Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “Well, give us another call, Bob,” he said.

  The other looked at him over his dyed mustache without answering, while the girl stared round with her wild black eyes, as if startled at finding herself perched so high up in the light of day. Both at the same time caught sight of Boynton and Egeria, who fell behind her father as he approached the doorway. The man leaned toward the girl and whispered something to her, at which she gave him a push and bade him stop his fooling.

  “Can I get a conveyance here to carry us to Vardley Village?” asked Boynton, accosting the landlord.

  “I don’t know,” answered the man, looking doubtfully at the doctor and Egeria. He turned his back on them in the manner of some rustics who wish to show a sovereign indifference, and made a pace or two towards the door, before he half faced them again.

  “Well, good-by, Tommy!” said the man in the buggy, drawing his reins, and then checking his horse. “Look here, will you?”

  The landlord went back, and the man leaned over the side of the buggy and said something in a low tone.

  “No!” cried the landlord.

  “Bet you anything on it!” said the man. “Get up!” He drove away.

  “Come in,” said the landlord to the doctor, “and I’ll see.”

  Egeria shrunk from following her father, who was mechanically obeying, and murmured something about walking.

  “Oh, come in, come in!” said the landlord, more eagerly. “I guess I can manage for you. Come in and rest ye, any way.”

  “Come, Egeria,” said her father.

  The landlord was a short, stout man, with a shock of iron-gray hair and a face of dusky red, coarse and harsh; his blood-shot eyes wandered curiously over Egeria’s figure. He led the way into the parlor of the tavern, which within had an air of former dignity, as if it had not been built for its present uses. The hall was wide and the staircase fine; the chimney-piece and wooden cornice of the parlor showed the nice and patient carpentry of seventy-five years ago. There was a fire in the sheet-iron stove on the hearth, and the lady who had just driven off in the buggy had left proof of a decided taste in perfumes. If Egeria had liked she might have dressed her hair at the glass in which this person had surveyed the effect of her paint, with the public comb and brush on the table before it. There were some claret-colored sporting prints on the wall, and some tattered, thumb-worn illustrated papers on the centre-table.

  “I’ll tell ye what,” said the landlord, who had briefly disappeared after showing them into this room, and had now returned, “I hain’t got any hoss in now, but I’ll have one in about an hour, and then I’ll set ye over to Vardley.”

  “What will you charge?” asked the doctor. “It ain’t a-goin’ to cost ye much. I d’ know as I’ll ask ye anything. I’m goin’ there, any way; and I guess we can ride three on a seat.”

  Boynton expressed a flowery sense of this goodness, but said that they should insist upon paying him for his trouble. Egeria had dropped into the rocking-chair beside the window, and, propping her arm on the window-sill, supported her averted face on her hand. Her head throbbed, and the thick, foul sweetness of the air made her faint; the glare of the sun from the snow and gathering pools beat into her heavy eyes.

  “Does your head ache?” asked her father.

  “Yes,” she gasped.

  “I’ll send in some tea,” said the landlord.

  A black man brought it; there seemed to be no women about the house.

  The landlord went and came often; through her pain and lethargy, the girl had a dull sense of his vigilance. Her father found her feverish, and no better for the tea she drank. He fretted and repined at her condition, and then he grew tired of looking at her pale face fallen against the chair back, and her closed eyes, that trembled under their lids, and now and then sent out a gush of hot tears. He went into the other room, where the landlord sat with his boots on the low, cast-iron stove, and a white-nosed bull-dog slept suspiciously in a corner. As the time passed, different people appeared within and without the tavern. A man in a blood-stained over-shirt drove a butcher’s wagon to the door; a tall man, in a silk hat, came with a fish cart painted black and varnished. With a blithe jingle of bells, a young fellow rattled up with a cracker wagon, and having come in for the landlord’s order — the landlord did not find it necessary to take down his feet from the stove, or to disturb the angle at which his hat rested on his head, during the transaction — he danced a figure on the painted floor, and caressed the bull-dog with the toe of his boot. “Next time you put up Pete,” he said, “I want to bring my brother’s brindle. I want him to wear the belt a spell. Pete must be gittin’ tired of it. Well, I wouldn’t ever said a dog-fight could be such fun,” he added, with an expression of agreeable reminiscence. “And the old ball-room’s just the place for it.” He spat on the stove, and taking under his arm the empty cracker box, which he had just replaced on its shelf with a full one, he went out as he had come in, without saluting the landlord. He stopped at the open door of the parlor, and catching sight of Egeria made her a bow of burlesque devotion, and turned to include the landlord in the fun with a parting wink.

  Egeria had not seen him; her eyes were closed; and her father, where he sat in the office, was looking impatiently out of the window. The sky had begun to thicken again.

  “Do you think it’s going to rain?” he asked, when the cracker wagon had jingled away.

  “Shouldn’t wonder,” said the landlord.

  “I hope your conveyance will be here soon,” pursued the doctor. “I’m anxious, on my daughter’s account, not to miss the train from Vardley that connects with the Portland express.”

  “Daughter, eh?” said the landlord, with a certain intonation; but Dr. Boynton observed nothing strange in it.

  “How soon do you think your horse will be here?” he asked.

  “I can’t tell ye,” said the landlord doggedly.

  “You did tell me,” retorted Boynton, “that it would be here in less than an hour. You have detained us that time already, and now you say you don’t know how much longer I must wait.”

  “Now, look here,” began the other, taking down his feet from the stove.

  “I wish to pay you for what accommodation we have had. I wish to go,” said the doctor, angrily.

  “I don’t want ye should go!” replied the other, with a stupid air of secrecy.

  “I’ve nothing to do with that,” said the doctor. “I am going. Here is the money for your tea.” He flung upon the counter the pieces of scrip which the school-teacher had given him.

  The landlord rose to his feet. “Ye can’t go. I might as well have it out first as last. Ye can’t go.”

  “Can’t go? You ‘re ridiculous!” Boynton exclaimed. “What’s the reason I can’t go?”

  “Well, you can go, but the girl can’t, — not till the off’cers comes. I mean to say,” he added, at Dr. Boynton’s look of amaze, “that she’s no more your daughter than she is mine. I d’ know where you picked her up, but she’s one of the girls that’s escaped from the reform school, and she’s goin’ back there as soon as the off’cers gets here. That’s what’s the matter.”

  “And do you mean to say that you are going to detain us here against our will?”

  “I don’t know what you call it. I’m going to keep you here.” He had planted his burly bulk in the door-way leading into the hall.

  “Stand aside,” said Boynton, “or I’ll take you by the throat.”

  “I guess not,” returned the landlord coolly. “Pete!” The brute in the corner had opened his whitish, cruel eyes at the sound of angry voices. “Watch him!” The dog came and lay down at his master’s feet, with his face turned toward Boynton. “There! I guess you won’t take anybody by the throat much!” The man resumed his chair, which he tilted back against the counter at its former comfortable angle.

  Boynton quivered with helpless indignation. “Is it possible,” he exclaimed, “that an outrage like this can be perpetrated at high no
on in the heart of Massachusetts?”

  “That’s about the size of it,” returned the landlord, with a grin of brutal exultation.

  “I must submit,” said the doctor. “But you shall answer for this.” The man was silent, and the doctor fancied that he might perhaps be relenting. He poured out a recital of the whole misadventure that had ended in their coming to his door, and appealed to him not to detain them. “My daughter has been sick, and she is now far from well. I am most anxious to pursue our journey. We have no friends in this region, and we are out of money. Let us go, now, and I will consent to overlook this outrageous attempt upon our liberty. If we lose the train this afternoon, she may suffer very seriously from the delay and the disappointment.”

  “She’ll be all right when she gets back to the reform school,” answered the landlord, as if bored by the long story.

  Boynton’s self-command failed him. He burst into tears. “My God!” he sobbed, “have I fallen so low as this? — impostor, and tramp, and beggar, and now the captive, the slave, of this ruffian! It’s too much! What have I done, — what have I done!” He hid his face in his hands, and bowed himself abjectly forward in the chair into which he had sunk.

  Some one drove up to the door, and shouted from the outside, “Hello!”

  The landlord rose, and saying to his dog, “Stay there,” went out to the door, and after a brief parley came in again with two other men. Their steps sounded as if they went to the door of the parlor and looked in, while their voices sank to rapid whispers. In his agony of anxiety, Boynton made an involuntary movement forwards; the dog growled and crept nearer. He was helpless; but the steps returned to the outer door, and there a voice said, “No, I don’t want to see him, as long as’t ain’t the girl. Somebody’s made a dumn fool of you, Harris, and you’ve made dumn fools of us. Guess you better wait a while, next time.”

  The landlord came sulkily back, and sat down in his chair, which he tilted against the counter as before. Boynton suffered some time to elapse before he asked, “Well, sir, do you mean to let us go?”

  “Who’s henderin’ you?” sullenly demanded the landlord, without moving.

  “Then call away your dog.”

  The landlord refused, out of mere brutish wantonness, to comply at once; but he presently did so, and followed Boynton to the parlor. Then, according to Boynton’s report, ensued a series of those events of which the believers in such mysteries fiercely assert the reality, and of which others as strenuously deny the occurrence. The sky darkened; there was a noise like the straining of the branches of the elms beside the house; but there was no wind, and the boughs were motionless. Presently this straining sound, as if the fibres were twisting and writhing together, was heard in the wood-work of the room. —

  “What the hell is that?” cried the landlord. The room was full of it, whatever it was; every part of the wood-work — doors, window casings, cornice, wainscot — was now voluble with a muffled detonation.

  “Wait!” Boynton answered. The sound beat like rain-drops on the floor, at which the landlord stared, with the dog whimpering at his heels. Egeria lay white and still in the rocking-chair by the window. At the sound of their voices she stirred and moaned; then, as Boynton asserted, they saw the marble top of the centre-table lifted three times from its place; a picture swung out from the wall, as if blown by a strong gust; and the brush from the table was flung across the room, flying close to the dog’s head; with a howl, he fled out-of-doors.

  “For God’s sake, man, what is it?” gasped the landlord, seizing Boynton’s arm, and cowering close to him.

  “I forgive you, I bless you!” cried the other, rapturously. “It was from your evil that this good came. It’s a miracle; it’s — it’s the presence of the dead.”

  “No, no!” protested the landlord. “I’ve kept a hard place; there’s been drinkin’ and fancy folks; but there hain’t been no murder, — not in my time. I can’t answer for it before that; they always tell about killin’ peddlers in these old houses. Oh! Lord have mercy!” A flash of red light filled the world, and a rending burst of thunder made the house shake. The electricity appeared to rise from the ground, and not to come from the clouds; it was, as sometimes happens, a sole discharge. The landlord turned, and followed his dog out-of-doors. The negro was already there, looking up at the house.

  Egeria started from her chair. “Did you will it, father, — did you will it?” she implored, at sight of Dr. Boynton’s wild face.

  “No; it has come without motion of mine,” he answered with a solemn joy. “I have never seen or heard anything like it.” He looked round the room, in which an absolute silence now prevailed.

  The girl shuddered. “I have had a horrible dream. The house seemed full of drunken men — and women — like that girl in the buggy; and we couldn’t get away, and you couldn’t get to me, and — oh!” She shook violently, and hurried on her hat and water-proof. “Come! I can’t breathe here.”

  As they passed out the landlord made no motion to detain them; he even shrank a few paces aside. When Boynton looked back from the next turn of the road, he saw him walking to and fro before the tavern, looking up now and then at its front, and taking unconsciously the cold rain that lashed his own face as he turned eastward again. He was in a frame of high exultation; he shouted in talk with Egeria, who scarcely answered, as she pressed forward with her head down.

  The snow dissolved under the rain and flooded the road, in which they waded, plunging on and on. They came presently to a lonely country graveyard, where the soaked pines and spruces dripped upon the stones, standing white and stiffly upright where they were of recent date, and where darkened with the storms of many seasons slanting in various degrees of obliquity to a fall. Here was one of those terrible little houses in which the hearse, the bier, and the sexton’s tools are kept; Boynton tried the door, and when it yielded to his battering he called to his daughter to take shelter with him there.

  “No!” she shouted back to him, “I would rather die!” She pushed, she knew not whither, down the road that wound into a stretch of pine forest, and he must needs follow her. At last they came to a hollow through which a brook, swollen by the snow and rain, rolled a yellow torrent. They stopped at the brink in despair; there was no house in sight, but on a knoll near by the trees stood so thick that the rain-fall was broken by the densely interwoven boughs.

  The doctor led Egeria to this shelter, and placed her in the dryest spot; he felt her shiver, and heard her teeth chatter, as the waves of cold swept over her. He left her fallen on the brown needles, and went and tried the depth of the stream with a stick; the rain dripped from him everywhere, — from his elbows, from the rim of his silk hat, and from the point of his nose; he looked at once weird and grotesque.

  “Heh!” cried a loud voice behind him. In a covered wagon crouched the figure of a young man in manifold capes and wraps of drab and blue, under the sweep of a very wide-brimmed hat. He had almost driven over Boynton. “Tryin’ for water, with a hazel-rod? Guess you’ll find it most anywheres to-day.”

  The voice was pleasant, and Boynton, looking up, confronted a cheery face in the wagon. “I was seeing if it was too deep to cross.”

  “‘T ain’t for the horses,” said their driver. “Get in.” He moved hospitably to one side. “You can’t make me any wetter.”

  “Thank you,” said Boynton. “I have my daughter here under the pines.”

  “Your daughter?” The young man in the wagon looked at first puzzled, and then, as he craned his neck round the side of the curtain and saw the little cowering heap which was Egeria,’ he looked daunted, but he only said, “Bring her, too.”

  Boynton gathered her into his arms, and placed her on the seat between him and the driver. “We were going to Vardley Station,” he explained. “Is this the way?”

  “It’s one way,” said the other, driving through the torrent. “But I guess you better stop with us till the rain’s over. We’ll be home in half a mile.”

>   “You are very good,” said Boynton, looking at him. “We must push on. We must get back to the Junction in time for the Portland express.” He once more gave the facts of their mischance.

  When he had ended, “Oh, yee,” said the other, “you are the friend that was speakin’ to some of our folks at the Junction.”

  The doctor started. “Your folks? What are you?”

  “Shakers.”

  “Egeria! Egeria!” shouted her father. “I have found them! This gentleman is a Shaker! He is taking us to the community! I accept, sir, with great pleasure. I shall be glad to stop and see more of your people. Egeria!” She made no answer. Her limp and sunken figure rested heavily against the young Shaker; her head had fallen on his shoulder.

  “I guess she’s fainted,” he said.

  XII.

  Egeria had not fainted, but she had lapsed into a torpor from which she could not rouse herself. She could not speak or make any sign when her father drew her head away from the young man’s shoulder and laid it on his own. The Shaker chirped his reeking horses into a livelier pace, and when he reached the office in the village he sprang from the wagon with more alertness than could have been imagined of him, and ran in-doors to announce his guests.

  Brother Humphrey and the three office sisters, (In placing some passages of his story among the Shakers of an easily recognizable locality, the author has avoided the study of personal traits, and he wishes explicitly to state that his Shakers are imaginary in everything but their truth, charity, and purity of life, and that scarcely less lovable quaintness to which no realism could do perfect justice.) very clean and very dry, with the warm smell of a stove fire exhaling from their comfortable garments, received him with countenances in which resignation blended with the natural reluctance of people within to have anything to do with people without, in such weather.