“We found her in the grass. That’s the man. Marry them.”
The minister, regarding both of them at once in an oblique manner, began to nod his head up and down as if saying to himself, “Oh-ho! So this is what we find?”
Thane was slow to understand Enoch’s words. He had the look of a man in the act of doubting his familiar senses.
Agnes, very pale, lips slightly parted, nostrils distended, sitting very erect, turned her head slowly and gazed at her father. The muscles around her eyes were tense and drawn, her eyes were hard and partially closed as if the sun were in them, and she looked at him so until his countenance fell. But not his wickedness.
“Marry them,” he said.
Thane reacted suddenly. He cleared his throat, swallowed, glanced right and left, and took a step forward, with a tug at his belt.
“You’re supposing what ain’t so,” he shouted at Enoch. “What do you mean by that about finding her in the grass? What does that mean? Me ‘n the Cornishman was racketing up there in the path like I told you at the gate. He ain’t come to yet, so there’s nobody can say as what happened but me ‘n the girl. She oughten have seen it. That’s correct. But there ain’t no harm done—none as you could speak of. If you don’t believe me ask her... You tell them,” he said, turning to Agnes.
“My father is mad,” she said.
Thane began to tell them what had passed on the path and became utterly incoherent. Despairing, he made a move toward Enoch. The minister raised his hand.
“What is your name?”
“Alexander Thane.”
Enoch, who had been standing with his back to the door, opened it, reached around the jamb and drew it back holding a shot gun, the barrel of which he rested on his left arm.
“Marry them, I tell you.” His voice was low. “Make it short.”
Thane made another move toward him. The minister raised his hand again,—a fat, white hand. It fascinated Thane and calmed him.
“Thane,” said the minister, “do you take this woman to be your lawful wife?”
“Not as he says it. Not for that shooting thing as he’s got there in his hand,” said Thane. “Not unless the girl wants it,” he added, as a disastrous and extremely complicated afterthought.
If he had flatly said no, the shape of the climax might have been different. There was no lack of courage. What stopped him was a romantic seizure.
The minister turned to Agnes.
“Will you, Agnes, take this man Thane to be your husband?”
The die was then in her hands. Thane had not meant to pass it. Gladly would he have retaken it if only he had known how to do so. The situation was beyond his resources. Moreover, the question—“Will you, Agnes, take this man Thane to be your husband?”—was so momentous to him that it deprived him of his wits and senses, save only the sense of hearing.
Emotions more dissimilar could scarcely be allotted to three men in a single scene, one of them mad, yet for a moment they were united by a feeling of awe and regarded Agnes with one expression. The woman’s courage surpasses the man’s. This he afterward denies in his mind, saying the difference is that she lacks a sense of consequences.
Agnes was cool and contemplative, and in no haste to answer. She kept them waiting. They could not see her face. Her head was bent over. With one hand she plucked at the pattern of her dress and seemed to be counting. Then slowly she began to nod her head.
“Yes,” she said, distinctly, though in a very far voice, “I will.”
“Stand up, please,” said the minister.
Thane made his responses as one in a dream. Hers were firm and clear, and all the time she was looking at her father as she had looked at him first, with those tight little wrinkles around her eyes.
So they were married.
“That’s all,” said Enoch, to the minister, curtly. “The carriage is at the door.”
The minister bowed and vanished.
Enoch drew a piece of cardboard from his pocket and handed it to Thane. It was a blue ticket,—the token of dismissal.
“Now go,” he said, “and let me never see you again.”
Agnes looked up at Thane.
“I can walk,” she said, taking him by the arm. It was so. She could, with a slight limp. Enoch, seeing it, sneered. He watched them walk into the night and closed the door behind them.
At the gate Thane said: “But you can’t,” and started to pick her up.
“Don’t,” she said.
They had changed places. She was no longer afraid of him. He was afraid of her.
XIX
ALL this time John had been seeking Agnes. First he went the high road to the mansion until he was sure she had not gone that way, for if she had he would have overtaken her. Turning back he began to make inquiries and presently heard of someone, undoubtedly she, who had been seen walking wide of the town, past the mill, toward the mountain. Knowing the path and divining her intention he walked in her footsteps.
The smell of Thane’s pipe was still in the air when he arrived at the place where the fight had taken place. A thing of white in the grass drew his eye. He picked it up and got a bad start. It was a tiny handkerchief. By the light of a match he made out the initials A. G. embroidered in one corner. Looking further he found a scarf that he instantly recognized. He had particularly noticed it on their way to the party. Now in a panic he began to examine the ground closely and discovered extensive evidence of a human struggle. Running up and down the path a short distance each way he came on the Cornishman’s shirt a little to one side where the groggy owner had tossed it away. To John’s disgust it was slimy with something that came off in his hands; as this proved to be blood his disgust gave way to horror.
Without actually formulating the thought, because it was too dreadful to be true, he acted under the tyranny of a fixed idea, which was that Agnes had met with a foul disaster. The possibility was real. Lately there had come to New Damascus a group of mill hands whose ways and morals were alien to the community. They were bestial drinkers and had been making a great deal of trouble.
In a state of frenzy he explored the mountain side, calling her name. His panic rising, it occurred to him to ask at the mill among the men who continually used the path. He found several who had been over it within a hour or so. Someone was missing, he told them. Something unknown had happened. Had they seen or heard anything unusual. They became individually contemplative, made him say it all over again, repeated it after him, thought very hard and shook their heads. Nobody had seen or heard the least thing strange. But somebody did, by a freak of intelligent association, remember the Cornishman. He was out there under the water tank, speechless and weeping, not caring whether Enoch saw him or not. Maybe something had happened to him.
John found him as indicated, with his face in his hands, water dripping on his naked back.
“What happened to you?” John asked, shaking him.
“Gotten m’dam head knocked off,” he groaned, without moving. It was a refrain running through him. John’s attack had made it once audible.
“Up there in the path?”
He grunted.
“Who was it?”
Faintly, though very definitely, the Cornwall beauty expressed a passionate desire to be let alone.
“Was there a girl?” John asked.
“Huh!” said the hulk, instantly penetrated by the sound of that word.
John repeated the question.
The Cornishman stirred painfully, sat up, turned a stupidly grinning face and nodded—yes.
“Who took her away?” John asked, thumping the body to keep the mind afloat. “Tell me,” he said, shaking him by the hair. “Where did they go?” he asked, kicking him in the shins.
But the Cornishman was either slyer or more stupefied than one could imagine. He relapsed. Nothing more could be got out of him.
There now was but one rational thing to do—report to Enoch and raise a general alarm.
From running hard with
a load of dread John was almost spent when he arrived at the mansion gate. It was shut and barred; the house was dark and where he had expected to find alarm and commotion everything was strangely still. Foreboding assailed him. Thinking it might be quicker to open the gate than to climb the wall he put his hand through and began to fumble with the latch bar inside. He was so intent upon the effort that a certain indefinable sense one may have of another’s invisible proximity failed to warn him of Enoch’s presence.
There was a swift, noiseless movement in the darkness and a hand clutched him powerfully by the wrist. The physical disadvantage of his position made him helpless. Over the vertical bars of the gate ran a pattern of wrought iron ornamentation in the form of vine and leaves; the interstices were irregular, with sharp edges. It was impossible to use his free arm defensively because there was no other opening through which he could reach far enough in. Besides, if he resisted Enoch could instantly snap the bones of his trapped arm. He was utterly bewildered by the circumstances. Enoch’s gesture was menacing, even terrifying in its sinister precision, and yet John could scarcely imagine that his intentions were destructive. So he submitted his arm passively to the old man’s dangerous grip and spoke.
“It is I,” he said. His voice betrayed his spirit, which was at the verge of panic. Enoch did not speak. His hold tightened. “I was trying to let myself in ta save time,” said John. “Agnes is lost. That is, I can’t find her. I was coming to tell you.”
Enoch still did not speak.
“Perhaps she is home,” said John. “Have you seen her? If you haven’t I’m afraid something has happened to her.”
The old man’s continued silence was unnatural and ominous. Slowly, purposefully, he drew John’s arm further in, to almost the elbow; it came to him unresistingly and bare, the cuffs of the coat and shirt having caught on the vine work outside. Then he began to explore it upward from the wrist, feeling through the flesh for the edges of the radius and ulna bones, passing them an inch at a time between his tumb and forefinger as if searching for something he was afraid to find. John’s arm had once been broken in a football game at school. There was a perceptible ridge in the radius bone at the point of fracture. On this ridge Enoch’s fingers stopped, lost their strength and began to tremble. At the same time the grip of his other hand around John’s wrist began to relax in a slow_involuntary manner.
“Aaron!” he whispered, awesomely.
The next instant John’s arm was free and there was the sound of a body falling on the gravel inside the gate.
Now John scaled the wall. He stopped to make sure Enoch was breathing and to ease his form on the ground; then he ran to the mansion. His furious alarm brought a stolid, dark woman to the door, holding a small oil light over her head.
“Is Miss Gib at home?” he asked.
The woman shook her head.
“Does anyone know where she is?”
In a dull manner the woman shook her head again.
“Mr. Gib has fallen at the front gate,” said John. “Go to him at once and send someone for the doctor.”
The woman put the lamp down on the floor where she stood and started alone down the driveway, running.
“Call the servants,” said John. “You may have to carry him in.”
But she went only faster. He followed her. Before he could overtake her she met Enoch. He could see them both clearly in the light streaming from the doorway. The woman looked at Enoch anxiously and made as if to touch him, solicitously. He did not exactly ignore her; he seemed not to see her at all and walked steadily on.
John turned out of the light and passed unobserved in the darkness. Then he ran headlong off the grounds, feeling at each step that his knees would let him down. His emotional state was almost unmanageable. The episode with Enoch at the gate had been not only very mysterious but fraught with some ghastly inner meaning to which he had no clue whatever. He knew nothing of Enoch’s obsession that he, John, was Aaron reincarnated. He had never heard of that boyhood contest in which Enoch broke Aaron’s arm. Therefore he could not know what it meant in Enoch’s troubled brain to find in the arm of Aaron’s son the scar of a similar fracture at almost precisely the corresponding place. To him it was the same scar in the same arm. It was the last thing needed to fix his hallucination and the discovery had momentarily overwhelmed his senses.
In that instant he had called John by his father’s name,—Aaron!
What did it mean? Intuitively John knew that here was the key to the riddle. But he could not apply it. He could see that in taking Esther, his mother, away from Enoch his father had brought upon himself
Enoch’s undying hatred. He could understand how such hatred might naturally be transferred to the son. Only, in that case, how could he explain the fact that until now Enoch’s attitude toward him had been friendly or indifferent?
XX
SO his thoughts were running in this perplexed and absent manner when suddenly a very urgent question burst through.
“What of Agnes?”
She was not at home. He could think of no way to find her unassisted. He knew not where to look next and time was pressing. It was necessary to raise a wide alarm and organize a search. But he had no authority to act. It was her father’s business to take such steps. Now recalling what he had said to Enoch through the gate about Agnes he realized that it was absurdly inadequate. He had not at all communicated his fears concerning her. Therefore, though the thought of another encounter with Enoch made him shudder, he would have to go back. On this decision he came to a sudden stop and was surprised to see how far he had come unawares, and that he was not on the highway. When or how he had left it he did not remember. “I must have come fast,” he thought. He was half way back to New Damascus, not far from the mill, in a road that further on became a street running into sooty locust trees, cinder sidewalks, rows of company houses and a stale, historic smell of fried food. Turning in his tracks he was making back when his name was called from the side of the road by a voice he instantly knew.
“Thane!” he said, going toward him. “I need you. Please go—oh! I’m sorry. I thought you were alone.”
He veered off at seeing the figure of a woman behind Thane, leaning on the fence, her face averted; but Thane, coming forward, caught him by the arm, saying anxiously:
“I need your advice is why I called you.”
“Hold it, whatever it is, Thane,” John answered. “I can’t stop now. I just can’t.” He was pulling away.
“Won’t hold,” said Thane.
“It must,” said John. “I can’t stop. I’m sorry.” He liked Thane and was loath to leave him in a lurch. “Go to the hotel and wait for me there,” he said, pushing him off. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
With that he was going when the woman spoke.
“Are you looking for me?”
“Agnes!” said John to himself, as a declaration of preposterous fact. He wheeled around and stood stone still.
One instant before he had been mad with anxiety to hear her voice. Yet to the sound of it, so collected and sure, his emotional reaction was one of fierce anger. There was also a desolate world-wide sense of loss. Why he was angry or what was lost he could not have said in words. These feelings referred to her. Toward Thane there was a thought that seemed to rise behind him with purpose and power of its own; and he braced his back against it.
“I’ve been looking everywhere for you,” he said, approaching her. “I found these.” He held out the handkerchief and scarf. She took them. “Then I went to the mansion... and...” There he stopped.
“Yes. What did you learn there?” she asked.
His anger kept rising. How could she be so suave and frontal about it? He had actually the impulse to set hands upon her roughly and demand to know what she had been doing, how she came to be here alone on a dark road with an iron puddler and how she could pretend to be so unembarrassed.
“Nothing,” he said. “It had just this instant occurred to me to g
o back and try again. I was in a beastly fume about you.”
“And seem to be still,” she said, in a way to put him in mind of the high tone he had been using.
“For reasons to which you are pleased to be oblivious,” he retorted. “It is to be imagined that I have some interest in seeing you safely home. May I take you on from here?”
“Another one,” Agnes murmured in a tone of soliliquy. “How repetitious!”
The thought touched off her feelings. They exploded in a burst of shrill, irrelevant laughter. John was scandalized. His rage was boundless. Yet at the same time his sense of responsibility increased. Abominable thoughts assailed him. He wondered if perhaps her father had not been right to keep her under restraint. He fervently wished he had never tempted her to break out. A resolve to get her home by force if necessary was forming in his mind when Thane put in.
“They ain’t no home,” he said. “That’s the trouble.”
“What do you know about it?” John asked, blazing.
“Oughten I know somewhat about it seeing as she’s my own wife?” said Thane, with dismal veracity.
John, for an instant appalled, turned fiercely on Agnes. “Now what have you done?” he asked. She was so startled by his manner that she couldn’t speak. “What have you done?” he demanded, now shaking her and with such authority that for a moment her spirit quailed. “Is it true? Are you married?”
“Yes,” she said.
“To a....” He caught the word just in time, slowly let go of her and stepped back.
“Say it,” she dared him. “To a... to... a what? Go on. Say it.”
John’s anger was gone. Other emotions had swallowed it up,—sorrow, pity, remorse, that devastating sense of loss again, more poignant than before in some new way, and above all a great yearning toward both of them.
“Where?” he asked, in a changed voice.
“In my father’s house,” said Agnes, derisively. “What a pity you missed it!”
“But what happened?” asked John.
The Cinder Buggy Page 13