CHAPTER X. Powers of Darkness
October dragged slowly along, and Christopher followed his work upon the farm with the gloomy indifference which had become the settled expression of his attitude toward life. Since the morning when he had seen Will drive by to the cross-roads he had heard nothing of him, and gradually, as the weeks went on, that last reckless night behind the hounds had ceased to represent a cause either of rejoicing or of regret. He had not meant to goad the boy into drinking—of this he was quite sure—and yet when the hunt was over and the two stood just before dawn in Tom Spade's room he had felt the devil enter into him and take possession. The old mad humour of his blood ran high, and as the raw whisky fired his imagination he was dimly conscious that his talk grew wilder and that the surrounding objects swam before his gaze as if seen through a fog. Life, for the time at least, lost its relative values; the moment loomed larger in his vision than the years, and he beheld the past and the future dwarfed by the single radiant instant that was his own. It was as if he could pay back the score of a lifetime in that one minute.
"Is it possible that what was so difficult yesterday should have grown so easy to-day?" he asked himself, astonished. "Why have I never seen so clearly before? Why, until this evening, have I gone puling about my life as if such things as disgrace and poverty were sufficient to crush the strength out of a man? Let me put forth all my courage and nothing is impossible—not even the attainment of success nor the punishment of Fletcher. It is only necessary to begin at once—to hasten about one's task—and in a few short years it will be accomplished and done with. All will be as I wish, and I shall then be as happy as Tucker."
Following this came the questions, How? When? Where shall I begin?—but he put them angrily aside and refilled his glass. A great good-humour possessed him, and, as he drank, all the unpleasant things of life—loss, unrest, heavy labour—vanished in the roseate glow that pervaded his thoughts.
What came of it was not quite clear to him next day, and this caused the uneasiness that lasted for a week. He had a vague recollection that Tom Spade took the boy home and rolled him through the window, and that he himself went whistling to his bed with the glorious sensation that he was riding the crest of a big wave. With the morning came a severe headache and the ineffectual effort to remember just how far it had all gone, and then a sharp anxiety, which vanished when he saw Will pass on his way to school.
"The boy was none the worse for it," Tom Spade told him later; "he had a drop too much, to be sure, but his legs were as steady as mine, an' he slept it off in an hour. He's a ticklish chap, Mr. Christopher," the storekeeper added after a moment, "an' I'd keep my hands from meddlin' with him, if I was you. That thing shan't happen agin at my place, an' it wouldn't have happened then if I'd been around at the beginnin'. You may tamper with yo' own salvation as much as you please—that's my gospel, but I'll be hanged if you've got a right to tamper with anybody else's."
Christopher wheeled suddenly about and gave him a keen glance from under his lowered eyelids. For the first time he detected a lack of deference in Tom Spade's tone, and a suspicion shot through him that the words were meant to veil a reprimand.
"Well, I reckon the boy's got as good a right to drink as I have," he retorted sneeringly, and a moment afterward went gaily whistling through the store. At the time he felt a certain pleasure in defying Tom's opinion—in setting himself so boldly in opposition to the conventional morality of his neighbours. The situation gave him several sharp breaths and that dizzy sense of insecurity in which his mood delighted. It had needed only the shade of disapproval expressed in the storekeeper's voice to lend a wonderful piquancy to his enjoyment—to cause him to toy in imagination with his hatred as a man does with his desire. Before Tom spoke he had caught himself almost regretting the affair—wondering, even, if his error were past retrieving—but with the first mere suggestion of outside criticism his humour underwent a startling change.
Between Fletcher and himself the account was still open, and the way in which he meant to settle it concerned himself alone—least of all did it concern Tom Spade.
He was groping confusedly among these reflections when, one evening in early November, he went upstairs after a hasty supper to find Cynthia already awaiting him in his room. At his start of displeased surprise she came timidly forward and touched his arm.
"Are you sick, Christopher? or has anything happened? You are so unlike yourself."
He shook his head impatiently and her hand fell from his sleeve. It occurred to him all at once, with an aggrieved irritation, that of late his family had failed him in sympathy—that they had ceased to value the daily sacrifices he made. Almost with horror he found himself asking the next instant whether the simple bond of blood was worth all that he had given—worth his youth, his manhood, his ambition? Until this moment his course had seemed to him the one inevitable outcome of circumstances—the one appointed path for him to tread; but even as he put the question he saw in a sudden illumination that there might have been another way—that with the burden of the three women removed he might have struck out into the world and at least have kept his own head above water. With his next breath the horror of his thought held him speechless, and he turned away lest Cynthia should read his degradation in his eyes.
"Happened! Why, what should have happened?" he inquired with attempted lightness. "Good Lord! After a day's work like mine you can hardly expect me to dance a hornpipe. Since sunrise I've done a turn at fall ploughing, felled and chopped a tree, mended the pasture fence, brought the water for the washing, tied up some tobacco leaves, and looked after the cattle and the horses—and now you find fault because I haven't cut any extra capers!"
"Not find fault, dear," she answered, and the hopeless courage in her face smote him to the heart. In a bitter revulsion of feeling he felt that he could not endure her suffering tenderness.
"Find fault with you! Oh, Christopher! It is only that you have been so different of late, so brooding, and you seem to avoid us at every instant. Even mother has noticed it, and she imagines that you are in love."
"In love!" he threw back his head with a loud laugh. "Oh, I'm tired, Cynthia—dog-tired, that's the matter."
"I know, I know," replied Cynthia, rubbing her eyes hard with the back of her hand. "And the worst is that there's no help for it—absolutely none. I think about it sometimes until I wonder that I don't go mad."
He turned at this from the window through which he had been gazing and fixed upon her a perplexed and moody stare. The wistful patience in her face, like the look he had seen in the eyes of overworked farm animals, aroused in him a desire to prod her into actual revolt—into any decisive rebellion against fate. To accept life upon its own terms seemed to him, at the instant, pure cowardliness—the enforced submission of a weakened will; and he questioned almost angrily if the hereditary instincts were alive in her also? Did she, too, have her secret battles and her silent capitulations? Or was her pious resignation, after all, only a new form of the old Blake malady—of that fatal apathy which seized them, like disease, when events demanded strenuous endeavour? Could the saintly fortitude he had once so envied be, when all was said, merely the outward expression of the inertia he himself had felt—of the impulse to drift with the tide, let it carry one where it would?
"Well, I'm glad it's no worse," said Cynthia, with a sigh of relief, as she turned toward the door. "Since you are not sick, dear, things are not so bad as they might be. I'll let mother fancy you have what she calls 'a secret sentiment.' It amuses her, at any rate. And now I'm going to stir up some buckwheat cakes for your breakfast. We've got a jug of black molasses."
"That's pleasant, at least," he returned, laughing; and then as she reached the door he went toward her and laid his hand awkwardly upon her shoulder. "Don't worry about me, Cynthia," he added; "there's a lot of work left in me yet, and a change for the better may come any day, you know. By next year the price of tobacco may shoot skyhigh."
Her face brightened and a flush smoothed out all the fine wrinkles on her brow, but with the pathetic shyness of a woman who has never been caressed she let his hand fall stiffly from her arm and went hurriedly from the room.
For a few minutes Christopher stood looking abstractedly at the closed door. Then shaking his head, as if to rid himself of an accusing thought, he turned away and began rapidly to undress. He had thrown off his coat, and was stooping to remove his boots, when a slight noise at the window startled him, and straightening himself instantly he awaited attentively a repetition of the sound. In a moment it came again, and hastily crossing the room and raising the sash, he looked out into the full moonlight and saw Will Fletcher standing in the gravelled path below. At the first glance surprise held him motionless, but as the boy waved to him he responded to the signal, and, catching up his coat from the bed, ran down the staircase and out into the yard.
"What in the devil's name—" he exclaimed, aghast.
Will was trembling from exhaustion, and his face glimmered like a pallid blotch under the shadow of the aspen. When the turkeys stirred on an overhanging bough above him he started nervously and sucked in his breath with a hissing sound. He was run to death; this Christopher saw at the first anxious look.
"Get me something to eat," said the boy; "I'm half starved—but bring it to the barn, for I'm too dead tired to stand a moment. Yes, I ran away, of course," he finished irritably. "Do I look as if I'd come in grandpa's carriage?"
With a last spurt of energy he disappeared into the shadows behind the house, and Christopher, going into the kitchen, began searching the tin safe for the chance remains of supper. On the table was the bowl of buckwheat which Cynthia had been preparing when she was called away by some imperious demand of her mother's, and near it he saw the open prayer-book from which she had been reading. From the adjoining room he heard Tucker's voice—those rich, pleasant tones that translated into sound the courageous manliness of the old soldier's face—and for an instant he yearned toward the cheerful group sitting in the firelight beyond the whitewashed wall—toward the blind woman in her old oak chair, listening to the evening chapter from the Scriptures. Then the feeling passed as quickly as it had come, and securing a plate of bread and a dried ham-bone, he filled a glass with fresh milk, and, picking up his lantern, went out of doors and along the little straggling path to the barn.
The yard was frosted over with moonlight, but when he reached the rude building where the farm implements and cattle fodder were sheltered he saw that it was quite dark inside, only a few scattered moonbeams crawling through the narrow doorway. To his first call there was no answer, and it was only after he had lighted his lantern and swung it round in the darkness that he discovered Will lying fast asleep upon a pile of straw.
As the light struck him full in the face the boy opened his eyes and sprang up.
"Why, it's you," he said in a relieved voice. "I thought it was grandpa. If he comes you've got to keep him out, you know!"
He spoke in an excited whisper, and his eyes plunged beyond the entrance with a look of pitiable and abject terror. Once or twice he shivered as if from cold, and then, turning away, cowered into the pile of straw in search of warmth.
For a time Christopher stood gazing uneasily down upon him. "Look here, man, this can't keep up," he said. "You'd better go straight home, that's my opinion, and get into a decent bed."
Will started up again. "I won't see him! I won't!" he cried angrily. "If you bring him here I'll get up and hide. I won't see him! Why, he almost killed me after that 'possum hunt we had, and if he found this out so soon he'd kill me outright. There was an awful rumpus at school. They wrote him and he said he was coming, so I ran away. It was all his fault, too; he had no business to send me back again when he knew how I hated it. I told him he'd be sorry."
"Well, he shan't get in here to-night," returned Christopher soothingly. I'll keep him out with a shotgun, bless him, if he shows his face. Come, now, sit up and eat a bit, or there won't be any fight left in us."
Will took the food obediently, but before it touched his lips the hand in which he held it dropped limply to the straw.
"I can't eat," he complained, with a gesture of disgust. "I'm too sick—I've been sick for days. It was all grandpa's doing, too. When I heard he was coming I went out and got soaking wet, and then slept in my clothes all night. I knew he'd never make a fuss if I could only get ill enough, but the next morning I felt all right, so I came away."
Kneeling upon the floor, Christopher held the glass to his lips, gently forcing him to drink a few swallows. Then dipping his handkerchief in the cattle trough outside, he bathed the boy's face and hands, and, loosening his clothes, made him as comfortable as he could. "This won't do, you know," he urged presently, alarmed by Will's difficult breathing. "You are in for a jolly little spell, and I must get you home. Your grandfather will never bother you while you're sick."
At the words the boy clung to him deliriously, breaking into frightened whimpers such as a child makes in the dark. "I won't go back! I won't go back!" he repeated wildly; "he'll never believe I'm ill, and I won't go back!"
"All right; that settles it. Lie quiet and I'll fetch you some bedding from my room. Then I'll fix you a pallet out here, and we'll put up as best we can till morning."
"Don't stay; don't stay," pleaded Will, as the other, leaving his lantern on the floor, ran out into the moonlight.
Returning in a quarter of an hour, he threw a small feather-bed down upon the straw and settled the boy comfortably upon it. Then he covered him with blankets, and, after closing the door, came back and stood watching for him to fall asleep. A slight draft blew from the boarded window, and, taking off his coat, he hung it carefully across the cracks, shading the lantern with his hand that its light might not flash in the sleeper's face.
At his step Will gave a stifled moan and looked up in terror.
"I thought you'd left me. Don't go," he begged, stretching out his hand until it grasped the other's. With the hot, nerveless clutch upon him, Christopher was conscious of a quick repulsion, and he remembered the sensation he had felt as a boy when he had once suddenly brought his palm down on a little green snake that was basking in the sunshine on an old log. Yet he did not shake the hand off, and when presently the blanket slipped from Will's shoulders he stooped and replaced it with a strange gentleness. The disgust he felt was so evenly mingled with compassion that, as he stood there, he could not divide the one emotion from the other. He hated the boy's touch, and yet, almost in spite of himself, he suffered it.
"Well, I'm not going, so you needn't let that worry you," he replied. "I'll stretch myself alongside of you in the straw, and if you happen to want me, just yell out, you know."
The weak fingers closed tightly about his wrist.
"You promise?" asked the boy.
"Oh, I promise," answered the other, raising the lantern for a last look before he blew it out.
By early daybreak Will's condition was still more alarming, and leaving him in a feverish stupor upon the pallet, Christopher set out hurriedly shortly after sunrise to carry news of the boy's whereabouts to Fletcher.
It was a clear, cold morning, and the old brick house, set midway of the autumn fields, appeared, as he approached it, to reflect the golden light that filled the east. Never had the place seemed to him more desirable than it did as he went slowly toward it along the desolate November roads. The somber colours of the landscape, the bared majesty of the old oaks where a few leaves still clung to the topmost boughs, the deserted garden filled with wan specters of summer flowers, were all in peculiar harmony with his own mood as with the stern gray walls wrapped in naked creepers. That peculiar sense of ownership was strongly with him as he ascended the broad steps and lifted the old brass knocker, which still bore the Blake coat of arms.
To his astonishment the door opened instantly and Fletcher himself appeared upon the threshold. At sight of Christopher he fell back as if from a blow in the chest, ripping out an oath with a big downward gesture of his closed fist.
"So you are mixed up in it, are you! Whar's the boy?" From the dusk of the hall his face shone dead white about the eyes.
"If you want to get anything out of me you'd better curb your tongue, Bill Fletcher," replied Christopher coolly, feeling an animal instinct to prolong the torture. "If you think it's any satisfaction to me to have your young idiot thrown on my hands you were never more mistaken in your life. I've been up half the night with him, and the sooner you take him away the better I'll like it."
"Oh, you leave him to me and I'll settle him," responded Fletcher, reaching for his hat. "Jest show me whar he is and I'll git even with him befo' sundown. As for you, young man, I'll have the sheriff after you yit."
"In the meantime, you'd better have the doctor. The boy's ill, I tell you. He came to me last evening, run to death and with a high fever. He slept in the barn, and this morning he is decidedly worse. If you come, bring Doctor Cairn with you, and I warn you now you've got to use a lot of caution. Your grandson is mortally afraid of you, and he threatens to run away if I let you know where he is. He wants me to sit at the door with a shotgun and keep you off."
He delivered his blows straight out from the shoulder, lingering over each separate word that he might enjoy to the full its stupendous effect.
"This is your doing," repeated Fletcher hoarsely; "it's your doing, every blamed bit of it."
Christopher laughed shortly. "Well, I'm through with my errand," he said, moving toward the steps and pausing with one hand on a great white column. "The sooner you get him out of my barn the better riddance it will be. There's one thing certain, though, and that is that you don't lay eyes on him without the doctor. He's downright ill, on my oath."
"Oh, it's the same old trick, and I see through it," exclaimed
Fletcher furiously. "It's pure shamming."
"All the same, I've got my gun on hand, and you don't go into that barn alone." He hung for an instant upon the topmost step, then descended hurriedly and walked rapidly back along the broad white walk. It would be an hour, at least, before Fletcher could follow him with Doctor Cairn, and after he had returned to the barn and given Will a glass of new milk he fed and watered the horses and did the numberless small tasks about the house. He was at the woodpile, chopping some light wood splinters for Cynthia, when the sound of wheels reached him, and in a little while more the head of Fletcher's mare appeared around the porch. Doctor Cairn, a frousy, white-bearded old man, crippled from rheumatism, held out his hand to Christopher as he descended with some difficulty between the wheels of the buggy.
Christopher motioned to the barn, and then, taking the reins, fastened the horse to the branch of a young ailanthus tree which grew near the woodpile. As he watched the figures of the two men pass along the little path between the fringes of dead yarrow he drew an uneasy breath and dug his boot into the rotting mould upon the ground. The barn door opened and closed; there was a short silence, and then a sudden despairing cry as of a rabbit caught in the jaws of a hound. When he heard it he turned impulsively from the horse's head and went quickly along the path the men had taken. There was no definite intention in his mind, but as he reached the barn door it shot open and Fletcher put out a white face.
"The Doctor wants you, Mr. Christopher," he cried; "Will has gone clean mad!"
Without a word, Christopher pushed by him and went into the great dusky room, where the boy was struggling like a madman to loosen the doctor's grasp. He was conscious at the moment that the air was filled with fine chaff and that he sucked it in when he breathed.
At his entrance Will lay quiet for a moment and looked at him with dazed, questioning eyes.
"Keep them out, Christopher!" he cried, in anguish.
Christopher crossed the room and laid his hand with a protecting gesture on the boy's head.
"Why, to be sure I will," he said heartily; "the devil himself won't dare to touch you when I am by, "