CHAPTER V.THE TRAGEDY.
“Next mornin’, about eight o’clock, Mari come to the tarvern to know where Mr. Dalton was, that he didn’t come home.
“‘He did go home,’ says Dot’s ancestor.
“‘He didn’t come home,’ says Mari, ‘and Miss Dalton is dreadfully worried for fear he’s sick. Never slep’ a wink, and kep’ a candle burnin’ all night.’
“I don’t know what put it into his head to think somethin’ was wrong, but he did,—Dot’s ancestor, I mean, and why the plague can’t I think of his name! I know it as well as I do my own. Here, Jeff, you rascal, come here,” he called, as the boy came leaping across the end of the piazza like a young deer. “Go and ask Miss Taylor the name of her ancestor who kep’ the tavern when Mr. Dalton was killed.”
Jeff disappeared with a bound and summersault, while his master continued: “Queer boy that, but smart as a steel trap. He’s descended from Mari, who lived with Miss Dalton. A good boy, but queer motioned,—never stands still. Jumps round like a grasshopper,—turns summersets, one after another, till it makes you dizzy to see him. Reads all the trash he can git hold of about pirates and Injuns runnin’ through the bushes. Told the parson, when he asked him what he was goin’ to be when he grew up, that he s’posed he or’to be a minister, but he’d rather be a robber. Dot thrashed him for that and shut him up in the back chamber without his supper. But, my land, he was out in no time. Clum’ out of the winder,—slid down the lightnin’ rod and went rollin’ off like ahoop on the grass. Here he comes. What did she say, Jeff?”
“She said his name was Joel Butterfield, and she didn’t see what you was borin’ Mr. Mason with that story for,” was Jeff’s reply, as he went hippy-te-hopping away.
“Be I borin’ you?” Uncle Zacheus asked, and Craig replied: “Not in the least. I’m greatly interested, and shall be more so when you get to the pith of the matter. Pray, go on. Mari had come to ask why Mr. Dalton didn’t come home, and Mr. Butterfield, your wife’s ancestor, suspected something wrong. That’s where you left off.”
“Jess so; Joel Butterfield; funny I couldn’t remember his name. I did think ofcheese. Wall, he was wonderful for smellin’ a rat, jess like Dot; she’s allus smellin’ things when there’s nothin’ to smell. Says he,—that’s Joel, I mean,—says he to Mari, says he, ‘Was anybody to your house last night?’ First she said there wasn’t; then she said there was, but she didn’t see ’em. ’Twas Monday, washin’ day, and Miss Dalton’s washin’s was big; allus wore white gowns in the summer. Had two in the wash that day, and four white skirts, and Mari was tired and went to bed early and dropped asleep at once. Bimeby she waked up and heard a man’s voice speakin’ to Miss Dalton, low like. Thinkin’ it was Mr. Dalton, she went to sleep agin, and didn’t wake till mornin’, but had bad dreams, as of a scuffle of some kind. When she asked Miss Dalton who was talkin’ if ’twasn’t Mr. Dalton, Miss Dalton said ’twas a stranger who wanted to see Mr. Dalton. She didn’t know his name, but sent him to the tarvern, where she s’posed her husband was, sayin’ he was to tell him to come right home, for she was afraid in the storm. This looked queer, and Joel and the bartender started post haste for the Dalton House.
“It was a beautiful mornin’, but it had rained so hardthe night afore that the road in the lane was soft as putty, and they see plain the mark of wheels and horses’ feet which went up to the house, turned round, went out of the lane and off toward East Ridgefield. Joel noticed it and p’inted it out to the bartender, whose name I don’t know, and it don’t matter,—he was no kin to Dot. They went into the house,—Joel and the bartender,—and found Miss Dalton fresh as a pink in a white gown, with a blue ribbon round her waist and a rose stuck in it, and she a workin’ a sampler. Know what that is?”
Craig confessed his ignorance, and Uncle Zach explained: “They used to work ’em years ago in school, and at home on canvas with colored yarn or silk. Sometimes the Lord’s Prayer; sometimes a verse of scripter, but oftenest the names of the family, and when they was born. Dot’s got one, but she hid it away after she got to be forty. Wall, Miss Dalton set in a rockin’ chair, workin’ Mr. Dalton’s name, and when he was born, and lookin’ as innocent as the baby playin’ on the floor. I forgot to tell you there was a little boy two years old, with eyes like his mother. That’s Mark’s grandfather. When Miss Dalton see Mari, who came in fust, she asked as chipper like, ‘Did you find him? Was he there?’
“‘No,’ says Mari. ‘It’s mighty curis, too, for he started for home about eleven o’clock.’
“‘Yes,’ says Joel and the bartender, comin’ in behind her. ‘He started home at eleven o’clock. I’m afraid there’s been foul play somewhere.’
“‘Foul play,’ Miss Dalton gasped, and her face began to grow white, and there was a scared look in her eyes, which rolled round as if lookin’ for some place to hide.
“‘Yes, marm,’ says Joel. ‘Foul play of the wust kind. Whose buggy track is that up to the door and back, andoff to the east? Who was here last night? They didn’t come to the tarvern.’
“Then she turned whiter, and wanted a glass of water, and told of the strange actin’ man who had asked for Mr. Dalton, and began to wonder if anything could have happened to her John. The bartender had gone into the yard, and was lookin’ round near the well,—one of them old-fashioned kind, with a curb and sweep and bucket. It is there now,—the well, I mean. Of course, there’s been a new curb and bucket.
“‘Great Scott’ says ’ee, faint like and sick at the pit of his stomach.
“All round the well in the mud and grass was the tracks of men’s feet, as if there had been a hard scuffle.
“‘Come here, for Lord’s sake,’ he called to Joel, and Joel come and seen the tracks all aimin’ for the well, and on the curb the muddy print of a hand as if some one had clung there fitin’ for life, and right under the curb what do you think was hangin’ on a nail?”
Zacheus was very dramatic and eloquent by this time, and pointed his forefinger at Craig, who was himself a good deal shaken, and answered under his breath, “Mr. Dalton’s hat!”
“Oh, my land,” Zacheus ejaculated, in some disgust. “A stovepipe hat on a broken nail! No,sir! The hat was found on the head of the vally’s brother, and on the nail was a piece of Mr. Dalton’s linen coat that everybody knew, and in the well stickin’ up out of the water and kinder lodged on the stones was one of his boots with his foot in it! Joel was that faint when he seen it that the bartender had to hold on to him to keep him from pitchin’ head fust inter the well.
“‘Here’s murder,’ says ’ee. ‘Mari, come here.’
“She come, with her knees knockin’ together and a lump in her throat as big as a goose aig.
“‘Mari,’ says ’ee, ‘where did you git water for breakfast?’
“‘From the spring, over there,’ pointin’ to the orchard. ‘Miss Dalton said she’d rather have the water from there, ’cause that in the well was low,’ says Mari, her tongue so thick she could hardly talk.
“‘Have you often got water from there,’ says Joel.
“‘No,’ says Mari, and ‘Yes, very often,’ says Miss Dalton.
“She had come out to where the tracks was in the mud, and was white now as her gown and leanin’ on to Mari.
“‘Miss Dalton,’ says Joel, ‘your husband is in the well.’
“Then she screeched so loud that some of the neighbors heard her and come runnin’ to see what was the matter, while she made as if she’d throw herself over the curb, but Joel catched her by her clothes and pulled her back.
“‘Oh, John, John. Is he dead? Get him out, somebody,’ she cried.
“‘That’s what we are goin’ to do. Who’ll go down after him?’ Joel said, and, as no one offered, he pulled off his shoes and stockin’s, and, tyin’ a rope round his waist, went down himself, clingin’ to the slippery stones, and got him up dead as a door-nail, with the marks of two big hands round his throat, as if he had been seized and choked till the life was out of him, and then been chucked into the well as the nearest place to hide him.”
At this point Uncle Zacheus became so excited and agitated that he was obliged to wait a few minutes before describing more of the terrible scenes which shook the little village of Ridgefield to its depths that summer morning, when the dead man lay upon the grass in his dripping garments, a bruise on his forehead where he must havestruck a stone in his fall, and a look of horror in his wide-open eyes as he lay with his face upturned to the sky.
“Oh, John, who could have done this?” Mrs. Dalton moaned, as she knelt beside him, her arms across his chest and her long curls falling over his swollen features.
Unnoticed by any one, the little boy, Robbie, had crept down the doorsteps and came toddling across the yard to the group by the well.
“Papa, mam-ma,” he said, laying one hand on his mother’s head and the other on his father’s wet hair. “Papa, wake up. I’s ’f’aid,” he said, shaking the drops of water from his fingers and beginning to cry.
“’Twas awful,” Uncle Zach said, resuming the story and dwelling at length upon the picture of the little boy stooping over his dead father and trying to wake him up. “Yes, ’twas awful, and, though I’ll bet I’ve told the story over a hundred times, if I have once, I can never get over that part without somethin’ stickin’ in my throat and thinkin’ what if it had been Johnny and me, with Dot makin’ b’lieve. Oh—h,” and he groaned aloud;—then continued: “‘Oh, please somebody find the murderers,’ Miss Dalton said; and Joel answered: ‘You bet we will. We know ’em,’ and he winked at the bartender.
“They’d got the coroner there and half the town come with him, for the news flew like lightnin’, and the yard was full, and the fence was full,—the folks fightin’ to git sight of the tracks in the mud, and the well and the mark of a hand on the curb and the piece of his coat on a nail, and when they couldn’t do that they went and looked at the wheel tracks where the buggy turned in the lane, and then went back and fit agin to see the well. The women was mostly in the house where Miss Dalton sat wringin’ her hands soft as wool and covered with rings, her white gown bedraggled with mud and her hair flyin’ over herface, makin’ her look like a crazy critter. I tell you she stimulated grief so well that she could almost have deceived the very elect, and folks at fust didn’t know what to think. That Mr. Dalton had been killed was sure, and the verdict was wilful murder by somebody, and in less than ten minutes a posse of men with Joel and the constable started full run for Worcester. At a livery stable there they heard that a hoss driv’ nearly to death had come in towards mornin’. Who brought him the stable man didn’t know. It wa’n’t the one who hired him the afternoon before, but he paid the bill,—a big one, too,—the hoss was so used up, and he wore a stovepipe hat. That was Mr. Dalton’s, and the man was the vally’s brother. I b’lieve I could have planned better than they did, for they left their tracks so plain behind ’em that before sundown they was all three under arrest and an officer on the way to Ridgefield to keep an eye on Miss Dalton and Mari. They found Mr. Dalton’s gold watch in the vally’s pocket and his wallet and twenty-five dollars in the pocket of the vally’s brother. St. John was at a hotel with a cigar in his mouth, readin’ a paper as cool as you please and mighty indignant at being suspected of murder. He pretended to be awfully shocked at the news. Dalton was his best friend, he said, and he’d no more harm him than he would himself. He knew nothing about the movements of the vally or his brother. He was at the hotel all night and could prove it. This was true, but the vally’s brother gin him away by sayin’ to him low, but so as to be heard, ‘We sink or swim together; that was the bargain, and I’ve papers to prove it.’ They found ’em on him, too, and the three was clapped into jail, and Joel and his men and the officer got back some time in the night to Ridgefield, which next mornin’ was all up in arms wus than the day before.
“My grandmother lived here, and she said half the women was runnin’ the street bareheaded, and some with their sleeves up and their kitchen aprons on, tellin’ the news of the arrest to them who hadn’t heard it, and then makin’ a bee line for the Dalton house, where Miss Dalton still set in her muddy white gown, with her hair streamin’ down her back, and she as cold and white as a block of marble. She’d set up all night; they couldn’t make her go to bed, and when the men got back and she heard St. John was took, she turned blue, but never spoke nor stirred. In the room with her was the officer watchin’ her and Mari, who was in hysterics most of the time. They’d laid Mr. Dalton out beautiful in his best clothes, and Miss Dalton had been in to see him. They tried to shet his eyes, but couldn’t, and they was wide open, starin’ at you, and when Miss Dalton see ’em she cried: ‘Oh, John, John, don’t look at me like that,’ and fell down in a swound, and they didn’t know for a spell but she was dead.
“They made him the biggest funeral Ridgefield ever seen, and folks come for miles and miles around. Why, Joel took in for drinks and keepin’ horses more’n he’d took for months. ’Twas better than general trainin’, or a cattle show for him. Miss Dalton sat like a stone with folks starin’ at her as if they’d never seen her before, and that strange man always close to her. When she got back from the grave she was that wilted they had to carry her into the house and put her on the bed, where she lay, never movin’, nor speakin’, only moanin’, like some dumb critter in pain.
“They took her next day, and the screetch she gin when they told her she was arrested was so awful that folks in the road heard it; then she froze up ag’in, except when she looked at her little boy. They say ’twas touchin’,and made ’em all cry when she bid him good-bye, with him a sayin’, ‘Take, mam-ma; take me,’ and clingin’ to her dress she had on,—the silk one Mr. Dalton had bought her and the gold beads round her neck.”
Here Uncle Zacheus’ feelings so overcame him a second time that he could scarcely finish the story, and tell of Mrs. Dalton’s farewell to her baby and home and Maria, against whom there did not seem sufficient evidence to warrant her arrest. She would be needed as a witness later, and was left with the child whom Mrs. Dalton entrusted to her, saying, as she took his little hands from her dress and put them in Maria’s, “It is preposterous to believe they can find me guilty. But if the worst happens, and I never come back, take good care of Robbie, and tell him all the good you know of his mother.”
Then like some tragic queen she turned to the officer, and, with a proud toss of her head, said to him, “Sir, I am ready.”
She was all in black, with no color about her except the beads and her luxuriant golden hair, which showed under her widow’s bonnet like a gleam of yellow sunshine as she was driven away from the home she was never to see again. The trial which came on quickly did not last long. There were not many witnesses, and few were needed, the case was so plain. Maria was on the stand until she lost her wits entirely, and what she said one minute she contradicted the next. Only one point of any importance was brought out by her evidence. Mrs. Dalton’s name was Christina, which her husband shortened into ’Tina, and Maria testified that on the night of the murder, after she heard a man’s voice speaking to Mrs. Dalton, she thought she heard, or dreamed that she did, some one call “’Tina, ’Tina,” in what shedescribed “a gugglin’” voice, like one in distress or choking.
Up to this point Mrs. Dalton had sat with her face unveiled, her youthful beauty enhanced by her widow’s weeds and her bright hair, telling upon the sympathy of the spectators. But when Maria repeated the name “’Tina,” as it must have been called that awful night by her dying husband, she covered her face with her hands and moaned, “Oh, Maria, in mercy stop before I go mad.”
Then Maria broke down and was taken from the room for a time, nor could any amount of questioning afterwards wring from her a confession that she ever observed anything wrong between Mrs. Dalton and St. John. He liked her,—she liked him,—and they played and sang together a good deal when Mr. Dalton was home, and more, perhaps, when he wasn’t. There was, however, sufficient evidence to convict Mrs. Dalton without Maria’s. The papers referred to by the man called by Uncle Zacheus the “vally’s brother,” and whose real name was Davis,—a recent convict from state’s prison,—contained a promise from St. John to pay Davis and his comrade, Brown, another convict, one thousand dollars to get Mr. Dalton out of the way. Davis, who, in spite of his unprepossessing appearance, was the least hardened of the two men, confessed that several plans had been suggested and talked over and abandoned, until he was getting tired and would have given up but for the thousand dollars, five hundred of which Mrs. Dalton had agreed to pay. The visit to Ridgefield that night was an accident. The horse had been hired to go to an intermediate town. On reaching it Brown had suggested going to Ridgefield to see how the land lay, as he expressed it. On hearing from Mrs. Dalton that her husband was at the hotel, andthat she was expecting him home when the storm was over, they decided that this was their opportunity, as no one knew they were in town, and, waiting in the darkness and rain, they accomplished their work. Taken as he was by surprise, Mr. Dalton uttered no cry as they grasped his throat, except the words “’Tina, ’Tina,” while the ’Tina called for gave no sign if she heard it.
She said she didn’t, but few believed her. The evidence against her as an accessory to the murder was sufficient to convict her, and with the three men she was sentenced to be hung. Efforts were made to commute her punishment to imprisonment for life, but public opinion was strong against her, and with her coadjutors in the crime she suffered the penalty of the law.
After the execution, which was public and which hundreds attended, a half brother of Mr. Dalton came to look after the property in the interest of his nephew. In accordance with Mrs. Dalton’s request repeated to Maria, who visited her once in her cell, the latter took charge of the little boy during his childhood, and for some time lived alone with him in the house, bravely fighting her nervous dread of the room where the body had lain, and her terror on wild, rainy nights when she fancied she heard her master’s voice calling “’Tina, ’Tina” through the storm,—the sound of a scuffle near the well, and the wheels on the grass as the murderers drove away. At last, overmastered by her fear, she left the house and the town, taking the child with her and going to Canada where her friends were living.
Gradually the tragedy ceased to be talked about, except when revived by stories that the house was haunted. It was rented at first, then sold by Robbie, who, after attaining his majority, came once to Ridgefield and was described as a fine looking young man, much like his father.There had been a stone placed at his father’s grave, but none at his mother’s, nor did he order one. He was there to sell his property, and he sold it and went away, while family after family occupied the house. If they did not believe in the supernatural they heard nothing. If they did believe in it they heard a great deal; a struggle by the well at midnight when the rain was falling heavily and the sky was inky black; a sound of wheels upon the grass; a choking call for ’Tina; stealthy footsteps across the floor, as if in response to that call ’Tina had gone to the window and looked out; and a child’s cry for papa and mamma, which came at any time, day or night. The mamma lay in her unmarked sunken grave and the papa under the shadow of the south wall in Ridgefield cemetery. Robert became a husband, a father and a grandfather, and he, too, died. Years passed and every actor in that tragic scene was dead, but its memory was kept alive by the house fast going to decay. For a long time it was unoccupied, and “For Sale” nailed upon the door, while the storms and the boys played havoc with it, inside and out. Then Mark Hilton, the clerk at the Prospect House, and great-grandson of Mr. Dalton, bought it for a song. He called it his ancestral hall, and said when he married he should bring his bride there and quiet ’Tina’s ghost, which still haunted it, clad in a soiled white dress, with her long curls down her back. He straightened up her grave and put a plain headstone to it with just her name, Christina Dalton, upon it. Some people censured him for this, and twice he found the stone lying upon the ground face down, where it had been thrown by some malicious or mischievous person. Without a word of comment he put it in its place, and whatever pain or humiliation he felt for his ancestor he made no sign, and held his head as high as if, through the vista of nearly ahundred years, no dark crime was looming which could in any possible way touch his good name. He had come to Ridgefield as a teacher from Amherst College, where he had been for two years, and had taken his place among the best people of the town. Once or twice, after correcting an unruly boy, he found a chalk picture of a gallows on the blackboard in the morning, and, instead of rubbing it out, he drew a fair likeness of the boy artist dangling by the rope and left it there all day. There were no more insulting pictures upon the board, and his pupils treated him with great respect. But school teaching was not to his taste, and he finally gave it up and hired to Mr. Taylor, who was never tired of eulogizing him, and who finished his story of the Dalton house by saying: “There’s no more hereditary in Mark than there is in me. No, sir! His folks lived in New Bedford. Father was a sea captain and drowned; mother died a natural death, and left him a little money; not much, and he’s willin’ to do anything for an honest livin’. If there’s anything in envirymen’ he’s got it strong. Mari brought up his grandfather Robert and had him go to college. He was here once. The Daltons was high bloods and never took much notice of him on account of his mother. But, bless your soul, he wasn’t to blame for her any more than Mark is. Mari, who married in Canada, was a good woman, and great-great-grandmother to Jeff, who acts at times as if possessed with the devil; has some habits I don’t like, but he’ll git over ’em, for he’s a good boy on the whole,—well meanin’ and friendly. His name is Jefferson Wilkes. His folks is all dead and he was jest a wafer on the streets in Boston, turnin’ somersets for a penny a turn and sleepin’ in a big hogshead on the wharf at night when Mark found him. He’d kep’ track of Mari’s pedigree, tracin’ ’emdown to the boy and was huntin’ for him. He asked Dot to take him, and said if he didn’t earn his board he’d pay the rest. He’ll get plenty of envirymen’ here, for Dot makes him toe the mark, especially Sundays, learnin’ the catechism and verses in the Bible, and boxes his ears when he don’t behave. Mark laughs and gives him a stick of candy for every box. Pays for it, though. He’s honesty itself. I’d trust him with all I own.
“Yes, Dotty. I’ll be there,” he added, as there came ’round the corner a call to which he always paid attention. “I’ll be back in a few minutes and tell you the rest,” he said, as he hurried away in the direction of the call.
It was fifteen minutes or more before he returned, and taking his seat, began: “Dot is so flurried and upset about them Tracys that she actually consulted me. You know they are comin’ to-night?”
“Who is coming?” Craig asked, rather relieved with a change from the Daltons to the Tracys.
“Why, Miss Freeman Tracy, from New York,” Uncle Zach replied. “Her grandfather was Gen. Allen, one of our big bugs,—lived in the house with the biggest brass knocker, and has that tall monument in the cemetery. She’s comin,’ and that’s why the west wing is bottom side up, and Dot don’t know whether she’s on her head or her feet. It’s somethin’ to brag about havin’ Miss Tracy here. She wrote for a saloon to eat in. We’ve gin her the west parlor and four bedrooms for herself anddaughter and niece and maid. None of ’em can sleep together. Nobody can nowadays. They are comin’ to-night, on the eight train.”
Craig had been greatly interested in the Dalton story, though a little confused at the last, with so much heredity and environment and so many great-great-grandfathers. Still he managed to get a pretty good idea of it and was deciding in his mind to visit the old house again and go through the rooms where ’Tina’s ghost was said to walk on stormy nights. At the mention of Mrs. Tracy, who was coming with two young ladies, his thoughts were directed into a different channel.
“I think I have heard of Mrs. Tracy. Is she very wealthy?” he asked.
“Yes, piles of money, with diamond ear-rings as big as robins’ aigs. I’ve never seen ’em, but some woman from here was at Saratoga last summer, and said they was the talk of the town, and she never let ’em out of her sight. I hope she’ll bring ’em. I never seen such stuns. I wonder what they cost, and what do you s’pose she wants of a maid here, when we cook her victuals and serve it?”
Craig did not reply. He was thinking of Mrs. Tracy and her daughter, who was a great belle and notorious flirt. He had heard of them at Saratoga as occupying the finest suite of rooms at the United States, where the daughter kept around her a crowd of gentlemen, whom she attracted or repelled as the fancy took her. He had only seen her at a distance, when it was impossible to tell just how she looked, nor did he care for a closer acquaintance, and when asked to call upon her had declined to do so. He detested flirts, and was not particularly interested in girls of any kind. Certainly not in Miss Tracy. Still he was glad she was coming. Itwould be a change, and he was getting tired with no company but Browning. There was no possible danger of his falling a victim to her wiles. He was not a ladies’ man, and if he were, a coquette of Miss Tracy’s style would be the last woman he should select for a wife. Of the niece he scarcely thought at all, except to ask Uncle Zach her name. Zacheus didn’t know. Mrs. Tracy telegraphed that morning that she was coming, and there must be a room for her.
“Probably a poor relation,” came into Craig’s mind, and the niece was dismissed from it. The daughter, however, occupied a good share of his thoughts as the day wore on, and moving his seat from the north piazza to the south, he watched the settling of the west wing, which the Tracys were to occupy, with a good deal of interest. Once, in passing him, Mark stopped and said: “You would suppose the queen of England was coming instead of a woman with nothing to recommend her but money, or family, which sometimes counts more than money.”
He spoke a little bitterly, and Craig wondered if he were thinking of his own tarnished heritage. If it is possible for the future to turn backward and touch those whom its events are to influence, it would seem as if it had done so with Craig and Mark. Both were exceedingly restless that afternoon, and their restlessness manifested itself differently. Mark went to the cemetery,—a very unusual thing for him,—and stood by ’Tina’s grave and looked at the headstone, with only “Christina Dalton” upon it, and for a few moments rebelled against the fate which had linked him with the dead woman at his feet. He had heard the whole story of the tragedy; not one particular had been omitted in the telling of it to him, and now, as he went over it in imagination, hetook a different view of it from what he had ever done before. Any thing like heredity had never troubled him, the relationship was so remote. But the possibility came to him now, and he said to himself: “Her blood is in my veins,—strongly diluted,—but it is there, and under provocation might work me harm if I yielded to it. But I will not. I’ll be a man for a’ that. She was only my great-grandmother, or great-great-grandmother, which was it? Poor ’Tina. Perhaps she was not guilty. She said she was not, except for liking another man better than her husband. Other women have done that.”
The year before he had planted a white rose at Mr. Dalton’s grave. It was the running species, and one long arm had reached out and twined itself around ’Tina’s headstone, on the top of which was a half opened rose nestled among a quantity of leaves. Mark was fond of flowers, and cut the rose carefully from its stalk, intending to put it in the office.
“I guess there’s nothing of ’Tina about it,” he said, as he picked a few leaves and weeds from the grass on her grave, examined the stone to see if it were secure, and then returned to the hotel.
Craig had been differently employed. He always made some changes in his toilet before supper, and this afternoon he took a little more pains with it than usual, although it was not likely that he would see the ladies that night. As his mother was gone, he took his supper alone, and with his quick eye saw that two or three pieces of china and glass were missing. He might not have given it a second thought if he had not heard Mr. Taylor telling a boarder that the rooms for Miss Tracy were in apple pie order, and the table sot for supper in thesaloon, with the best linen and china and silver. The missing articles were accounted for. They were adorningthe table in thesaloon. Boston had gone down in the scale, and New York was in the ascendant.
“I don’t object,” he thought, “so long as she leaves us a china tea cup. I should not like those thick things I see on some of the tables.”
After his supper he went round to the west piazza, and, walking up and down, glanced into the room where the table was laid for three, and looked very inviting with its snowy linen, china and glass. He recognized the cream jug and sugar bowl which had done duty for his mother and himself, and was glad they were there. It seemed right and proper that the Tracys, as new-comers, should take the precedence. He was getting quite interested in them, and when he saw there were no flowers on the table he asked Sarah, the house-maid, if she had forgotten them.
“We hain’t any but flag lilies, and I didn’t know as they’d be pretty. I’ll pick some if you say so,” she said.
He knew she meant the fleurs-de-lis, of which he had seen great clumps from his window. They were blue,—his color,—and he followed Sarah to the garden, where she gathered a large bunch of the lilies together with some young ferns growing near them.
“They do look pretty,” she said, admiring the effect, as she placed them in the centre of the table. “Be you acquainted with the ladies?”
“No, I am not, but I know city people like to find fresh flowers in their rooms when they go into the country,” Craig replied, and then, as it was nearly time for his mother’s train from East Ridgefield, he went to meet her.
As he was walking with her up the long hill from the station he told her of the expected arrivals, and asked if she had ever seen the ladies.
“Once when I called on some friends at the UnitedStates, in Saratoga, the mother and daughter were in the parlors, and were pointed out to me. I remember thinking them very showily dressed, and that Mrs. Tracy’s diamond ear-rings were quite too large for good taste. The daughter had half a dozen young men around her,” was Mrs. Mason’s reply, and her chin gave a tilt in the air, which Craig knew was indicative of her disapproval of the Tracys.
Craig told her of Mrs. Taylor’s elation on account of her distinguished guests, and of the removal of the cream jug and sugar bowl from the table to the salon.
“Boston is nowhere, and we may come down to two-tined forks and plated spoons,” he said laughingly, while his mother laughed in return.
She had no anxiety about the forks or the spoons, but she was a little anxious with regard to the young lady, of whose outrageous coquetry she had heard a great deal, and, mother-like, she dropped a word of warning.
“No danger for me,” Craig said. “Forewarned is forearmed, but I am glad she is coming. We want something to brighten us up.”
Meanwhile Mark Hilton had also made the tour of the west piazza, and glanced in at the table with its centrepiece of fleurs-de-lis and ferns.
“I didn’t know you had so much taste,” he said to Sarah, who was putting some napkins at the plates.
“’Twasn’t me; ’twas Mr. Mason thought of it,” Sarah replied, and Mark was conscious of a feeling of not wishing to be outdone by Craig.
“I’ll contribute my moiety,” he thought, and bringing the rose from the office, he placed it on the table.
It was very fragrant, and filled the room with perfume, and Mark smiled as he thought: “They can’t help noticing it, but will not know it came from ’Tina’s grave.”
It lacked but half an hour of the time for the New York train. The scorching heat of the day had given place to a feeling of rain. In the west great banks of clouds had obscured the setting sun, while growls of thunder, growing louder and nearer, heralded the storm, which came on so fast that by the time the hotel carriage was ready for the station the wind was blowing a gale, and the rain falling in torrents.
“Great guns!” Uncle Zacheus exclaimed as he saw one of the horses rear on his hind feet when a peal of thunder, which shook the house, broke over its head. “If Jake hain’t got out the bloods! They are as ’fraid of thunder and lightnin’ as they can be. He can’t hold ’em a minit. Somebody’ll have to go with him and see to the ladies. Mark, do you feel like it?”
“Certainly,” Mark answered, and Craig saw him in the hall a few minutes later habited in his mackintosh and wide-rimmed hat, which shed water like an umbrella.
Owing to the storm the train was late, and Mrs. Taylor was greatly worried lest her broiled chicken and coffee should be spoiled. She had put on her second best dress, with a pretty little cap and lavender bow, and with her white apron looked the embodiment of the buxom landlady, as she hovered between the kitchen and the salon and the front door, giving a sharp reproof to Jeff, who came sliding down the banister, nearly upsetting her as, with a summersault, he landed on his feet. Jeff was also interested in the expected guests, and if the future had stretched backward and touched both Mark and Craig, it had grasped him as well, making him seem more possessed than ever as he rolled around the house wherever there was room for his athletics.
“There they be,” he exclaimed, as the carriage droveup with Mark on the box, the water dripping from his hat and coat, for it was still raining heavily.
With a bound he sprang to the ground just as Jeff came darting out with an umbrella and opened the carriage door. On the walk were pools of water, and Mark’s feet splashed in them as he stepped to the side of Jeff just as one of the ladies put her head from the door and then, with a cry of dismay, drew back.
“I can never go through all that water; it is actually a pond,” she said, and Mrs. Taylor, who was holding a lamp in the door, felt sure that the voice belonged to the matron of the party.
“Let me assist you,” Mark said, and, taking her in his arms, he ran up the walk with her and deposited her in the hall.
A second foot was on the carriage step when he went back,—a very small foot,—though to which of the young ladies it belonged he could not tell. He had seen neither distinctly at the station, it was raining so hard, but he felt intuitively that it was Miss Helen whom Jeff was advising to keep still till Mr. Hilton came to fetch her.
“Oh, thanks; don’t drop me, please,” she said, putting her arms around his neck as if afraid of falling.
He felt her breath through the dampness of the night, and as Mrs. Taylor just then held her lamp higher, he caught sight of two bright, laughing eyes, and if he held her a little closer than he had held the older woman, it was not strange. He was young, and she was young, and would have flirted in her coffin had she life to do it.
“I hope you are not very wet. It is a nasty night,” he said, as he put her down by her mother.
“Not wet at all, thanks to your kindness; but please go back for Alice,” the lady said, as he showed signs of having forgotten there was another to be cared for.
Alice didn’t need him. Jeff was attending to her.
“I don’t want to be lifted. I’m not afraid of a little wetting; but hold the umbrella over me. I shouldn’t like to spoil my hat,” she said, and, gathering up her dress, she ran swiftly into the house, followed by a girl, presumably the maid, as she carried several bags and began to talk to the ladies in what to Jeff was an unknown tongue.
Mrs. Mason’s rooms were on the other side of the hotel, but Craig was in the office when the carriage drove up, and saw Mark carrying two of its occupants into the house, and saw a third dashing like a sprite through the rain under the cover of Jeff’s umbrella, while the fourth followed more leisurely. Bidding Uncle Zach goodnight, he went to his mother’s room and said to her: “The Tracys have come.”
On a morning in June, before our story opens, Mrs. Freeman Tracy sat in her breakfast room looking over the papers, hoping to find some advertisement for a pleasant and inexpensive place in which to spend the summer. She had just returned from Europe, and her twelve trunks were not yet all unpacked. So far as real estate, houses and lands were concerned she was rich, but some of the investments on which she depended largely for ready money had failed, and she felt the necessity of retrenching for a time.
“Yes, mamma, but not here; let’s wait till we get homeand are tired and glad to go into some poky little hole,” her daughter Helen said, when it was suggested to her that they take a less expensive suite of rooms in Paris than they were looking at.
In Florence, where they had spent most of the winter, they had occupied a handsome villa and entertained and been entertained on a grand scale. Horses and carriages and servants in livery had been at their command without stint, and Helen had been the belle of the season. Wherever she went she had taken precedence as the beautiful American to whom both her own countrymen and foreigners paid tribute. If a perfect form and features and brilliant complexion constitute beauty, she was pre-eminently beautiful, with the added charm of a seeming unconsciousness of her beauty. But it was only seeming. She knew her own value perfectly, and had spent much time in cultivating that naturalness and sweetness of manner which seldom failed when its object was to win either attention, admiration or love. Her cousin Alice said of her that a smile or a wink from her eyes would bring any man to her feet, no matter how callous he might be to another lady’s charms. To be surrounded by a crowd of young men, each one of whom was struggling for a chance to propose, while she skillfully kept him at bay, was a pastime in which she delighted, and in which she had been tolerably successful. At twenty-two she had received twenty offers, and could count at least twenty more who would have proposed had she given them a chance. She had their names in a blue and gold book which she called her “Blue Book.” Those who had proposed were in one column, and those who wanted to in another, with certain marks against them indicative of their standing in her estimation and the possibility of her winking them back if the fancytook her. There was also a third column with a few names of those whom she did not know, and whom she greatly desired to know. Heading this list was “Craig Mason, Boston; old family; woman hater; very aristocratic and reserved, and almost too refined to enjoy himself; does not wish to know me; does not like my style. Should very much like a chance to wink at him, as Alice expresses it.”
This entry was made the year before when she was at Saratoga, and nearly every young man from the different hotels had called upon her except Craig. He had been asked to do so by a friend, and had replied: “No, thanks; Miss Tracy is not my style.”
This in due time was reported to her, and although she gave no sign, it rankled deeply. She made no effort to meet him after that, and only saw him driving his famous horse, Dido, with his mother, who, she had heard, was very proud of her position as Mrs. Mason, and very watchful lest her son should make a mesalliance, or indeed an alliance of any kind. With her mother she was rather tired of travel. She had had a good deal of dissipation in Florence and Paris and London; had added a few names to her blue book, and had come home heart whole and exceedingly glad to be there.
“If it were the thing to do, and I hadn’t so many new dresses to show, I’d rather stay here all summer than go dragging around to the same places, stopping at the same hotels and meeting the same people, who say the same tiresome things,” she said to her mother as they were taking their breakfast at home after their return from abroad.
In this state of mind it was easier than it was in Europe for her to fall in with her mother’s proposal that they find some quiet place in which to spend a few weeks.
“If it is very dull we can leave at any time, and I may accept Mr. Prescott yet; I haven’t quite decided,” she said, as she sipped her chocolate, while her mother looked over the papers in quest of advertisements.
Mr. Prescott was the last man Helen had refused, but she had done it in such a way that she felt sure a word from her would bring him back. She always had some one on the leash in this way, marked in her book with a big interrogation, “so as to run no risk of being an old maid,” she said to her cousin Alice, who was her confidant in her love affairs, and knew the three sets of men whose names were in her “Blue Book” as possibles and impossibles.
“If you are going to some out of the way place, let it be very much out of the way, where there is no danger of seeing people, or being made love to. I’m so tired of it, and I really begin to think it is wicked. Alice says it is. Dear little chick; I don’t suppose any one ever made love to her. Strange, too, when she is so pretty and sweet.”
“And poor,” Mrs. Tracy added, while Helen continued: “I don’t believe that would make any difference with me. I could wink ’em up if I hadn’t a dollar. I’d like to pose once as a penniless maiden and see.”
“What nonsense,” Mrs. Tracy replied, and then suddenly exclaimed: “Here it is at last,—Ridgefield! My grandfather’s old home. Strange I’ve never thought of that place. Listen,” and she read aloud Mark Hilton’s advertisement of the Prospect House.
Mrs. Tracy, who had been in Ridgefield when a child, had some very pleasant recollections of the town, with its river and ponds and hills, which Mark described so eloquently. The palatial hotel, with its modern improvements, must be something new, she thought, asshe had no remembrance of it. But times change, and Ridgefield undoubtedly kept pace with the times, and Mrs. Tracy thought she would like to go there, and said so to her daughter.
“Your grandfather was the leading man in the town, and we should undoubtedly be lionized by the people,” she suggested, while Helen shrugged her shoulders and replied: “Oh, mamma, do let me indulge in a bit of slang and saydry upon lionizing. I’m tired of it. If you want to go to Ridgefield I am quite willing. I only hope there isn’t a newspaper there, nor a reporter, to write up the beautiful Miss Helen Tracy; nor a man to make love to her. Such a state of things would be Heaven for a few weeks; then I should pine for the flesh pots of Egypt. Go to Ridgefield by all means. I’m in love with its scenery as set forth in the paper, especially the haunted house, which makes me feel a little creepy. Did you ever hear of it when you were there?”
Mrs. Tracy replied that she was almost too young to have such things make an impression upon her when she was in Ridgefield, but she believed she did hear of such a house and passed it with her grandfather,—a big old brown house at the end of a lane.
“Delicious! The very place for us. Write at once,” Helen urged, and her mother wrote to Mr. Taylor that morning, engaging rooms for herself, daughter and maid, and in two days’ time the postman brought her Uncle Zacheus’ wonderful production, which Helen read aloud with peals of laughter and running comments on his composition, orthography and honesty. “Perfectly rich,” she cried. “Rivers and ponds and meadows and hills and views and graves a hundred years old and a haunted house and a cellar hole where a garrison stood,I believe I’ve read about that, haven’t I? Alice would know. She’s up in history. And then the house; clean sheets,—think of it! All the towels we want! He don’t know that I use about a dozen a day. Silver forks, solid, not plated! That is something new for a hotel. Bread that Dotty makes, and washes her hands every time she turns round. Good for the bread; bad for the hands. Big rooms, with a rocking chair in each one. Glad of that. You won’t be getting mine. No real suites. He spelled itsweets. Dear old man! I shall fall in love with him if he doesn’t with me. Only two faucets, and those under the stairs. Can have asaloonto eat in. Good! That comes of your confusing him withsalon. Watched with your grandfather, and helped at the funeral. That must make him related to us. Yes, mother, sweets or no sweets, faucets or no faucets, we’ll go, and I’ll write and tell him so.”
She wrote the letter which Uncle Zach put away in his hair trunk, and after it was gone turned suddenly to her mother and said: “By the way, now is your chance to carry out your promise to Cousin Alice. You have always been going to take her somewhere with us, and have never done it, because it would make our expenses heavier. Ridgefield is cheap. A whole week will not cost much more than one day sometimes did when we had the best rooms in the hotel. Let me invite Alice to go with us. Just think how poky and forlorn her life must be in that stuffy little schoolhouse among the mountains, with those children smelling of the factory and things. Can I write to her? She’s such good company and so helpful every way.”
After a little hesitancy Mrs. Tracy consented, and Helen was soon dashing off the following letter: