XIX
THE habit of drink, which had fouled the blood in Overdale, retarded his recovery. He had naturally what his neighbors called powerful healing flesh, such as would have responded with prompt self-cure to any hurt, but, as it was, his bruises and broken bones healed so slowly that it was well into October before he was out-of-doors. Even then he did not get back to his work in the mill. A temporary miller, as Powell carefully explained to him, supplied his place; an amiable and voluble Pennsylvania German, whom Ann had to give his meals, though he slept on the buffalo robes in Overdale’s den. He was acceptable to the younger boys because he let them play in the wheat-bins, where they buried each other in the grain and stuffed their garments out with it to unseemly corpulence. He allowed Richard to run the mill and dress the burrs; but at table he was dreadful to them all from his habit of helping himself to the butter with his knife after first sucking it clean. He was gentle with their father, and even respectful, so that Ann almost liked him.
Powell hurried the work forward on the new house with a constancy which the carpenters scarcely expected of him, and which he could himself scarcely have counted on. In the weeks that had passed the roof was shingled and the walls were weather-boarded, so that the black walnut gave its mellow color convincingly to the eye, and almost persuaded the neighborhood that its natural surface was as handsome as the white paint or the red brick of other houses. The sash was glazed and put in and the doors hung, and then the rooms were divided off and lathed for the plastering; but at this point Ann’s patience gave out, and she decided to leave the cabin and move into the house without further waiting. It seemed to her that if she were once in it the work could be pushed forward much more rapidly; even if it were not plastered till the spring came with its drying winds, they would suffer less discomfort from the cold than if they weathered the winter through in the old cabin.
When they were settled in it Powell found a beauty in the conditions which almost tempted him to delay. The rooms up stairs and down, with their neat lathing, were like a succession of latticed bowers which, he said, might be covered with vines; he made believe for the children that plants could be set in the ground beside the chimney and trained over the partitions and ceilings. There was an open hearth in each room; in the first cool evenings fires were kindled on them, and the soft play of the flames through the lathing was so much prettier than any foliage he could think of that he said there was no hurry to cover it even with vines. The children fell in with his humor, and if Ann held aloof it was without reproach, but not without anxiety. She was anxious about Felix, and the more so because she could not make Powell share her troubled mind. Letters came from Jessamy, not very often, but regularly enough, reporting at first that the warm climate was doing Felix all the good that they had expected; then she did not write so confidently, but only said that he was getting on and was waiting eagerly for the spring, so that he could go North and could come to them at the mills, As the weeks went by she merely told what they were doing; and Owen insisted that this no news was good news. He read hopeful auguries into Jessamy’s omissions, and Ann felt herself almost culpable in failing to share his confidence.
“The dear knows,” she said, after one of these letters came, “I’d like to believe it, Owen. And I will believe it if you say so. You ought to know best. But if Jessamy feels the way you say — Well, it is a good thing, her sending those messages from him, about hurrying up the work on the house; and I hope you’ll mind them, Owen. Don’t wait till spring before you plaster. We could get on very well ourselves, but an unplastered house will be no place for a sick person.”
“Felix won’t be sick when he gets here in April; and the more fresh air he can get the better.”
“We can let in enough air through the windows. I want the whole house finished before he sets foot in it, and I’m afraid if you feel that way about it you’ll let the plastering lag along and it won’t be done before summer.”
“Oh, you needn’t be afraid of that,” Powell said; and then, “Ann,” he continued, “do you know whether Rosy has seen anything of Bickler lately?”
“Why, no. What makes you think she has?”
Owen had not much reason, if any, to think she had, and he had brought the matter in partly to divert Ann from her anxieties about Felix; but he made the most of a fact in the matter.
“I met him yesterday when I was in Spring Grove, and I took occasion to speak plainly to him about Rosy.” Owen did not say that the occasion which he took was the long-delayed return of the brooch. He had so often forgotten to give it back that he acquired the greater merit with himself for remembering it in passing Bickler’s office and going in expressly to restore the gift. Bickler made no pretense of not knowing why; he said very seriously he was glad Owen had brought it, for he was afraid there was some misunderstanding on Rosy’s part. He looked on her as a child, but he saw how his giving her such a present might appear to Mrs. Powell, and he wanted Owen to tell Mrs. Powell so. Without telling her so now Owen said, with the assumed shrewdness of not crediting Bickler with too much goodness, “I think he wishes particularly to stand well with us at present, for the election is going to be very close, and he has an exaggerated notion of my influence in this neighborhood.”
“If he has any notion of it at all, Owen, it’s exaggerated. Now that poor Bellam is gone, I don’t believe you could influence a single vote,” Ann said.
Owen laughed. “Why, I don’t know but Overdale is working round to my way of thinking in some things.”
“Well, if Bickler will only let that poor child alone, I don’t care why he does it. Did you get any letters?”
“I declare, I quite forgot. There’s a letter for you from Jessamy. I just glanced into it; she seems to be writing in high spirits for some reason.”
“It’s because there’s such a decided turn for the better with Felix,” Ann said, running her eye down the page. “He’s better than he’s been yet, and they’re both so full of hope.” She kept on reading. “Yes, there isn’t one unfavorable symptom, and she’s just as confident now as he has always been. What a load it takes off my heart! Now we must begin really to get ready for them. If only you won’t let the plastering lag along!”
“Oh, you may rest assured I won’t do that.” Powell felt so sure of himself that for some days he allowed his interest in the political situation to occupy him, and did not agree with the plasterers to come until the day before the first Tuesday in October. “Well, to-morrow will tell the tale for Master Bickler,” he said, as if that could possibly interest Ann.
That night he got his harp out, for the first time in the new house, and tuned it. He believed that he really played “Rosin the Bow” on it, and the children recognized the song when he sang it. Ann went cheerfully to bed after sitting up rather late, in talk of Felix and Jessamy coming early in the spring. The children’s spirits had been damped a little by hearing that the mill would not make ruled writing-paper at first, but only yellow wrapping-paper; their father assured them that the wrapping-paper would be such as could be used for kites. He pretended to chase them upstairs to bed, and they had fun calling down through the latticework of the walls to Rosy, where she was washing the belated supper dishes in the kitchen.
Rosy slept in a little room lathed off from the kitchen on an entry leading to the back door; and the room of the Powells was on the same floor beside the front hall. Sometime after midnight Ann woke from a dream of Felix, and he seemed to be dying. Jessamy was crying over him, and a strange voice sounded through the room which in her breaking dream Ann thought was the voice of death. She started fully awake, and sat up in her bed to listen, while Powell slept on.
The crying continued; now Ann knew that it was Rosy crying in the kitchen, and the voice continued, low, coarse, and wheedling. It coaxed Rosy, and answered what seemed her bursts of protest.
The girl stopped her sobbing and wailed out: “Oh, mother, mother, mother! He’d never marry me in the world!”
The voice did not reply at once, then it said low, coarse, and wheedling, but clear, “Well, honey?”
A cry of grief came from the girl, and there was a rush as of steps and a sound as of a door flung open.
Ann jumped from her bed and ran to the kitchen. Beside the table, dim in the light of the dying fire of the stove-front, the shapeless bulk of a woman rose at Ann’s coming and stood holding a bundle as of clothes. Ann understood.
“You worthless, good - for - nothing, drunken old thing!” she shuddered at the apparition. “Go out of my house this minute!”
The woman did not speak, but stumbled through the door that Rosy had left open into the night. The dark gave no answer back to Ann as she called, at first softly and then loudly and imploringly, “Rosy, Rosy! Rosy, child!”
XX
THE candle which Ann lighted showed Rosy’s sun-bonnet hanging on its nail beside the door, and she went again and again to the outer steps and held the candle at her forehead and peered into the warm, windless dark. The rays which streamed to the border of the woods on the hill slope showed nothing, and Ann waited more and more hopelessly for the girl’s return. Neither her figure stealing back barefooted nor her mother’s bulk lurking in the shadows defined itself in the vague shapes which Ann conjured out of the trees and bushes. At last she went and wakened Powell, and they watched together till the daylight dimmed the candle-light.
Then she set about getting breakfast at the fire which they had kept going in the stove; the children woke, and the miller crossed from the mill, and the life of the household, broken in its course, began to make its way again over the interruption. It seemed every moment as if the girl must come back; all things were still so perfectly part of her presence that her absence was more and more incredible. Powell went away to vote at Spring Grove, and that was a relief to Ann, as if while he was gone Rosy would have more courage to return; she could not explain to the younger children; to Richard she could be clearer, and that was a comfort; and she could make him tell the others that Rosy had gone off in the night, but she expected her any time; the Dreamer knew of something tragical without the telling. Now and then Ann drowsed and had swift, long dreams which she woke from to the fancied sound of Rosy’s singing and her steps on the kitchen floor, or her calling to the chickens at the back porch.
Powell came home in the late afternoon, and she had to bear his disappointment that Rosy should be still away. He reported a very light vote at the polls; what really interested Ann at all was the fact that Bickler was running behind the ticket. The next morning news came by the first passer at the mill that the rest of the Whig ticket had been elected, but Bickler had been defeated. The rumor of Rosy’s absence had gone through the neighborhood the day before, though Ann had tried to keep it quiet. The miller must have told it, for she saw some of the farmers who had stopped at the mill on their way from the polls looking harder at the house than usual as they drove by. She did not care to blame the miller for it, and when some of the farm wives came the next morning to verify the rumor she confirmed it. She did not try to explain the fact, but her heart stood still when the first of her visitors offered to bet that Captain Bickler could tell where Rosy was.
The fear which she thought had been kept to Powell and herself she found was the common suspicion; the women who now talked of it to her were bitter against Bickler; they said he ought to be cowhided, that Mr. Powell ought to cowhide the truth out of him; there was blame for Rosy too on their tongues, but nothing like their blame for Bickler. His defeat at the polls was a judgment on him, but they did not believe that was the end of it. Ann alone seemed to know of the mother’s presence, with its sinister implications, and she could at least keep that to herself.
The neighborhood talk grew as each day went by; it spread to the children, and at the log schoolhouse two miles away the little Powells were asked if Rosy had come back or if they had heard from her. Ann silenced her own belief, but she could not silence the belief of others. It began to be said that Rosy had drowned herself, and it began to be said that Owen Powell ought to have the dam and the head-race dragged. The general gossip knit Rosy’s name closer and closer with Bickler’s, and from the depths of Ann’s remembrance of the girl’s cry and the mother’s answer by night there was proof which even the optimism of Powell could not always resist. She urged no duty in the matter upon him; she could trust him for his duty as he saw it; but they were both in doubt of what his duty would be.
If it was to summon Bickler and demand the truth of him, Powell was saved that extreme of action, so alien to his temperament, by Bickler’s coming to him unsummoned after the third day had gone by. He seemed to have timed his coming to the hour when the children were away playing on the other side of the hill, and he rode up to the back door of the new house and called softly to Ann in the kitchen. “Mrs. Powell, Mrs. Powell!”’
Ann looked out, dumb with abhorrence and then with pity of the man. His face was as if drenched from tears, and as she stared at him they began to stream afresh. He choked down the sobs to say, “I want to speak to you and Mr. Powell.”
“I’ll tell my husband,” Ann said, with more severity than she felt; and she called Owen from the front room, where he was arranging the volumes of the Heavenly Arcana and some Collateral Works on a shelf with some other books; he had not thought Pope’s Homer and Byron’s poems unfit for their company.
“Well, well!” he answered so dreamily that she doubted if he realized who it was wanted to speak to him. He came to the back door in his shirt-sleeves and stood in the soft October air, silent and waiting for Bickler to speak.
Bickler had dismounted and dropped the bridle on his horse’s neck; it was cropping the grass at his feet.
“You know why I’ve come, Mr. Powell. Have you found out where she’s gone yet?”
“I didn’t know but you might tell us, Captain Bickler.”
“Mr. Powell, you’re a good man, about the best man I ever saw, and I want you to believe me just as if I was saying it before the Judgment Seat. I don’t know any more than you do where Rosy Hefmyer is. I fooled with her, and I can’t say I didn’t mean her any harm, but for all the harm I ever did her she was like the babe unborn. I knew her mother was hunting for her, and I told her where Rosy was.”
At the confession of this atrocity Powell’s heart, which had begun to soften in pity of the wretched man, hardened again. “Bickler,” he said, dropping any formal address, “it isn’t merely the wrong we do that we’re guilty of—” —
“I know it, I know it!” the miserable man wailed out. “Don’t I know it, don’t I think it, don’t I feel it night and day, every minute, every second?”
The Doctrinal truth was precious to Powell, and he felt bound to retract what he had just said. He recognized that it was a Puritanic contravention of the New Church precept teaching that there are degrees in sin, that all sinning is not of one quantity of wickedness. “I don’t mean,” he said, “that you are as guiltless of what you meant as if you had not meant it; in the nature of things you must now suffer the same as if you had done it, and I couldn’t lessen your suffering if I wished.”
“I don’t want you to, Mr. Powell; and if you don’t believe what I tell you I want you to take this and lay it onto me for all you’re worth.”
He held out the cowhide which he carried for his whip. Powell remembered how for far less he had said that Bickler ought to be cowhided; with the culprit before him it was a different thing. “Throw it away I” he said with loathing, as if the cowhide were a snake. “You won’t have your punishment at my hands, if you’ve counted on that. We think Rosy may be dead. She ran away, we don’t know where, in the dark; she probably didn’t know, either; the poor wild thing may have fallen into the river, or the head-race, and been drowned. We are going to drag them, and if you choose to come and help—”
Ann had been listening within, and now she came to the door. “What are you thinking of, Owen? He shall not come! I wouldn’t let him help find tha
t dead child to save his own life.”
She went further than she meant, and she was not proof against the man’s prayer. “Oh, do let me come, Mrs. Powell! I won’t make any trouble. I don’t believe she’s drowned, but if she is it’s for me more than anybody else to find her. I wouldn’t ask it to save my own life. What do I care for my life now? I’m done for. I can’t hold up my head in this neighborhood again. All I want now is to show people how I feel about it.”
“Yes, to show people, that’s what you want,” she said, with a cruelty which caused the relenting Owen to murmur, “Ann!”
“Well, you won’t come with my leave,” she ended, lamely.
“No, I don’t ask any one’s leave,” Bickler said, with fallen head. “All I want is just to come.” He pleaded with pitiful repetition; Ann went indoors again; and at last Owen, worn out by his reasons and entreaties, said:
“If we hear nothing of her, we are going to drag the dam to-morrow morning.” Then he turned away too, without other forms of parting, and Bickler thanked him haggardly and mounted his horse and rode off.
The neighbors came early with a seine. It was a long net with wide meshes, which they used for the larger fish whenever Powell invited them to the frolic of dragging the dam. “I reckon that’ll hold her,” one of them said, as he tested the strength of the twine with a pull.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 905