CHAPTER XIITHE 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 stageand 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.
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 offat 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 muchmyhouse andmymystery 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 backin 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 ambiguouslytoward 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 beenlying 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.”
“Pleasedon’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 namescarved 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 againstthe 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 immediatevista, 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.”