CHAPTER XXI
Itwas black when Keith woke suddenly. Some little sound had pierced the depths of his profound immersion in sleep. He imagined Indians or Cowboys or Skinners. His ears seemed to rise like a terrier’s; his skin bristled with attention. He wondered if thieves were about; or lions or tigers or any of the witches or hobgoblins that peopled the night.
It was the good old custom to invoke all manner of demons for the discipline of children. Good children never asked questions or never delayed to sleep. Bad children were watched not only by an unsleeping God of remarkable vindictiveness but by swarms of demons, child-eating animals, ogres that made ginger-bread of babies, or so-called saints who broiled them on live coals in a kitchen called hell. It was a hard world for children here and hereafter.
The nightmares that attended waking hours were horrifying, but at night alone upstairs, with the dark smothering and blinding the wide eyes that could see little and imagine much, and the room a very lair of shapeless monsters that could see without being seen, it was the supreme torment. Even to cry aloud to nurse for help or a bit of light was to incur an added punishment. To run wildly out of the cavern and seek shelter in parental arms was to incur ridicule and often to shock strange guests and bring shame upon father and mother.
Even grown-up people lost their senses when they were awake in the dark and made spooks and ghosts of dark chairs and tables, heard groans and clanking chains in the night-wind noises and the creaking of restless timbers.
RoBards as a child had run the gauntlet of such agonies. He tried to save his children from them, but in vain. Thelonely babies concocted fiends of their own, and nurses, impatient to be free of their importunities, added traditional atrocities.
RoBards had caught one or two of the nurses at the ancient game and discharged them, only to be looked upon as a meddler. He had threatened the dusky Teen with a return to slavery if she did not try to disabuse the children’s minds of savagery. But she believed too much herself to be relied upon to inculcate atheism.
Keith was a brave little knight, however, and an investigator by instinct. Instinctively he pitted his inborn skepticism against the tyrannies of imagination, and when he could not exorcise a fiend by denying it, he met it with bravery. His bedroom was a little Thermopylæ and he Leonidas fighting the swarming hosts.
Sometimes he surrendered and buried his head under the pillow. Sometimes he put them all to ignominious flight. He had an ally of mystic powers who now and then gave unconscious aid: an old crack-voiced rooster, a tenor who had seen better days, who dreamed aloud at midnight of his former glories and snored a sleepy cock-a-doodle-doo long before the young beaux started their morning fanfare.
This old rooster’s drowsy utterances always reminded Keith that dawn would come again and the sun with its long broom of light would sweep the room clear of its child-hating mobs. The blessed sun would explain the panther about to spring as an old rocking chair, the broom-straddling witch at the window as a tulip tree bough, the pirate with uplifted cutlass as a pile of clothes.
Keith loved realism. He was educating himself in the night school to disbelieve the dark, to rely upon hard facts and distrust his terrifying fancies. A dawning scientist was evolving so fast that each week covered an æon of human experience.
Besides, he had an explorer’s curiosity, a soldier’s curiosity, a willingness to bet his safety against any mystery that threatened or nagged him.
He had put to flight no end of Indians, Skinners, andbogies by simply pointing his forefinger at them, snapping his trigger-thumb and observing, “Bang! bang!”
To-night he quaked only a few minutes before he realized that whatever the menace was it was downstairs. His first theory was that Jud Lasher might be stealing back to make another attempt to carry Immy away. The why of Jud’s persistence baffled him—as well it might. His best guess was that Jud wanted to take Immy with him on the whaling ship that his father had commanded him to join.
This thought substituted anger for terror. Keith’s little heart plunged with resentment and he slipped out of bed. The first sweat of fear chilled as he stood barefoot on the creaking floor. Then, like a child ghost in his long white nightshirt, he stole from his room to the hall. He peered into Immy’s room and saw that she was asleep in safety. He padded stealthily to his father’s room and, lifting the latch as silently as he could, swung back the door. He was stunned to find the room empty, the bed unoccupied, the covers still smooth and taut.
His father might be at work in the library. He peered over the banisters, but the library door was open and no light yellowed the hall carpet as he had so often seen it when he had wakened on other occasions and made adventurous forays about the house in search of a drink or reinforcements against the armies in his room.
Sometimes he had dared to steal down into the pantry and loot the cooky-jar. The thought of the pantry emboldened him now. He descended the stairway slowly with the awe of an Orpheus in Hades.
The moon poured down on the front of the house; and, streaming through the glass in the front door, carpeted the lower hall with a swaying pattern of moon-dappled tree-shadows. Keith felt as if he waded a little brook of light as he flitted here and there. The sound continued, but always from below.
He went at last to the cellar door. This house boasted to all passers-by that its builders had not placed the cellar out in the yard but had tucked it under the ground floor.There were two doors to the cellar, one in the kitchen, one on the outside of the house.
Keith was interested to find a little glow of light on the kitchen floor, seeping in from the cellar. He listened and heard someone moving about, heard a mystifying chipping noise, such as the stone-cutters had made when they put the new marble hearthstone in place and when they had recently enlarged the cellar and strengthened the foundation with a course or two of stone. The cellar walls were eleven feet thick in places.
They were made, Mr. Albeson said, “in the good old days when builders were honest and houses were solid—none of your modern flimsies.”
Keith had spent much time there on the cellar stairs watching the masons and asking questions. He had learned much of the chemistry of mortar and the dangers of quicklime. He had seen it smoke like milk on fire. He had been told that if he fell in it he would disappear, be just eaten up bones and all.
What could be going on down there now? Masons did not work at night. A burglar would hardly try to cut his way through stone foundations when the windows were usually left unlocked.
Keith reached up and putting his fat hand on the thumb-latch pressed it down with all the gentleness he could command. Not a sound did he make, and the door came open silently. But a damp draught enveloped him and icy water seemed to flow round his ankles.
With the wind that poured up the stairs came a stream of light, and an increase of sound. He leaned through the door and stared down.
He saw his father in rough old clothes splotched with white. He looked like a mason and he was dragging from the thick wall of the chimney a big stone. On the cellar floor were many others ragged with old mortar. In the chimney was a big hole and his father was making it bigger.
Keith’s darting eyes made out a long box of white limefuming and simmering with a long something half buried in it.
He watched his father in a stupor of bewilderment while he cleared a sort of oven in the wall. He had never seen such a look on his father’s face. At length he took the lamp and set it in another place, and bent to draw that something from the quicklime box.
As he hoisted it awkwardly out of the shadow into the light, Keith saw that it was Jud Lasher.
He seemed to be asleep, for he hung all limp in white clothes and he made no sound.
Keith saw his father carry the gaunt, gangling form to the chimney and stuff it into the hollow. It would not fit, and he began frantically thrusting at the arms and legs to crowd them in. The head rolled across the edge and Keith caught sight of the face.
Jud was not asleep! He was——
The boy pitched forward; slid and thudded down the cellar stairs head first.
He fell and fell. The next thing he knew was the feel of his bed about him. His head was on his pillow. The covers tucked under his chin.
His head was swimming and there was a big throbbing lump on his forehead. As he put his hand to its ache, his eyes made out a tall figure standing by him.
“That you, Papa?”
“Yes, Keith.”
“Papa! what happened?”
“You must have had a dream, honey.”
“But my head hurts.”
“I heard you scream and I found you on the floor.”
“In my room?”
“Yes.”
“That’s funny! I thought I fell down the cellar stairs.”
“That would be funny!”
“I thought I saw you in the cellar.”
“What would I be doing in the cellar?”
“You were—papa, where’s Jud Lasher?”
“He’s gone to sea, hasn’t he?”
“Will he come back? Ever?”
“Not unless you talk about him. He might if you do.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in ghosts.”
“There are ghosts and ghosts. Foolish people talk about the imaginary ones. The real ones—big men don’t talk about them at all, and you’re getting to be a big man, aren’t you?”
“Yes, papa; yes, sir.”
He was dizzy. He swung like a blown rag on a clothesline—or like a sailor on a—a whaler. A sailor on a whaler.
The old rooster snored. His father’s hands came out across the ocean and drew the covers over the sailor’s hands. He—he was—was——
It was morning.
It takes girls a long while to dress, and Keith was always downstairs long before Immy. This morning he was quicker than ever. He wanted to get to that cellar and see it by daylight.
He met his father in the hall, pacing up and down. His father looked at him queerly as if he were afraid. That was a silly thing to think, of course, but his father looked sick—as if he hadn’t slept well or any at all.
The boy thought it best to be frank.
“Papa, was that a dream? All of it?”
“Was what a dream?”
“About me being in the cellar and seeing you taking stones out of the wall.”
“Let’s go down and look at the cellar.”
Keith loved that. When in doubt, visit the scene of the legend.
He went down the steps. The morning light came in through little windows smeared with cobwebs.
Keith missed first the heap of stones on the floor, the hole in the foundation of the chimney, the box of quicklime. The stones were in place. There was no hole in the wall,no quicklime. The cellar floor was clean—cleaner than usual.
“I guess it was a dream, papa.”
He took his father’s hand. The hand felt funny, gritty and clammy, as if it had been washed very hard. He glanced down and the nails were white along the edges.
He said nothing as they started upstairs, but his backward look noted a thing he thought he ought to speak of:
“Papa, the stones in the chimney look like they’d been chiseled out and put back in again with fresh mortar.”
“Do they?” his father gasped, and sat down hard on the cellar steps. He nodded and groaned wearily.
“They do look that way.”
He thought a while, then rose and took an old broom and jabbed it into spider webs on the windows and whisked them away and spread them across the fresh lines.
“Does that look better?”
“If you could get the spiders to move there it would.”
Now the boy felt that he was made an accomplice. His father took his criticism and acted on it.
It was the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to the boy. He was saving his father from some mistake. The greatest lawyer in the world was taking Keith’s advice. He groaned with delight and hugged his father’s arm, murmuring:
“We’re like pardners——”
“Partners we are.”
“I’m a big man now at last. Couldn’t you let me know ever’thing, so’s I could help you when you needed me?”
His father gazed at him devotedly and kissed him. He did not like that kissing business. Big men did not indulge in such girls’ play. Still he remembered the story of Nelson’s death in the sea battle and how the fearless admiral’s last words were a plea to another officer to kiss him.
But in spite of this burst of affection his father would not explain the Lasher mystery; he said the boy was too young to know. Yet he was not too young to tell enoughto let other grown-up people know. RoBards, haggard with loss of sleep and the storms he had barely weathered, was frantic to prevent the children from publishing the devastating news.
Curiosity would work in them like a yeast and the instinct to ask questions could only be overcome by some overwhelming injunction.
He led Keith to the library and fetched out the vast family Bible, and set the boy’s little hand on it and said:
“Swear that you will never mention Jud Lasher’s name to anybody, or breathe a word of what he did or what I did to him. Do you swear?”
“Yes, papa, I swear, and I p’omise——”
“Do you know what happens to people who break their oaths?”
“Oh, yessir, they burn in hell-fire forever and ever, amen.”
His father paid the boy a noble homage when he made the appeal to his chivalry above his fear:
“Worse than that, it would mean that if you told, your little sister would be shamed before everybody as long as she lived. Everybody would think of her as if she were worse than wicked; nobody would ever marry her. She would be afraid to be seen anywhere. She would cry all the time and never smile.”
“That would be worse’n me burning in hell. Oh, yessir, I won’t tell, sir.”
“This promise won’t wear out in a few days or months, will it? This house will be yours when I am gone. It must never be sold; never be torn down till I am dead and gone. After Immy dies it won’t matter so much. Does your poor little brain understand all this?”
His accurate soul answered: “I don’t understand it, no sir; but you do, and what you want is enough for me. I wish you would trust me.”
“I do. And one last word: don’t tell Immy what I’ve told you. Don’t let her talk about it. And always remember that the least word you let slip might mean that thepolicemen would come and take me away and hang me before all the people.”
The boy screamed at that and was hardly soothed back to calm.
“SWEAR THAT YOU WILL NEVER MENTION JUD LASHER’S NAME TO ANYBODY”
“SWEAR THAT YOU WILL NEVER MENTION JUD LASHER’S NAME TO ANYBODY”
“SWEAR THAT YOU WILL NEVER MENTION JUD LASHER’S NAME TO ANYBODY”