Chapter X A SKELETON IN THE FIRE
The mountains now burst into midsummer. Bloom, color, and fragrance reigned; also heat and drought. The cups of the tulip tree, the tassels of the chestnut, lit the leafy canopy. The covert of azaleas blazed on the open slopes in all shades of red and yellow. In every crevice by the trickling streams rhododendrons lined the glades with garlands of purple and white.
The hidden house of the sisters was embowered in climbing roses and the passion flower. It was surrounded by gorgeous parterres, and the tendrils of the porch vines hung still, or only fluttered at sundown. There was no vapor at dawn or eve in gorge or on mountain-top. A dry blue haze like wood smoke dulled light and shade in the myriad hills. They looked like a vast perspectiveless painting by some prentice Titan, who had ground his one color from the pale petals of the wild hydrangea. Some clouds there were—ragged towers, tinted in the light browns and pinks of seashells. They tottered round the far horizon in fantastic trains, but came no nearer. The very azure of the sky was faded by the heat of the sun.
All moss and low wild flowers had long withered; the earth under the forest was hot and dry. The whole region basked, and from all the valleys a louder and more ceaseless tinkling rose from the herds of pigs and oxen who roamed for meagre provender.
One afternoon Durgan and his laborers heard a cry. It was the voice of Adam. They heard him crash through the brushwood above them.
"Fire!" yelled Adam, and crashed back toward the summit house.
Durgan outran his men, and was relieved to find the evil not beyond hope of redress. Smoke was issuing from one corner of the roof of the dwelling-house; no flame as yet, but the roof was of shingle, like tinder in the sun.
The ladies, with admirable skill and courage, had already organized their forces—Adam pumping, Bertha and Eve stationed on the path from the well, Miss Smith, the most agile, taking the bucket at the door and running up the stair. Thither Durgan followed, leaving his men to Bertha's command. The fire was smouldering between the ceiling of the kitchen and a pile of papers and books which lay on the floor far under the sloping roof of the low attic. Miss Smith had been wise enough to move nothing. The solid parcels of periodicals kept out the air, and she was dashing the water on the roof and floor.
With the added help smoke soon ceased. It remained to investigate the cause of the fire, which was not obvious, to make sure that the rest of the house was safe, and undo as far as possible the injury of the water, which, spreading itself on the attic floor, had poured into the bedrooms below.
While the negroes were carrying out the parcels of printed matter, wet and charred, Durgan moved about in all the recesses of the house, examining the walls, lifting wet furniture on to the sunny veranda roof, and otherwise helping to modify the unaccustomed disorder.
While thus engaged, he realized how strongly had grown upon him a fancy that these lonely women might be harboring some insane person, whose escape and violence they might justly dread. He must now smile at himself for thinking that any source of terror lurked here in visible shape. As he followed Miss Smith from one simple room to another, creeping under the very eaves of the roof and feeling the temperature of every wall and shelf, he certainly assured himself that neither the skeleton nor its closet was of material sort.
He was struck with the orderly and cheerful arrangement of the house, with the self-control, speed, and good sense the sisters had displayed; but most of all was he surprised that the excitement and effort had unnerved them so little. When the hour for relaxation came, they appeared neither talkative nor moody; they neither shed tears nor were unusually cheerful. In his married life he had had some experience of women's nerves. This calm, practical way of taking a narrow escape from great loss roused his admiration.
Many bundles of papers were too much damaged to be worth keeping. Durgan had a use for these in a stove his laborers used, and, after Miss Smith had looked them over, they were carted down to the mine. Durgan sorted them, storing some old magazines and more solid papers for future use.
He soon found the covers of an old book, tied together over a collection of parchment envelopes. These in turn contained newspaper clippings still legible. Each envelope had its contents marked outside; they were the reports of a number of criminal trials, extending over a number of years, cut from American, English, and other European papers. Durgan was at once convinced that neither of the sisters could have been interested in the collection, and, assuming it to be the work of some dead relative, he reflected for the first time how rarely they spoke of family ties. It was true that Bertha would sometimes say: "My dear father would have enjoyed this view—would have liked this flower," or "Dear papa would have said this or that." He remembered how her voice would soften over these sacred memories, and remembered, too, how they always came to her among the beauties of nature, never in domestic surroundings. Such a father would scarcely have been so much interested in annals of crime.
Sitting by the lamp in his hut, Durgan went over the envelopes. The first was dated ten years before; it contained the notorious Claxton trial, reported by the New York Tribune. The next was the case of the Wadham pearls, from the London Times. Durgan was not familiar with the case, and became interested in the story of the girl, very young and beautiful, who, being above temptation of poverty and above reproach, had been sentenced, on convincing evidence, for theft and perjury. The common interest in these cases obviously was that in both the accused was a gentlewoman, and the evidence overwhelming, altho chiefly circumstantial. The cases that came after did not follow this thread of connection. They were stories of such crimes as may almost be considered accidental, in which respectable people fall a prey to unexpected temptation or sudden mania. The last selection was from the Galignani Messenger. It was the case of a parish priest, apparently a dilettante and esthetic personage of highly religious temperament, who was condemned for having killed his sister with sudden brutality, and who gave the apparently insane excuse that, seeing her in the dusk, he had thought her a spirit, and been so terrified that he knew not what he did. The date of this last story was only about three years after the first.
Next day, when Bertha passed by on her horse, Durgan told her what he had found.
"Oh, I am sure we don't want them," said she. "Burn them with the rest."
She was wearing a deep sun-bonnet; he could hardly see her face in its shade.
Durgan had very naturally tried to fit the circumstances of any of these stories of crime to a domestic tragedy which might have resulted in the hiding of these sisters and in Bertha's fears; but none of them seemed to meet the case, nor did any story he could devise.
Since the opening of the letters, and Bertha's words in the moonlight, he had wondered more than once whether she believed in some ghostly enemy. Durgan had been rudely jostled against such fantasies in his domestic experience. His wife was nominally a spiritualist, and altho he was inclined, from knowledge of her character, to suppose her faith more a matter of convenience than of conviction, he had reason to think that the man who had long dominated her life under the guise of a spiritual instructor was, or had been, entirely convinced of his own power to communicate with the spirit world. This man had believed himself to see apparitions and hear voices. Durgan did not believe such experiences to be spiritual, but gave more weight to the question of such a belief in Bertha than if he had not already rubbed against the dupe of such a monomania.
The subject was not a pleasant one, yet, in connection with this painful theme, Durgan resolved to speak to Bertha in the hope of inducing confidence and perhaps driving away her fears.