“Aunt Caroline,” interrupted Henry Maitland, drawing himself up and speaking with some coolness, “will, I suppose, grant me the perspicacity and the freedom to make my friends as I choose.”
“Of course, Cousin Henry,” replied Jewel weakly, “it’s only that—”
“Miss Philo and I must be getting on then,” he said, “so good morning to you, Jewel. I will see you at luncheon, I presume.”
Jewel Varley nodded dumbly, and stood openmouthed in the street, staring after the man she had come to look on as her fiancé walking with the daughter of her former dressmaker! When they turned the corner, Jewel ran off toward home, her eyes brimming angry tears, and on her way flung a rock at the doctor’s dog.
“This bag,” said Mrs. Drax, with a melancholy smile, “I made from the scraps of the carpet I brought with me from Goshen. Generations of Parrocks wore that carpet down. Your poor father trod on it. And now you’re going to take it with you back to Parrock Farm. I wonder if Father will recognize the pattern.”
Philo’s few articles of clothing were packed away in the medium-sized carpetbag that had rested beneath Mary Drax’s bed for as long as Philo could remember. But neither she nor her mother had travelled anywhere, and the satchel had never been used. The large squares of carpeting that made up the sides were of a dark floral pattern: bloodred lilies on black stems, with a dark green background.
Mary Drax’s farewell was tearful. Philo insisted that her mother not accompany her to the station – she wanted as little notice as possible drawn to her journey, and her parting words to Mary Drax were “Remember Mother, not a word to anyone. . . .”
Philo climbed aboard the cars with the carpetbag full of her clothes. Her ticket was tucked beneath the cuff of her sleeve. The journey required a change of cars at Philadelphia, and Philo, never having been to the city, was astounded to see so many persons – and all strangers to her! – gathered in a single place. It was nightfall before she reached Cape May Court House, which was the nearest town on the line from Goshen and about four miles distant. Philo put up for the night in a small hotel, where for twenty-five cents she obtained a hall room.
It was not possible for Philo to anticipate the future with unalloyed hopes – it might very well be that the Slapes would prove themselves stronger in mischief than she was in defense. And the notion of being alone and unknown in a strange place – and under an assumed name – did not allow her to lie comfortably in her hard and narrow bed. Her principal consolation was the thought that she had with this doubtful journey discounted Jewel Varley’s tidy dismissal of her life. It was a pang to have left New Egypt just when the presence of Mr. Maitland had made it so pleasant a place for her, but the sense of adventure and discovery that nearly overwhelmed Philo as she lay alone in her room, wakened every few minutes by the tread of unknown feet just outside her door, pretty well made up for it. And though she had thought ill of her mother’s concern for the possibility of getting money from Mr. Parrock, Philo could not help but indulge herself a little, and wonder what it would be to stand equal to Jewel Varley, ribbon for ribbon and flounce for flounce. Philo would like to know who would win Mr. Maitland then!
PART II
GOSHEN
Chapter 6
PARROCK FARM
Goshen was a town even smaller and less significant than New Egypt. It was situated just a few miles from Delaware Bay in the northwestern part of Cape May, the rectangular peninsula at the southern extremity of New Jersey. In 1871 Cape May was just becoming popular as a resort. The well-to-do of Philadelphia wanted a place not overrun with grasping families from New York, and in quiet Cape May it was found. There was at this time a great deal of building on the Cape, but principally in the tiny towns along the Atlantic Coast: Cape May, Holly Beach, Wildwood and Stoneharbor. Goshen was unaffected, but in watching how prices rose in the towns where the Philadelphians came and noting the increase in noise and carriage accidents, Goshen’s inhabitants were glad to be excluded from the general boom.
If Goshen must be said to have a reason for existence, it was probably for the convenience of the farmers who had concentrated in that area. However the town wasn’t much of a convenience, since it had no bank, telegraph office, hotel, or dining saloon. For those things one had to travel to Cape May Court House, another five miles toward the coast. The land around Goshen was given over to agriculture, clover and other cultivated grasses being the greatest and most lucrative crop, but also grown were rye, Indian corn, and oats. Larger farms grazed milch cows, and smaller farms had poultry.
Parrock Farm lay a couple of miles to the south of Goshen and fronted Delaware Bay. It was a place of about four hundred acres – more than moderate size for this area – and its principal crops were hay and forage. On the ground gradually rising from the Bay shore was a generous farmhouse, just about a hundred years old. It was a fine, sturdy old building, constructed of stone and filled with the furniture made by the generation of Parrocks who had been sixty or seventy years in the graveyard of Goshen. During the time Parrock Farm had been managed by Richard Parrock and his son James alone, it had prospered, but the old man’s wagon mishap brought an end to three decades of good fortune that had been marred only by the death of Parrock’s wife, the marriage of his daughter to Poor Tom Drax, and the War Between the States.
The accident that invalided Richard Parrock was cited as the cause of all their sorrow, not because it crippled the man, but because it was the inducement for his son James to marry. Under Hannah Jepson’s reign Parrock Farm started its decline, a decline which began quite at once and so unmistakably as to lead the superstitious to believe that she had cast an evil spell upon it. Field hands had accidents with the plows, work animals took on diseases no one could cure or even identify, violent storms came up just when the hay had been cut and stacked in the fields, and the servant girls hired by Hannah to do work that she ought to have done herself stole money or got into trouble with the fieldhands. It was not easy to judge who was unhappier: Richard the father, confined to his bed and hearing one report after another of the deterioration of the farm that was his very life; or James the son, who made these reports and blamed himself for having brought Hannah to Parrock Farm.
But James’s sudden death was only the first peal of the bell that tolled the old man’s sorrows. Grief over his son, coupled with his physical infirmity, rendered him defenseless before his daughter-in-law. Before he realized what had happened and how, he found himself the cowering prisoner of Hannah, her new husband, and her stepdaughter. He had signed over to them Parrock Farm, though feeling as he did so that he was betraying four generations of Parrock ancestors who had owned this land since before the War of Independence. Now the Slapes wheedled to have him alter his will in their favor. Slowly the conviction had come upon him that if he did consent to strike his daughter Mary from the document – Mary, whom he had abandoned in all but this – he would not live out the succeeding month. Richard Parrock suspected that Hannah had murdered his son, probably at the instigation of this man John Slape.
He rarely left his chamber now. John Slape was required to lift and carry him about, and John Slape had let it be known how little this operation pleased him. In Richard Parrock’s chamber were but his bed, a dresser, two chairs, and his desk. It once had been a comfortably furnished room but Hannah, upon pretense of cleaning or repair, had taken away the carpet, bed curtains, draperies, lounge, and bookcase. The pieces had never returned, and the old man assumed the Slapes had appropriated them to their own use or had taken them away merely for spite. The Slapes, he knew, had no use for literature, and it was with some particular pleasure that Hannah and the girl Katie refused to bring him anything to read. The hours were lonely and long, and he lay most of the day on his side, looking out the windows toward Delaware Bay. The chamber was rarely swept and the linen infrequently changed, but Richard Parrock knew that his requests for more attention would go unheeded.
It was with t
he last of his courage that he wrote to his daughter Mary and asked her to send Philomela to him. Daniel Killip, his lawyer in Goshen, had made discreet inquiries into the situation of Mary Drax and her daughter Philomela in New Egypt, and his report on Philo was encouraging. Richard Parrock had now one hope in his life, and that was, with the help of Philomela Drax his granddaughter, to escape the Slapes. He had sent his letter on Monday the twentieth of March, and could not help but expect some reply to it almost immediately. Tuesday and Wednesday passed with no news, and Thursday – when some reply might be possible – Richard Parrock was on tenterhooks.
So on Thursday afternoon the twenty-third, though he hated like a dog to do it, he took his cane from the hooks on the wall above his bed and rapped sharply three times on the floor. His chamber was just above the kitchen, and this was the signal that he wanted attendance.
After the lapse of some few minutes – a passage of time meant to inform him of how little consequence he was thought in the house – the door of his chamber scraped open, and in it stood Hannah Slape. She was a tall, raw, overgrown sort of woman with red arms and prominent knuckles. Her strength was probably tremendous, although this would never be known from the amount of work she did about the house. She wore a checked gown, frayed around the hems and not overly clean, a dingy apron smeared with grease and dirt, and a calico nightcap over her strawlike hair. She had no smile for her father-in-law.
“What’s wanted, Pa?” she said in no happy tone of voice. She insisted on addressing him so, though they were but tenuously related and not by affection.
“I wanted to know if Mr. Killip had called,” replied Richard Parrock. He tried to infuse politeness into his voice, for he had no wish to antagonize the Slapes at present or to put them on their guard against him.
“No one’s called. What’s wanted with Mr. Killip? Change your will at last, and put your family in? Us who’ve kept you for so long?”
“Perhaps,” replied Richard Parrock evasively.
“Well,” said Hannah, “Mr. Killip calls, I’ll say you want to change your testament. Save a deal of grief, Pa, if you’d just turn everything over to us now. Give John the trouble of your affairs. Have this chamber till you die, have us to keep you.”
“I’ll think about it,” said Richard Parrock uncomfortably. Hannah Slape’s solicitude was worse than her anger, for her anger at least was genuine.
A repulsive grin momentarily altered Hannah’s features as she wiped her hands on her apron in grimy expectation of the old man’s money. She put her hand on the latch and was turning to go when Richard Parrock asked, “Have you found a girl yet to replace the one that went away?”
“Not yet,” she shrugged. “Why are you asking?”
“Oh, I know that when there’s no one helping in the kitchen, you and Katie have to do all the work.”
“Don’t like my cooking, Pa?” The thought appeared to amuse her, as did all the other of Richard Parrock’s discomforts.
“No, no, Hannah! I just don’t like to see you overworked.”
She snorted. “Be someone along sometime. John’s left word in Goshen that a girl’s wanted at Parrock Farm. Last one run off with three spoons; this one I’ll watch close. Next girl comes here won’t get away with nothing!”
Chapter 7
THE RABBIT
“What did the old man want today?” asked Katie Slape.
Hannah’s stepdaughter sat at the table in the kitchen of the Parrock Farm house. She was eighteen years of age, with thick black hair and fine black eyes. But for the expression of her mouth, which was thin-lipped and hard, she might have been thought a lovely young woman. She held a sharp thin-bladed knife in her hand, and with it she was carefully flaying a rabbit, an operation with which she seemed tolerably familiar.
Hannah grinned. “Wanted to know if the lawyer’d come. Decided at last to give us the money.”
Katie smiled too, and it wasn’t pleasant to see. “I knew he’d do it, Mar; I said to you he’d do it. Said so in the leaves at the bottom of my cup last night. Leaves in the bottom of my cup said he’d do it today!” The skin of the rabbit was detached, and Katie neatly folded it and laid it atop the four severed feet that stood in a neat row on the tabletop.
The kitchen of Parrock House was of the old-fashioned sort: large and square, with a stone floor and stone walls that sweated in damp weather, with shallow wide fireplaces, and with ovens set into the walls. All round were dark cupboards for storage and in one corner a pump and sink and drain. In the center of the room was a vast deal table, so large that only a portion needed to be kept clean at any one time. It had a variety of mismatched chairs set about it, and it was here that the Slapes most often gathered.
Hannah took the skinned rabbit, and with a knife of her own slit open its belly and dug out the entrails. Katie watched her greedily, as if it were a task she coveted.
“Signed nothing yet,” warned Hannah as she dumped the entrails into a pan. “Not agreed yet, but he’s thought of it.”
Katie banged the heels of her boots on the stone floor. “Oh, Mar, I’d like to have him . . . I’d like to have him . . .”
“Have him where, Katie?” asked Hannah indulgently.
“Have him where it was just him and me, that’s where! Oh that old man don’t care one straw for me. That old man called me a crazy head!” She leaned over to one side, and rummaged in a bloody canvas bag on the floor and in a moment brought up another rabbit.
“Because you went up there one day and looked at his palm, and looked at the frost on the pane, and told him he wasn’t going to live to see next Christmas.”
“He won’t!” cried Katie with malicious triumph. “That old man is booked for the grave. Only he’s to sign first, ain’t he, Mar? He’s to sign and then he’s to die, ain’t it so?”
Hannah only smiled and put her bloodstained finger to her lips. Katie was a wild girl, thought by some to be simpleminded, by others to have the power of looking into the future and knowing things it wasn’t for the sober and whole-brained to know. Katie, even more than Hannah, relished tormenting Richard Parrock.
At the signal for lowering her voice, Katie grinned and lopped off the feet of the second rabbit. She spoke in a low energetic whisper to her stepmother: “Oh, Mar, how you think that old man’ll die? Won’t be easy, no ma’am! That old man’s tough as a ten-year-old chicken. I took down his curtains, and I took off his coverlets, and I sneak in when he’s sleeping and open the window, and he don’t no more take chill than if he was a stone in the riverbed. Anybody else would have yards of sore throat, but not him. I put ashes in his beans but he’s fat as butter. I watch that old man like he was the weather, but there’s nothing disagrees with him!” she exclaimed in her exasperation.
They were silent for a few moments as Katie turned her attention to the skinning of the second rabbit. When she was finished Hannah took it. “Old man,” said Hannah, resuming the conversation. “Lots happens to folks who’s old.”
“Sometimes,” said Katie with a wink, “their bedclothes catches fire.” Hannah nodded and split open the rabbit’s belly. “Sometimes,” said Katie, “they gets their arms chopped off with a axe.”
Hannah laid back the skin of the rabbit and uttered an expression of disgust. Just within the belly of the rabbit was an immense pale tumor overspread with distended veins. It had crowded the organs of the rabbit aside and rendered them black with bad blood. Hannah let go quickly and wiped her tainted fingers on her apron.
“No,” cried Katie, “open it again.”
Hannah reluctantly pulled apart the flaps of the rabbit’s flesh. Katie reached across the table and experimentally pressed the cyst with the flat of her knife blade. It bulged and looked about to burst.
“Oh, lord!” cried Hannah.
Katie turned the blade and pricked the tumor. Noisome bile sprayed a foot into the air. Worms flooded out and swarmed over the blade of the knife. Hannah withdrew her hands suddenly and the flesh
closed over it. The worms began to squirm out of the rent made in the rabbit’s flesh.
“And sometimes,” Katie said, “old folks get hold of a bad piece of flesh. . . .”
That day John Slape had been absent on business in Cape May Court House. His business was an attempt to sell off a hundred acres of timber that belonged to Parrock Farm, and he had been successful. Men would come within the week to hew down the fine cedars that grew on the northern part of the farm. John Slape had no intention of telling Richard Parrock of this transaction, and as the old man could not see that portion of the farm from his chamber, he would know nothing of it. The noise could be attributed to similar work on an adjoining property.
John Slape was city-born and city-bred. He knew nothing of farming and hadn’t the intelligence or inclination to learn anything of it. He could not do a thing himself, and the pay he offered anyone else for the job was so ridiculously low as to attract only those who sought to cheat him of that little by doing nothing to earn it. The returns on the farm decreased every season, and, unknown to Richard Parrock, already half the land had been sold off. The fields which the old man had plowed for thirty years were now in the possession of a neighbor whom he detested.
It had become apparent to John and Hannah Slape that their fortunes were not to be made in agriculture. They had given up on Parrock Farm and now looked toward the other assets which the old man still possessed. James Parrock had once told Hannah that his father was worth $25,000, most of which was held in railroad stocks and government bonds. Hannah’s careful investigation had informed her that such investments were not negotiable by the mere possessor – they must be endorsed first – so that there was nothing to be gained by robbing the old man of the paper. Hannah had considered forgery, but she was not expert with a pen and mistrusted hiring a third party. Since Richard Parrock was old, the best plan seemed to be the legal one: that of convincing him to alter his will in their favor. Once that was accomplished, who knew but that the old man might die suddenly and soon?
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