“Where is the key to this door?” she laid her hand over a knob to the right of the stairs.
“I guess if there is one it's on the other side. Yes, it's in the key-hole.” Chauncey turned the knob and shoved and lifted. The door yielded to his full strength, and he allowed Mrs. Bogardus to precede him. She stepped into a room hardly bigger than a closet with one window, barred like those in the outer room. It was fitted up with toilet conveniences according to the best advices of its day. Over all the neat personal arrangements there was the slur of neglect, a sad squalor which even a king's palace wears with time.
Chauncey tested the plumbing with a noise that was plainly offensive to his companion, but she bore with it—also with his reminiscences gathered from neighborhood gossip. “He wa'n't fond of spending money, but he didn't spare it here: this was his ship cabin when he started on his last voyage. It looked funny—a man with all his land and houses cooped up in a place like this; but he wanted to be independent of the women. He hated to have 'em fussin' around him. He had a woman to come and cook up stuff for him to help himself to; but she wouldn't stay here overnight, nor he wouldn't let her. As for a man in the house,—most men were thieves, he thought, or waiting their chance to be. It was real pitiful the way he made his end.”
“Open that window and shut the door when you come out,” said Mrs. Bogardus. “I will send some one to help you down with that secretary. Cerissa knows about it. It is to be sent up on the Hill.”
XXII. — THE CASE STRIKES IN
Christine's marriage took place while Paul and Moya were lingering in the Bruneau, for Paul's health ostensibly. Banks and Horace had been left to the smiling irony of justice. They never had a straight chance to define their conduct in the woods; for no one accused them. No awkward questions were asked in the city drawing-rooms or at the clubs. For a tough half hour or so at Fort Lemhi they had realized how they stood in the eyes of those unbiased military judges. The shock had a bracing effect for a time. Both boys were said to be much improved by their Western trip and by the hardships of that frightful homeward march.
Mrs. Bogardus had matched her gift of Stone Ridge to her son, which was a gift of sentiment, with one of more substantial value to her daughter,—the income from certain securities settled upon her and her heirs. Banks was carefully unprovided for. The big house in town was full of ghosts—the ghosts that haunt such homes, made desolate by a breach of hearts. The city itself was crowded with opportunities for giving and receiving pain between mother and daughter. Christine had developed all the latent hardness of her mother's race with a sickly frivolity of her own. She made a great show of faith in her marriage venture. She boomed it in her occasional letters, which were full of scarce concealed bravado as graceful as snapping her fingers in her mother's face.
Mrs. Bogardus leased her house in town, and retired before the ghosts, but not escaping them; Stone Ridge must be put in order for its new master and mistress, and Stone Ridge had its own ghosts. She informed her absentees that, before their return, she should have left for Southern California to look after some investments which she had neglected there of late. It was then she spoke of her plan for restoring the old house by pulling down that addition which disfigured it; and Paul had objected to this erasure. It would take from the house's veracity, he said. The words carried their unintentional sting.