CHAPTER XIX
Backof the house and above it on a hilltop too rocky for clearing, too rough for pasture even, was a little pool ringed around with huge boulders. No one could explain them, though the Indians had believed that they had been hurled in a battle of giants.
Tall trees stood up among them and canopied the pool with such shadow that on the hottest days there was a chill there.
RoBards had brought Patty hither on their first visit to Tuliptree Farm as bride and groom fugitive from the cholera plague. She had cried out in delight at the spookiness of the place and he had called it the Tarn of Mystery. He was not quite sure what a tarn might be but the word had a somber color that he liked. And Patty had shuddered deliciously, rounding her eyes and her lips with a murmurous “ooh!” like a girl hearing a ghost story late at night.
He had helped her to skip from rock to rock like an Alpine climber among glaciers, but when they came close to the pool glowing as an emerald of unimaginable weight, she had recoiled from it in disgust, because it seemed to her but a sheet of green scum. He explained to her that what revolted her was an almost solid field of drenched tiny leaves. But he could not persuade her to come near and admire. She hated the look of it, and when she saw a tiny water snake wriggling through it in pursuit of a frog, she fled in loathing.
In the fall the leaves came down from the trees in slow spirals. They lay on the surface of the pool, which had not water enough to draw them into its plant-choked shallows. The sharpening winds swept them across the surface in little flocks.
The children loved to play beside the Tarn, though Patty told them stories of Indians that had murdered and been murdered there. She whispered to RoBards that when she saw the Tarn it always hinted of suicide or assassination. The farmer, Mr. Albeson, laughed at this, but his wife, Abby—even the children called her Abby—said they was stories about the place. She had forgotten just what they was, but like as not they was dead bodies there. Folks enough had vanished during the Revolution, and maybe some of them was still laying out there waiting for Judgment Day to rouse them up.
It was to this moody retreat that RoBards hurried now. He took one rail fence at a leap and landed running, like a hurdler. He stumbled and fell and was up again. Keith clambered after his father, crawled through the fence and over the rocks till he came where Immy lay bruised and stunned. Keith saw his father drop to his knees and lift the child, clench her to his breast, and shake his head over her, then raise his eyes to the sky and say something to God that the boy could not hear.
The boy had always been reproached for tears and had been told, “You’re a big man now and big men don’t cry.” Yet he could see that his father was crying, crying like a little frightened girl. This strange thing twisted the boy’s heart and his features and he pushed forward to comfort his father. He was near enough to hear his sister moaning:
“Papa—papa—I’m hurt—Immy’s hurt!”
Before the boy could touch him, RoBards lowered Immy gently in the autumn leaves and put up his head and let out a strange sound like a wolf’s howl.
Then he struggled to his feet, and ran here and there, looking, looking. He climbed one of the high boulders about the Tarn and stared this way and that; leaped down and vanished.
Keith ran past Immy whimpering and struggled up the steep slab of the same boulder on all fours. Before he reached the top he could hear voices, his father’s in horrible anger, and another voice in terror. It was Jud Lasher’svoice and there was so much fear in it that Keith’s own heart froze.
Sprawling at the peak of the boulder, he peered over, and there he saw his father beating and kicking and hurling Jud Lasher about on the sharp stones. He swung his fist like the scythe the farmer swung and slashed Jud’s head and swept him to the ground; then picked him up and raised him high in the air and hurled him flopping against a rock; and plunged down upon him.
His father was like a mad dog that Keith had seen worrying a sheep once. The froth streeled from his mouth and his teeth were gnashing; he snarled like a mad dog.
At last he shoved and knocked Jud over into the green pool, all misty now with dead weeds and brown fallen leaves. The pool was so shallow that Jud’s face was not covered and he threshed about, bawling, choking, begging for mercy.
But RoBards knelt on him and twisted his face round and held it under the water. Keith hardly knew his father; the look on his face was so strange.
The boy was so afraid of the great fear that filled the Tarn with a cold wind that he let go his grip on the rock and rolled and scuffled down the side of the boulder to the ground.
His father heard him fall. Forgetting Jud Lasher, he ran to Keith. The boy cowered, expecting to be beaten, but when his father drew near, his face was so charged with tenderness that he was surely a different man. The boy wondered who it was that had just been destroying Jud Lasher. RoBards knelt by Keith and felt about him to see if any of his bones were broken, lifted him and set him on his feet, and said in a hoarse tone:
“Run back to Immy and wait.”
Keith started to return and was slipping through a narrow cleft between two boulders when he heard his father’s voice and turned.
He saw Jud Lasher stumbling weakly from the pool on all fours. He was slimy and weedy as a green-brown snake.But his face was white, washed clean with water and terror.
When he sprawled at the edge of the pool and tried to rise, Keith saw his father move forward and set his foot on Jud’s hand; heard him say:
“Listen! Can you hear me? Then listen hard! You’re dead by rights. I was killing you. I will kill you—if ever I see you again. Only one thing holds me back. It’s no pity for you. You’ve got no call to live. But people might learn about Immy if they found you dead. It would follow her all her life. But if you’ll get out of our sight forever, I’ll let you live. Go kill yourself somewhere—or run away—anywhere you please, so I never see you. For if I ever find you, by God, you’re dead! Do you hear?”
From the thing that cringed on the ground came a whine:
“Ye-yessir, thanky, sir. But where could I go, mister? I can’t think very good. Where could I go? What’d I tell Ma?”
There was a silence and Keith could feel in the tormented toss of his father’s head that it was hard for him to do the thinking for this dolt. But at last he muttered:
“Tell your mother you’re going to sea—on a whaler—anything. My God, have I got to help you to get away from me?”
Jud hung panting and slavering like a dog that had been run over by a heavy wagon and waited to be put out of its misery. RoBards spoke again at last:
“Tell your mother you’re going to New Bedford and ship before the mast.”
“Where’s New Bedford, mister? how’d a feller git there?”
“I don’t know! What difference does it make how you get there—or where you go? The thing is to get away from this country. Haven’t you brains enough to run off and save your own life? Look here, do you know the way to Poughkeepsie?”
“Yessir; yessir; I been there.”
“Well, there are whaling vessels there. Go there and ask them to take you. Tell your mother you’re going to sea.”
“She’ll cry awful hard. She always does when I talk about runnin’ away.”
“Let her cry! She’ll cry harder if I kill you, won’t she? And I will if you let her keep you here! But don’t tell her why you’re going. Don’t tell her what happened here. Just get away—far—far! and never come back. Oh, you poor thickwitted toad! Oh, God, that such a beast should befoul such a flower! Oh, Immy, Immy! my baby! my little girl.”
He fell against a tree and beat upon its harsh bark and wept, wagging his head and twisting his mouth like a boy’s, while the tears came pelting down.
Keith dared not go to him. He felt that he ought not to spy on his father’s agony. As he slipped through the gap in the rocks, his last backward glance showed him Jud Lasher scrambling weakly to his feet and shambling off into the thicket.
Keith went to his sister where she lay among the trampled leaves. She was crying so softly and wearily that he was afraid to speak to her.
He stood wondering what to do, until, by and by, his father came lurching up and dropped down to her side. Her voice rose at once to a loud wail:
“Papa! bad, bad man—hurt Immy!”
“Hush! hush, sweetness! Don’t tell—don’t tell! Promise papa you’ll never tell anybody about this—not anybody on earth.”
“Not Mamma?”
“No—never—never!”
“Not Abby?”
“Nobody on earth!”
“God?”
“He knows, honey.”
“Why did God let that man——”
“Hush, my baby. Don’t!”
The torn and bruised child was hardly more baffled than her father. He picked her up and went on, as dazed as any little girl whose doll has been torn by a playful dog.
Keith tagged after them, wondering. His father took note of him at last and paused to turn on the boy and say with pleading anxiety:
“You’re not going to tell?”
“No, papa, ’course not. Big men don’t tell things.”
His father did not take comfort from this braggart wisdom. He groaned:
“That two little children should have such a secret to keep!”
“Just what is the secret we’re to keep, papa?”
“Nothing!”
“How can we keep it, then, papa!”
“Never speak to anybody about Jud Lasher—never say his name—never think of it.”
“All right, papa. I p’omise.”
He could not speak the word, but he accepted the pledge.
The top of the hill was almost as high as the crest of the big tulip tree, and as they descended to its level the tree seemed to grow upwards above them.
Halfway down the rough slope, they saw Mrs. Albeson clambering toward them difficultly, fat as she was and short of breath and full of autumnal rheumatism. She sent her garrulous voice ahead of her:
“What o’ mercy’s happened up there? What’s the voices I heard? Sounded like murder bein’ done.”
RoBards could not answer her in words. She glanced from his white face to the torn lamb he carried and she tried to thrust from her mind the hideous guess it made:
“Not—not?—Aw, no!”
“Hush!” said RoBards. And she knew.
She wavered a moment and wanted to faint or die, but was not used to such comfortable escapes from reality. Revulsion shook her big frame; then her soul seemed to scold her for a cowardice. She raised her head and put out her arms, saying:
“Gi’ me the pore little martyr.”
And RoBards was glad to surrender to this big womanthe tiny woman in whose invaded sanctity he felt himself all the more forbidden for being her father.
His last word was: “You won’t speak of this to your husband—or anybody.”
Abby gave him a look of reproach and drew the child into her own breast, smothering the little fainting wail: “Abby—big bad man——”
“Hush!” said Abby.
“Hush!” said the tulip tree, as always, and kept reiterating its watchword at the window of the library where RoBards sought the dark quiet and paced the floor, wringing his hands and beating back into his mouth the mad yelping atheisms that came up as vainly as the bayings of a hound against the imperturbable moon.
He did not see his boy hiding among the young tulip trees about the children’s graves. There was a little hillock there and Keith could see into the library and see his father weaving to and fro like a caged fox. He wondered what it was all about. There was something terrible beyond the terrible fact that Jud Lasher had hurt Immy. But the mystery was impenetrable to his little mind. And his father would not tell him.
Keith wanted to go to him and help him, but he knew that he wanted to be alone. Fathers did not call for little boys to help them at such times.
It might have aided poor RoBards a little to feel that he himself was at just such a distance from his own heavenly Father, and He as helpless to explain. But that would not comport with any theology he understood. And he paced his cage.