Chapter II: The Green Emotion (3)

Even in his ignorance the vagabond understands much of Molly. In his first musings on these subjects the night of Dan's coming to bargain with him for the wreck of the car he had foolishly torn up the page she had written over.

He had torn up that fragment of message because the memory of the cozy room and hearth fire had tempted his thoughts away from these hardships and loneliness; he resented Molly's smile and welcome as an attempt to lure him from the way of ambition, much as the pity of Katy and good-humor of the lime burners would do. Now he understood that Molly offered no such temptation; that to herself the fire and comforts were as nothing; far away and beyond these had dwelt her thoughts in some place as lonely and echoing as the old terminal. There in wisdom and sorrow she had pondered her duty; how to keep the promise she had made. "Dam' luck, she had," Tim Cannon swears roundly. Of course she had also been a fool to bind herself with a promise; but to die before she had found a way to keep it was harder still, somehow.

As for himself--his only duty is to manage Craney's road till he returns. After that the things within him can be let loose, and many exploits be expected of them.

"And if Craney does not come back! Sure," sneers Tim to the dark and loneliness, "I'll be no worse than the old dame who died on the job!"

One day Katy speaks of returning to town for the winter, and he tells her sternly that the road is run for her convenience and she is expected to ride on it.

And so she continues to do, without further argument about returning to town; and he is mildly interested in the journeys she makes after that, on Sunday afternoons. To the old Craney homestead she journeys and sits on the doorstep, sometimes speaking of the young man who has left his railroad to be run for her sake, and then wandered away with his coat wrong side out in search of fortune.

"Never a bit of encouragement did I give him," she will always conclude, with blushes; "but when he returns his welcome will not be the same I would offer a stranger."

Once she thanks Tim for attending his trust so faithfully, but he does not reply. It is not worth while; she could not understand--that he does this thing because it is promised and inevitable, not because he relishes it.

As Craney's orders are to arrange the Sunday schedule to Katy's convenience he sits erect on a stone, watching from a distance till she starts toward the car. The things within him burn and torment, and keep him company; he will not let them go or even quiet them by promises of what he will achieve when this duty is done and off his hands. Instead he holds them at bay, coldly.

Till one Sunday afternoon a message mutters out of the northern sky; from Regan it comes, shaking the very ground which the vagabond, as if understanding it, grips in his nervous fingers. "'T is like the guns in battle," he says, and that night strolling among the men up the yard learns that the roar is that of dynamite where the construction gangs of Regan's new line are breaching the distant hills for entrance into Great Southwest territory.

Regan is coming on, undaunted by the refusal of Barlow to let him through; day by day the iron rumor swells in the northern sky, and Tim sleeping or waking presses close after the vision of a giant of bronze with half-lidded smoldering eyes who juggles men and steel in the burning dusk beyond the construction camps.

Defiant of the winter winds, even to refusing the jacket which Katy buys for him, he shivers with the chill of exhaustion, for now he must struggle the more fiercely with ambition, night and day. Yet on he plods, keening in that strange little whistle. All this bleak stretch of his history he crosses, in a sort of delirium loading the battered old car with company of the make-believe kind whom he has watched the children in the city parks playing with long ago. The ghost of a jack-in-the-box which he had once dragged away from a playground and murdered with a stick in his den appears by night in the terminal building. It smiles forgivingly and he frowns back.

When the snow falls he marches ahead of Charley, a shovel on his shoulder, storming the drifts. A rope round his body keeps the whipping rags together, and he wears an old sack for a waistcoat. The limekiln closes down and there is no passenger left but Katy, so Tim breaks into the treasure holes in the wall to buy oats and bread. Once again the Barlow Suburban is devouring its master. And now the rumble of dynamite sinks lower and lower like the death rattle of Regan's destiny and one afternoon dies away entirely.

That night Tim sits cross-legged on his pallet by his rusty little stove, awe-stricken, as if somehow a battle waited on him. And out of that dread stillness under the northern sky Regan comes to him, streaked red with the clay of the camps.

"Craney is lost or dead," he says. "I have searched high and low; now it is up to you."

The boy listening intently agrees with Regan. "'T is too bad I promised Craney and have the duty."

"You are far from a fool," says Regan; "look out of the window here with me." And as they stare up the yards, awink with the colored lamps of the switch stands: "Do you see the giant black engines and cars, and the shops beyond with their roaring mountains of machinery; the tracks stretching thousands of miles, all swarming with trains and men? Such are the playthings of me; have you a game which can beat that? Listen." He holds up his hand, and out of the simmering dusk rises the groan of iron and steam and toil. "It is marching music like the bands of armies," says Regan. "D' you understand? You must; you can feel it! Such armies I command and will bring you up in the way of commanding if you but keep the bargain you made."

"Is it walk off the duty, you mean?" asks Tim astonished.

"But listen again, as man to man," says Regan, patient and crafty and desperate. "I have no way into Barlow, bold as I have been in building to its very walls. A few crooks who run the town keep me out. My end of track is now a mile from the Barlow limits on the north, and there as if I had given up hope I have bought land for depots and set engineers to work laying out yards, and masons raising foundations. By building in from the north I have not called my enemies' attention to the Suburban, which enters from the southeast; nobody has even thought of it as my means of breaking in. But if you will carry out the deal you made with me," says Regan, "I will own the Suburban and throw my rails from the present end of track to the Suburban right of way and into this town in a single night! Think over it well; on this spot where you sit among tumbledown walls you will raise up"--the man's tones thrilled like a prophecy--"you will raise up a station of stone and glass. The sounds in here, instead of running mice and the pawing of the old horse and your own curses on poverty, will be the footsteps of hurrying people, their laughs and cries of welcome and godspeed. Ah, Timothy," breathes Regan, "think well!"

But Timothy, wilder and gaunter than ever, sets his teeth. "'T would be walkin' off the duty."

Dan Regan grinds out the word after him. "Duty! What is this, I ask of you, but duty? The duty to thousands of people who want this road in Barlow, instead of duty to one man, Craney, who has set you to guard a thing he does not want and has deserted himself? He will never come back. Now ask what you want of me. The price, whatever it is! And where do you come by this false notion of duty?" he demands with an inspiration.

"'T was an old woman--she was the wise one," says Tim, and explains, as in confidence, about his visit to the cottage on that snowy night. "She was putting it into a message," he says, "but her hand was too old and shaky--and I did not know my letters to write it for her. She had a beginning all blotted and scratched--I brought it away, and tore it up the first night you came here. The Farthest Lantern, it was. Here is the pen she broke by stabbing into the table, she was that mad!"

The Farthest Lantern!

Remotely Dan Regan hears the word, with a little shock, as a challenge whispered in darkness; he shrugs his shoulders.

"Come, Timothy," he urges.

Now memory has seized on the word, sending it echoing through his brain; but he goes on, impatient of the start which Tim has given him, and not yet realizing how it was done.

"Will you help those crooks of Barlow against myself and all the good people of the town? Will you cheat Craney of the price of his road in case he ever comes back? Is this duty? I tell you, no!" And in a flash of afterthought: "The wise old woman herself would cry 'No' from the grave of her. I tell you as one who knows. For she was Regan's mother, and her message of the things she saw beyond the day's work at Turntable--was to me!"

With terrible fascination Tim gazes at the man racked by the old powers of pull-down and trample-under, which Tim himself holds imprisoned in Regan's breast. And as the last words drive home the vagabond answers, high and clear: "Sure, you must know then. Tell me true, Mr. Regan--'t will not be breaking the promise?"

Through the dingy panes in the corner wink the lights as did those of Turntable long ago; but they do not beckon.

"I will ditch the car now," says Tim.

"I might be mistaken----" Regan's voice is hollow; the memories of a lifetime cloud his vision. "Perhaps you would do well not to trust me," he says; the warning of a hypocrite to satisfy his startled conscience as once more his gaze lifts bold and far along the road which lies through the corner guarded by this scarecrow of a boy.

"Sure, I trust you," answers Tim in that singing voice the likes of which was never heard out of him before, and ties his tatters round him against the cold outside. The promise has been kept, the duty done, he is at last on the road with Regan.

The man holds the pen in his hand--the pen his mother had tried to write her last, her life's message with, and failed. Fearfully he gazes on this gaunt campaigner of destiny, delivering his unspoken message by deed and bearing and duty done, through storm and danger, indifferent to bribe and threat.

But now this Tim Cannon nods and is on his way like any credulous boy to clear the highway of fortune for Regan, by the wreck of the Suburban car.

"Hold!" Regan's head is bowed and he is listening. "No, I cannot pass here," he answers in thought, and in a strained, quiet voice tells Tim: "You trust me too late."

The miracle of Molly's messenger has not been worked in vain.

Light had broken in flashes from the vagabond's countenance since the great things within him were set free to join this mighty partnership. Halted now in his tracks he listens too, gloomily, wrathfully hearing in fact what Regan does not--a quickening footfall, the tug at the latch, the rumble of the door. Craney comes in.

He is almost as gaunt as Tim and covered with the grime on the road.

"What? Are you not yet swallowed up by the cursed Suburban?" he asks, astonished. "Then you will give me word of Katy O'Hare, and I am gone by the through freight. Fortune was not in the direction I took," he adds by way of explaining; "so I am beating up west and south; 't is a far search and leaves me little time between trains."

"There is time enough!" Regan has him by the arm. "You are Craney of the Suburban. Come!"

And so terrible is the grip he is fallen into that Mr. Craney is dragged out and through the dark with hardly perceptible struggle.

Tim Cannon watches them out with ghastly nonchalance; once more fortune has declared against him and he takes his loss, biding only Craney's return to throw up his job and be gone.

The night passes and a faint iron rumor drifts down from the northern sky where the P. D. construction gangs are breaking camp; then a boom of dynamite. The campaign is on again; no need of concealment now, the Suburban has passed safely into Regan's hands.

The red coal in the rusty stove crumbles, the lantern smokes out.

"I was just too late; 't is little I know," thinks Tim Cannon.

A burly battered man enters the door and leads out the horse; the gang at his heels attack the old building with pick and bar; to a ripping of shingles the dawn twinkles through; the battle which the outcast had halted so long is passing over his body.

The battered man shakes the iron bar in his hand, pointing it significantly at walls and roof tumbling about; Tim looks at him scornfully, and the gang tear at the flooring with picks and axes.

Why it is so, I cannot say, who make no pretense of sorcery, but 't is certain that the mice linger and spiders swing low from the rafters with presentiment of tragedy as Tim Cannon stands his last guard in the corner of the doomed old terminal. Twice he catches glimpses of Regan without, compelling this storm of men and steel.

The floor is now torn up to his very feet; the far end of the building, roof and walls, has been scattered like chaff. Indifferently Tim watches the battered man point to him with the iron bar and waits calmly to be dragged away by the gang.

Mr. Craney running lightly along the last remaining girder to Tim's corner presses some folded bills and a paper into his hand.

"Salary and honorable discharge," he explains; "and invitation to the wed----"

And his voice being smothered by a great crash within and without he signals with his hands that not a moment is to be lost in saving themselves alive.

Above all the uproar is a shriller yell, a rush of staggering men past the end of the terminal, a heavy clang of steel; fighting. "Regan is crossing the Great Southwest main!" shrieks Mr. Craney over his shoulder.

In fact the P. D. frog for the main-line crossing is set in only after a sharp skirmish with a G. S. force rushed up to prevent it. And then Regan, threatened with police and military by his gathering enemies, passes them the court order obtained during the night. By this order they are enjoined from tearing up the frog, even before it has been laid down! Such is the forethought of genius.

Regan's special, ordered out since midnight, stands drumming up the line, and Tim lurking in his corner sees the signal he gives as he crosses the track. The special glides down between them, and once more the vagabond watches through the flying dust clouds the flash of Regan's car, signaling farewell.

Now he is free to pick and choose where he will, but Tim Cannon girds his rags with fierce regret; the great things within him cling to this spot; he cannot break away, and he curses in a cold agony of disappointment.

"I was too late. Never again will I promise the duty."

"You gang boss!" crashes a voice behind him; "breach me the wall at the corner."

And the battered man and his crew fly at it with pick and bar.

With twisted face and hand clenched on his breast the boy stares at Regan, who has just sent his car home without boarding it at all.

"My path lies through this corner; last night you blocked it; to-day I will pass."

'T is a poor sort of triumph over the vagabond, whose body straightens and stiffens proudly.

"Which I never could do with you on guard! Come; first through the breach, Timothy! 'T is your right. Now we are through--catch stride here in fortune's highway. You are on duty with Dan Regan!"

This queer sentimental thing the man does in honor of his mother's messenger, and never again through all the years is the spell broken which draws the man of pull-down and trample-under away and upward to the things which the pretty colleen of long agone saw beyond the day's work at Turntable. 'T is little we know.

MRS. DRAINGER'S VEIL[17]

[Note 17: Copyright, 1918, by Smart Set Company, Inc. Copyright, 1920, by Howard Mumford Jones.]

BY HOWARD MUMFORD JONES

From _The Smart Set_

If the house had been merely shabby I doubt whether I would have been interested. Every residence section has its shabby houses, monuments to departed aspirations, falling into slow decay in the midst of weedy yards, sometimes uninhabited and sometimes sheltering one or two members of the family who apparently have been left, like the ancient furniture, to be forgotten. The paint cracks and peels, the windows fall into impossible angles or are boarded up, the porches sag, the chimneys lose a brick or two and come in time to look like stumps of teeth. By and by the whole structure seems to sink into the grass under the burden of its neglect, and only a faint tenacity, a melancholy inertia keeps it from crumbling altogether. Then suddenly the inhabitants die, the neighbors awake to a sudden sense of change, and that is all.

The Drainger house was such a house, but it was more. It was mysterious, uncommunicative. In the midst of the commonplace residence block, with its white cottages, its monotonous lawns and uninteresting gardens, the contrast was startling, secretive, contemptuous. The tall grass waved ironically at the neat grassplots which flanked it. The great untrimmed elms sent branches to beat against the decaying shingles, or downward into the faces of passers-by, with patrician indifference to the law. They had, indeed, the air of ragged retainers, haughty and starving, and yet crowding about the house as if to hide the poverty of their master from the eyes of the vulgar. City ordinances required the laying of cement walks; the rotting boardwalk in front of the Drainger mansion was already treacherous, and no one complained.

The building itself was extraordinary. Built in the days when Crosby had been a lumber town and building material had consequently been cheap, its pretensions were immense. A tall, six-sided tower occupied two-thirds of the front, an elaborate affair, crowned by rusty ironwork in lieu of battlements. Windows were inserted at appropriate intervals, suggesting a donjon keep or a page from Walter Scott. The heavy brown shutters were never opened. There was a grim angularity to the deep porch below, a military cut to the bare front door which added to the forbidding character of the place. Behind this imposing front the rest of the building lay like the parts of a castle, each portion a little lower than the preceding. There were four of these sections, like four platforms, their flat roofs crowned with further rusty ironwork. The windows were infrequent and all barred, and a massive elm to the east of the house threw over them a gloomy and impenetrable shade. Although the whole building had been painted brown, time and the weather had combined to make it almost black, the only patch of color being the rich green of the mossy shingles on the roof of the porch.

I had first noticed the Drainger house because of its oddity. Then I was impressed by its air of speechless and implacable resentment. So far as I could observe it was empty; no foot disturbed the rank grass or troubled the dismal porches. The windows were never thrown open to the sunlight. The front door, in the month I had spent in Crosby, remained locked. I had once observed a grocery wagon standing in front of the house, but this, I assumed, was because the driver wished to leave his horse in the shade.

Proceeding homeward one night to my cousin's, Mark Jedfrey, with whom I was spending the summer, I was startled, when I came in front of the Drainger place, to see a light in the front window of the tower on the ground floor. It was moonlight, and the heavy shadows sculptured the old mansion into fantastic shapes, revealing a barred window inscrutably facing the moon, carving the top of the house into gargoyles of light and throwing the porch into Egyptian darkness. The light through the shutter of the window was therefore as unexpected as a stab. I paused without knowing it. Apparently I was observed; there was a light sound of footsteps from the invisible porch and the creaking, followed by the shutting, of the front door. Immediately afterwards the light was extinguished.

The person who had been on the porch had moved so quickly and so quietly, and the street, drenched in the July moonlight, seemed so still, that I wondered a moment later whether to credit my senses. At any rate, it was not my business, I concluded, to stand staring at a strange house at one o'clock in the morning, and I resumed my walk home.

A week later, a change in the routine of my daily life made me a regular visitant in the neighborhood. Twice a day I passed the Drainger house. In the morning it seemed to resist the genial sunlight, drawing its hedge of shade trees closer about it and remaining impervious to all suggestions of warmth. And on my return from the office in the evening it was as sealed, as autumnal as ever. The pleasant sounds of human intercourse, the chatting of women on the steps or the whirr of lawn-mowers should, I fancied, at least unshutter a window or burst open a frigid door. But the warm impulses of neighborhood life, like the cries of the boys at their evening game of baseball, broke unheeded against that clifflike impassivity. No one stirred within; no one, not even the paper boy, dared to cut across the front yard; and a pile of yellowing bills on the front steps testified to the unavailing temerity of advertisers.

There was nothing to show I had not dreamed the episode of the light, as I had begun to think of it. I could have made inquiries--Helen, Mark's wife, knows everybody--but I did not. I could have consulted the directory. But I preferred to keep the house to myself. I had a secret sense of proprietorship (I am, I suppose, a romantic and imaginative soul) and I preferred that the mystery should come to me. My alert devotion must, I thought, have its reward. Indeed, my daily walks to and from my work took on the character of a silent duel between the expressionless walls and my expressionless face, and I was not going to be beaten in taciturnity.

One Friday morning, well into August, I was surprised and curious to see a woman standing under the elms in the front of the Drainger mansion. The neighborhood was, for the moment, deserted. I concealed my eagerness under a mask of impassivity. I thought myself masterly as, pretending an interest in nothing, I yet watched the place out of the tail of my eye. Imagine my increasing surprise to observe that as I approached, the person in question came slowly down to the junction of her walk with the sidewalk, so that, as I drew near we were face to face.

"You are Mr. Gillingham?" she asked.

I stopped mechanically and raised my hat. I visit Crosby regularly, where I am well known, so that I was not surprised to be thus accosted by one who was a stranger to me. She was about forty, obviously a spinster, and clad in a costume not merely out-of-date, but so far out-of-date as to possess a false air of theatricalism. I can best describe her (I am not clever in matters of dress) by saying that, with the exception that she was not wearing a hoopskirt, she appeared to have stepped out of _Godey's Lady's Book_. A Paisley shawl was wrapped tightly around her head, although the morning was warm, and its subdued brilliance clashed oddly with the faded lemon of her dress. Her face was small, the features regular, but her complexion was more than sallow, it was yellow, the yellow of dying grass and sunless places. A spot of rouge glared on either cheek, and, with her eyes, which were black and brilliant, gave her face the look of fever. Her dark hair, just visible under the shawl, deepened the hectic quality of her features, although, as a matter of fact, she was not ill.

"You are a lawyer?" she continued, her brilliant eyes searching my face, I thought with some boldness, and without waiting for an answer she said, "Come," and walked abruptly toward the house.

I followed her. On the porch we paused; my companion turned and searched the street, which was still empty, a fact which seemed to increase her satisfaction, and without giving me a glance, unlocked the front door with a key which she was carrying.

II

She led me into the house and through two of the rooms into a third before we paused. The transition from sunlight to darkness had been too rapid for my eyes, so that, for some moments I could only stand ridiculously in the middle of the room. I was conscious of the presence of a third person--intensely conscious--and exceedingly uncomfortable. My conductor busied herself pushing forward a chair which, fortunately, she placed under the shuttered window. To this I stumbled.

"You are a lawyer?" asked a voice from the darkness.

I was startled.

The voice sprang from the corner I was facing as though it were a live thing that had seized upon me. It was the voice of a woman, of great age apparently, and yet it possessed a fierce, biting energy that no amount of years could weaken.

"This is Mr. Gillingham," said my conductor with, I thought, a shade of asperity. "Of course he's a lawyer."

To this there succeeded a silence, broken only by the sibilant drawing in of the younger woman's breath.

"I am indeed a lawyer," I said at length. "In what way can I be of service?"

"We see no one," said the imperious voice abruptly. "You must therefore pardon the manner in which I have had you called in."

I was now able to discern something through the gloom.

The speaker sat in extreme shadow. Her dress was a blur in the darkness, faintly outlining her person, which seemed to be of medium height, though in the great chair she looked shrunken and huddled together. Her eyes, faint points of light, were steadfastly fixed on mine, but her face was, I thought, in such deep shadow that I could not make it out.

But the concentration points, so to speak, were not her eyes, but her hands. They lay in her lap motionless, and yet they were extraordinarily alive. Even in that light their emaciated condition testified to her extreme age; but they were not decrepit, they seemed to glow with a steady light, an inward and consuming energy.

"You may leave us, Emily," said the voice, and Emily, who had been hovering with what I somehow felt to be a hint of malice, unwillingly withdrew. The other closed her eyes until the shutting of the door assured us of privacy.

"I am dying," she began suddenly in her strange, impersonal manner.

"Do not interrupt me," she added coldly as I was about to utter some inanity. "I desire to be certain of one thing while there is time, namely, that my wishes respecting the disposition of my body shall be respected--in every particular."

Her manner indicated nothing out of the ordinary. She might have been speaking of the merest commonplace.

"You are a lawyer. How can I so arrange that the directions I will leave must be carried out after my death?"

"Ordinarily," I managed to stammer, "directions in such matters when given to the heirs, have the binding force----"

There was a second's pause.

"That is not what I wish," continued the inflexible voice. "I wish to compel attention to my instructions."

"A provision can be inserted in your will," I said at length, "which would make the inheritance of your property conditional upon the fulfillment of your wishes."

She seemed to consider this. Her hands moved slightly in her lap.

"And if those conditions were not fulfilled?"

"Your estate would go elsewhere as you might direct."

There was prolonged pause. Her eyes disappeared, and try as I would, I could not distinguish her face. Her hands shifted, and she spoke.

"Step to the door and call my daughter. I am Mrs. Drainger."

I might have been the servant. I arose and groped my way toward the door. She neither offered me any direction as to its location, nor commented upon the gloom in which I hesitated.

I reached the door and, opening it, was about to call, when I was aware of Miss Drainger's presence; she seemed to have materialized, a pale specter, out of the dusk, and I was again conscious of vague malice.

"Your mother wished me to call you," I said, holding the door open.

Her strange eyes searched mine for a brief moment as she entered the room.

Suddenly Miss Drainger, poised in the gloom over her mother's chair, seemed to my startled sense like a monstrous pallid moth. The impression, though momentary, was none the less vivid. I felt choked, uncomfortable. An instant only, and Mrs. Drainger's voice recalled me to my senses.

She gave directions for the bringing of a box containing some documents she wished. Miss Drainger said nothing, but turned abruptly, gave me another sidelong glance and left the room.

In the time she was absent neither of us spoke. The strange woman in the corner shrank, it seemed to me, deeper into the dusk, until only her extraordinary hands remained; and I sat in my uncomfortable and ancient chair, the little streaks of sunlight from the blind making odd patterns on my legs and hands.

The return of the daughter with a tin box which she placed in my hands was followed by an extraordinary moment. I became, if I did not deceive myself, increasingly conscious of a silent struggle going on between the two. Mrs. Drainger, in her biting, inflexible voice, again requested her daughter to leave us. Emily demurred and in the interval that followed I had a sense of crisis. Nay, I fancied more; upon hearing Emily's brief protest Mrs. Drainger slowly clenched her hands, and the movement was as though she were steadily bending her daughter's will to her purpose. At length, with the same sibilant in-taking of the breath I had observed before, Emily turned and swept through the door, her face unusually yellow, the little spots of rouge on her cheeks burning suddenly.

The box she had given me contained a will made by Mrs. Drainger, together with a few securities totaling no great value, and other less important documents. This will she now directed me to modify so that the inheritance of the property upon her death would be conditional upon the fulfillment by the heir of certain conditions which she said she would indicate in writing.

I asked why those conditions could not now be indicated.

"You are all alike," she said bitterly. "All alike in your curiosity. I prefer to put them in writing."

I assured her of the inviolability of her confidence and rose.

"Stay," she commanded. "If that girl asks you any impertinent questions send her to me."

Her hands moved quickly as she spoke. The concentration of her voice alarmed me so that I could think of nothing to say. I bowed and withdrew. It was only when I was once outside the room that I recalled, curiously enough, at no time during my interview had I seen Mrs. Drainger's face.

Miss Emily was not visible. I was about to search for the street door when, in her usual extraordinary manner, she appeared out of the gloom.

"What did she want?" she demanded, almost fiercely, her eyes holding me as though they were hands.

I explained as best I could why I could not tell her.

"Humph!" she ejaculated, and without further speech led me to the door.

"There will be fees, I suppose," she said contemptuously, staring at her hand upon the doorknob. "Do not expect much. You are the only person who has entered this house for a year."

I was embarrassed how to reply.

"Poverty is like contagion. People flee from it," she added with a mirthless laugh, and opened the door.

I bade her farewell. She stared at me, a shrewd look in her black eyes, but said nothing. The instant I was on the porch the door was shut and locked behind me.

III

On my way to Jedfrey's office I could not shake off my unfavorable impression of Miss Drainger. I assured myself again and again that the oddity of their manner of life was sufficient reason for her peculiarities, and yet the same picture of her kept recurring to my mind--a vision of her flitting to and fro in that great house like a monstrous evil moth. I imagined her pale face with its spots of rouge and her lemon dress so unlike any costume I had ever seen. I pictured her materializing, as I phrased it, out of the shadows; hovering expectantly (I knew not why) over the gaunt form in the great chair by the window; or peering out of the unopened shutters as she moved from room to room. I positively grew ashamed of myself for my fancies.

The following morning a square, yellowed envelope (everything about that place seemed to lack freshness), addressed in the fine, regular hand of a generation ago, caught my eye in the heap of mail, and putting aside more important matters, I at once opened it. The note was from Mrs. Drainger, evidently written in her own hand, and contained the provision I was to insert in the will. It was sufficiently queer. She desired that upon her death no one should venture to see her face, which would be covered, she wrote, by a thick veil, and she was particularly anxious that her daughter Emily should respect her wishes. Otherwise her property was to go elsewhere.

The energy and clarity exhibited by the old lady on the previous day forbade any notion that this preposterous idea sprang from a mind touched by the infirmities of age, and yet her stipulation was so peculiar, so irrational that I pondered long over my duty in the case. What Mrs. Drainger wanted was, in one sense, absurdly simple--merely the revision of her will, scarcely more than the retyping of that simple document; but I was conscious of a deeper demand; as though, to the support of her desires, she had called in my person upon the assurance, even the majesty of the law. I could not justify her breaking of what I instinctively took to be a determined habit of seclusion except by postulating deeper issues than I saw on the surface. There was no reason why I should not revise the document and be done with it; queerer provisions have been made in other wills. Yet, to make the inheritance conditional upon so strange a request might be unfair to Miss Drainger. It was true, I distrusted her; but that was not to the point, and this provision was one that she would have every natural incentive to break.

A further thought occurred--there might be other children not known to me who would expect some share in the modest estate; finding the property willed to Emily upon so tenuous a provision, they might easily charge that that provision had been broken, when proof and disproof would be equally difficult, and Mrs. Drainger's wish that her companion (despite her singular testament) be her sole heir would then not be met. The will simply provided that, should Emily forfeit her right to the property the estate should go to a local charity; no mention was made of other children; but this silence did not disprove their existence.

I was too well aware of the ease with which so singular a document could be attacked in court, not to be uneasy. I resolved finally again to consult my client (if the name could attach to so imperious a lady) and briefly announcing my absence to Mark Jedfrey, I sought the Drainger residence.

The old house looked as deathlike as ever. It seemed incredible that human existence could be possible within its sunless walls. Indeed, my persistent efforts at the rusty bell-handle produced only a feeble echo, and the round-eyed interest of a group of urchins, who volunteered, after a time, that nobody lived there. I was beginning to agree with them when a key was turned in the lock and the weatherbeaten door yielded a few cautious inches. Miss Emily looked out at me.

"It's you," she said ungraciously, and seemed rather to hope that I would disappear as at the uttering of a charm.

"I wish to see your mother," I said.

She hesitated. At length, opening the door scarcely enough to admit me, she bade me enter, and disappeared. The house was as dismal as ever.

"Come in here," she said, appearing after her usual sudden fashion in a dim doorway and looking more like a wraith than ever.

Her eyes burned me as I walked cautiously into the other room.

It was one I had not seen, but Mrs. Drainger was seated, as before, in the obscurest corner, a blur of white in which her pale hands looked like pallid lumps of flame. I faced my invisible client.

"I have come about the will," I began, and was immediately conscious of Miss Emily's voracious interest. The opening was, as I recognized too late, scarcely diplomatic.

"Will?" said the daughter in a harsh voice. "You are making a will? You--you----"

She looked enormously tall and unpleasant as she spoke.

"Yes, my dear," responded Mrs. Drainger dryly.

"You? _You_?" continued the daughter rapidly. "After all these years? It is incredible. It is incredible." She laughed unpleasantly with closed eyes.

Then, conscious that she was betraying emotions not meant for me, she turned to my chair. "You will understand that the information is something of a shock for a daughter. My mother's condition----"

"Mrs. Drainger," I ventured to interrupt, "wishes merely to make certain changes in an instrument already drawn up." I was conscious of a stir, whether of gratitude or of resentment, from the darkened corner.

Emily seemed momentarily bewildered.

"You frightened me," she said at length with a frankness palpably false.

"I quite understand," I retorted, the sham being, I thought, tolerably obvious. "And now if your mother and I----"

She took the hint.

"I will leave you," she said.

It was evident I had not won her gratitude.

As the door closed behind her I heard a low sound from Mrs. Drainger.

"I am afraid--afraid," she murmured weakly. I think forgetting my presence; and then, as if suddenly conscious of a slip:

"Old women, Mr. Gillingham, have their fancies. Death seems at times uncomfortably close."

I murmured some polite deprecation, but I was sure it was not death that frightened her.

Drawing from my pocket her letter and the copy of the will I had prepared I explained as best I could why I had come. I was tolerably confused. I could not question her entire sanity, and as I did not wish in any way to hint at what I felt concerning Emily I soon involved myself in a veritable dust of legal pedantry. Finally I asked whether there were other children.

Mrs. Drainger heard me out in ironic silence.

"I have no others," she admitted at length, and added after a second, "Thank heaven!"

"There remains only one other matter," I said. "The provisions of your will are such that unless she knows them in advance Miss Emily will almost inevitably forfeit the inheritance."

"I am aware of that," said the voice, and the pale hands moved imperceptibly. "I am quite well aware of what I am doing, Mr. Gillingham, and I repeat, my daughter is not to ask impertinent questions."

I bowed, somewhat ruffled. I added that it would be necessary to witness her signature in the usual manner. She seemed surprised to learn that two persons were necessary, and remained silent.

"Call Emily," she directed.

"Emily will not do," I objected, "since she is a possible beneficiary."

"I am aware," she responded coldly. "Call Emily."

Emily, being summoned, was directed to procure the presence of a Mrs. Mueller, living near by, who occasionally helped with the work. She seemed unusually tractable and departed on her errand without comment.

For some three or four minutes Mrs. Drainger did not speak. I could not, of course, see her face; but once or twice her hands shifted in her lap, and I thought she was perturbed. My own conversational efforts had been so uniformly unfortunate that I concluded to remain silent.

"You will see an old, worn woman," she said musingly. "But it does not matter."

The entrance of Miss Emily followed by that of a stout, comfortable German woman prevented the necessity of a reply. I explained what was wanted; Emily assisted me in making it clear to Mrs. Mueller, and then withdrew to the door, where she assumed an attitude of disinterestedness--too obviously assumed it, I thought.

It became necessary to have more light, and Emily went to the window and opened the shutter. I turned to where Mrs. Drainger sat, the will in my left hand, my fountain pen in the other, and in that attitude I hesitated for a brief moment of incredulity. I thought I was looking at a woman without a head.

A second's glance showed how mistaken I was. The thin, emaciated figure, clad like her daughter's, in a fashion long forgotten, was, as I had surmised, somewhat shrunken by age. Her strange hands, loosely held in her lap, were wrinkled with a thousand wrinkles like crumpled parchment, and yet, even in that crueler light, they conveyed the impression of power. They seemed like antennae wherewith their owner touched and tested the outer world. As I sought the reason for this impression I saw that the face and head were entirely wrapped in the thick folds of a black veil, which was so arranged that the eyes alone were visible. These seemed to swim up faintly as from the bottom of a well.

My imperceptible pause of surprise drew from Emily that sudden in-taking of breath I have before remarked, and I could not but feel that she intended, as I felt, a subtle sarcasm in the sound. Accordingly I made no comment, secured Mrs. Drainger's signature without difficulty, then that of Mrs. Mueller (who, during the whole procedure, uttered no word), and added my own with as natural an air as I could manage. Miss Emily led Mrs. Mueller away and I offered the completed document to Mrs. Drainger.

"Keep it," she said with some feebleness and then, more loudly,

"I will take care. Keep it. Make her call for it when it is time. Now let her come to me."

My search for the daughter necessitated my going through the several rooms, so that I had a tolerable notion of the house. Miss Emily's inheritance would not be great, although the lot was itself valuable. The furniture was all old and of just that antiquity which lacks value without acquiring charm. I remarked a vast what-not in one corner; one table promised well, and there were one or two really fine engravings; but for the most part the upholstered chairs were shabby, the tables and desks old and cracked, and the carpets of a faded elegance. The kitchen into which I passed was notably bleak, and the decrepit wood-stove seemed never to have held a fire.

Miss Drainger came in the back entrance as I entered the kitchen. Her face was paler than I had ever seen it. She confronted me silently.

"If you are through," she said bitingly, "I will let you out the front door."

I observed mildly that her mother wanted her and accompanied her into the sitting room. I hesitated how best to broach the matter I had in mind without giving offense and resolved, unfortunately, on a deliberate lie.

"My fee has been paid," I said, awkwardly enough.

She searched my face. I affected to be busy with my hat.

"I see," she commented with a short, cynical laugh. "Sometimes it is done that way, sometimes in ways less pleasant. We are quite used to it. I suppose I had better thank you."

I felt my face flush scarlet.

"It is not necessary," I faltered and was grateful to get out of the house without further blunders.

I filled my lungs with the sweet August morning in positive relief, feeling that I had been in the land of the dead.

IV

I had no further contact with the Draingers for some days. Indeed, the whole curious episode was beginning to fade in my mind when, some three weeks later, a dinner that Helen was giving recalled my experience and added fresh interest to my relations with them. I sat next to one of those conventionally pretty women who require only the surface of one's attention, and I was preparing to be bored for the rest of the evening when I caught a chance remark of Isobel Allyn's.

Mrs. Allyn (everybody calls her Isobel) was talking across the table to Dr. Fawcett.

"You've lost your mysterious veiled lady," she said.

"Yes," said Fawcett.

Fawcett is a good fellow, about forty-five, and inclined to be reticent.

"Veiled lady?" shrilled some feminine nonentity, much to Fawcett's distaste. "How thrilling! Do tell us about it!"

"There is nothing to tell," growled Fawcett.

Isobel, however, is not easily swept aside.

"Oh, yes, there is," she persisted. "Dr. Fawcett has for years had a mysterious patient whose face, whenever he visits her, remains obstinately invisible. Now, without revealing her features, the lady has had the bad taste to die."

I leaned forward.

"Is it Mrs. Drainger, Fawcett?"

He turned to me with mingled relief and inquiry.

"Yes. How did you know?"

I promised myself something later and remained vague.

"I had heard of her," I said.

His eyes questioned mine.

"Everyone must have heard of her but me," came the same irritating voice. "Aren't you going to tell us?"

"Merely a patient of mine," said Fawcett impolitely. "She has just died--at an advanced age."

It was cruel, but justified.

Isobel was penitent.

"I am sorry," she said prettily, and Helen hastily introduced the subject of automobiles, concerning which she knows very little.

I sought out Fawcett on the porch after dinner.

"About Mrs. Drainger," he said. "How did you know?"

"I am, I suppose, her lawyer--or was, rather," I explained. "I have her will."

"I thought soulless corporations and bloated bondholders were more your line."

"They are," I said, and briefly recounted how I had come to be Mrs. Drainger's attorney.

Fawcett's cigar glowed in the dark. His wicker chair creaked as he shifted his weight.

"The daughter is a curious creature," he observed slowly, "something uncanny about her, even devilish. Somehow I picture her striding up and down the shabby rooms like a lioness. The town has grown, the neighborhood changed, and I don't believe either of them was aware of it. They lived absolutely in the past. So far as I could see they hated each other--not, you understand with any petty, feminine spite, but splendidly, like elemental beings. I never went into the house without feeling that hot, suppressed atmosphere of hate. And yet there they were, tied together, as absolutely alone as though they had been left on a deserted island.

"Tied together--I fancy that's it. Emily could, of course, have gone away. And yet I have a queer fancy, too, that so long as Mrs. Drainger wore her veil the girl could not leave; that if she had once uncovered her face the tie between them would have been broken. The old lady knew that, certainly, and I think Emily knew it, too, and I fancy she must have tried again and again to lift the covering from her mother's face. But Mrs. Drainger--she was will incarnate--was always just too much for her."

I told him about the provisions of her will.

"Ah," he said, "it is even clearer now. My theory is right. The veil was, as it were, the symbol that held them together. But now, I wonder, does the will represent the old lady's revenge, or her forgiveness?"

"We shall know shortly," I interjected.

Fawcett nodded in the dark.

"Captain Drainger built the house," he continued inconsequentially, "back in the forties for himself and his young bride, and, though it looks bleak enough now, it was for the Crosby of those days a mansion of the first class. The captain, the tradition is, was a wild, obstinate fellow with black hair and brilliant eyes (I fancy Emily has much of her father in her), and nobody was greatly surprised, when the war broke out, to have him at first lukewarm, and then avowedly a Confederate. Of course he might as well have professed atheism or free love in this locality--he might better have blown his brains out--which he practically did, anyway. Public sentiment forced him out of the state and over Mason and Dixon's line, and he entered the rebel army as a cavalry captain, and deliberately (we heard) got himself killed. Of course the Drainger fortune, fair enough for those days, went to pieces at once.

"Mrs. Drainger immediately adopted the policy of complete seclusion she was to follow ever after. When the captain left, it was said they would not speak; at any rate, she broke off her friendships, refused herself to callers, and saw nobody. Her condition served her as an excuse, but everybody knew, I guess, the real reason why she kept to herself. There, alone with an old servant who died a year or so later, she walked the floor of that mockery of a house, or sat brooding over the coming of the child. It must have been pleasant! Emily was born just before we heard of the captain's death.

"One or two of her nearest friends tried to comfort her, but she would see no one except the doctor--who, by the way was my father. I have inherited the Draingers, you see."

Fawcett's cigar was out, but he did not light another.

"My mother, from whom I got all this, said there was something magnificent in the way Mrs. Drainger suffered, in the way she resented any intrusion upon her self-imposed solitude. My mother was a courageous woman, but she said she was positively frightened when Mrs. Drainger, a tall, fair woman with straight, level eyes, came to the door in answer to her knock.

"'You may go back, Lucy Fawcett,' she said. 'A rebel has no friends,' and shut the door in my mother's mortified face.

"At first there was some grumbling and ill-natured talk, but it soon ceased. People who knew her family (she was a Merion) saw pretty clearly that Mrs. Drainger's heart had, for most purposes, stopped beating when the captain found the bullet he was looking for, and tumbled from his horse. What was left was the magnificent shell of a woman in that great shell of a house--that, and the child. I can picture her sitting upright in some great chair by the shuttered window, peering out at the rank grass and the elm trees, or else wandering, always majestic, from room to room with her baby in her arms, listening to the silence. She cut herself off from the world of the living as though she had been buried, and she tried to bring up Emily as though they were in the land of the dead.