The boy, sitting erect now, caught his mother’s hand silently, and his eyes stared into hers as he drank in every word:
“Mammy, who was, of course, little Philip’s nurse, told my mother afterward that she was sent away before my father and the boy went into the garden, but she saw them go and saw that my father had a tin box—a box about twelve inches long, which seemed very heavy—in his arms, and on his finger swung a long red ribbon with a little key strung on it. Mother knew it as the key of the box, and she had tied the ribbon on it herself.
“It was a bright, crisp Christmas day, pleasant in the garden—the box hedges were green and fragrant, aromatic in the sunshine. You don’t even know the smell of box in sunshine, you poor child! But I remember that day, for I was ten years old, a right big girl, and it was a beautiful morning for an invalid to take the air. Mammy said she was proud to see how her ‘handsome boy’ kept step with his father, and she watched the two until they got away down by the rose garden, and then she couldn’t see little Philip behind the three-foot hedge, so she turned away. But somewhere in that big garden, or under the trees beside it, my father buried the box that held the money—ten thousand dollars. It shows how he trusted that baby, that he took him with him, and you’ll see how his trust was only too well justified. For that evening, Christmas night, very suddenly my father died—before he had time to tell my mother where he had hidden the box. He tried; when consciousness came a few minutes before the end he gasped out, ‘I buried the money’—and then he choked. Once again he whispered just two words: ‘Philip knows.’ And my mother said, ‘Yes, dearest—Philip and I will find it—don’t worry, dearest,’ and that quieted him. She told me about it so many times.
“After the funeral she took little Philip and explained to him as well as she could that he must tell Mother where he and Father had put the box, and—this is the point of it all, Philip—he wouldn’t tell. She went over and over it all, again and again, but it was no use. He had given his word to my father never to tell, and he was too much of a baby to understand how death had dissolved that promise. My mother tried every way, of course, explanations and reasoning first, then pleading, and finally severity; she even punished the poor lithe martyr, for it was awfully important to us all. But the four-year-old baby was absolutely incorruptible. He cried bitterly and sobbed out:
“‘Farver said I mustn’t never tell anybody—never! Farver said Philip Fairfield of Fairfield mustn’t never bweak his words,’ and that was all.
“Nothing could induce him to give the least hint. Of course there was great search for it, but it was well hidden and it was never found. Finally, Mother took her obdurate son and me and came to New York with us, and we lived on the little income which she had of her own. Her hope was that as soon as Philip was old enough she could make him understand, and go back with him and get that large sum Iying underground—lying there yet, perhaps. But in less than a year the little boy was dead and the secret was gone with him.”
Philip Beckwith’s eyes were intense and wide. The Fairfield eyes, brown and brilliant, their young fire was concentrated on his mother’s face.
“Do you mean that money is buried down there, yet, mother?” he asked solemnly.
Mrs. Beckwith caught at the big fellow’s sleeve with slim fingers. “Don’t go today, Phil—wait till after lunch, anyway!”
“Please don’t make fun, Mother—I want to know about it. Think of it lying there in the ground!”
“Greedy boy! We don’t need money now, Phil. And the old place will be yours when I am dead——” The lad’s arm went about his mother’s shoulders. “Oh, but I’m not going to die for ages! Not till I’m a toothless old person with side curls, hobbling along on a stick. Like this!”—she sprang to her feet and the boy laughed a great peal at the haglike effect as his young mother threw herself into the part. She dropped on the divan again at his side.
“What I meant to tell you was that your father thinks it very unlikely that the money is there yet, and almost impossible that we could find it in any case. But some day when the place is yours you can have it put through a sieve if you choose. I wish I could think you would ever live there, Phil; but I can’t imagine any chance by which you should. I should hate to have you sell it—it has belonged to a Philip Fairfield so many years.”
A week later the boy left his childhood by the side of his mother’s grave. His history for the next seven years may go in a few lines. School days, vacations, the four years at college, outwardly the commonplace of an even and prosperous development, inwardly the infinite variety of experience by which each soul is a person; the result of the two so wholesome a product of young manhood that no one realized under the frank and open manner a deep reticence, an intensity, a sensitiveness to impressions, a tendency toward mysticism which made the fiber of his being as delicate as it was strong.
Suddenly, in a turn of the wheel, all the externals of his life changed. His rich father died penniless and he found himself on his own hands, and within a month the boy who had owned five polo ponies was a hard-working reporter on a great daily. The same quick-wittedness and energy which had made him a good polo player made him a good reporter. Promotion came fast and, as those who are busiest have the most time to spare, he fell to writing stories. When the editor of a large magazine took one, Philip first lost respect for that dignified person, then felt ashamed to have imposed on him, then rejoiced utterly over the check. After that editors fell into the habit; the people he ran against knew about his books; the checks grew better reading all the time; a point came where it was more profitable to stay at home and imagine events than to go out and report them. He had been too busy as the days marched to generalize; but suddenly he knew that he was a successful writer, that if he kept his head and worked, a future was before him. So he soberly put his own English by the side of that of a master or two from his bookshelves, to keep his perspective clear, and then he worked harder. And it came to be five years after his father’s death.
At the end of those years three things happened at once. The young man suddenly was very tired and knew that he needed the vacation he had gone without; a check came in large enough to make a vacation easy; and he had his old dream. His fagged brain had found it but another worry to decide where he should go to rest, but the dream settled the vexed question offhand—he would go to Kentucky. The very thought of it brought rest to him, for like a memory of childhood, like a bit of his own soul, he knew the country—the “God’s Country” of its people—which he had never seen. He caught his breath as he thought of warm, sweet air that held no hurry or nerve strain; of lingering sunny days whose hours are longer than in other places; of the soft speech, the serene and kindly ways of the people; of the royal welcome waiting for him as for everyone, heartfelt and heart-warming; he knew it all from a daughter of Kentucky—his mother. It was May now, and he remembered she had told him that the land was filled with roses at the end of May—he would go then. He owned the old place, Fairfield, and he had never seen it. Perhaps it had fallen to pieces; perhaps his mother had painted it in colors too bright; but it was his, the bit of the earth that belonged to him. The Anglo-Saxon joy of landowning stirred for the first time within him—he would go to his own place. Buoyant with the new thought, he sat down and wrote a letter. A cousin of the family, of a younger branch, a certain John Fairfield, lived yet upon the land. Not in the great house, for that had been closed many years, but in a small house almost as old, called Westerly. Philip had corresponded with him once or twice about affairs of the estate, and each letter of the older man’s had brought a simple and urgent invitation to come South and visit him. So, pleased as a child with the plan, he wrote that he was coming on a certain Thursday, late in May. The letter sent, he went about in a dream of the South, and when its answer, delighted and hospitable, came simultaneously with one of those bleak and windy turns of weather which make New York, even in May, a mar
velously fitting place to leave, he could not wait. Almost a week ahead of his time he packed his bag and took the Southwestern Limited, and on a bright Sunday morning he awoke in the old Phoenix Hotel in Lexington. He had arrived too late the night before to make the fifteen miles to Fairfield, but he had looked over the horses in the livery stable and chosen the one he wanted, for he meant to go on horseback, as a southern gentleman should, to his domain. That he meant to go alone, that no one, not even John Fairfield, knew of his coming, was not the least of his satisfactions, for the sight of the place of his forefathers, so long neglected, was becoming suddenly a sacred thing to him. The old house and its young owner should meet each other like sweethearts, with no eyes to watch their greeting, their slow and sweet acquainting; with no living voices to drown the sound of the ghostly voices that must greet his homecoming from those walls—voices of his people who had lived there, voices gone long since into eternal silence.
A little crowd of loungers stared with frank admiration at the young fellow who came out smiling from the door of the Phoenix Hotel, big and handsome in his riding clothes, his eyes taking in the details of girths and bits and straps with the keenness of a horseman.
Philip laughed as he swung into the saddle and looked down at the friendly faces, most of them black faces, below. “Goodbye,” he said. “Wish me good luck, won’t you?” and a willing chorus of “Good luck, boss,” came flying after him as the horse’s hoofs clattered down the street.
Through the bright drowsiness of the little city he rode in the early Sunday morning, and his heart sang for joy to feel himself again across a horse, and for the love of the place that warmed him already. The sun shone hotly, but he liked it; he felt his whole being slipping into place, fitting to its environment; surely, in spite of birth and breeding, he was southern born and bred, for this felt like home more than any home he had known!
As he drew away from the city, every little while, through stately woodlands, a dignified sturdy mansion peeped down its long vista of trees at the passing cavalier, and, enchanted with its beautiful setting, with its air of proud unconsciousness, he hoped each time that Fairfield would look like that. If he might live here—and go to New York, to be sure, two or three times a year to keep the edge of his brain sharpened—but if he might live his life as these people lived, in this unhurried atmosphere, in this perfect climate, with the best things in his reach for everyday use; with horses and dogs, with out-of-doors and a great, lovely country to breathe in; with—he smiled vaguely—with sometime perhaps a wife who loved it as he did—he would ask from earth no better life than that. He could write, he felt certain, better and larger things in such surroundings.
But he pulled himself up sharply as he thought how idle a daydream it was. As a fact, he was a struggling young author, he had come South for two weeks’ vacation, and on the first morning he was planning to live here—he must be lightheaded. With a touch of his heel and a word and a quick pull on the curb, his good horse broke into a canter, and then, under the loosened rein, into a rousing gallop, and Philip went dashing down the country road, past the soft, rolling landscape, and under cool caves of foliage, vivid with emerald greens of May, thoughts and dreams all dissolved in exhilaration of the glorious movement, the nearest thing to flying that the wingless animal, man, may achieve.
He opened his coat as the blood rushed faster through him, and a paper fluttered from his pocket. He caught it, and as he pulled the horse to a trot, he saw that it was his cousin’s letter. So, walking now along the brown shadows and golden sunlight of the long white pike, he fell to wondering about the family he was going to visit. He opened the folded letter and read:
“My dear Cousin,” it said—the kinship was the first thought in John Fairfield’s mind—“I received your welcome letter on the 14th. I am delighted that you are coming at last to Kentucky, and I consider that it is high time you paid Fairfield, which has been the cradle of your stock for many generations, the compliment of looking at it. We closed our house in Lexington three weeks ago, and are settled out here now for the summer, and find it lovelier than ever. My family consists only of myself and Shelby, my one child, who is now twenty-two years of age. We are both ready to give you an old-time Kentucky welcome, and Westerly is ready to receive you at any moment you wish to come.”
The rest was merely arrangements for meeting the traveler, all of which were done away with by his earlier arrival.
“A prim old party, with an exalted idea of the family,” commented Philip mentally. “Well-to-do, apparently, or he wouldn’t be having a winter house in the city. I wonder what the boy Shelby is like. At twenty-two he should be doing something more profitable than spending an entire summer out here, I should say.”
The questions faded into the general content of his mind at the glimpse of another stately old pillared homestead, white and deep down its avenue of locusts. At length he stopped his horse to wait for a ragged Negro trudging cheerfully down the road.
“Do you know a place around here called Fairfield?” he asked.
“Yessah. I does that, sah. It’s that ar’ place right hyeh, sah, by yo’ hoss. That ar’s Fahfiel’. Shall I open the gate fo’ you, boss?” and Philip turned to see a hingeless ruin of boards held together by the persuasion of rusty wire.
“The home of my fathers looks down in the mouth,” he reflected aloud.
The old Negro’s eyes, gleaming from under shaggy sheds of eyebrows, watched him, and he caught the words.
“Is you a Fahfiel’, boss?” he asked eagerly. “Is you my young marse?” He jumped at the conclusion promptly. “You favors de fam’ly mightily, sah. I heerd you was comin”’; the rag of a hat went off and he bowed low. “Hit’s cert’nly good news fo’ Fahfiel’, Marse Philip, hit’s mighty good news fo’ us niggers, sah. I’se btlonged to the Fahfiel’ fam’ly a hundred years, Marse—me and my folks, and I wishes yo’ a welcome home, sah—welcome home, Marse Philip.”
Philip bent with a quick movement from his horse and gripped the twisted old black hand, speechless. This humble welcome on the highway caught at his heart deep down, and the appeal of the colored people to southerners, who know them, the thrilling appeal of a gentle, loyal race, doomed to live forever behind a veil and hopeless without bitterness, stirred for the first time his manhood. It touched him to be taken for granted as the child of his people; it pleased him that he should be “Marse Philip” as a matter of course, because there had always been a Marse Philip at the place. It was bred deeper in the bone of him than he knew, to understand the soul of the black man; the stuff he was made of had been southern two hundred years.
The old man went off down the white limestone road singing to himself, and Philip rode slowly under the locusts and beeches up the long drive, grass-grown and lost in places, that wound through the woodland three-quarters of a mile to his house. And as he moved through the park, through sunlight and shadow of these great trees that were his, he felt like a knight of King Arthur, like some young knight long exiled, at last coming to his own. He longed with an unreasonable seizure of desire to come here to live, to take care of it, beautify it, fill it with life and prosperity as it had once been filled, surround it with cheerful faces of colored people whom he might make happy and comfortable. If only he had money to pay off the mortgage, to put the place once in order, it would be the ideal setting for the life that seemed marked out for him—the life of a writer.
The horse turned a corner and broke into a canter up the slope, and as the shoulder of the hill fell away there stood before him the picture of his childhood come to life, smiling drowsily in the morning sunlight with shuttered windows that were its sleeping eyes—the great white house of Fairfield. Its high pillars reached to the roof; its big wings stretched away at either side; the flicker of the shadow of the leaves played over it tenderly and hid broken bits of woodwork, patches of paint cracked away, windowpanes gone here and t
here. It stood as if too proud to apologize or to look sad for such small matters, as serene, as stately as in its prime. And its master, looking at it for the first time, loved it.
The Ghost Story Megapack Page 46
