Chapter VII: Introduction (5)

Julia sobered to a tentative frown. Jack's eyes were bigger than usual, and he did look, notwithstanding the feverish flush on his cheeks, rather fagged. How she had been counting the days for him to come! It didn't seem possible that the visit which he had been promising for so long to make her should have finally materialized. Wasn't it really an indication,--she pondered while again happily she sized up the situation,--if he took so much trouble for her, that he did, after all, care more perhaps than she had sometimes thought? But what an extraordinary meeting it had been! He had at once launched forth on this extreme discourse. She sat back, and let her eyes rest on him with amused tolerance, her smile attentively adjusted to suit his mood; for her moment's anxiety vanished at further sight of his strong, broad shoulders and the handsome appearance he made in her favorite high-back chair, his firm hands grasping the arms of it.

"You've stayed away from America too long," she said carelessly; "Paris is bad for you."

He leaned forward, his delicately modeled cheekbones emphasized by the firelight, his hair becomingly awry.

"I _knew_ it would all be as it was," he went inspiredly on. "There was a thick clump of hedge, cold and dreary in the mist, that awoke pictures of a prison I used to dread the sight of when I was--I don't know how old. Once I partly thought I must be dreaming; so I put out my hand and touched the wet, sodden picket of an old fence. I looked suspiciously behind me. But there was only an old man behind, fully two hundred yards away. Then the idea came to me that it would be a relief to talk to somebody; I hadn't interchanged a word with any one since I got off the ship. All kinds of impressions, you see, had been accumulating, and they thronged like phantoms about me.

"I wanted to hear myself speak--to see if I could. So I turned, and waited for him to come. The rain was dripping all around; there wasn't another sound anywhere. Now, this is the queerest thing of all: what do you think I said to him?" Jack leaned forward, his eyes darting intensely over her face. "I said: 'Can you tell me the way to Mr. Eberdeen's house?'"

"Mr.--_Eberdeen's_ house!" She stood abruptly up. "Who--who told you," she gasped, "that this was Mr. Eberdeen's house?"

He stood up, too, stepping back from her. "You must have told me," he said, aware of his quivering lips, "in one of your letters. The name came to me--"

"I never told you," she stated emphatically, "I never told any one--for--for--why did you ask such a question of that old man?"

His gaze wandered.

"My throat felt parched from disuse. It took a distinct effort to make the words sound articulate.

"'Sure, now,' answered the old man, while I was still puzzling to explain to myself the question I had asked him, 'but never have I heard it called _that_--not since my father died from the cold he caught drivin' the mare up from Portsville. Ther' was a time, in the days when they talked of it bein' ha'nted, you'd hear folks call it Eberdeen Manor; but not--no, and my father likely's been dead these forty years now--never, Mr. Eberdeen's house!"

"'Mr. Eberdeen--there was such a person, then?'

"'There'll be a time, me boy, when they'll doubt yerself was a living thing.' He straightened his bent body reprehensibly; he shook his head. 'Walk back to the next corner,' he muttered, 'and turn to yer left. It'll be down there ber the cliffs, if nobody's stolen it. Somebody'll sure 'nough be there ter point it out to yer.'

"'I'm a stranger,' I apologized; 'I really didn't know.'

"'_Know!_' he shouted. 'Who was it owned the land this 'ere street runs over? Who built it? Who was it paid fer the church on the hill? Who did fer the sick, and gave to the poor, and got nothin' hisself fer the trouble but grief and loneliness and a broken heart? Wher' did yer come from?'

"And he surveyed me, as if the mere fact of his seeing me for the first time made him doubt my intentions. Still I stood there waiting.

"'What was he like? What did he do? Who was he?' I couldn't help flinging out in my wonderment.

"'As good's'll ever come back from wher' yer've been, or 'll pray fer the like of yer, I reckon. Judge not, I tell yer, that yer be not yerself judged.'

"I tried to smile at the old man.

"'Good-day to yer,' he grumbled, and walked back in the direction from which he had come. I watched until he was lost in the thickness."

Julia looked at Hastings in astonishment. Just another glimmer of anxiety crossed her mind; but any foolish worry she might have had for him was merged in her consciousness of something indeed more staggering.

"Do you think," she brooded, "that it can be true--that--that the house is--_was_--haunted?"

"I had," Jack unresponsively continued--"I couldn't help it--on the way a queer loathing of the little village. The gaunt house-fronts obtruded themselves so obstinately, so self-satisfiedly, like anemic country parsons, with their eyes close together, giving me a mean, soulless stare. Every object testified to its lack of any temperamental share in the joy of living. The emptiness of the streets seemed pitiless; their narrowness was oppressive."

"I love every inch of it," said Julia, defiantly.

Hastings was silent. He looked at the dry, colorless walls, covered with circuitous lines of crackling old paint.

"Was this furniture here, Julia?" he asked.

"Not this," she exclaimed with pride.

"No wonder," he argued half to himself, "that the next generation preferred black walnut, even with all its grapes and gewgaws! Horrible as it was, it wasn't so orthodox and priggish and mirthless as what came before."

He strayed out into the hall again; he viewed its stateliness, its expurgated elegance. "Well, this has got me, Julia--seriously," he said with a surprised realization that she was standing beside him. "It's--it's immense."

"Oh, _that_," she cried out, "from _you_!" And slowly she stepped closer to say something to him; but she thought better of it. "Don't you think," she just let slip, "I've made it look at least--well--_old_?"

"As only a Westerner could want to make it look." His sense of humor affectionately covered any lack of enthusiasm.

"Come, Jacky," she urged at last, "I'll show you all of it before lunch is ready."

The stairs rose straight in the rear of the hall, directly opposite the main entrance, with its border of finely traceried windows, branching squarely to right and left two thirds of the way up. By the first door above the side whither Julia conducted her guest she stepped fondly back and announced:

"This, Jack, is your room. I hope you will like it."

"Yes," he murmured, distractedly gazing about him.

Despite the freshness of everything, despite the new woolen carpets, with their correct geometric designs, ones Julia had had copied from some battered relics which she had somehow acquired, despite the new chintzes and the recently refinished furniture so deliberately assembled there for the first time, despite the spickness and spanness of each suitably collected detail of the room's decorations, a musty smell in the air caught his breath. The floor swooped reminiscently down toward the right; the boards of it made a stifled creak as he stepped across them. He himself was a little unsteady. The window gave on impenetrable fog. Hastings threw up the sash and peered out into the dampness; he heard the sound of unseen boats groping their ways through the distance; the water lapped and laved below him.

"Jack!" Julia called.

He turned to her, dazed, smiling in that way he had of trying to conceal his consciousness of inattention.

"Of course, it seems plain and spare and--rather humble, after Europe. I know _that_."

As if directed by her words, his eyes swept rapidly over the room.

"It's no use, Julia," he answered; "if you're New England to the core, you can't get free of it. I'd like every drop of New England blood drained out of me, and something--say Hebrew or--or Middle-West," he laughed, "substituted in place of it. To you this is 'pretty' and 'cozy' and--and 'cheerful'; to me--well, it's like an orgy of blue laws; it's the personification of witch-lore--like self-inflicted penance for I don't know what." He glanced at her in excitement, shifting his hands uneasily in and out of his pockets.

"Yes," she said slowly. "I had thought, nevertheless, that you might like it."

"Like it?" he echoed. "That's the trouble. I wish I weren't so full of the meaning of it all. Can you fancy how a monk might feel, who'd been away on a vacation, just getting back to his cell? _Like_ it? I can't help liking it. It's my proper setting; I see that fast enough. But I've come back to find how inexorable and harsh and catechismical it is, and naturally I resent being what I am. Oh--" he broke off, suddenly realizing the folly of his harangue, and after another moment he added: "It's delightful, Julia dear, really. If only all the Westerners could come to New England and revive it--and all the New-Englanders move West and revive themselves!"

They went on from room to room.

"You Westerners," Hastings reiterated--"oh, I don't just know what the difference is, for you're New England, too. Only you've got so much else mixed up with it. You've become free-lances; your more recent, less bigoted adventures have made you forget."

"What?" asked Julia, indignantly.

But he was at a loss, as he looked about him, to explain, however much each new survey of the scene convinced him. "Here," he muttered, "everything has been steeping so long in the attenuated resolutions that drove us to come; everything is still conscientiously soaked--saturated--in the barren memory of it."

"_You're_ not," said Julia, testily, to draw him out. "Precious little of it _you've_ had! Two years at a school! You're more foreign than you are New England. Remember--your--"

"Yes. I don't forget I've one foreign ancestor to boast of, and bless Heaven for it! How my great-grandmother ever happened to marry--see this!" Hastings went on, incoherently catching her arm and waving his other over the exquisite array of her "colonial" chamber. "Now, this, to you, is--well--it's as 'amusing' as if you'd tried to furnish a room to imitate one in Cinderella's palace, as 'interesting' as if you'd done it Louis Sixteenth, or--or--its meaning is hardly more personal to you than the room you furnished in Munich that winter."--She blushed admiringly at memory of their first meeting.--"The problem appealed to you, and you made it charming. But to me--"

"You really hate it," said Julia, determined to face the facts.

"I really love it," he retorted sadly, "the way you couldn't help loving a parent, even though you mightn't believe in him."

"Jack," she characteristically cried out to him again, "there is one thing more that I hardly dare show you then. You'll think me such a fool. I--"

A servant appeared to announce that luncheon was ready.

"Don't say anything to _them_ against it," she told him on the way down.

That wasn't, however, what made him silent during the meal. He took little part in the conversation except when Mr. and Mrs. Elliott plied him with questions, which he then found himself answering with only unsatisfactory vagueness--answers that he could do nothing, not even when Julia flew tenderly to his rescue, to make any better. Yes, he liked the house, he said gravely. It was a nice old house. And he thought how murky, despite its new coats of cleaning, was that far corner up near the ceiling. No, he wasn't sorry, he responded, that he had left the École des Beaux Arts to devote all his time to painting; it was the one thing he was suited for. Yes, his foreign great-grandfather had been a portrait-painter. He couldn't remember what his name was. Tremaine? Henry Tremaine. That was it. Julia was looking hard at him. She was gazing down at her plate. He knew he had eaten nothing. He could not eat. No, he wasn't at all hungry. Why was it so chilly? he thought. Doubtless he had picked up a germ. The house, he muttered to himself, was on his nerves. It was so everlastingly gloomy! Julia had reinhabited it too authentically. "Eberdeen Manor"--"Mr. Eberdeen's House." What names!

An hour afterward he told Julia he was dead sleepy and that, contrary to all his habits, he was going up-stairs to take a nap. Dinner was at seven? All right, he would be in better shape by then. He felt wretchedly, but he didn't say so.

Out in the hall he paused a moment at the foot of the wide lower staircase. The ticking of a good many clocks came to him from different parts of the house; they seemed to focus their monotonous activity especially on his hearing. Extraordinary recollections swept him. He remembered having heard an old nurse, Sarah Teale, describe how her aunt once rushed out the back door right in the midst of frying doughnuts, and was instantly stricken with paralysis on account of it. There was a low groaning; a moan floated to him from somewhere above. Bravely he forced himself to climb the stairs toward it. He turned the knob. The door stuck. He shook it again, and it yielded.