They had shut the head-gates of the race, which they were to drain later if necessary, and now they set about dragging the waters of the dam in two parties, one in the flatboat which Powell kept there and one in the skiff which they had carried up from the river below. Bickler had promised to be there among the first, but Powell thought it quite like the man that he was not to be seen. He himself directed the course of the flatboat, close to the shore, and at a point where some bushes overhung it Bickler parted them and jumped aboard. No one spoke to him, but at his appearance there was a sensation in the men poling the heavy boat, as Powell bade them, in the low tones to which they dropped their voices with his. Bickler took his place at the bow and stooped over the still water with eyes that seemed to pierce its depths.
There was no wind, and the slow ripple of the flat-boat as it advanced scarcely broke the oily surface.
From time to time a red or yellow leaf dropped from an overhanging tree and made a faint circle in it. At the seine’s length away to the larboard the skiff kept even with the flatboat. When something caught the net below the waters, which had been lowered by opening the sluice in the dam, one of the men would say, “What’s that?” Then the course of the boats would be arrested till the net was carefully lifted and a decaying branch or sodden log released from it and thrown ashore. At such times Bickler would shrink back from where he knelt, or hold himself unmoved, with hands clenching the gunwale. When fish were brought up they were thrown back, not without mute appeals from the men which Powell denied, or protests from the boys on either shore who followed the course of the boats and saw the bass and mudcats and pickerel wastefully returned to their haunts among the roots holding the projecting banks together, or in the mats of withered iris along the shore.
The search went on for hours until the whole of the dam was dragged; then there had begun to be murmurs of impatience among the crews which Powell could not check. In fact, the event had been losing reality for him, and he was glad to be able to say at last: “Well, we might as well stop. There’s no use. Now we will try the head-race.” With the authority which would not have been conceded to him at other times he led the crowd of men, with its border of dogs and boys, down the banks of the race to the flood-gates below the sluice of the sawmill. In his progress he was aware of Bickler keeping close at his side, as if in terror of himself, and as the waters began their sheeted spurt from the opening valves of the gates he felt the man at his elbow.
Powell himself believed that the girl’s body, if she were drowned, might more probably be found in the race, which could, at any rate, be effectually searched; he seemed to draw breath in the wretch beside him and to watch with his vision for what the waters should reveal. He wanted to say to Bickler, whose gasping peculiarly molested him, to go away, but in pity he could not, and he was sensible of their calming their respiration together as the spurt from the gates grew weaker and lower without discovering what they mutually dreaded. With a sort of nether sense he perceived that Overdale had added himself to the crowd, and with bandaged head and one arm still in a sling was now appearing for the first time out-of-doors. No one noticed him, as if in the greater interest no one felt any strangeness in his presence.
At last the race was drained and the gates set wide. There was nothing but a heap of fish flapping and floundering in the scattered puddles left by the waste.
“Oh, blessed be God Almighty!” Powell heard Bickler groan out at his shoulder and then give a screech of terror and make a choking sound.
“Don’t you be too sure o’ God Almighty!” Overdale was shouting, and Powell saw him with his sound arm outstretched, as if he had leaped the pool that parted them; his hand was at Bickler’s throat, pushing him backward and making his head shake from side to side. “If Owen Powell, here,’ll say the word I’ll shake the life out of you!”
“What do you mean?” Powell shouted. “Let the man alone! Don’t any one touch him!” He turned to the others, for they seemed to be preparing for a rush upon Bickler. “He’s coming with me! Till there’s something proved against him he’s as innocent as any of you.” —
Some such disappointment as dumbly shows in a dog’s eyes when he is made to release his prey, and something of a man’s amaze at an unimaginable difference of opinion, was visible in Overdale; but he did as he was bid, and stood a little off so that Powell could put himself before Bickler and take, much against the grain, the wretch’s elbow in his hand and lead him away toward the new house. He turned and called back to the crowd: “There’s no reason why you shouldn’t have the fish now”; and this, if anything of the kind were needed, operated a diversion, and Bickler continued safe in his keeping.
XXI
“YES, Ann,” Powell said that night, after the children had gone to sleep, “you gave him shelter, I don’t deny, but can you say you gave him welcome?”
“I had no welcome to give him, and I don’t pretend that I had. All that I wanted after he got into the house was to get him safely out of it. I hate the sight of him, and I shouldn’t have been sorry if the crowd had seen him going.”
“Oh yes, you would, Ann. But the fish looked after that. If it hadn’t been for the fish, I doubt if your vigilance would have been enough to smuggle him through the back door and start him off to Spring Grove. But seriously, my dear, I think Bickler has behaved very well, considering the mischief he has made without meaning the whole of it. He certainly seems truly repentant.”
“I don’t care for his repentance. All the repenting in the world won’t bring poor Rosy back,” Ann said, with passionate pity for the girl.
“Well, perhaps she will come back of herself,”
Powell hopefully suggested.
“No, she never will come back. I just know her dreadful old mother has got her somewhere, and that’s the end of Rosy.”
In the morning it seemed as if Rosy might have stolen back. Her sunbonnet hung on its nail behind the kitchen door, and her shabby little shoes, side-worn at the heels, stood on the floor beneath it; but the day went by, and the days after that, and no Rosy returned to wear the bonnet and the shoes. Her poor best dress clung to the wall beside her bed in that mocking facsimile of the wearer which clothes have the trick of, and in her bureau drawer, among her ribbons and collars, Ann found the brooch which Bickler had given her.
“He must have made her take it again,” Ann said to her husband. “There is no telling how often the miserable scamp saw her or how he kept her from letting us know. We shall never have the truth from him.”
It was Powell’s belief, as the days and weeks went by, that they not only had the truth, but more than the truth from Bickler. He came almost daily, or, rather, nightly, to confess the wrong he had done and to repeat his repentance with some increasing form of selfaccusal. He owned that he had made the girl take back the brooch and keep it a secret from Mrs. Powell, and he exaggerated his guilt in the matter in order to extract the comfort from Powell which Powell more and more unwillingly ministered. He began escaping Bickler and leaving him to Ann, who healed his wounds by unsparing cautery rather than such medicament as Powell’s philosophic compassion supplied. The two, as they sat together in the kitchen, still haunted by the vanished presence of the girl, heard Powell tuning his harp, or striking it untuned, in the remotest front of the house, and singing to it some of the Scotch songs so alien to its Welsh nature. It tired Ann, too, having the man dwell upon his vain despair, his vain hope of finding Rosy; yet if he left these a moment with some hapless remark upon the minstrelsy she brought him pitilessly back and suffered on with him.
He still wore the fashionable clothes in which she had first seen him, for he had no others; but he seemed to have shrunk in them, and they hung about him in the neglect which they shared with his unshaven beard and unoiled hair. The splendor of his electioneering days was far from him; he remained visibly in the shame of his defeat at the polls. He rode up to the back of the house, and entered at the kitchen door with boots spattered from the mud of the c
ountry road. “I always think,” he would say, “that I’m going to find her here when you open the door. I reckon you haven’t heard anything yet?”
“Not yet, Bickler,” Powell would answer, kindly, “but I don’t give up the hope of doing so,” and then the wretched man would begin with the tale of his suffering and with his self-accusal mixed with self-pity.
“I don’t seem to care for eating any more, and I wake half a dozen times in the night. I always dream that she has come back, and as I get along nearer to your house I bet myself she won’t be here. God’s my judge, how glad I’d be to lose once.”
Powell could not forbear a smile. “Well, perhaps you will yet.”
“Mighty little chance, I reckon. Now, Mr. Powell, I’d like to go the case all over; go through it like as if it was in court.”
“Well, Bickler, you’ve done that already, you know.”
“But some points have come up in my mind. Still, I won’t to-night. There’s one thing, though, I wanted to speak about. Do you think it would do any good if I was to go into church, some church, and own up before everybody just how it was?”
“I doubt it, Bickler. Doesn’t everybody know the worst already?”
“Ah, they know more than the worst! They don’t know the best, bad as it is. I believe if it could be understood once — But what do I care what they think? It’s what I think myself that I care for. Do you suppose that if I made public confession it would help me to get the Lord’s forgiveness? I shouldn’t care whether it made them take after me, and tar and feather me, and ride me out of the county on a rail, if it would only help me to get a little peace of mind. But nothing will do it, and that’s a sign that the Lord isn’t going to forgive me. Oh my, oh my, oh my!”
They had talked again and again to this point, and again and again Powell had assured the sinner that if he owned his sin to himself he had disowned it, and that this renunciation made before himself and his wife was morally as effective as if made before the whole community.
“But what I want is punishment, something to take it out of me,” and it was at this point that the notion of relaxing him to the secular arm in the person of Mrs. Powell first occurred to her husband. He did not at once act upon it, but it finally formed his justification in summoning Ann to the conference, and when once the appeal had been made to her as a point for adjudication, retiring himself from the case and leaving it wholly to her.
She found at first a certain satisfaction in bringing his potential guilt before the wretched man, though in his collapse she could not always recognize him for the miscreant she theorized him, but at times felt as if he were some miserable boy, whose fault had found him out in worse guilt than it necessarily implied. From the pathos of this she had to recall herself to the abhorrence of his betrayal of Rosy to her mother; that was his greater guilt.
“There is one thing you can do, Mr. Bickler,” she” said at last, “and that is to look up that wicked old mother of hers.”
“What good would that do?” Bickler gasped, in the reluctance which he had for putting his remorse to a practical proof; it was much easier to suffer shame at the hands of the Powells than take some action that would entail the public consequences which he had professed himself so eager to meet.
“It would do the good that nothing else would. It would be the way of finding Rosy, if she is still alive. Her mother knows, if anybody. If you can’t find her mother, you can find that cousin of hers that cooks on the canal-boat. She could tell you where Rosy’s mother is, at any rate. But why do you make me tell you all this? You are a lawyer and you know how to act.”
Bickler answered, vaguely: “It’s like as if I couldn’t move. I can come here and talk with you, because you know about it, but it doesn’t seem as if I could speak to anybody else.”
“Well, then, I can tell you that’s very cowardly, and if you are as sorry as you pretend to be you’ll overcome it and do the only thing that’s left for you to do.”
“I’m afraid, I’m afraid; I don’t deny it. I can’t bear to speak her name anywhere, or to ask anybody, for fear I’ll find out that she’s dead, or worse than dead.”
“Then don’t come here any more, Mr. Bickler, for I won’t stand it. You pretend to be sorry and to want punishment, and you shirk it in the only shape you can get it.” Ann rose. “Now I want you to go and not come back unless you come to tell me that you’ve been to look for Rosy’s mother and cousin.”
Bickler got up perforce from the chair he was sunk in, and turned his cap on one hand with the other; he now always wore it pulled over his eyes and no longer jauntily slouched on one ear when he made his appearance at the hack door. “Don’t you think we had better talk it over with Mr. Powell?”
“No, I don’t. And if you want to know, Mr. Powell is sick and tired of your coming here, and he’ll never want to see you again unless you’ve really got something to tell.”
“That was rather severe, Ann,” Powell said when she repeated the fact to him. He looked down thoughtfully while she stared indignantly at him. “I am sick and tired of him. I realize that his repentance has worn out my patience. But it’s dreadful, isn’t it, that the remorse of a man should bore his fellow-creature?”
Ann was unable to enter into the psychological inquiry. “I don’t know anything about that, Owen, and I don’t care. It’s nearly enough, your taking it that way, to make me feel that there’s a pair of you — that you’re as bad as he is.”
Powell laughed now with a humorous sense of her excess. “Well, I hadn’t any part in driving poor Rosy away, exactly.”
“Perhaps you had. If you’d made him take his brooch back at once, or let me make him, it might never have come to his driving her away.”
This brought Powell’s guilt home to him. “Ann,” he said, solemnly, “you are right. I am to blame almost as much as Bickler himself. But it was mere forgetfulness—” —
“Forgetfulness may be a sin, too.”
Powell waived the point at least for the time being. “And what did he say when you told him I didn’t want to see him or wouldn’t?” —
“He didn’t say anything. Just went. What else could he do?”
“Nothing, I suppose. But it seems rather hard.” The tears of vexation came into Ann’s eyes. “Owen,” she said, “if I didn’t know how good you were, I should say you were the cruelest man in the world. And as it is, I will say you are the most trying.”
“Oh, my dear girl, I know I am trying, and I am sorry for it. You have done just exactly right with the fellow, and from this out I will take him in hand myself. I realize that I have been shirking him, and I assure you that I have been ashamed of myself for doing so. I ought to have borne with him to the bitter end, and the least reparation I can make him is to stand his remorse from now on.”
Bickler did not come the next night or the next, and then the third night Powell was true to his word and received him, though in illustration of her own regret for forcing the distasteful office upon him Ann presently joined them both. Perhaps a certain impatience for his report mixed with her compassion.
He showed a haggard face at the door, and asked, dry-tongued, to be allowed to sit down a moment first. He sat without offering to speak, and then had to be prompted by Powell with a “Well?” as sharp as he could make it.
“Well” — he took the word huskily on his own lips—” I didn’t see her mother. I found the canal-boat, and I saw her cousin. Rosy — Rosy has gone off somewhere with her mother. I’ve been in Tuskingum the last three days, and I’ve searched the place all over — everywhere that I was afraid she would be.”
He began to cry piteously, to sob and to moan, and to rock himself backward and forward in his chair.
Ann stared at him silently, but the sight wrought upon Powell so that he made several beginnings of consolation. “Oh, well, we mustn’t give up all — Certainly they can be found somewhere or other — There isn’t the least danger but what—”
Ann stopped him with a d
istracted cry of “Owen!”
XXII
No man lives well into the forties, as Owen Powell had lived, if he is of Owen Powell’s philosophic mind, without realizing that it is not a misfortune misfortunes come not single spies. He perceives that he borrows from one misfortune strength to support another, and power somehow from their successive help to turn the day against them all. The trouble lingers near, but the man is left in possession of the field.
It had often seemed to Powell that his life at New Leaf Mills had been a series of large and little tragedies which were none the less tragic because they were also rather squalidly comic. He had grieved most truly for the fate of the unhappy girl who was like a child in his family, and he had fully shared his wife’s anger with the means by which the offense came. His anger passed as Bickler’s remorse persisted, and, though the remorse bored him more and more, he could not refuse him the sympathy the man did not merit; the stress of its reason remained. The girl was gone in mysterious silence to a destiny that his wife and he, though it harrowed them with its dreadful possibility, did not explicitly forecast, but left in the silence into which Rosy herself had vanished. Now when a letter came from his brother James at Middleville definitely renouncing his hope of joining the family community at the mills, Powell found a sort of relief in thinking of Rosy and her intangible disaster; and again when the new miller said one morning that he had made up his mind not to stay any longer, and the running of the mills must fall into the unskilled hands of himself and Richard, he took comfort from his brother’s defection, and could at least join Ann in refusing to blame Jim and Sally for not wanting to come to such a hapless place.
But Ann’s real stay in the matter was her faith in the coming of Felix in the spring. That was to be atonement for all injuries, compensation for all losses, and it seemed to her that it was by the direct favor of Heaven that the day after Jim’s letter came there should be one from Jessamy reporting a great increasing improvement in Felix, so great that she was now fully sharing his never-failing hopefulness. The letter had been a week making its slow steamboat journey up the Mississippi and the Ohio, but Ann was not impatient with that. She began reading it aloud, and then she stopped her reading aloud and partly reported its tenor to Powell.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 906
