Lewis Rand

by Mary Johnston

The Three-Notched Road stretched red and stark between rusty cedars and gaunt trunks of locust trees. It was cold, and overhead the sun was fighting with the clouds. Rand went rapidly, his powerful horse taking the road with a long and easy stride. Few were abroad; the bare and frozen fields stretched on either hand to the hills, the hills rose to the mountains, grey and sullen in the changing light. That meadow, field, and hill had once been mantled with tender verdure, and would be so again, was hard to believe, the land lay so naked and so grim.

Mrs. Selden's small, red brick mansion appeared among the leafless trees. Rand checked Selim slightly, gazing at the place with the weary uncertainty he had before exhibited, then turned for the moment from the task, irksome now as were all tasks, and rode on past Mrs. Jane Selden's to the house in which he had lived with his father and mother, and had lived with Jacqueline.

The place had been rented out since that summer of 1804, but the tenant, failing to make good, was gone, and for some months the house had been vacant. Rand and Selim moved slowly along the old, old familiar way. Every stick, every stone, every fence-corner was known to both. The man let his hand fall upon the brute's neck. "We're going home, Selim," he said. "We're going home."

It was not now the small, clean place, fresh with whitewash and bright with garden flowers, shone upon by the sun and sung about by birds, to which he had brought Jacqueline. The tenant had been dull, and the place was fallen into disrepair. In the winter air and without a leaf or flower, it looked again as it had looked when he and Gideon lived there alone. He dismounted, fastened Selim to the fence, and entered by the gate beneath the mimosa tree.

That the mimosa had ever shown sensitive leaf and mist of rosy bloom ranked now among other impossibilities. He stood for a moment looking at it in silence, then walked up the narrow path, mounted the porch steps, and tried the door. It was locked, but with an effort of all his wasted strength he burst it open and so entered the house.

The rooms were unfurnished and forlorn. He went from one to another, pausing in each in the middle of the floor, and gazing around as if to replace in that empty square the objects of the past. This progress made, he looked for a place to rest, but there was neither chair nor bench. All was bare, unswept, and desolate. He went into the kitchen, for he remembered the old settle there upon the enormous hearth. That they could not have removed, it was too heavy. He found it, took off his riding-coat and made a pillow for his head, then lay down full length upon the time-darkened wood. He had lain so, often and often, a little boy, a larger boy, a long-limbed, brooding youth. It had been his refuge from the fields, though hardly a refuge from his father. Gideon had been always there, lounging in his chair on the other side of the hearth, black pipe in hand, heavy stick beside him, revolving in his slow-moving mind, there in the dusk after the day's work, tobacco—tobacco—tobacco—and how he should keep Lewis from learning. "It had been better if he had succeeded," said Rand aloud.

With Gideon still before his eyes he fell asleep. Grim as was that figure, there was in the vision of it a strange sense of protection. It was his father, and, giddy from want of sleep, he sank slowly into oblivion, much as before now he had travelled there in the other's presence,—travelled with a gloomy mind and a body sore from the latest beating. Now the mind was full of scorpions, and the body stood in deadly need of sleep. It took it with a strange reversion to long gone-by conditions. The thought of Gideon's stick, the feel of his heavy hand upon his shoulder, were with him as of yore. The difference was that the man was comforted by what had been the boy's leaden cross.

Exhausted as he was, he slept at first heavily, and without a dream. This state lasted for some time, but eventually the brain took up its work, and the visions that plagued him recommenced. He turned, flung out his arm, moaned once or twice, lay quiet, then presently gave a cry and started up, pale and trembling, the sweat upon his brow. He wiped it off, drew a long, shuddering breath, and sat staring.

The kitchen windows were small, and half darkened by their wooden shutters. While he slept, the day had rounded into an afternoon, with more of sunshine than the morning had contained. The gold entered the room uncertainly, dimly, filtering in by the small apertures and striking across to the cavernous fireplace.

Rand knew it was but a trick of the light touching here and there in mote-filled shafts,—a trick of the light aiding the vagaries of an overwrought brain. He put forth his arm and found that it was so—there was no chair there and no figure seated in the chair. It was a trick of the light and an effect of imagination, an imagination that was hounded, day by day, from depth to pinnacle, from pinnacle to depth, back and forth like a shuttlecock in giant hands. No chair was there and no seated figure. He sank back on the settle and found that he saw them both.