The Collected Supernatural and Weird Fiction of Elia W. Peattie

by Elia W. Peattie

  “You are getting rich, Geoffry,” the men said to him.

  “No, no!” and Geoffry shook his grizzled head with a flattered smile.“Not from you womenfolk. There’s no such bargain-drivers between here and Boston town.”

  “Thou’lt be a setting up in Boston town, Geoffry,” said another. “Thou’rt getting too fine to travel pack a-back amongst us simple country folk.”

  “Not a bit of it,” protested Geoffry. “I couldn’t let the pretty dears go without their beads and their ribbons. I come and go as reg’lar as the leaves, spring, summer, and autumn.”

  By twilight Geoffry had made his last visit, and with his pack somewhat lightened he tramped away in the raw dusk. He went straight down the road that led to the next village, until out of sight of the windows, then turned to his right and groped his way across the commons with his eye ever fixed on a deeper blackness in the gloom. This looming blackness was the orchard of Micah Rood. He found the gate, entered, and made his way to the dismantled house. A bat swept its wing against his face as he rapped his stick upon the door.

  “What witchcraft’s here?” he said, and pounded harder.

  There were no cracks in the heavy oaken door through which a light might filter, and old Geoffry Peterkin was blinded like any owl when the door was flung open, and Micah Rood, with a forked candlestick in his hands, appeared, recognised him, and bade him enter. The wind drove down the hallway, blew the flame an inch from the wicks, where it burned blue a moment, and then expired, leaving the men in darkness. Geoffry stepped in, and Micah threw his weight against the door, swung the bar into place, and led Geoffry into a large bare room lit up by a blazing hickory fire. When the candles were relit, Micah said:

  “Hast thou supped this night, friend Peterkin?” “That have I not, though Rogers the smith would have made me welcome. But I waited to sup with thee, friend Rood. I like thy cakes and I like better thy company.”

  Micah made up the fire and swung the kettle over the blaze. He drew up a table and set dishes on it, warmed half a fowl in the pot, raked potatoes from the ashes and cut slices from the big loaf.

  “I buy my bread of Hannah Stebbins, and she doth give good measure,’’ remarked Micah, interested in his domestic labours. “Also I have from her this golden butter, and these cakes of cheese made from curds. Sit to, Peterkin, and make all that is here your own.’’

  But though the welcome was so hearty, and though the guest seemed fain for his meat, the conversation flagged somewhat. Never had these men eaten together in such silence. Some constraint rested upon them. Each flap of the shutters startled them; each squeal of the wainscot mouse pierced their ears disagreeably. Micah forced himself to speak as the meal drew near its close.

  “Thou hast prospered since thou sold milk-pans to my mother, Peterkin,” said he.

  “I’ve made a fortune with that old pack,” said the peddler, pointing to the corner where it lay. “Year after year I have trudged this road, and year after year has my pack been larger and my stops longer. My stuffs, too, have changed. I carry no more milk-pans. I leave that to others. I now have jewels and cloths. Why, man! There’s a fortune even now in that old pack.” He arose and unstrapped the leathern bands that bound his burden. He drew from the pack a variety of jewel-cases and handed them to Micah.“I did not show these at the village,” he continued, pointing over his shoulder; “I sell those in towns.” Micah clumsily opened one or two and looked at their contents with restless eyes. There were rubies as red as a serpent’s tongue; silver, carved as daintily as hoar-frost, gleaming with icy diamonds; pearls that nestled like precious eggs in fairy golden nests; turquoise gleaming from beds of enamel, and bracelets of ebony capped with topaz balls.

  “These,” laughed Geoffry, dangling a translucent necklace of amber, “I keep to ward off ill-luck. She will be a witch indeed that gets me to sell these. But if thou’lt marry, good Master Rood, I’ll give them to thy bride.”

  He chuckled, gasped, and gurgled mightily; but Micah checked his exuberance by looking up fiercely.

  ‘‘There’ll be never a bride for me,” he said. “She’d be killed here with the rats and the damp rot. It takes gold to get a woman.”

  “Bah!”’ sneered Geoffry. “It takes youth, boy; blue eyes, a good laugh, and a strong leg. Why, if a bride can be had for gold, I’ve got that.”

  He unrolled a shimmering azure satin, and took from it two bags of soft, stout leather.

  “There is where I keep my yellow boys shut up!” the old fellow cried in great glee; “and when I let them out, they’ll bring me anything I want, Micah Rood, except a true heart. How have things prospered with thee?” he added, as he shot a shrewd glance at Micah from beneath his eyebrows.

  “Bad,” confessed Micah, “very bad. Everything has been against me of late.”

  “I say, boy,” cried the peddler, suddenly, “I haven’t been over this old house for years. Take the light and show us around.”

  “No,” said Micah, shaking his head doggedly. “It is in bad shape, and I would feel that I was showing a friend who was in rags.”

  “Nonsense! “cried the peddler, bursting into a hearty laugh. “Thou need’st not fear, I’ll ne’er cut thy old friend.”

  He had replaced his stuffs, and now seized the branched candlestick and waved his hand toward the door.

  “Lead the way,” he cried. “I want to see how things look;” and Micah Rood sullenly obeyed.

  From room to room they went in the miserable cold and the gloom. The candle threw a faint gleam through the unkept apartments, noxious with dust and decay. Not a flaw escaped the eye of the peddler. He ran his fingers into the cracks of the doors, he counted the panes of broken glass, he remarked the gaps in the plastering.

  “The dry rot has got into the wainscoting,” he said jauntily.

  Micah Rood was burning with impotent anger. He tried to lead the peddler past one door, but the old man’s keen eyes were too quick for him, and he kicked the door open with his foot.

  “What have we here?” he cried.

  It was the room where Micah and his brothers had slept when they were children. The little dismantled beds stood side by side. A work-bench with some miniature tools was by the curtainless window. Everything that met his gaze brought with it a flood of early recollections.

  “Here’s a rare lot of old truck,” Geoffry cried.“The first thing I should do would be to pitch this out of doors.”

  Micah caught him by the arm and pushed him from the room.

  “It happens that it is not thine to pitch,” he said.

  Geoffry Peterkin began to laugh a low, irritating chuckle. He laughed all the way back to the room where the fire was. He laughed still as Micah showed him his room—the room where he was to pass the night; chuckled and guffawed, and clapped Micah on the back as they finally bade each other goodnight. The master of the house went back and stood before the dying fire alone.

  “What did he mean in God’s name?” he asked himself.“Does he know of the mortgage?”

  Micah knew that the peddler who was well off frequently negotiated and dealt in the commercial paper of farmers. Pride and anger tore at his heart, like wild beasts. What would the neighbours say when they saw his father’s son driven from the house that had belonged to the family for generations? How could he endure their surprise and contempt. What would the children say when they found a stranger in possession of the famous apple-trees? “I’ve got no more to pay it with,” he cried in helpless anguish, “than I had the day the cursed lawyer came here with his threats.”

  He determined to find out what Peterkin knew of the matter. He spread a bear’s skin before the fire and threw himself upon it and fell into a feverish sleep, which ended long before the purple dawn broke.

  He cooked a breakfast of bacon and corn cake, made a cup of coffee, and aroused his guest. The peddler clean, keen, and alert, noted slyly the sullen heaviness of Micah. The meal was eaten in silence, and when it was finished, Geoffry put on his
cloak, adjusted his pack, and prepared to leave. Micah put on his hat, took a pruning-knife from a shelf, remarking as he did so:

  “I go early about my work in the orchard;” and followed the peddler to the door. The trees in the orchard had begun to shimmer with young green. The perfume, so familiar to Micah, so suggestive of the place that he held dearer than all the rest of the world beside, wrought upon him till his curiosity got the better of his discretion.

  “It is hard work for one man to keep up a place like this and make it pay,” he remarked.

  Geoffry smiled slyly, but said nothing.

  “Bad luck has got the start of me of late,” the master continued, with an attempt at real candour.

  The peddler knocked the tops off some gaunt, dead weeds that stood by the path.

  “So I have heard,” he said.

  “What else didst thou hear?” cried Micah, quickly, his face burning, and shame and anger flashing from his blue eyes.

  “Well,” said the peddler, with a great show of caution, “I heard the mortgage was a good investment for anyone who wanted to buy.”

  “Perhaps thou know’st more about it than that,” sneered Micah.

  Peterkin blew on his hands and rubbed them with a knowing air.

  “Well,” he said, “I know what I know.”

  “Do you,” cried Micah, clinching his fist, “out with it!”

  The peddler was getting heated. He thrust his hand into his breast and drew out a paper.

  “When May comes about. Master Rood, I’ll ask thee to look at the face of this document.”

  “Thou art a sneak!” foamed Micah. “A white-livered, cowardly sneak!”

  “Rough words to call a man on his own property,” said the peddler, with a malicious grin.

  The insult was the deepest he could have offered to the man before him. A flood of ungovernable emotions rushed over Micah. The impulse, latent in all angry animals to strike, to crush, to kill, came over him. He rushed forward madly; then the passion ebbed, and he saw the peddler on the ground. The pruning-knife in his own hand was red with blood. He gazed in cold horror; then tried in a weak, trembling way to heap leaves upon the body to hide it from his sight. He could gather only small handfuls, and they fluttered away in the wind.

  The light was getting brighter. People would soon be passing down the road. He walked up and down aimlessly for a time, and then ran to the garden. He returned with a spade and began digging furiously. He made a trench between the dead man and the tree under which he had fallen; and when it was finished he pushed the body in with his foot, not daring to touch it with his hands.

  Of the peddler’s death there was no doubt. The rigid face and the blood-drenched garments over the heart attested the fact. So copiously had the blood gushed forth that all the soil, and the dead leaves about the body, and the exposed roots of the tree were stained with it. Involuntarily Micah looked up at the tree. He uttered an exclamation of dismay. It was the tree of the gold apples.

  After a moment’s silence he recommenced his work and tossed back the earth in mad haste. He smoothed it so carefully that when he had finished not even a mound appeared. He scattered dead leaves over the freshly turned ground, and then walked slowly back to the house. For the first time the shadow that hung over it, the gloom deep as despair that looked from its vacant windows, struck him. The gloss of familiarity had hidden from his eyes what had long been patent to others—the decay, the ruin, the solitude. It swept over him as an icy breaker sweeps over a drowning man. The rats ran from him as he entered the hall. He held the arm on which the blood was rapidly drying far from him, as if he feared to let it touch his body with its confession of crime. The sleeve had stiffened to the arm, and inspired him with a nervous horror, as if a reptile was twined about it.

  He flung off his coat, and finally, trembling and sick, divested himself of a flannel undergarment, but still, from finger-tip to elbow, there were blotches and smears on his arm. He realized at once the necessity of destroying the garments; and, naked to the waist, he stirred up the dying embers of the fire and threw the garments on. The heavy flannel of the coat refused to burn, and he prodded it deeper in with a poker till he saw with dismay that he had quenched the fire.

  “It is fate!” he cried;“I cannot destroy them.”

  He lit a fire three times, but his haste and his confused horror made him throw on the heavy garments every time and strangle the infant blaze. At last he took them to the garret and locked them in an old chest. Starting at the shadows among the rafters and the creaking of the boards, he crept back through the biting chill of the vacant rooms to the one that he occupied, and washed his arm again and again, until the deep glow on it seemed like another bloodstain.

  After that, for weeks he worked in his garden by day, and at night slept on the floor with the candles burning, and his hand on his flintlock.

  Meanwhile in the orchard the leaves budded and spread and the perfumed blossoms came. The branches of the tree of the gold apples grew pink with swelling buds. Near that spot Micah never went; he felt as if his feet would be grasped by spectral hands.

  One night a swelling wind arose, strong, steady, warm, seemingly palpable to the touch like a fabric. In the morning the orchard had flung all its banners to the air. It dazzled Micah’s eyes as he looked upon the tossing clouds of pink and white fragrance. But as his eye roamed about the waving splendour he caught sight of a thing that riveted him to the spot with awe.

  The tree of the gold apples had blossomed blood-red!

  That day he did no work. He sat from early morning till the light waned in the west, gazing at the tree flaunting its brilliant blossoms against the sky. Few neighbours came that way; and as the tree stood in the heart of the orchard, fewer yet noticed its accursed beauty. To those that did Micah stammeringly gave a hint of some ingenious ingrafting, the secret of which was to make his fortune. But though the rest of the world wondered and wagged its head and doubted not that it was some witchcraft, the children were enraptured. They stole into the orchard and pilfered handfuls of the roseate flowers, and bore them away to school; the girls fastened them in their braids or wore them above their innocent hearts, and the boys trimmed their hatbands and danced away in glee like youthful Corydons.

  Spring-time passed and its promises of plenty were fulfilled. In the garden there grew a luxury of greenness; in the orchard the boughs lagged low. Micah Rood toiled day and night. He visited no house, he sought no company. If a neighbour saw him in the field and came for a chat, before he had reached the spot Micah had hidden himself.

  “He used to be as ready for the news as the rest of us,” said they to themselves, “and he had a laugh like a horse. His sweetheart has jilted him, most like.”

  When the purple on the grapes began to glow through the amber, and the mellowed apples dropped from their stems, the children flocked about the orchard gate like buzzards about a battlefield. But they found the gate padlocked and the board fence pricking with pointed sticks. Micah they saw but seldom, and his face, once so sunny, was as terrible to them as the angel’s with the flaming sword that kept guard over the gates of Eden. So the sinless little Adams and Eves had no choice but to turn away with empty pockets.

  However, one morning, accident took Micah to the bolted gate just as the children came trooping home in the early autumn sunset; for in those days they kept students of any age at work as many hours of the day as possible. A little fay, with curls as sunny as the tendrils of the grape, caught sight of him first. Her hat was wreathed with scarlet maple leaves; her dress was as ruddy as the cheeks of the apples. She seemed a sprite of autumn. She ran toward him, with arms outstretched, crying

  ‘‘Oh, Master Rood! Do come and play. Where hast thou been so long? We have wanted some apples, and the plaguy old gate was locked.”

  For the first time for months the pall of remembrance that hung over Micah’s dead happiness was lifted, and the spirit of that time came back to him. He caught the little one in his
brawny arms and threw her high, while she shrieked with terror and delight. After this the children gave no quarter. The breach begun, they sallied in and stormed the fortress. Like a dream of water to a man who is perishing of thirst, who knows while he yet dreams that he must wake and find his bliss an agony, was this hour of innocence to Micah. He ran, and leaped, and frolicked with the children in the shade of the trees till the orchard rang with their shouts, while the sky changed from daffodil to crimson, from crimson to gray, and sank into a deep autumnal twilight. Micah stuffed their little pockets with fruit, and bade them run home. But they lingered dissatisfied.

  “I wish he would give us of the golden apples,” they whispered among themselves. At last one plucked up courage.

  “Good Master Rood, give us of the gold apples, if thou please.”

  Micah shook his head sternly. They entreated him with eyes and tongues. They saw a chance for a frolic. They clung to him, climbed his back, and danced about him, shouting

  “The gold apples! The gold apples!”

  A sudden change came over him; he marched to the tree with a look men wear when they go to battle.

  “There is blood in them!” he cried hoarsely. “They are accursed—accursed!”

  The children shrieked with delight at what they thought a jest.

  “Blood in the apples! Ha! ha! ha!” and they rolled over one another on the grass, fighting for the windfalls.

  “I tell ye ’tis so!” Micah continued.

  He took one of the apples and broke it into halves.

  “Look,” he cried; and in his eyes there came a look in which the light of reason was waning. The children pressed about him, peeping over each other at the apple. On the broken side of both halves, from the rind to the core, was a blood-red streak the width of a child’s little finger. An amazed silence fell on the little group.

  “Home with ye now!” he cried huskily.“Home with ye, and tell what ye have seen! Run, ye brats!”