CHAPTER IV
REUBEN CARTWRIGHT’S father had built the house in the lane at Farleigh, and one who had known Dick Cartwright well would have said the cottage was like him. There was something odd and unusual about it which gave it a peculiar charm without making it startling or bizarre; and something of his whimsicality seemed to have crept into the arrangement of nooks and corners and cupboards and bookcases. Oddest of all was the living-room, which was disproportionately large and contained a good-sized platform, raised three feet or more above the floor, which was to have held the pipe organ which the years were to have brought. But the years, instead of bringing the pipe organ, fame and other desiderata, material and otherwise, had taken away from Dick Cartwright his greatest blessing, his wife and sweet-heart whose presence and companionship had been the necessary conditions of fulfilling and enjoying his dreams. And after her death, the quaint cottage with the platform for the organ and the odd bits of furniture he had made and carved were only a mockery to Dick Cartwright. He had his little boy, it is true, who was very like his mother, and he had Mr. Langley as an intimate friend; but he could not forget Jessie and he took to drink to ease the torture remembrance was. Whereupon he forgot not only Jessie but their child and his duty as well. He lost his place as organist at Farleigh church and as book-keeper at one of the banks at Wenham. And when presently, three years after the death of his wife, he disappeared, it was found that he had lost his house also and all his possessions.
When news of his death in a railway wreck near Chicago came to Mr. Langley, who had meanwhile sheltered Reuben, he made enquiries and found that the cottage had been mortgaged to its full value. The bank at Wenham which held the mortgage offered the cottage for sale, then, when no purchaser appeared, for rent. Soon after, an elderly couple whose married daughter lived in the South Hollow took it and occupied it for six years until early in the preceding summer when their daughter had been widowed and they had gone to live with her. The cottage stood idle all summer but early in September a new family moved in, a mother and daughter, the first strangers to come to the village for years. No one knew whence they came nor who they were. They moved in so quietly that scarcely anyone knew the house was occupied until they saw smoke coming from the squat, picturesque chimney.
No one had seen the mother; but the daughter, who had answered the door or gone out on errands, was said to be as handsome as she was haughty. They responded to no friendly overtures, refusing entrance even to Mr. Langley, and seemed to feel themselves superior to the place and the people and to the cottage where they lived which was, indeed, a simple dwelling when compared with the simplest summer homes of the wealthy. For they were said to have been enormously wealthy and suddenly to have found themselves penniless at the death of the husband and father who had gambled or speculated until he had come to his last farthing. It was understood that they were relatives or connections of the president of the bank at Wenham, who had offered them the shelter of the cottage in the lane.
Anna Miller attributed their desire for seclusion to grief over the death of the husband and father rather than to pride. She couldn’t help fearing what had evidently occurred to none other that he might have died by his own hand, and she felt that such a shock might well leave them too sore and sick at heart to wish to see any human being. Nevertheless she said to herself, with an assurance that was made up of humility and warm-heartedness as well as of vanity, that she would somehow effect an entrance where others failed.
When she ran straight into the strange girl’s arms on the day she was fleeing from the parsonage and the spectre she had elicited, the one shock counteracted the other. Controlling her hysterical shuddering, she murmured an earnest apology.
“Dear me! I might have knocked you down, butting into you that way. You are sure I didn’t hurt you?”
“Not at all,” the girl repeated quietly, and Anna liked her voice as much as her dark, pretty face. “But what was it?” she asked. “Was someone or something chasing you?”
Anna smiled rather wanly as she moved back to get the support of the stone wall which fenced the lane. “Not exactly, unless it was a ghost,” she said in her usual droll way. “Sit down here, won’t you, and I’ll tell you about it.”
“I mustn’t stop,” the girl said nervously. “I only thought—you needed help.”