THE CASKET AND THE GHOST
Richard Travis could not sleep that night—why, he could not tell.
After he returned from Westmoreland, Mammy Charity brought him his cocktail, and tidied up his room, and beat up the feathers in his pillows and bed—for she believed in the old-fashioned feather-bed and would have no other kind in the house.
The old clock in the hall—that had sat there since long before he, himself, could remember—struck ten, and then eleven, and then, to his disgust, even twelve.
At ten he had taken another toddy to put himself to sleep.
There is only one excuse for drunkenness, and that is sleeplessness. If there is a hell for the intellectual it is not of fire, as for commoner mortals, but of sleeplessness—the wild staring eyes of an eternity of sleeplessness following an eon of that midnight mental anguish which comes with the birth of thoughts.
But still he slept not, and so at ten he had taken another toddy—and still another, and as he felt its life and vigor to the ends of his fingers, he quaffed his fourth one; then he smiled and said: “And now I don't care if I never go to sleep!”
He arose and dressed. He tried to recite one of his favorite poems, and it angered him that his tongue seemed thick.
His head slightly reeled, but in it there galloped a thousand beautiful dreams and there were visions of Alice, and love, and the satisfaction of conquering and the glory of winning.
He could feel his heart-throbs at the ends of his fingers. He could see thoughts—beautiful, grand thoughts—long before they reached him,—stalking like armed men, helmeted and vizored, stalking forward into his mind.
He walked out and down the long hall.
The ticking of the clock sounded to him so loud that he stopped and cursed it.
Because, somehow, it ticked every time his heart beat; and he could count his heart-beats in his fingers' ends, and he didn't want to know every time his heart beat. It made him nervous.
It might stop; but it would not stop. And then, somehow, he imagined that his heart was really out in the yard, down under the hill, and was pumping the water—as the ram had done for years—through the house. It was a queer fancy, and it made him angry because he could not throw it off.
He walked down the hall, rudely snatched the clock door open, and stopped the big pendulum. Then he laughed sillily.
The moonbeams came in at the stained glass windows, and cast red and yellow and pale green fleckings of light on the smooth polished floor.
He began to feel uncanny. He was no coward and he cursed himself for it.
Things began to come to him in a moral way and mixed in with the uncanniness of it all. He imagined he saw, off in the big square library across the way, in the very spot he had seen them lay out his grandfather—Maggie, and she arose suddenly from out of his grandfather's casket and beckoned to him with—
“I love you so—I love you so!”
It was so real, he walked to the spot and put his hands on the black mohair Davenport. And the form on it, sitting bolt upright, was but the pillow he had napped on that afternoon.
He laughed and it sounded hollow to him and echoed down the hall:
“How like her it looked!”
He walked into Harry's room and lit the lamp there. He smiled when he glanced around the walls. There were hunting scenes and actresses in scant clothing. Tobacco pipes of all kinds on the tables, and stumps of ill-smelling cigarettes, and over the mantel was a crayon picture of Death shaking the dice of life. Two old cutlasses crossed underneath it.
On his writing desk Travis picked up and read the copy of the note written to Helen the day before.
He smiled with elevated eyebrows. Then he laughed ironically:
“The little yellow cur—to lie down and quit—to throw her over like that! Damn him—he has a yellow streak in him and I'll take pleasure in pulling down the purse for him. Why, she was born for me anyway! That kid, and in love with Helen! Not for The Gaffs would I have him mix up with that drunken set—nor—nor, well, not for The Gaffs to have him quit like that.”
And yet it was news to him. Wrapped in his own selfish plans, he had never bothered himself about Harry's affairs.
But he kept on saying, as if it hurt him: “The little yellow cur—and he a Travis!” He laughed: “He's got another one, I'll bet—got her to-night and by now is securely engaged. So much the better—for my plans.”
Again he went into the hall and walked to and fro in the dim light. But the Davenport and the pillow instantly formed themselves again into Maggie and the casket, and he turned in disgust to walk into his own room.
Above his head over the doorway in the hall, on a pair of splendid antlers—his first trophy of the chase,—rested his deer gun, a clean piece of Damascus steel and old English walnut, imported years before. The barrels were forty inches and choked. The small bright hammers rested on the yellow brass caps deep sunk on steel nippers. They shone through the hammer slit fresh and ready for use.
He felt a cold draught of air blow on him and turned in surprise to find the hall window, which reached to the veranda floor, open; and he could see the stars shining above the dark green foliage of the trees on the lawn without.
At the same instant there swept over him a nervous fear, and he reached for his deer gun instinctively. Then there arose from the Davenport coffin a slouching unkempt form, the fine bright eyes of which, as the last rays of the moonlight fell on them, were the eyes of his dead cousin, Captain Tom, and it held out its hands pleadingly to him and tenderly and with much effort said:
“Grandfather, forgive. I've come back again.”
Travis's heart seemed to freeze tightly. He tried to breathe—he only gasped—and the corners of his mouth tightened and refused to open. He felt the blood rush up from around his loins, and leave him paralyzed and weak. In sheer desperation he threw the gun to his shoulder, and the next instant he would have fired the load into the face of the thing with its voice of the dead, had not something burst on his head with a staggering, overpowering blow, and despite his efforts to stand, his knees gave way beneath him and it seemed pleasant for him to lie prone upon the floor....
When he awakened an hour afterwards, he sat up, bewildered. His gun lay beside him, but the window was closed securely and bolted. No night air came in. The Davenport and pillow were there as before. His head ached and there was a bruised place over his ear. He walked into his own room and lit the lamp.
“I may have fallen and struck my head,” he said, bewildered with the strangeness of it all. “I may have,” he repeated—“but if I didn't see Tom Travis's ghost to-night there is no need to believe one's senses.”
He opened the door and let in two setters which fawned upon him and licked his hand. All his nervousness vanished.
“No one knows the comfort of a dog's company,” he said, “who does not love a dog?”
Then he bathed his face and head and went to sleep.
It was after midnight when Jack Bracken led Captain Tom in and put him to bed.
“A close shave for you, Cap'n Tom,” he said—“I struck just in time. I'll not leave you another night with the door unlocked.” Then: “But poor fellow—how can we blame him for wandering off, after all those years, and trying to get back again to his boyhood home.”