FATE CASTS HER DIE
When he woke it was full sunset. The lonely reefs were red with it, (O Margarita, well I know that hour! Do you remember our talks?) the point of land seemed drowned in it, and with a sense of something inexcusably forgotten and put off, Roger hurried to the house that stood strangely deserted, it seemed, in the dying glow. In just that glow I have watched it, leaning on my oars, and for a few strange minutes, the exact time necessary for the sun to drop behind the coast-hills, I have felt myself a small boy again, crouched in a cane chair before my mother's sewing-table, unable for very terror to drop my feet to the floor as I gazed through wide eyes at the House of Usher, that home of sunset mystery. Such a strange, Poe-like atmosphere could that sanded, secret cottage take upon itself.
Roger pushed rapidly up the beach and entered the house quietly, so quietly that he caught Margarita's last sentences, which struck him as odd even in his utter ignorance of their connection. She was evidently scolding Caliban, for his grunts and shufflings punctuated her pauses.
"It is very saucy and unkind of you, Caliban," she was saying, "and you need not think you can do as you like because Hester is dead. I know she can not walk any more. My father could not walk when he was dead. And you need not think that Roger Bradley will not ask, because he will. He knows everything."
Roger thought that the lout had been teasing her with stupid ghost hints and bade him begone sternly, more vexed than before as he noticed the dim twilight drawing in and realised how late and inconvenient the hour was for all he had to do.
"Can you get me a lantern, Margarita?" he said shortly. "I must get back to the village and try to bring someone out with me to see about the—all the matters that must be attended to—upstairs."
"Upstairs?" she repeated, "what matters?" He blessed her indifference then, and explained as gently as he could the necessity for some disposition of her old housekeeper's body.
"Oh! Hester," she returned, "you cannot do anything to Hester, Roger Bradley, for she has gone."
"Gone," he echoed stupidly.
"Go and see," said Margarita, pointing to the stairway, and he took the steps two at a time. The room that she indicated faced the stairs directly. It was furnished plainly with an ugly wooden bed covered with a bright patchwork quilt, a pine bureau and two cheap chairs. The walls were utterly bare and the floor, but for a woven rug near the bed, of the sort so common in New England. And yet there was an air of homely occupation in the plain chamber, a bright, patched cushion in one chair, a basket full of household mending and such matters, on a small table, a pair of spectacles and a worn Bible beside it. The room had that unmistakable air of recent occupation, that subtle atmosphere of use and wont that no art can simulate—and yet it was empty.