to-day!”

“Fine,” some one answered.

“Ebenezer, how about that money you promised me?” the sailor began,
trying to force his personality upon the control. But Ebenezer would
have none of him. “This is Mattie, this is Mattie,” it was whispering.

What? I had not been listening accurately. It had never crossed my mind
that this farce could be directed toward me.

“Ask it something,” urged the judge in a fierce whisper.

“You ask,” I whispered back.

“Aw, who is Mattie?” the disappointed sailor growled under his breath.

But the excitement of the quest had caught me at last, and I was
panting for the next words from that strange, disembodied voice.

“This is Mattie,” it repeated, fainter now. “Doesn’t anybody want to
speak to Mattie?”

“Where are you, Mattie?” demanded the judge.

There was a dreadful silence.

“They never answer that,” whispered the ship-captain. “You’d better try
something else.” Then, addressing the spirit of Mattie directly, the
captain asked: “Who do you want to speak to? Can you tell?”

“To the woman,” wailed the voice.

“To you,” they all hissed at me.

“What do you want?” I besought it.

“You must leave.”

“Leave where?”

“The house.”

A murmur of opposition went around the circle. Enmeshed in a bad
dream as I was, I was grateful to them for their loyalty. They would
not have me put out. And then another meaning to these words made my
flesh creep. The judge at the same moment asked the question that was
trembling on my lips.

“What house?”

“The house of th-three--seven--”

“It’s trying to say it,” he assured me; “they can’t get numbers very
well. Yes, Mattie?”

But the control had been seized by another spirit and, with a great
pounding of the trumpet on the floor, announced: “Is the captain here?
Is the captain here? I am Jacques Davit who went down on the _Dolly
B._”

This was a great strong masculine spirit. I had no hope of hearing from
Mattie now.

The captain sat up stiffly and was swearing under his breath. “Gosh
willikins, I’m a son of a-- Jacques Davit! Hello, Jack!”

“Too bad,” murmured the judge to me. “Wait, we’ll get her again.”

“I’m out o’ luck all around!” said my horny-handed colleague in deep
disgust.

One of the Portuguese kept repeating: “Do you see any change for me? Do
you see any change for me?”

I could not keep my mind on what the control was perpetrating in the
name of Jacques. Like the veriest devotee among them I wished to get
hold of Mattie again.

“Get Mattie back,” I whispered to the judge.

And immediately the masculine tones changed to the light fluttering
voice that had been hers. “Five pines, five pines, five pines,” it
repeated rapidly, like a telephone-operator.

“Mattie,” I demanded, no longer surprised at my own voice, “what is in
that secret room?”

“Huh?” interrupted the sailor, grasping my hand harder.

I felt that every one in the circle was straining for the answer. The
phrase “secret room” had won instant coöperation. We bent forward in
abysmal darkness, listening through the silence, till even the sand
blown down on the roof grated on our raw nerves. The phonograph had
stopped playing. Then one word hung in the air like a floating feather:

“_Murder!_”

That was all. As if the circle had been cut with a sharp knife, every
one dropped hands and pushed back from the others. Some one rushed over
to the door and unbolted it, and the light struck in across the floor.

The horns lay in a disordered heap at the foot of the medium, who was
slowly running his fingers through his kinky hair, as if coming back
to life. The men stood up and breathed hard, without looking at one
another.

“What was it she asked?” the Portuguese was saying; but no one answered
him. Nor did they look at me. They made me feel guilty, an accomplice
to some dark deed they did not understand. No more did I understand
it, I wanted to scream at them! The judge was taking money out of his
pocket, and handed five one-dollar bills to the colored man, who had
revived enough by now to take up a general collection.

“Good-by,” said the sailor genially. “I didn’t find out nothin’, but it
was worth it, anyway, to be in on that. Say, he’s good, ain’t he?” He
followed me to the door. “Say,” he whispered, “if anything, you know,
turns up, let me know, will you? I’d take it as a favor. I’m off from
three to five, short leave. See you to-morrow, corner of Long Wharf.”

I smiled hysterically. These were strange days for me. I had been at a
séance, and made a date with a sailor!




CHAPTER XIV

THE FOURTH NIGHT


Judge Bell and I climbed up the shifting cliff of sand and paused at
the top, out of breath.

While we had been in the cabin holding the séance, a fog had risen. The
sun was hidden behind a gray bank, barely causing a brighter patch of
mother-of-pearl in the western sky, where feathery clouds were heaped
high, one upon the other, like the soft silken cushions of the fairy
princess’s bed. Mist swept around the top of the dunes and filled
the hollows. Lakes of fog spread themselves at our feet, deceptively
solidifying the craters between the hills into opaque pools of silver.
Vapor eddied in slow masses backward and forward, disclosing the dunes
and hiding them again at the will of the sluggish wind. Outlines were
dim; the blue of the ocean had become invisible. Distances were so
distorted that it seemed as if in three strides one might reach the
outside shore, where the surf was roaring.

The rain of yesterday had pounded every track out of the wet dark sand,
leaving it imprinted with a wind-stamped water-mark. The grass-topped
pyramid where Ruth and I had played with the children last summer was
dissolved. There was no formation in all that desolate region which
bore any resemblance to it. The dunes must have challenged the sea to a
wild race during the hurricane, with a gale driving the bitter sand so
swiftly that whole hills were moved. The pounding of the breakers was
reminiscent of the orgy they had indulged in during the storm, crashing
as clearly across the waste as if we were listening where the foam
fell. Our damp clothes clung to us, and our faces became wet and our
lips tasted salt.

I turned to the silent judge, whose rugged figure, buffeted by many
tempests of the soul as well as of the sea, stood staunchly beside me
in the dusk, a strong defense. His introspective vision penetrated
further than the eye could follow.

“Who do you think was speaking to us, back there in the hut?” I asked.

“Why, Mattie,” he answered in a surprised tone.

“But I do not understand it.”

Judge Bell smiled slowly, making no reply. He did not expect me to
understand.

       *       *       *       *       *

We descended from the dripping dunes at the place where the judge had
left his handkerchief tied to a tree-top to mark the path that dipped
into the thicket. The groaning of a fog-horn at the coast-guard station
followed us, and the tidal breeze laid an icy hand upon our backs.

The way home was traversed quickly, for it was downhill most of the
distance. When we drew near the railroad tracks I caught the judge by
his coat.

“Judge,” I said, “I was going to the Sailor’s Rest, because I can’t
stay in the House of the Five Pines any longer, but if you will come up
and spend the night there, too, I will go back. I hadn’t intended to
tell you, but--there are very strange manifestations in that old house,
far more amazing than what we saw this afternoon, and you ought to know
about them. You owe it to yourself not to miss them; it is research
work. I’ll stay there once more if you will. Can you come?”

The judge’s face glowed like a scientist about to resolve the
atmosphere into its component parts.

“I’ll come,” he swore. “I’ll be there; watch out for me!”

“Well, then, now!”

“No,” he insisted, “not right away. I’ve got to go home first--the
cow--but I’ll be back. Depend on me!”

He started off on a dog-trot up the railroad track, making a short-cut
through the back of the town. Reluctantly I turned away toward my own
house and sat down on the step. It did not seem worth while to go in
and unpack any more of Jasper’s things. I might never live there.

While light lasted I lingered outside and looked at the quiet bay
and the fishermen returning from their boats. They wore high red
rubber boots and gray flannel shirts open at the throat. Barefooted
children in denim overalls came running to meet them on the boardwalk,
and tugged at their brown hands and begged for rides upon their
shoulders.... And I had thought that some day children might be
running down our flagging--but now, I did not know.

I could see the old arcade grinning at me, were I forced to go back
to New York, and the sign in the corridors leaped into malicious
letters, “Dogs and children not allowed.” I remembered the sort of man
who returned there at night, stepping languidly out of a yellow cab,
light-wood cane under one arm while he paid the driver, nothing waiting
for him but a fresh bunch of bills under his door. And those other
ne’er-do-well tenants, hatless and unpressed, affecting sandals to save
socks, having nothing in common with their sporty neighbors but the
garbage-pail on the fire-escape. After three days of the promised land,
must I go back to that?

Why didn’t the judge come?

I went inside and lit the lamps, because I dared not let the house
grow dark before entering, then sank down by the window and rocked
nervously, watching the street. But what I saw was not the stalwart
figure of my old friend approaching through the evening haze, but the
grotesque contour of the town crier, preceded by his bell.

_Clang, clang, clankety-clang!_ He swung the big brass tongue as if
all the world were waiting for his message.

In front of the House of the Five Pines he stopped short and with his
back to it, read out to the bay: “Burr ... buzz.... Sheriff’s auction
... Long Nook Road ... Monday....”

He swung his bell again and hobbled up the street. It was late for the
town crier to be abroad and he was in a hurry.

“That will be the next thing,” I thought; “that will happen to me. Some
day the bell-man will be going up and down the boardwalk advertising
another house for sale, and that one will be mine.”

The idea was so discouraging that I tried to think of something not so
lugubrious. Where was the judge? I picked up the magazine that he had
thrust upon me earlier in the day and began to read it.

The cover had a large eye in the center from which shot orange rays,
and underneath were symbols I did not understand. The paper was cheap
but well printed, one of those ventures in sect literature which,
like those dedicated to social propaganda, are always coming and
going on the market and sending out subscription-blanks with every
issue. The advertisements were, for the most part, how to get fat
and how to get thin, where to send words for songs and how to sell
motion-picture scenarios. The editorial matter was equally erratic.
One erudite article held my interest: a savant had written of the
“aura” that surrounds a person. This is the light which exudes from
his body, an excrescence imperceptible to the agnostic outside the
realm of “truth,” but plainly visible to the initiate. The aura was
supposed to radiate various distances, depending on the magnetism of
the subject, and its hue changed with the individual. Red was the
color of youth and exuberance, blue designated the purist, purple
betrayed sex passion, and yellow surrounded the intellectual. Pink
and heliotrope were the auras of the artistic; green was the halo of
genius. In life this color might not be evident, but after death, the
body being expressed in highly magnetized atoms, the color of the aura
was quite clear, being, in fact, the sole attribute of the apparition.
That is, instead of being visited by the subject reincarnated in mortal
form, you beheld his astral color. Understanding his temperament in
life, you recognized him by the aura which represented him. Although
most difficult to discern with the naked eye, this aura could easily be
photographed, and photographs were reproduced on the next page--shadowy
outlines of nude figures. Much space was devoted to the female aura,
posed in interesting silhouette with a wavy water-line around it, like
the coast upon a map. The subjects’ names were given. It was hoped that
later they would be able to reproduce the aura of a specter, to print a
colored photograph of light alone.

I shut the magazine. It had made fascinating reading, but I would have
to procure the observations of more than one savant to be convinced.
I began to see how profound a study the psychic might become, and why
Mattie and the New Captain had spent all their time on it and gathered
together so many books on the occult. It was not so simple as I had
supposed when I knew nothing at all about it. Did the judge believe
this? I wished that he would come.

It was nine o’clock.

If only this gnawing in my fagged brain to discover the cause of my
nocturnal obsessions had taken some other form of elucidation! Why
did I force my addled intellect to prove or disprove this theory
of spiritism, this revived dogma of the Dark Ages, culled from all
religions? I had never subjected Christianity to such severe criticism.
After childhood, one ceases to question the code of morality under
which he has been brought up; it is his then, for better or for worse.
To argue is to lose the nuance of faith. Would a child, I wondered,
brought up in the House of the Five Pines, take ghosts as easily
as I took Jonah? He certainly would not grow up into materialism
by believing that the age of miracles was past. He would take the
supernatural as a matter of course. One could hear the family arguing
at the breakfast-table:

“I heard something last night; it must have been grandmother.”

And another child, with its mouth full of grapefruit: “No,
_great_-grandmother. I saw her.”

And the bobbed-hair one: “It couldn’t have been Grandmother Brown,
because the aura was yellow, and she never had anything in her bean.”

Then they would go roller-skating, leaving the subleties of color
emanations to solve or dissolve themselves.

But I had not been brought up that way. I had plunged into this
atmosphere unprepared. I never felt more ancient than at that moment,
when I realized that I was too old to learn.

What was keeping the judge?

It was ten o’clock.

I got up and looked out of the window. The street was quiet and dark
as the water beyond it. Cold stars shone feebly through the clouds
above the bay, and the revolving planet at the lighthouse on Long Point
blinked every minute. From the highlands another light shone steadily,
and at the entrance to the harbor a bell-buoy swung sadly back and
forth. The waves, rocking the floating tongue, set it ringing louder
as they rose in strength, and let it die away again to the tinkle of a
tea-bell. I was glad the fog-horns were not groaning in the harbor. I
hate fog-horns.

No man ever knows the weariness of a woman who waits for him. No
man has ever experienced to the full the hours when the night
grows longest, when the mind catches at the faintest sound in the
thoroughfare and listens to the ebb of footsteps that after all were
not quite the ones expected. Because, universally, it is the woman who
is in the house and the man who is outside, he has missed for centuries
the finest form of torture devised by the unthinking and the tardy and
the dissipated for those who must sit at the window. There is no use
in saying afterward, “Why did you wait up?” and the tired reply, “I
won’t again.” She will do so again, goaded by forebodings that grow
with the minutes, and she will keep on sitting up for him until the end
of life, when, if there is any justice, the man will go first into the
meandering meadows and on the banks of the last river wait for a cycle
or two.

Every far-away sound attaches profound significance to itself--a piano,
a child crying, a window being raised; and the night seems full of
freight-trains chugging up a grade, although you never hear an engine
all day long. I have heard the whistle of steamboats in inland cities.
But worse is that rattle and bang up the street, that clinking of
bottles and running feet, that continued panting of the engine which
it is not worth while to shut off, by which you know that you have sat
up till the milk is being delivered and that it is _too late_!

Why did the judge not come? It was after eleven o’clock.

I wished that it was Jasper for whom I was waiting, for more reasons
than the obvious one. Jasper would prove that the phenomena which had
harassed the House of the Five Pines were not psychic; Judge Bell would
prove that they were.

       *       *       *       *       *

A hand on the window-pane! On the outside of the window-pane was a
hand. There was no body to it, but in the lower corner of the window
where I sat a hand was feeling around. It was a small hand. It knocked.

At the sound of flesh on glass my heart rebelled; it ceased functioning
altogether.

The hand knocked again, impatiently. Then a voice was added.

“Let me in! Anybody home?”

Something about the homely words released a spring, and my heart jumped.

“Who is it?”

“Me! Open the door!”

I unlatched the kitchen shutter and peered out. A diminutive youngster,
too short to be visible above the window-sash, was coming around from
the side of the captain’s wing.

“Gee, I pretty near went away again, only I saw the window was lighted.”

“Why didn’t you go to the door?”

“I did! The front door.”

That was why I had not heard him.

“I would have gone,” the boy continued, still full of his own troubles,
“only he give me the quarter before I came.”

“The judge?” I interrupted.

“No, Isabella; he broke his arm.”

“He broke his arm?”

“Cranking his Ford.” The boy made a windmill motion. “He was just
starting out.”

“Coming here?”

“I don’t know. My mother said likely--She leave me come to tell you,
but she said it was just as well.”

“Just as well?”

“Yes, she was helpin’ over there to-night; everybody is. He said to
tell you if you was afraid to stay here alone all night, to come back
down to his house with me; but my mother says she wouldn’t if she was
you, and anyway, there ain’t room.”

For a moment I was too stunned to be angry. Then I thought I might
as well take the matter easily. The child had no idea what he was
repeating.

“Tell the judge it will be all right,” I answered. “And tell your
mother-- Don’t tell your mother anything!”

He had admitted receiving his quarter, and he had frightened me so
badly that I would not offer him more. He backed away and slid through
the hedge, and then he ran.

However, I did not immediately reënter the house. With my cape wrapped
round me I stood outside, wondering what to do.

It was too late to go anywhere. Alf locked up the Sailor’s Rest at the
respectable hour of ten, and every cottage in the village was dark by
half-past. Even before that they would have given me scant welcome, for
I could tell from the remarks repeated by the boy that I had fallen
heir to the suspicion in which they held Mattie. The judge’s home, my
natural refuge, was full of sickness and of gossips, of bandages and
hostility. I was furious with the judge for breaking his arm. Why
didn’t he install a self-starter?

I considered the possibility of finding my way to the Winkle-Man’s or
to Mrs. Dove’s, my old laundress, but as I never had taken them into
my confidence before, it was literally too late to begin. I could not
imagine living in the town longer than to-morrow morning if I was found
in the position of begging lodging from door to door. And I had not
actually made up my mind to abandon the place altogether; the instinct
for home-making was too strong.

The night was damp and foggy, but still I lingered in the yard.

The old house fairly yawned with peace. Such a quiet, innocent,
companionable house! The five pine-trees swept the roof with the rhythm
of the sea in their misty branches.

My chance glance clung to them.

There was a red light in the tops of the trees.

The red light came from the skylight--the skylight of my house--in the
roof of the loft. The red light was shining from the little secret room.

Could it be a fire? No flames crackled up through the rotten
shingles.... Some one--? There had not been a sound to-night.

The red light made a glowing rectangle so bright that the roof was
invisible. It had the effect of being suspended high in space, like a
phantasmagoric banner of the witches. The outlines of four panes of
glass made a black cross upon it.

“The attribute of the apparition.... The aura of youth is red,” said
the savant.

I did not stay to take any photographs. I fled.

Like the boy before me, I backed out of the yard, stumbled through the
hedge, and then ran. Turning to look back, I saw that the skylight
still burned on redly through the branches of the pines.

I spent the night under an old dory on the beach.




CHAPTER XV

BEACH-PLUMS


Did you ever wake up looking at the inside of a boat?

My impulse to sit up came to an abrupt finish with a stunning blow on
the head, where the seat struck me across the eyes. I lay blinking at
it. The roof of the interior rounded over me securely, resting upon the
beach on one gunwale and on the other side leaving a tipped-up opening
under which I had crawled. Through this slit I could see waves curling
up at the water’s edge and was glad that whoever owned the dory had
pulled it well beyond the rising. Had it stood where the tide reached
it I would have been under it just the same.

I was wondering how I had come there and why, when two mammoth feet
crunched across the sand toward me. Before I had time to slide out of
my retreat, great hands turned the dory over and I was gazing into the
face of a fisherman. He held a pair of bleached oars under one arm and
from his hairy fist dripped a punctured bait-bucket.

“Gosh!” was all he said.

He set down his pail, dropped his oars, and, wiping his hands across
his mouth, sized me up with unmixed disapproval in which there was no
particle of respect.

I tried to twist my damp hair out of my face, but the pins had fallen
from it and were lost, and my dress, drenched with sea salt, clung to
me like the shriveled skin of a dead fish. I staggered to my feet, not
knowing how to explain myself.

But by this time the fisherman had his own line of attack well in hand.

“Where’s your partner?” he asked rudely.

“My--?”

“You don’t sleep down here on the beach alone, do you?”

The hot blood rushed to my colorless face, and for the first time that
dreadful foggy morning I felt warm. Who or what did the creature think
I was?

“You do not understand!”

He was pushing the dory across the beach with great sweeping pulls
along one side. “Oh,” he grunted, between jerks, “I--think--I--do!”

The evil imagination of these people was too much for me to cope with.
I could neither forestall nor refute it. I stood wretchedly watching
him, without trying to say a word in my defense.

Prow in the water, he turned back accusingly. “You been here before,”
he sneered; “night after night.”

“I haven’t!”

“I seen the marks in the sand!” His brute eyes leered at me. “What’s
your name?”

“I live in the House of the Five Pines,” I answered, with all the
dignity that five hours’ sleep on a wet beach could put into my limp
manner. “I’m the woman who bought it.”

With one foot in the dory, he looked me up and down.

“I thought as much!”

He pushed out into the bay.

I was sorry then that I had told him who I was. I ought to have
answered, “Maud Smith,” or something. I was only adding to the
ill-repute that surrounded that luckless dwelling and any one who
set his foot within it. Last night insinuations had been made about
my having asked the judge to stay with me; this morning a vile
construction had been placed upon my sleeping on the beach. For
innocence and charity and sweet faith in each other, let me commend the
country mind! It is as willing to wallow in scandal as a pig in mud.

After the fisherman’s appraisal I dared not face any one without going
back to the house and cleaning up. Ghost or no, some sort of toilet
would have to be made before I was ready to face the world. I felt
shaken and degraded, and as willing as any one else to believe the
worst about myself. Perhaps my traveling clothes would restore my
self-respect.

I was leaving.

       *       *       *       *       *

The green-shuttered door of the kitchen was open, as I had left it
last night, and, turning up the broken flagging, the house seemed so
beseechingly friendly that I was half-ashamed of my mood of hatred.
I was even willing to believe that the trouble was with me, instead
of with the house. It was not its fault that hateful mysteries had
attached themselves to it with the grafting on of the captain’s wing.
Probably the old house resented the secret room and the apparitions as
much as I did, for in its youth it had been highly respected, holding
its head above all the other houses on the cape. I felt the same sort
of pity for it that I had for myself after my recent experience on the
beach.

“We’re both old ruins,” I said to the House of the Five Pines. “We
ought to stick together.”

Everything within was just as I had left it, the door of the closet
downstairs locked and the one upstairs nailed. I felt like a deserter
all the time I packed my trunk. With tears in my eyes and a heavy pain
in my heart, I went out of the front door, which Jasper and I had
opened so hopefully, and closed it after me.

On the flagging was the boy from the telegraph-office, snapping a
yellow envelope at the tall grass as he loitered along.

“Is that for me?” I ripped it open before I paused to sign.

  Don’t give up house. Am returning Saturday morning. Wait.

                                                                 JASPER.

And this was Friday! Our trains would pass each other.

Well, if I were out of my mind, as I more than half-suspected, one
night more or less would not make any difference. A sanatorium was very
much like a jail. I put my hat and bag inside the door and wandered off
to think it over. This might be my last day of freedom.

I had no impulse to call on the judge. He could not help me solve
anything, because his point of view was too much like mine. Moreover, I
was still angry with him in an unreasonable way because he had failed
me last night. Why hadn’t he arrived quietly, as he had promised,
instead of getting into a scrape which necessitated explanations to the
whole town? He had no right to break his arm!

I took the back street and followed it to the edge of the village, and
there, in front of Mrs. Dove’s cottage, met her coming out of the white
picket-gate with a tin pail on her arm. She smiled as if the world were
just as usual and I one of her best friends. I was so surprised and
grateful to meet some one who still considered me a normal human being
that I could have kissed her.

“Do you want to join me?” asked Mrs. Dove. “I’m going to pick
beach-plums. If you are going to be a regular householder up here, you
ought to learn where to find them.”

“What do you do with them after you get them?”

I was already suiting my step to hers.

“Jelly.”

“Will you put mine up for me?”

“Why, the idea! Anybody can do it. There’s no trick to beach-plums.”

“But I want you to come down to the house to-night, and we’ll do them
together.”

“Down to your house?” Mrs. Dove looked at me strangely.

“There’s a good range in the House of the Five Pines,” I hastened to
add, “and everything is convenient.”

She opened her mouth and closed it again without speaking.

“You can stay all night with me,” I hurried on, before she had the
courage to refuse, “and we can work all evening.”

Mrs. Dove was flustered, but at last had an excuse. “Why, I don’t know
whatever in the world Will would say!” she answered, “I ain’t used to
going out nights, unless it’s to nurse somebody--”

I took hold of both of her hands, much to her embarrassment. “Mrs.
Dove,” I said, “pretend you are nursing me. The truth is, I’m afraid to
stay alone. To-morrow my husband will return. I’ll promise you, this is
the very last night.”

She drew back like a shy girl. “If that’s the case, I guess Will will
leave me come over.”

I drew a breath of relief. That settled that. I began to enjoy the
scenery.

We had passed the last straggling house, and, following the pike down
the cape, had come to a high, wide part of it where the dunes were
covered with coarse grass and bordered little fresh-water lakes.
Leaving the main road for a path between the rushes, we came to a
height which commanded a view of the sea in all directions--before
us, to the left, where the backbone of the cape turned east to the
mainland, and behind us, where it rounded northwest toward the outside
lighthouse. Three miles of moors separated us from its deep blue, but
it looked almost as close as the bay on our immediate right. At our
feet was a fourth bit of water, Pink Pond, where lilies were cut
in the summer and ice in the winter, a bright blue sheet bordered
with tall brown cat-tails. Far away, on the outside sea, jetties of
suspended smoke marked the passing of an invisible ocean liner; near at
hand, in the bay, rocked the fishing-boats; and at the entrance to Star
Harbor a government cruiser was turning its gray nose northward.

I remembered my sailor, whom I had promised to meet at three o’clock
this afternoon, but even as I wished that I might in some way take
advantage of his eagerness to help me smoke burst out of the black
funnels and the cruiser glided past the point. The sailor would have to
pursue his investigations of the psychic in some other port.

“Pretty, ain’t it?” said Mrs. Dove. “The beach-plums is further on.”

We found them growing on a hillside on stunted trees no larger than
bushes, as wild and untended as a patch of blackberries whose briers
were all around us and hindered our progress. They were a hard,
cherry-sized fruit all shades of ripening-red and purple, thick
upon each tree, but the trees were separated by clumps of sassafras
and the low brittle bayberry whose pale wax clusters are used for
candle-making. I tasted a beach-plum and found it juicy and tart, but
almost all pit.

“The green ones is good, too,” Mrs. Dove advised me. “They make it
jell.”

The day was as warm as Indian summer, now that the early fog had
melted, and the moist heat, oozing up from the humid ground, was
soothing to my tired body. The convolutions of my brain seemed to
uncoil and extend themselves into a flat surface, like a piece
of table-linen laid in the sun to bleach. I did not pick as many
beach-plums, perhaps, as Mrs. Dove, but I was more benefited by the
day’s work. I began to feel revived and almost normal.

“I brought lunch along,” announced my wonderful companion. She pulled
some paper-wrapped packages out of her capacious pockets, and we sat on
a rock and ate lobster-sandwiches and muffins spread with sweet butter
till I was ashamed. It seemed a long time since I had tasted anything
that I ate. I felt so grateful that I wanted to cry. Mrs. Dove sensed
my mood and my need, and kept right on mothering me.

“We’ll put the plums on as soon as we get back,” she said, “and have
some jam for supper, maybe, or to-morrow when your husband comes,
anyway. He’ll enjoy them; mine always does.”

It was hard to tell her that to-morrow I was going to leave, her plans
sounded so pleasant.

“That house is funny, Mrs. Dove,” I said; “I don’t know whether I will
live in it.”

“I thought you’d come to that!” she answered.

And another time, when we were picking plums, I tried again to explain
to her how things stood, because I felt that if she were going to be
any help to me she must know the truth about the House of the Five
Pines, in so far as that was possible.

“I know what you heard crying in the captain’s buggy, that night you
told me about when he brought Mattie home.”

And she said, “I’ve often wondered.”

“There’s a secret room in the loft of the captain’s wing; it’s a
child’s room.”

“You don’t say!”

“That’s why he wouldn’t ask any men to help him build it.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised.”

She bore with me in that patient way which country women have
of greeting life, expecting nothing and counting extraordinary
circumstances as merely phases of the conditions they have always
known. Something like children, to whom all things are strange and
equally incredible.

“How many have you in that poke?” she changed the subject. And when I
held up the juice-stained bag to show her, “We’ll keep on till we get a
gallon.”

We said no more, and nothing was heard but the thud of the beach-plums
as the fruit fell into her pail. I was so drowsy I did not pick very
fast.

“I bet they hated each other,” Mrs. Dove said, unexpectedly.

I had been thinking about Mattie and the New Captain, too; I thought of
little else. But the intensity of her remark, coming as it did out of
nothing and cutting the still afternoon like a curse, surprised me.

“Nobody could keep it up,” she went on deliberately, giving me the sum
of her silent rumination, “a secret like that. Always guarding, always
watching, always afraid the other one would do something to give it
away! Between watching it and each other they must have been wore out.
Beats me how old Mis’ Hawes never got on to it. She must ’a’ been dead.”

“It died before she did; I saw the little coffin in the vault.”

“How did it die?”

“I don’t know.”

“What did you go over to the cemetery for?”

“To see if the captain was in his coffin.”

“Was he?”

“Yes,--that is, the coffin was there; I didn’t open it.”

“I would ’a’!” said Mrs. Dove.

It struck me that she had put her finger on two weak parts of the
story. I was resting on the belief that I knew all there was to know
about the history of Mattie’s life, but it was true that I had not
looked inside any of the coffins, and it was equally true that I did
not know--yet--how the child met his death.

I was well enough informed in occultism by now to realize that this
spectral apparition had not put in its last appearance. It would keep
on coming, like Hamlet’s ghost, until its tragedy was explained. That
was what was keeping it near this plane, hovering about the scene of
its death till it had made itself understood. Not until the evil done
to it in life had been revenged could its spirit move on into the
higher astral regions and be at peace with the infinite. As long as I
did not know how the child had died, I might be sure of phantoms.

“Poor Mattie!” sighed Mrs. Dove.

“Her coffin wasn’t there,” said I.

“Of course not!”

“Where did they bury her?”

“They didn’t bury her.”

But before my horror had reached articulation she added,
absent-mindedly, “They never found her.”

I put my bag of beach-plums down and began to reconstruct my ideas.
What had been told me and what I had imagined were confused in my mind.

“Do you mean to say,” I asked, “that they never found Mattie out there
on the flats, caught in the lobster-pots after the tide had gone out?”

“Law!” said Mrs. Dove, “She went out with it. They scarcely ever gets
’em back from behind the breakwater. The current is too strong.”

I wondered why the judge had not told me that. He must have been
thinking of something else when I asked him where Mattie was. I
remembered his wide gesture toward the bay, which I had misconstrued
into meaning that she had been buried in some place other than the
family vault. Evidently I was the only one who knew she had committed
suicide. I had never told any one of the note I had found in the
bookcase, and I was glad now that I had not. Her message was safe with
me. I resolved that I would have a tombstone erected for Mattie in that
part of the cemetery which is sacred to those who are lost at sea.

At four o’clock we walked back to Mrs. Dove’s house and gained her
husband’s consent to her staying all night with me. We asked Mr. Dove
if he wanted to come, too, but he scorned the idea. And Mrs. Dove did
not urge it, I noticed; she seemed to think that this was something we
had planned by ourselves and that no men-folks were wanted. She divided
the beach-plums scrupulously in half, in spite of my protest, and soon
had my share simmering upon the range. The House of the Five Pines
relaxed and became filled with good smells and homelike noises and made
a pretense of being all that a house should be.

Mrs. Dove ran from room to room, exclaiming with enthusiasm over what
she found, just as Jasper and I had done. She was so pleased with
everything that she restored my courage.

“You never in the world are going to give this up,” she said. “I won’t
let you.”

The secret stairs did not interest her half as much as the Canton china
and the patchwork quilts.

“I never knew Mis’ Hawes had that pattern,” she would say; or, “It’s a
wonder they never put that out on the line!” I could see that she was
going to relish telling the rest of the town what the House of the Five
Pines contained. She was stealing a march on them.

“Didn’t you ever come here?” I asked.

She was scandalized at the suggestion.

“Nobody did. Not since old Mother Hawes died, anyway. And before that
we just used to talk to her through the window. That was her room, that
nice one across the hall in front of the dining-room. Shall we sleep
there?”

I showed her Mattie’s little room upstairs.

“But this is the hired girl’s bedroom,” she objected. “With all them
grand rooms furnished with mahogany, I don’t see why you should pick
this one out for yourself.”

I confessed to her my attachment for the little room in the loft behind
it and my feeling that if I did decide to stay here, this was the very
part of the house I would want.

“You never can tell about people,” said Mrs. Dove.

She was more moved by the reason for my desire to stay in the old house
than she had been by any of the mysteries.

“I would never have thought it of you,” she kept saying. And when she
took the beach-plum jelly off the stove and hung it up in a bag to drip
overnight, she added: “It’s just as well you are learning how to make
this. They like lots of it. I know. I raised seven.”

We let the cat in and went to bed. As I settled down behind the portly
back of Mrs. Dove, I reassured myself with the thought that in the
morning Jasper would surely be here and that, no matter what might
happen, this would be my last night in the House of the Five Pines.

One never knows.




CHAPTER XVI

THE FIFTH NIGHT


My sense of security was so natural that housekeeping was my last
thought. I fell to thinking of how I would have made over the room if
I had decided to stay in the house. The dark walls would have to be
painted lighter and the stuffy feather-bed changed for new box-springs.
I turned over and over, trying to find a place that was neither on the
hard edge of the frame of the bed nor directly under my comfortable
companion.

It was not easy to be neurasthenic when in the society of Mrs. Dove,
even if she was asleep. To look at her and hear her quiet breathing
was like watching a peaceful baby. All the repose of the country
was embodied in her relaxed form, from the tired hand resting on
the patchwork quilt, to the head indulging in its one vanity of
hair-curlers. I was wishing that Mrs. Dove had stayed at the house
on the four preceding nights when, unconsciously, I drifted off into
dreams. Nothing untoward could happen, I thought, when Mrs. Dove was
near. What I had needed was another woman to keep the vigil with me.

       *       *       *       *       *

The house was too still.

I woke up thinking that I heard something, but there was not a sound.

The tide was out and there was no noise of waves lapping the beach.
There was no wind and no murmur in the pine-trees. Then I heard what I
had heard before. Some one was crying!

Mrs. Dove slept on beside me, the high mound of the bed-clothes rising
regularly with her deep inhalations. If only I could sleep like that!
But in spite of the fact that I had gone to bed in peace and was
rested from my day in the sunlight, although I had been thinking happy
domestic thoughts dear to the heart of contented women and far removed
from overwrought nervous hallucinations, still I could not deceive
myself--I heard crying! They were weeping softly, in a smothered way,
as if they were trying not to be heard, as if they knew well they must
not allow themselves to be heard, but as if their grief had passed
beyond human control.

At the sound all my scant and precious reserve of courage was
dissipated. The calm repose of spirit that I had been developing during
the day was gone. The unearthly manifestation played on my chilled
heart. I was appalled.

It was such a wailing suffocated cry! Like some one in a nightmare, or
a child struggling in its sleep--or a child shut up in a room!... That
was it!

I tried not to comprehend the meaning of this horror. I wanted to hide
under the bed-clothes, but a voice rose above the weeping. I raised my
cowardly head to be sure that what I was straining to listen to was
there.... It was like the séance. I did not believe in it, but I heard
it just the same. The tones were not unlike those last faint whispers I
had heard in that eery hut on the sand-dunes. It was a woman’s voice,
frightened and trembling and shut away from me by two partitions, but
still I understood it.

“No-- No-- You can’t go! He would kill you if you ever got out.”

The cry was distraught and agonized, terrified as only a mother bird’s
is when the young robin hops out of the nest to the branch and a cat
crouches under the tree, or of a lioness whose cub is facing a coiled
snake at the mouth of her deep cave.

Some one moaned. I looked sharply at Mrs. Dove, but she was sleeping.
Had I uttered that despairing sigh myself, or was it only a fitful gust
in the tops of the five pine-trees?

Again there was wild weeping, and once more, barely distinguishable,
“_Don’t go! Don’t go!_”

But even that thwarted mother-love, defeated in life and restless in
death, could not hold back the elusive footsteps. I heard them start,
as they always had, to cross the room and try the doors and go up and
down the stairs.

Suddenly I remembered that after I had shown the secret way behind
the chimney to Mrs. Dove I had not wired or locked the doors again. I
had left everything open, thinking she might want to go up there, and
afterward we had forgotten. Guilt overwhelmed me. Something urged me to
go immediately and lock the downstairs closet. I felt that I had to do
this thing as much as if some one were telling me to and urging me not
to put it off. There was barely time if I was to turn the key before
twelve o’clock. And at the same time I felt that nothing I could do
would make any difference, that what was about to happen had happened
that way before. Afraid, but drawn on despite myself, I slipped out of
bed and down through the kitchen to the captain’s room.

There I stopped. Some one was in the room. I could not see any one in
the room, but I _knew_ some one was there. The moonlight flooded every
corner of it and the giant pine-trees outside cast great shadows that
ran like bars across the floor. The closet door was partly open, and
a faint red light shone through. But that there was something alive
in the room I felt so sure that I dared not take another step. I was
equally unable to go forward or to retreat. Then I heard soft steps
descending the chimney, heard them distinctly, as I had heard them that
night when I had slept down here in this room, only now I knew them for
what they were.

I strained to hear the latch lifted, but did not. This was my fault. I
had left the door open and it would slip out. Its mother would not want
it to get out!

I tried to call a warning, but it was too late. Something brushed
across the red crack of the doorway, something that was no more than an
ugly gesture, a hiss, or a black shadow. There was the sound of impact
and a blow, a body falling, a moan, a door banging. Then all was still.

The red aura had vanished.

“_Murder!_” I screamed.

I staggered back to the kitchen companionway, gasping and calling out,
“Help! Help! Murder!”

A light was descending the stairs and Mrs. Dove was behind it. She
stood on the step in her starched white night-dress, holding a candle
high above her curl-papers.

“Murder!” I sobbed, and threw myself at her feet.

“Why, dearie,” said Mrs. Dove, “I didn’t hear nothing.”




CHAPTER XVII

DAWN

  Four by the clock.
  Four by the clock. And yet not day;
  But the great world rolls and wheels away,
  With its cities on land and its ships at sea,
  Into the dawn that is to be.

  Only the lamp in the anchored bark
  Sends its glimmer across the dark,
  And the heavy breathing of the sea
  Is the only sound that comes to me.

                                         _Longfellow._


At dawn I leaned over and blew out the kitchen-lamp.

All night we had sat there shivering, with the wick burning down on the
table between us, not daring to go upstairs again nor even to move.
There had not been another sound, unless it was the well-nigh inaudible
drip of the beach-plum jelly where it hung in a cheese-cloth bag above
a yellow bowl.

Mrs. Dove was asleep now, her poor tired head upon her bare arms on
the table. In the growing light I saw a shawl upon a hook, which all
night had looked to me like a person hanging there, and I took it down
and laid it around her shoulders. Outside the fog still shrouded the
bay, so that nothing was visible. The faint outlines of houses along
the shore grew momentarily more solid. The lights of early risers
began to appear in the windows. Star Harbor had slept right through
the tragedy of the House of the Five Pines as it had been sleeping for
almost fifty years.

Determined to be ready to leave as soon as my husband returned, I
went back up the kitchen companionway to Mattie’s room to dress. The
bed-clothes were tossed wildly over the foot, where Mrs. Dove had
thrown them when she had dived for the candle and made her hurried
exit, but the rest of the room was as I had left it. I pulled the
bureau away from the little door and tried it. It was still nailed
tight. When I came down again Mrs. Dove was bending over the fire in
the range.

“Get me a few kindlings, will you, dearie?” were the first words she
said.

Without answering, I got them. Then she looked up and saw I had my hat
on.

“Why, wherever in the world are you going?” she asked.

“Home.”

“Don’t you do a thing,” she admonished, “until you have something to
eat.”

“How about yourself?” I tried to muster a smile.

“What, me? I’m all right. Don’t worry about me.”

She looked all right. She had found a skirt somewhere and tucked the
shawl into the belt of it, and put a mob-cap on over her curlers and
gone to housekeeping. How could she be so methodical after all that had
happened? I sat down meekly in a tall-backed rocking-chair beside the
red-clothed table, too weak to resist her ordered comfort, and before I
could check myself I had fallen asleep.

The hands of the banjo-clock on the wall were at ten when I sat up.
Mrs. Dove was pouring hot jelly into a row of glasses.

“It turned out fine,” she said. “Do you want a taste?”

I put my finger tentatively into the sticky saucer and suddenly woke
up, realizing that here was something delicious that I had never
tried before and that doubtless life still held many new sensations
if one had wit enough to enjoy them. But I had not. Housekeeping,
jelly-making, were nothing to me this morning. I had only one impulse,
one thought, one purpose--to leave.

The black cat came miawing around for her breakfast. It seemed strange
to me that after I had put her out in the storm that night she should
keep coming back.

“Which of your nine lives are you living, kitty?” I asked, endeavoring
to give her a caress which she avoided. The cat had never admitted that
I lived in her house.

“It might have been her you heard,” said Mrs. Dove, pouring out a
saucer of milk.

“If it was, she and Mattie are the same thing.”

“What do you mean?” asked Mrs. Dove sharply.

But I was too worn out to explain.

“I don’t know anything about such things,” said Mrs. Dove impatiently,
“and don’t you go thinking that you do, either. All I know is that
if you had put the cat down cellar, you could be sure it wasn’t her
prowling around.”

“Cellar? Why, there is no cellar.”

“Isn’t there?” asked Mrs. Dove. “Where did you think you was going to
put the jelly?”

“I hadn’t thought.”

The captain’s wing had so much space beneath it that, were it not for
the rubbish stored there, a cow could have walked under the floor
without grazing her horns. The rest of the house stood on open brick
piles.

“Don’t put away the beach-plum jelly at all,” I said. “I’ll take it
back to New York with me.”

“I wouldn’t be too sure till I saw my husband.”

Mrs. Dove belonged to a different generation.

“It’s time to meet him now,” I replied. “Will you be here when I come
back? We sha’n’t stay any longer than we have to, but I know he will
want to see things for himself. I’d like my husband to know you, Mrs.
Dove; you’ve been so kind!”

Mrs. Dove blushed. “I’ll just finish up here,” she answered. “I ain’t
in any hurry.”

She stood in the doorway, smiling comfortably, as I walked off. She
looked like part of the house as she lingered there, motherly and
pleasant, more congenial to it than Mattie had ever been or I would
ever have become.

“There is no use,” I thought, “in putting a foreign waif or a city
woman in a Cape Cod house. It simply refuses to assimilate them. It was
a grand adventure--but it is over!”

The Winkle-Man was mending his nets in the sail-loft when I passed. He
came to the doorway and called to me.

“Say, how about them vines and shrubs you asked me to get for you? Do
you want ’em to-day? It’s time to get ’em in before frost.”

“I’m leaving,” I confessed. “I’m giving up the house.”

Caleb Snow nodded understandingly.

“I been hearing things,” he suggested.

“What have you heard?”

“Well, that you was sleeping down on the beach the other night.”

So it was all over town!

“What else?”

“And that the judge broke his arm.”

“Well, what of that?”

“‘What of that?’” repeated Caleb. “That’s what I says to ’em: ‘What of
it?’”

They all must have been discussing me.

“I says,” Caleb continued, anxious to inform me of his defense in my
behalf, “that I didn’t blame you none.” He held out his hand gravely.
“You show your good sense by leaving.”

“And will you say good-by to the judge for me?” I asked. I felt all
choked up.

“Sure! Say, come back next summer and visit that lady friend of yours;
that’s the way to do it--visit! I never could see what anybody wanted
to buy one of them old houses for.”

A long whistle sounded.

“That’s your train,” said the Winkle-Man. “Oh, no hurry! It lets off
steam five miles down the cape.”

I began to run, and passed other people doing the same thing. Half a
dozen of us turned simultaneously at the crossing and arrived out of
breath on the platform. There was so little to do in Star Harbor that
it was easy to miss the only excitement. One got entirely out of the
habit of keeping engagements.

There were two Fords drawn up, an old white horse and phaëton, the
station-barge, and a two-wheeled wagon. A short-sleeved boy in one
of the jitneys kept honking his horn, trying to hasten trade. The
baggage-master importantly pushed his truck alongside the track, and
some loafers, who had been sitting on their heels against the station,
stood up. A sea-captain spit out his plug of tobacco and wiped off his
face with a red handkerchief. We were all ready.

With a great grinding of brakes and shouting of orders the cape train
rounded the curve and drew up at the end of the line. The engineer
leaned out of the cab and began a conversation where he had left off
yesterday with one of the yardmen. The mail and a bundle of newspapers
were thrown out and snatched away. A clinking of milk-cans sounded
from the baggage-car. Jasper was swinging off the last platform, and I
rushed toward him, suddenly and unexpectedly dissolved in tears.

He looked so different from any one whom I had seen in five days
that he seemed a magnificent stranger. He waved his hat, dropped his
luggage, and ran to meet me. When I felt his rough, tweed coat against
my face, I could hardly look up into his eyes. It was too much to
believe that this was my husband.

“Jasper,” I said, “I nearly died while you were gone.”

“So did I,” said Jasper, keeping his arm around me and gathering up
suit-cases with the other hand. “Horrible in the city! I don’t see why
people live there.”

He looked fagged, and I realized that he had been working hard and fast
to get back here the sooner. He had never understood that I was not
going to stay.

“I brought the typewriter.” He pointed out a square black box. “All
ready to go to work again. I suppose you’ve got things fixed?”

“No,” I answered helplessly. “Things aren’t ready at all.” Hating to
disillusion him, yet knowing I must get rid of my burden somehow, I
threw down three more words. “Not even lunch!”

“Not even lunch?”

The full significance of a disastrous domestic breakdown finally
overwhelmed him. “What do you mean, my darling? What is the matter up
there at the House of the Five Pines?”

So I told him, sitting down on the empty truck on the sunny platform
after the crowd had scattered, for I thought he might as well know
before going any further. There was no need in carrying suit-cases and
typewriters up the street, only to lug them back. The afternoon train
would leave at three, and I intended to take it.

Jasper listened in silence, giving me close attention and now and then
a little pat on the arm or a sympathetic squeeze. Toward the end, as I
came to the part about the séance and the aura and the fourth and fifth
nights, I could see that he wanted to interrupt me and was barely able
to restrain himself till I had finished. Then he jumped off the truck,
laughed, and said,

“Now I’ll tell you what is the matter with you.”

And because I looked so doubtful and pathetic, I suppose, he hastened
to add, “Oh, it’s nothing much, but it all works out so easily; it
doesn’t take a psychoanalyst to understand it!”

“What is it, then?”

“Self-hypnotism! No, don’t be angry!”--for I had turned away in
disgust; I had really thought he might elucidate the mystery. “It is
a pure case of materialization from the subconscious mind, drawing an
image of the subconscious across the threshold of consciousness and
reproducing it in sound, or motion, or color, or some other tangible
form. It is the same thing that the spiritualists take for evidence
of the return of the dead, but it is actually only the return, or the
recall, of dead thoughts.”

“I wouldn’t use the word ‘actually,’ if I were you,” I said.

“No, but wait. I have been listening to you for half an hour, and,
while it was very interesting, you must see, my dear--” Jasper looked
into my eyes so earnestly that I almost laughed, for I knew he thought
I was on the verge of insanity and I had a dreadful temptation to
convince him of it by giggling hysterically and not listening at all.
“You must see,” he repeated, “that these manifestations, these nightly
hallucinations, follow a regular sequence. First you fill yourself
up on the traditions of the house before you enter it. You do not
share them with any one, not even me, and the first night you are
subjected to a sort of dream about the headboard moving. I was here
that night, but I did not see it. Then you read a lot of stuff about
materialization, and when you try to go to sleep your disordered brain
conjures up footsteps.”

“My _what_?” I demanded.

Jasper did not bother to contradict his outrageous statement.

“The third night, after you had discovered the secret room, you
materialize the child who you have decided lived in it. The fourth
night, after you read about auras, you contrive one of your own in the
skylight. The fifth night you conjure up the scene of the murder which
was suggested to you by that fraud over there on the sand-dunes. By the
way, I’m going over there and have that place raided. He’s a fake. He
knew all about you. He’s the same colored man that came up on the train
with us last Monday.

“The only thing I’m not sure about is the cat. There is something
tremendously psychic about a cat. I haven’t gone into the science of
the occult very extensively, but I would not pretend to say that there
is nothing in it. The theory of reincarnation is just as plausible a
theory of what becomes of the spirit as any other, so far as I know.
Personally, I don’t believe or disbelieve anything.”

“I have heard you say so before,” I interrupted, “but you do believe
in the cat.” I was glad to point out to him that his logic was not
invulnerable. “There is not a soul living who is not superstitious
about something. Call it what you like. Say I am crazy and that the
cat is ‘actually’ the soul of a woman who is drowned. It is all the
same to me. But as the cat is left over from the régime of Mattie, her
soul must have been reincarnated before she died, which is spinning the
‘wheel of life’ a little fast, isn’t it?”

Jasper grinned.

“If we are going to walk back to the House of the Five Pines,” I
finished more amiably, “we had better start, or we shall miss the
afternoon train.”

We left the luggage, the new suit-case that Jasper had invested in and
the typewriter that he had carried for three hundred miles, and walked
off up the street. He told me then about his play that he had been
working over, and I tried to renew my interest in New York. Myrtle had
been dropped unconditionally and ignominiously, much to her chagrin.
She had attempted to get an interview with my husband for the purpose
of being reinstated by him over the expressed wishes of the manager,
but he had succeeded in avoiding her devices and had at last left the
city without seeing her at all. (“And I am dragging him back there!” I
said to myself.) Gaya Jones had persuaded Burton to try a young friend
of hers in the part of ingénue, and the two were doing such excellent
team-work that the play was swinging in triumph through its difficult
first six weeks and was billed to last all winter.

“I’m glad I’m through with it,” finished Jasper. “It’s funny how sick
you get of a thing, even a good thing, before you finish grinding it
out. I had no idea plays were so difficult. Writing them is all right,
but it’s a life job to get rid of them. I’m going to settle down here
and write a long novel. I’ve got it all worked out.” He began to tell
me the beginning. “It will take me all winter, and I’m not going back
to New York at all. I’m tired of that crowd. Quiet is what a person
needs. Christmas on the cape! How will that be?”

I stared at him mutely.

“What is the matter with you, my dear?” he asked. “You’ve told me
what is the matter with the house, but that’s nothing. If you think
anything is wrong with me--anything has happened,” he went on lamely,
“that would make any difference between us--why, you are wasting
your worries. Everything is just as I have told you, my darling, and
everything is all right. I want to be with you, and I am glad you found
this place. We can afford to live anywhere we please as long as ‘The
Shoals of Yesterday’ lasts. Why do you try and create obstacles?”

And I, who had been struggling for this very opportunity, who had
withstood the city and endured the country to this end, that we might
have a home together where we wanted it, was now the one to refuse what
I had longed for when it lay in the palm of my hand.

“I’m sorry, Jasper,” I said. “I’m terribly sorry. I know I was the one
to bring you up here, and now I won’t stay. But all I can say is that
I _am_ sorry, and that I _won’t_ stay. You take a look at the house
yourself.”

He took one long look inside the kitchen door and stopped short. Then
with an exclamation of horror, he dove out of sight. By the time I
stood where he had been standing, no one was there.




CHAPTER XVIII

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF MRS. DOVE


A yawning hole was in the center of the kitchen floor.

“Jasper,” I called, “where are you?”

“Here!” answered a far-off voice.

The kitchen oilcloth had been torn up and rolled to one side, exposing
a trap-door. I leaned over the edge and peered into a pit.

“Are you there, Jasper?”

“Yes.”

“Is Mrs. Dove there?”

“No.”

“Anybody else?”

“No, nobody but me; come on down.”

But on learning that he was safe, my fears leaped to the finding of
Mrs. Dove. If it was she who had opened up that trap-door, or if some
one had unfastened it from underneath, I was terror-stricken. What had
burst forth, and what had happened to her?

“Mrs. Dove!” I called out. “O Mrs. Dove!”

There was chowder scorching in the bottom of a kettle on the stove,
which she must have forgotten. I ran through the house, looking into
corners and stairways for her and crying everywhere, “Mrs. Dove!”

But there was no one in them; the rooms were so quiet that they seemed
to have been deserted for a long time.

Jasper’s voice followed me. “Come here!” he kept shouting.

I let myself backward through the trap-door in the kitchen floor and
felt the top rung of a ladder under my feet. The next rung was gone,
and I slid. Jasper caught me.

We were in a circular underground room, like a dry cistern, about
twelve feet across, with plastered sides and a damp earth floor. The
first thing I saw was a mattress, strewn with clothing, overalls,
shirts, and trousers. On a hanging shelf were quantities of cans, some
of them empty. A portable stove with dozens of boxes of condensed
cubes showed how cooking had been done. I remembered the coffee I had
smelled, not made by human hands. There was a can of oil and a pail
half-full of water. I picked up a ship’s lantern with a red bull’s-eye.

“The aura,” said I, handing it to Jasper.

“The what?”

“The aura.”

But he had never seen it; the red light meant nothing to him.

“Look!” he said; “he got out that way!”

In the gloom I made out double wooden doors halfway up the further wall
of the round room, one of which was open, but through which came no
light. I followed his lead up over a box that had been placed beneath
them, and found myself in the “under.” We crawled out from behind a
boat which concealed and darkened the entrance, and discovered that we
were banked in on every side by the stuff that had been stored there.

“What is it all about?” asked Jasper.

“I hardly know myself,” said I, “but those doors must have been in
plain sight at the back of the house, if they were there before the
captain’s wing was built. The rubbish thrown in here from year to year
has covered them up. Perhaps they used that place for something.”

“Some one is using it now, all right,” said Jasper. “Who do you think
it is?”

“Oh, don’t ask me.”

I doubled up in a heap on an old wheelbarrow. Neither of us could stand
upright, or we would have bumped our heads on the flooring. Jasper was
leaning over me, uncertain what to do.

“Go and find Mrs. Dove!” I wept. “Run down to her house on the back
street; she may have gone there, if she got away at all. And bring her
husband back with you.” I pointed out the direction from beneath the
house. “Run! We’ve got to find her. Hurry!”

Jasper, with a perplexed glance at the chaos he was leaving, dashed
off down the yard. If I had had my wits about me, I should never have
sent him. He had no sooner left than I heard something moving. Peeping
between the heaps of piled-up furniture, I saw two legs vanishing
upward at the further end of the “under.”

“Mrs. Dove!” I called wildly. But Mrs. Dove did not wear red rubber
boots.

I began crawling over to where they had disappeared, and found a well
defined path in that direction, as if the broken beds and old chests
had been drawn aside to make it possible for some one, crouching, to
reach the further end of the “under” without being seen.

Standing upright at last, in the higher part beneath the chimney, I
suddenly realized that I had raised myself much too far. What was I
looking at? My head had passed the floor and my eyes were on a level
with the captain’s room. There was the old rosewood desk and the cat
asleep in the rocking-chair. Wheeling about, I confronted the back
entrance to the secret stairs.

I had stood up directly under the chimney-closet, whose whole floor was
lifted against the wall. There it was, to one side, with the hasp that
had fastened it from underneath hanging loosely. In the hasp was an
open padlock.

I had no time to wonder how it came to be that way or why I had never
noticed it before. Some one had just opened this door and gone through
it. He was still going. I could hear him on the secret stairs.

We were not so far behind the ghost as I had thought. I swung myself
up into the opening, but could climb no further. Horror held me and
gripped me from above and from below. What was I chasing? What would I
find? I slammed the trap at my feet, which comprised the entire floor
of the closet, and, stepping on it firmly, wired shut the door of the
secret stairs. It would be futile to lock the door of the closet that
led into the captain’s room. I wondered how many times that strong
looking copper wire had been unfastened and fastened again, while I
remained oblivious beyond the further door. As I wound the wire around
the hook all was silent, but when I had finished and had withdrawn I
heard footsteps crossing overhead. I ran through the kitchen, skirting
the great rolled-up oilcloth and avoiding the opening in the floor,
and climbed the kitchen companionway three steps at a time. I must be
sure that the little door above was still nailed shut, and as a double
precaution I shoved the bureau once more in front of it.

“If you can’t get out by night,” I muttered, “you won’t get out by day!”

The footsteps came to the inside door of the eaves closet, tried the
latch, shook it furiously, and, leaning against it, shoved with mortal
might. But the mirror of the bureau did not move, the door on the
further side of the eaves closet held, and the frail partition remained
firm. I heard the footsteps start the other way, and ran down to watch
results.

In the kitchen doorway two men were standing, open-jawed. I did not
even pause to see who they were, but dashed on into the captain’s room,
and was in time to see the latch of the secret door raised stealthily,
then dropped, then clicked again. Some one rattled and shook it, but it
would not open.

I smiled grimly.

“It’s different, isn’t it,” I said, “when some one wires it up after
you get in? You’re human, you are; you can’t get out of there any more
than I could!”

“Who are you talking to?” asked the judge. It was he who had arrived
with his arm in a sling, and Alf had followed him.

“I don’t know,” said I. “Wait a while and we will all find out.”

They seemed in doubt as to how to take this information.

“What’s up?” asked Alf, pointing to the kitchen floor.

“You can see,” I answered.

“I see the door open to the round cellar, but what for?”

“You know as much about it as I do! Why would any one build a round
cellar?”

“So the sand can’t wedge off the corners. You know,” Alf reminded me,
“I told you they didn’t build cellars on the cape. Well, they don’t,
not regular ones, but that’s the kind they do build. Round, like a well
under the kitchen, to keep food cool.”

“Sure,” said the judge, seeing the doubt in my eyes. “All the good
houses have them. I’ve got one myself.”

“I never heard of such a thing,” said I. “But then,” I added, “there
are so many things I never heard of.”

“That reminds me,” said the judge. “I heard you was leaving. We came to
say good-by.”

“I haven’t got time to go just now,” I answered.

“I brought this back.” The judge showed me a wooden sign he was
carrying--“For Sale. Enquire Within.”

Much good it had ever done any one to enquire within!

“I’m glad we got here when we did,” said Alf. “Looks as if we was in on
the killin’.”

I winced. I was strung so taut that every word vibrated on naked
nerves. I could hear the footsteps over my head, pacing back and forth,
as they always did, trying one door and then the other, and I knew,
with nameless dread, that whatever they were, this would be the last
hour they would walk that floor.

“What became of Mrs. Dove?” asked the judge.

“Oh,” I broke down, “I don’t know! I wish I knew!”

He picked up the great iron poker that had once mounted the secret
stairs with me and weighed it speculatively.

“I guess that’s all right,” he said, “for a one-armed man to handle.”

Jasper came running back across the yard with Will Dove, who carried a
shotgun, and Caleb Snow, whom they had annexed with his winkle-fork.

“Did you find any one?” shouted Jasper.

We motioned to him to be quiet and pointed to the room above.

“How about Mrs. Dove?” I asked anxiously.

“Oh, she’s all right,” said her husband; “she’s to home.”

The men fell silent, listening to the ominous footsteps that crossed
and recrossed the ceiling.

Will Dove began to whisper. “My wife, she thought”--we all drew closer
together--“she had to find a place to put the beach-plum jelly--she’s
like that! She looked all over the rooms, and then decided she would
rip up the kitchen oilcloth and see what was below. And there it
was--the door to the round cellar! While she was taking up the tacks
she kept hearing noises, so she thought she must be right and kept on
going. Maybe it was rats running around. She ain’t afraid of rats.

“The trap wasn’t locked, just covered over, and she jerked it up and
was going down, when she see a man in there.

“‘Who’s that?’ she yelled.

“He never answered, but he disappeared! He wasn’t there any more! She
looked down, and lit a candle and held it over, but he was gone. She
could see where he had been livin’, but it was empty.

“That was too much for her. My wife ain’t afraid of rats _or_ men, but
that cellar was too much for her. She cleared out by the kitchen door,
and run all the way home. I can tell you I was scairt myself, the way
she looked when she come pantin’ in. She ain’t a hand to carry on; I
never seen her that way; and when she said there was something wrong
over here--why, I believed her. I was just thinkin’ about puttin’ my
hat on, when he,” indicating Jasper, “showed up! Then the missus she
had another fit. She says it must have been the captain livin’ down in
the round cellar the last five years, ever since he was supposed to be
dead, and if it was, he was a crazy man by this time, and it was all
tom-foolishness to leave the lady here in the house with him loose. And
if it wasn’t the captain, it wouldn’t be anything that we could catch
anyhow, but for the Lord’s sake to hurry!”

As he stopped whispering the footsteps upstairs ceased. There was a new
sound. Something was being dragged across the floor.

We did not stand and talk about it any longer. The judge seized the
poker and vanished up the kitchen companionway.

“Even a man with a broken arm can guard a door that’s nailed tight
shut,” he called back.

Will Dove made for the front door.

“I’ll watch outside,” he said. “I’ve got a gun.”

The other three men fell into a single file. Jasper flourished a gourd
that had hung over the sink; Alf had a great glass paperweight; Caleb
Snow came last, with his winkle-fork ahead of him.

“Good-by,” said Jasper. “I may never see you again!”

I laughed, and to my own ears it had a horrid sound.

“It’s more likely,” I answered, “that you won’t see anything up there.”

Simultaneously they turned and frowned at me, as if they did not like
the strangeness of my remark. Jasper leaned down and whispered,

“Steady, dear!”

But what I said was true.

I unwired the door, and as they crept up the secret stairs fear
fastened my feet to the spot on which I stood.

The dragging and pushing noise increased. There was the crash of glass,
and before any one realized what was happening a black shadow slid
down off the roof. I ran to the window and saw a little old man pick
himself up off the ground and crawl quickly under the house.

At the same time Will Dove’s gun went off, wildly. He had aimed for the
skylight, and knocked off two shingles.

“Quit that!” called one of the men above. They were rushing about the
empty room, wrenching open the doors of the eaves closet, trying to
mount through the hole in the roof and getting in each other’s way.

I let myself down the ladder into the round cellar just as the ghost
came scrambling into it by the outside door.

The little scuttling figure wilted down in a heap at my feet upon the
earthen floor. Confronted by me, when he thought he had reached a
haven, the pitiful thing collapsed. Raising hunted eyes, clawing at my
skirt with skinny hands, he moaned in a queer thin voice, “Save me!”

The oilskin hat fell back from the creature’s head, and there was the
scraggly, drawn-back, wispy gray hair of _a woman_. I had seen that
face and heard that voice before, and in spite of the flannel shirt and
rubber boots, in spite of the fact that she was drowned, I knew that I
looked at Mattie!




CHAPTER XIX

I HIDE THE GHOST


I could hear the men above me, like bloodhounds on the trail.

Will Dove, following his shot, had rushed off down the back street,
hoping to find what he had aimed at. I drew down the cellar doors which
opened beneath the house and locked them, just as Alf began to prowl
around the “under.”

“Stay here!” I whispered.

Mounting the ladder, I shut the trap-door before the judge had time to
negotiate the kitchen companionway.

“There is no one in the round cellar,” I lied.

And he was saying, “No one entered Mattie’s room.”

“Look over on the back street,” I advised, and so got rid of him.

To every one I met I gave the same word; “I saw him jump off the roof
and escape that way,” pointing in the direction Will Dove had taken,
and seeing his retreating figure yelling and brandishing the shotgun
they did not lose any time in following. The house was soon cleared.

Only to Jasper did I say, at a moment when no one heard me, “Wait, I’ve
caught the ghost!”

But as soon as I had said it I regretted confiding in him. Unequal to
facing the horror alone, he immediately set up a shout after the last
man in sight, “Hi, wait a minute!”

Luckily the Winkle-Man did not hear him and kept on going. He had
tripped on his long fork two or three times and was desperately trying
to catch up.

“Before they return,” said I, “look here!” And I opened the trap and
led Jasper down the ladder.

A huddled figure lay prone upon the earth where it had fallen, as if it
had not moved since I had left.

“What?”

“Stop!” I cried, for Jasper would have wrenched the creature to its
feet. “Can’t you see?” I turned the lifeless body over and tried to
raise it from the damp floor. “Help me lift her on the mattress!”

Jasper caught hold of the limp form, and at the feel of the light body
in his strong arms exclaimed again, “What--what is it?”

“It’s Mattie,” said I. “Don’t you understand? Mattie ‘Charles T.
Smith.’”

“She’s not dead?” he asked.

“I hope not!”

I bathed her face with water from the pail and made her limbs lie
comfortably.

“I think we had better leave her here till she comes to,” I said. “I
don’t want all those men pursuing her.”

“Just as you say,” he answered. He was nonplussed and confused, willing
to let me manage matters any way I wanted to. “Suppose you stay down
here and watch, and I’ll go up to the door and head them off if they
come back. If you want anything, call. I’ll be right near.”

Jasper went up the ladder again, and I sat down beside the prostrate
form of Mattie and waited for her return to consciousness.

The round cellar was dark now. Early dusk was stealing the light of the
short autumn day, and except for the shaft of strained sunshine that
seeped through the trap-door the pit was dark. I opened the doors into
the “under,” but only a faint ray filtered in from behind the boat.

“How gloomy it always must have been!” I thought. “If it had not been
for that outside door, she would not even have had air. I suppose it
was when she was going for water to the spring in the woods that the
half-witted child saw her and told people it was the New Captain. That
was what she wanted every one to think! She has always counted on
that.... She must have gone out of here through the ‘under’ and up the
stairs to the secret room every night. But why?”

“I went because I always went,” said Mattie.

Had I been talking aloud or had she answered my unspoken thought?
Startled, I looked at the prone figure of the haggard woman in the
tattered overalls and saw she had not even opened her eyes but was
lying in the same exhausted position in which we had dropped her--that
not a muscle moved, except for the faint breathing of her flat chest
and her trembling jaw. She was speaking, or trying to speak again, and
I leaned over her in the dark to catch every precious word. It was as
if I listened to the unrelated utterances of an oracle. No one could
tell whether Mattie would recover from this wanton chase or live
through her devastating imprisonment. Each syllable, I thought, might
be her last, and whatever clue she gave was important.

The house above me, where Jasper sat waiting on the doorstep, was so
silent that I thought perhaps he might be able to hear her talking. I
took hold of one of Mattie’s claw-like hands and stroked it gently.

“I went--up there,” the fluttering voice repeated, “because I always
went. Every night of my life I spent in that room--ever since--it
happened.”

“Yes, Mattie,” I whispered, trying not to frighten her.

“Jerry was a beautiful boy,” murmured Mattie. “Jerry--we named him for
his grandfather--but his grandmother never knew it. Don’t you think his
grandmother would have liked to know it?”

“Yes, Mattie.”

“You would never have forgotten him if you had ever seen him.”

“I shall never forget him now,” I said softly.

“No one ever saw him.”

The burden of her life came back to her as she regained consciousness
completely. Tears trickled down her withered cheeks beneath her closed
veined lids.

“No one ever saw him,” she repeated.

I was crying.

It was Mattie who sat up weakly and laid her thin arm around my shaking
shoulders, the mood of motherliness so strong in her that she could
protect even her worst enemy.

“Don’t take on,” she said; “it can’t be helped. It never could be
helped.”

But I wept on and would not be comforted. For the five nights that I
had spent listening to her presentation of her story, and the five days
I had wondered whether it were true, and for all the empty days of
Mattie’s life, and the lost opportunity of her neighbors and the lonely
people whom she served, tears of contrition coursed unchecked.

“Mattie,” I sobbed, “what can I do for you, what can I do for you?”

She answered my question strangely.

“I’m ready to go,” she said.

I thought she meant that she was prepared to die.

Jasper could not stand the sound of crying any longer and had descended
the ladder. When she saw him she looked worried, swung her two feet in
their absurd boots to the floor, and stood up shakily.

“You can take me to the town home now,” she said, with a brave little
swagger.

Jasper and I were too surprised to speak.

At the amazement on our faces she became disconcerted herself. A new
terror assailed her.

“Or is it the jail you will take me to, eh? Is it against the law to be
a ghost?” She staggered back against the white-washed wall.

Jasper caught her in his arms.

“Here,” he cried to me, “let’s get her out of this! Put her in bed, for
Heaven’s sake. We’ve been down in this cave long enough!”

“Where are you taking me?” she implored.

“To your own room,” said I; “to the gabled room over the kitchen, where
you belong.”

Between us we managed her, and as I laid her down once more and
stripped off the captain’s ridiculous old clothes, and dressed her in
a decent nightgown and tucked her in between the linen sheets with a
hot-water bottle, she said brokenly,

“Seems as if I couldn’t stand havin’ you sleep in my bed.”

“I know. It won’t be that way any more, I promise you.”

Jasper went back to his vigil on the doorstep.

Mattie looked from me to the bureau and the nailed-up door.

“You’ve changed things,” she mumbled drowsily, and then; “my, but you
are a brave woman!”

I smiled, and she smiled, too.

“I thought you would leave the house after the first time,” she
continued. “I didn’t mean to do it before you come--not when I wrote
that note. I never meant to bother you. Did you get a letter from me in
a book?”

“Yes.”

“But afterward, when I knew you was asleep in my room, the both of you,
I just gave way and threw myself against the little door. I didn’t care
if you found me and settled things then and there, but you didn’t do
nothing. You never did.”

“No,” I answered, “I didn’t think you _were_ anything--but my
imagination.”

Mattie turned her face from me.

“You didn’t imagine nothing,” she replied.

My heart stood still.

“I didn’t make anything up. I just went over and over it, like I always
done, in my mind. Seems as if I never thought of anything else ever
since.”

“Then the only psychic thing,” said I, more to myself than to her, “was
thought-transference.”

I fell silent, but Mattie knew what was in my mind.

“That last night--” she began, and seemed to strangle.

“Hush, Mattie, it’s all right; nobody believes anything about that
fifth night but me, and I’m your friend!”

Her eyes burned into mine, beseechingly.

“I believe you are.” And then her feeble fingers began to pick at the
basket-pattern in the quilt. “I never had none,” she said, at length.

“Mattie,” I tried to make her understand, “you have me now to take care
of you, and you can have this room and stay here as long as you live.”

“I can still work,” said Mattie, with a tired sigh.

“No, I don’t mean that. I don’t want you to work for me. I just want
you to be here and be one of us, and--if you can--be happy.”

Mattie shook her head as if she hardly believed me.

“That is,” I added, “if you are willing to let me and my husband live
here, too.”

Her answer surprised me.

“Have you any children?”

I looked at her and hesitated, blushing to the roots of my hair.

“Why, no.”

“I’d be more glad to stay,” said Mattie, “if you had some children.
Oh, don’t go away! I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings after you’ve
been so kind to me, and all. I only meant there’s plenty of room in
the house for all of us, and room for more than us, too.... Because it
always seemed to me, when people were married and everything was easy
for them, and everybody knew it and was glad, and would bring them
presents--wedding-presents and silver spoons for christenings--and they
could show the little dresses all around--well, I don’t understand it,
that’s all, them not having any.... You must excuse me.”

I wished that Jasper had heard what she said, just as she said it, for
I never could repeat it to him in the same way, although I went right
downstairs and tried.

We sat for a long time on the doorstep talking it over and
reconstructing our lives to suit new necessities. Building our lives
around the house, one might have called it, instead of building a house
around our lives. It was easy to do that, with a home like the House of
the Five Pines. A life built around the way we had been living hitherto
would have been as difficult as growing ivy on a moving-van.

“The only disappointment is our room,” I said. “I have given it back to
Mattie.”

“Well, there are three other bedrooms upstairs,” replied Jasper, “and
one down.”

Probably he would never understand how much that little room, where so
many things had happened, had come to mean to me.

“The nursery is all ready,” I continued, following my own train of
thought; “and a nurse is living with us who not only will never leave,
but fairly begs that we give her something to rock to sleep.”

My husband smiled, and put his hand over mine as we lingered there in
our doorway, in the starlight.

       *       *       *       *       *

Our intimate conversation was interrupted by Caleb Snow and Judge Bell,
who came back tired and discouraged from the chase on which I had sent
them. Will Dove had dropped off at his own house on the way back from
the woods, and Alf had been obliged to give up the hunt long ago and go
back to the Sailor’s Rest for supper.

“So it was Mattie!” said the judge, trying to cover his disappointment.
“I thought so all the time.”

“Yes, you did!” The Winkle-Man waxed indignant. “You didn’t know no
more who it was than the rest of us.”

“Didn’t I keep telling Will Dove not to fire that gun off in the woods?”

“Sure! You says that he couldn’t hit nothin’ _with_ nothin’; that’s
what you says!”

“Well, I meant that it was either Mattie or her ghost.”

“I don’t know what _you_ meant,” said Caleb, “but when _I_ told him to
quit shootin’ I meant I was gosh-darned afraid he was goin’ to hit me.”

They continued their argument as they went down the street, and Jasper
and I sat and smiled. They were not half so surprised as I thought
they would be. They had lived too close to the sea to be much amazed
at anything. If we wanted to keep Mattie and take care of her, they
had no objections. The ways of city people were inexplicable, but as
we had taken the burden of decision off their hands, they were glad
to be relieved. The future of Mattie “Charles T. Smith” would not
rest with the town council and the town home, nor would her financial
needs embarrass the tax-payers. They eased their conscience by saying
we would not be bothered very long. Consoling us and congratulating
themselves, they went off arguing. It was something, after the trouble
of their long evening’s hunt through the woods, to have the glory of
spreading the news.




CHAPTER XX

JEZEBEL


“But what made her do it?” asked Jasper.

We had gone into the house and prepared a supper, and as it was
the first meal either of us had eaten since early morning, we were
sitting a long time at the kitchen table. The oil-lamp shed a cosy
radiance over the blue china on the red checkered cloth, and a bowl of
golden-rod between four brass candlesticks added a touch of festivity
to our late repast. We had begun our home-making.

“She wanted to frighten us away,” I answered.

“Do you think she was here, all those weeks before we moved in, after
they thought she was drowned?”

“She never left the house, I fancy; she moved into the cellar. You see,
Jasper, she always thought the place belonged to her. All her life she
had known no other home, no other way of living, except here. She could
not allow herself to be evicted, because she had nowhere to go. The New
Captain left her nothing to live on, and she had no earning capacity.
You heard how those men talked. She would have become an unwelcome
public charge, and she had suffered too much from the townspeople to
tolerate having them support her. She preferred death.”

“Well, then, why didn’t she really drown herself, instead of just
pretending she did?”

“Ah, that is different,” I answered; “that leads us out of practical
speculation into the realms of psychology. She was not that kind of
person.”

I had thought so much about Mattie that it seemed to me she was
perfectly apparent in her motives and sane in her actions.

“To each one who takes his own life there must be five who go to the
brink of death and, looking over its fearful abyss, retreat again
and let their bark drift on the tide without them. It has never been
demonstrated that people who take their lives in their own hands do
better with it than God. The wreckage of one’s life is mostly caused
by self. Mattie was the sort of person who does not take any sinful
initiative, but to whom life is a whiphandle. The crimes of those
around her made her what she was. In other circumstances she would have
been what is known as ‘a good woman.’ The old mother who refused to
let them marry might have had enough determination to have committed
suicide if she had wanted to, but not Mattie. Or the New Captain might
have taken his own life, for he took Mattie’s life and spoiled it, and
her son’s--and willed her home away from her in his evil legacy after
he had no further use for it himself.”

Jasper motioned for me not to speak so loud.

“Do you still believe--about the boy--what you told me coming from the
train?”

“More than ever,” I answered sadly.

We did not want to question Mattie. We felt that the repose due her
spirit was as important as that which must resuscitate her weakened
body, if she was ever to be a normal human being again. And so for
months, all the time that we were getting ready for winter on the
cape, we learned nothing more about her story.

The walking up and down of the first three nights was self-evident, as
was the bending wall and the swinging mirror; the aura had been created
by her natural need for light and the fact that her only lantern
happened to be red. That I had only seen the aura on the night I read
the occult magazine was not her responsibility; she must have always
had the lantern with her when she went up to the secret room. It was
the boy who arrived with the message from the judge that tempted me
outside, where I happened to see the red light shining through the
skylight. The séance was more readily understandable when one day
Mattie happened to mention casually that she was afraid to go to the
spring for water because once, when she was masquerading, she had met a
colored man there late at night who asked her questions. The rogue had
not known who she was, but he had doubtless followed her and guessed
enough to piece out a plausible spirit for his control to interpret at
the séance.

It was not until one quiet evening the following winter, when we
three sat in front of the blazing fire in the captain’s chimney, as
was our custom, that Mattie brought up the subject of the fifth night.
We had been snow-bound for a week, and the white frost sparkled on
the crust of the drifts when I opened the door upon the starlight and
let in Mattie’s cat. The creature had been hunting fish too long on
the icy shore and was stiff with cold, despairing in its dumb way of
regaining our hospitality before it froze to death on the doorstep. It
bounded into the house like a bad omen, as it had done that day before
the hurricane, and dashed through the kitchen and into Mattie’s arms,
leaping upon her before she could straighten herself up in her chair
and shake off her fireside doze. She tumbled the cat back to the hearth
and looked at it reproachfully.

“That’s the way you done, Jezebel, that night you seen me through the
crack in the door,” she said. “You jumped at me as I was carrying
my lantern down them steep steps and knocked me over. I had hardly
time”--she turned to us with her wistful crinkled smile--“to get back
down through the trap-door. I thought sure you would catch me.”

“I didn’t try,” said I, and Jasper laid down his book and
leaned forward intently to listen. “I thought it part of the
manifestations--the way that the New Captain murdered his son.”

There was an acute silence, broken by the pine-logs crackling higher in
the fireplace.

Mattie put her hands across her eyes to shield them from the blaze.

“It was,” she whispered.

The fire died down again. We waited. But she said no more. After a
while she rose, as if weary of her own thoughts, and said she would go
up now to her room. At the doorway she turned back to us.

“Only I never intended to tell you,” she faltered. “I never meant it to
go so far, not so far as that. That was what I didn’t want you to know.”

So we always pretended that we did not know.

The part that Jezebel played was one of those coincidences of
life which make of tragedy a greater drama in the living than the
presentation of it can ever be.

       *       *       *       *       *

If you are ever in Star Harbor the House of the Five Pines will be
pointed out to you as one of the show places.

There is a high, well trimmed box-hedge along the street, but if you
look through the gate you will see the wide, close-cut lawn, with
its old-fashioned rose-garden and the sun-dial on one side, and on
the other the children’s playground, with the slide and the seesaw
and the little fountain they love for the birds’ bath. The flagging
to the green-shuttered portal is just as it used to be, but both the
doors with their brass knockers stand wide open. Against the clean
white house hollyhocks paint their gay faces and lean upon the kitchen
lovingly. Ruffled dotted-muslin curtains at all the square-paned
windows show that people live within to whom no detail of housekeeping
is too much trouble. You cannot see the garage that has been built
beneath the captain’s wing in place of the “under” filled with rubbish,
but if you will walk along the back street, after you have finished
staring in from the front, you will notice the driveway that curves
past the new entrance cut in the rear, behind the hall, and you will
see the playhouse made out of a boat. The children will be there,
romping, taking turns riding their old hand-made rocking-horse; and
the loving arbiter of all their quarrels is that little gray-haired
woman in the soft black dress who sits knitting peacefully in the
shadow of the five pines.




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:


Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.