“Are they living or dead?” I asked presently.
“I’ve hearn strange tattle,” answered the old man nervously, “but nobody kin tell. Folks do say as young Alan’s pa is shut up in a padded place, and that his gran’pa died thar arter thirty years. His uncles went crazy too, an’ the daftness is beginnin’ to crop out in the women. Up tell now it has been mostly the men. One time I remember old Mr. Peter Jur’dn tryin’ to burn down the place in the dead of the night. Thar’s the end of the wood, suh. If you’ll jest let me down here. I’ll be gittin’ along home across the old-field, an’ thanky too.”
At last the woods ended abruptly on the edge of an abandoned field which was thickly sown with scrub pine and broomsedge. The glow in the sky had faded now to a thin yellow-green, and a melancholy twilight pervaded the landscape. In this twilight I looked over the few sheep huddled together on the ragged lawn, and saw the old brick house crumbling beneath its rank growth of ivy. As I drew nearer I had the feeling that the surrounding desolation brooded there like some sinister influence.
Forlorn as it appeared at this first approach, I surmised that Jordan’s End must have possessed once charm as well as distinction. The proportions of the Georgian front were impressive, and there was beauty of design in the quaint doorway, and in the steps of rounded stone which were brocaded now with a pattern of emerald moss. But the whole place was badly in need of repair. Looking up, as I stopped, I saw that the eaves were falling away, that crumbled shutters were sagging from loosened hinges, that odd scraps of hemp sacking or oil cloth were stuffed into windows where panes were missing. When I stepped on the floor of the porch, I felt the rotting boards give way under my feet.
After thundering vainly on the door, I descended the steps, and followed the beaten path that led round the west wing of the house. When I had passed an old boxwood tree at the corner, I saw a woman and a boy of nine years or so come out of a shed, which I took to be the smokehouse, and begin to gather chips from the woodpile. The woman carried a basket made of splitsIV on her arm, and while she stooped to fill this, she talked to the child in a soft musical voice. Then, at a sound that I made, she put the basket aside, and rising to her feet, faced me in the pallid light from the sky. Her head was thrown back, and over her dress of some dark calico, a tattered gray shawl clung to her figure. That was thirty years ago; I am not young any longer; I have been in many countries since then, and looked on many women; but her face, with that wan light on it, is the last one I shall forget in my life. Beauty! Why, that woman will be beautiful when she is a skeleton, was the thought that flashed into my mind.
She was very tall, and so thin that her flesh seemed faintly luminous, as if an inward light pierced the transparent substance. It was the beauty, not of earth, but of triumphant spirit. Perfection, I suppose, is the rarest thing we achieve in this world of incessant compromise with inferior forms; yet the woman who stood there in that ruined place appeared to me to have stepped straight out of legend or allegory. The contour of her face was Italian in its pure oval; her hair swept in wings of dusk above her clear forehead; and, from the faintly shadowed hollows beneath her brows, the eyes that looked at me were purple-black, like dark pansies.
“I had given you up,” she began in a low voice, as if she were afraid of being overheard. “You are the doctor?”
“Yes, I am the doctor. I took the wrong road and lost my way. Are you Mrs. Jordan?”
She bowed her head. “Mrs. Alan Jordan. There are three Mrs. Jordans besides myself. My husband’s grandmother and the wives of his two uncles.”
“And it is your husband who is ill?”
“My husband, yes. I wrote a few days ago to Doctor Carstairs.” (Thirty years ago Carstairs, of Baltimore, was the leading alienistV in the country.) “He is coming to-morrow morning; but last night my husband was so restless that I sent for you to-day.” Her rich voice, vibrating with suppressed feeling, made me think of stained glass windows and low organ music.
“Before we go in,” I asked, “will you tell me as much as you can?”
Instead of replying to my request, she turned and laid her hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Take the chips to Aunt Agatha, Benjamin,” she said, “and tell her that the doctor has come.”
While the child picked up the basket and ran up the sunken steps to the door, she watched him with breathless anxiety. Not until he had disappeared into the hall did she lift her eyes to my face again. Then, without answering my question, she murmured, with a sigh which was like the voice of that autumn evening, “We were once happy here.” She was trying, I realized, to steel her heart against the despair that threatened it.
My gaze swept the obscure horizon, and returned to the mouldering woodpile where we were standing. The yellow-green had faded from the sky, and the only light came from the house where a few scattered lamps were burning. Through the open door I could see the hall, as bare as if the house were empty, and the spiral staircase which crawled to the upper story. A fine old place once, but repulsive now in its abject decay, like some young blood of former days who has grown senile.
“Have you managed to wring a living out of the land?” I asked, because I could think of no words that were less compassionate.
“At first a poor one,” she answered slowly. “We worked hard, harder than any negro in the fields, to keep things together, but we were happy. Then three years ago this illness came, and after that everything went against us. In the beginning it was simply brooding, a kind of melancholy, and we tried to ward it off by pretending that it was not real, that we imagined it. Only of late, when it became so much worse, have we admitted the truth, have we faced the reality—”
This passionate murmur, which had almost the effect of a chant rising out of the loneliness, was addressed, not to me, but to some abstract and implacable power. While she uttered it her composure was like the tranquility of the dead. She did not lift her hand to hold her shawl, which was slipping unnoticed from her shoulders, and her eyes, so like dark flowers in their softness, did not leave my face.
“If you will tell me all, perhaps I may be able to help you,” I said.
“But you know our story,” she responded. “You must have heard it.”
“Then it is true? Heredity, intermarriage, insanity?”
She did not wince at the bluntness of my speech. “My husband’s grandfather is in an asylum, still living after almost thirty years. His father—my husband’s, I mean—died there a few years ago. Two of his uncles are there. When it began I don’t know, or how far back it reaches. We have never talked of it. We have tried always to forget it—Even now I cannot put the thing into words—My husband’s mother died of a broken heart, but the grandmother and the two others are still living. You will see them when you go into the house. They are old women now, and they feel nothing.”
“And there have been other cases?”
“I do not know. Are not four enough?”
“Do you know if it has assumed always the same form?” I was trying to be as brief as I could.
She flinched, and I saw that her unnatural calm was shaken at last. “The same, I believe. In the beginning there is melancholy, moping, Grandmother calls it, and then—” She flung out her arms with a despairing gesture, and I was reminded again of some tragic figure of legend.
“I know, I know,” I was young, and in spite of my pride, my voice trembled. “Has there been in any case partial recovery, recurring at intervals?”
“In his grandfather’s case, yes. In the others none. With them it has been hopeless from the beginning.”
“And Carstairs is coming?”
“In the morning. I should have waited, but last night—” Her voice broke, and she drew the tattered shawl about her with a shiver. “Last night something happened. Something happened,” she repeated, and could not go on. Then, collecting her strength with an effort which made her tremble like a blade of grass in the wind, she continued more quietly, “To-day he has been better. For the first time he
has slept, and I have been able to leave him. Two of the hands from the fields are in the room.” Her tone changed suddenly, and a note of energy passed into it. Some obscure resolution brought a tinge of colour to her pale cheek. “I must know,” she added, “if this is as hopeless as all the others.”
I took a step toward the house. “Carstairs’s opinion is worth as much as that of any man living,” I answered.
“But will he tell me the truth?”
I shook my head. “He will tell you what he thinks. No man’s judgment is infallible.”
Turning away from me, she moved with an energetic step to the house. As I followed her into the hall the threshold creaked under my tread, and I was visited by an apprehension, or, if you prefer, by a superstitious dread of the floor above. Oh, I got over that kind of thing before I was many years older; though in the end I gave up medicine, you know, and turned to literature as a safer outlet for a suppressed imagination.
But the dread was there at that moment, and it was not lessened by the glimpse I caught, at the foot of the spiral staircase, of a scantily furnished room, where three lean black-robed figures, as impassive as the Fates, were grouped in front of a wood fire. They were doing something with their hands. Knitting, crocheting, or plaiting straw?
At the head of the stairs the woman stopped and looked back at me. The light from the kerosene lamp on the wall fell over her, and I was struck afresh not only by the alien splendour of her beauty, but even more by the look of consecration, of impassioned fidelity that illumined her face.
“He is very strong,” she said in a whisper. “Until this trouble came on him he had never had a day’s illness in his life. We hoped that hard work, not having time to brood, might save us; but it has only brought the thing we feared sooner.”
There was a question in her eyes, and I responded in the same subdued tone. “His health, you say, is good?” What else was there for me to ask when I understood everything?
A shudder ran through her frame. “We used to think that a blessing, but now—” She broke off and then added in a lifeless voice, “We keep two field hands in the room day and night, lest one should forget to watch the fire, or fall asleep.”
A sound came from a room at the end of the hall, and, without finishing her sentence, she moved swiftly toward the closed door. The apprehension, the dread, or whatever you choose to call it, was so strong upon me, that I was seized by an impulse to turn and retreat down the spiral staircase. Yes, I know why some men turn cowards in battle.
“I have come back, Alan,” she said in a voice that wrung my heartstrings.
The room was dimly lighted; and for a minute after I entered, I could see nothing clearly except the ruddy glow of the wood fire in front of which two negroes were seated on low wooden stools. They had kindly faces, these men; there was a primitive humanity in their features, which might have been modelled out of the dark earth of the fields.
Looking round the next minute, I saw that a young man was sitting away from the fire, huddled over in a cretonneVI-covered chair with a high back and deep wings. At our entrance the negroes glanced up with surprise; but the man in the winged chair neither lifted his head nor turned his eyes in our direction. He sat there, lost within the impenetrable wilderness of the insane, as remote from us and from the sound of our voices as if he were the inhabitant of an invisible world. His head was sunk forward; his eyes were staring fixedly at some image we could not see; his fingers, moving restlessly, were plaiting and unplaiting the fringe of a plaid shawl. Distraught as he was, he still possessed the dignity of mere physical perfection. At his full height he must have measured not under six feet three; his hair was the colour of ripe wheat, and his eyes, in spite of their fixed gaze, were as blue as the sky after rain. And this was only the beginning, I realized. With that constitution, that physical frame, he might live to be ninety.
“Alan!” breathed his wife again in her pleading murmur.
If he heard her voice, he gave no sign of it. Only when she crossed the room and bent over his chair, he put out his hand, with a gesture of irritation, and pushed her away, as if she were a veil of smoke which came between him and the object at which he was looking. Then his hand fell back to its old place, and he resumed his mechanical plaiting of the fringe.
The woman lifted her eyes to mine. “His father did that for twenty years,” she said in a whisper that was scarcely more than a sigh of anguish.
When I had made my brief examination, we left the room as we had come, and descended the stairs together. The three old women were still sitting in front of the wood fire. I do not think they had moved since we went upstairs; but, as we reached the hall below, one of them, the youngest, I imagine, rose from her chair, and came out to join us. She was crocheting something soft and small, an infant’s sacque, I perceived as she approached, of pink wool. The ball had rolled from her lap as she stood up, and it trailed after her now, like a woollen rose, on the bare floor. When the skein pulled at her, she turned back and stooped to pick up the ball, which she rewound with caressing fingers. Good God, an infant’s sacque in that house!
“Is it the same thing?” she asked.
“Hush!” responded the younger woman kindly. Turning to me she added, “We cannot talk here,” and opening the door, passed out on the porch. Not until we had reached the lawn, and walked in silence to where my buggy stood beneath an old locust tree, did she speak again.
Then she said only, “You know now?”
“Yes, I know,” I replied, averting my eyes from her face while I gave my directions as briefly as I could. “I will leave an opiate,” I said. “To-morrow, if Carstairs should not come, send for me again. If he does come,” I added, “I will talk to him and see you afterward.”
“Thank you,” she answered gently; and taking the bottle from my hand, she turned away and walked quickly back to the house.
I watched her as long as I could; and then getting into my buggy, I turned my mare’s head toward the woods, and drove by moonlight, past Buzzard’s Tree and over the Old Stage Road, to my home. “I will see Carstairs to-morrow,” was my last thought that night before I slept.
But, after all, I saw Carstairs only for a minute as he was taking the train. Life at its beginning and its end had filled my morning; and when at last I reached the little station, Carstairs had paid his visit, and was waiting on the platform for the approaching express. At first he showed a disposition to question me about the shooting, but as soon as I was able to make my errand clear, his jovial face clouded.
“So you’ve been there?” he said. “They didn’t tell me. An interesting case, if it were not for that poor woman. Incurable, I’m afraid, when you consider the predisposing causes. The race is pretty well deteriorated, I suppose. God! what isolation! I’ve advised her to send him away. There are three others, they tell me, at Staunton.”VII
The train came; he jumped on it, and was whisked away while I gazed after him. After all, I was none the wiser because of the great reputation of Carstairs.
All that day I heard nothing more from Jordan’s End; and then, early next morning, the same decrepit negro brought me a message.
“Young Miss, she tole me ter ax you ter come along wid me jes’ ez soon ez you kin git ready.”
“I’ll start at once, Uncle, and I’ll take you with me.”
My mare and buggy stood at the door. All I needed to do was to put on my overcoat, pick up my hat, and leave word, for a possible patient, that I should return before noon. I knew the road now, and I told myself, as I set out, that I would make as quick a trip as I could. For two nights I had been haunted by the memory of that man in the armchair, plaiting and unplaiting the fringe of the plaid shawl. And his father had done that, the woman had told me, for twenty years!
It was a brown autumn morning, raw, windless, with an overcast sky and a peculiar illusion of nearness about the distance. A high wind had blown all night, but at dawn it had dropped suddenly, and now there was not so much as a ripple i
n the broomsedge. Over the fields, when we came out of the woods, the thin trails of blue smoke were as motionless as cobwebs. The lawn surrounding the house looked smaller than it had appeared to me in the twilight, as if the barren fields had drawn closer since my last visit. Under the trees, where the few sheep were browsing, the piles of leaves lay in windrifts along the sunken walk and against the wings of the house.
When I knocked the door was opened immediately by one of the old women, who held a streamer of black cloth or rusty crape in her hands.
“You may go straight upstairs,” she croaked; and, without waiting for an explanation, I entered the hall quickly, and ran up the stairs.
The door of the room was closed, and I opened it noiselessly, and stepped over the threshold. My first sensation, as I entered, was one of cold. Then I saw that the windows were wide open, and that the room seemed to be full of people, though, as I made out presently, there was no one there except Alan Jordan’s wife, her little son, the two old aunts, and an aged crone of a negress. On the bed there was something under a yellowed sheet of fine linen (what the negroes call “a burial sheet,” I suppose), which had been handed down from some more affluent generation.
When I went over, after a minute, and turned down one corner of the covering, I saw that my patient of the other evening was dead. Not a line of pain marred his features, not a thread of gray dimmed the wheaten gold of his hair. So he must have looked, I thought, when she first loved him. He had gone from life, not old, enfeebled and repulsive, but enveloped still in the romantic illusion of their passion.
As I entered, the two old women, who had been fussing about the bed, drew back to make way for me, but the witch of a negress did not pause in the weird chant, an incantation of some sort, which she was mumbling. From the rag carpet in front of the empty fireplace, the boy, with his father’s hair and his mother’s eyes, gazed at me silently, broodingly, as if I were trespassing; and by the open window, with her eyes on the ashen November day, the young wife stood as motionless as a statue. While I looked at her a redbird flew out of the boughs of a cedar, and she followed it with her eyes.
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