I

I

Doctor Dreeme, turning sleepily on his pillow, heard the clatter of a horse’s hoofs coming down the steep Leeminster Road. The steely clash on the rock-path tore abruptly through his semi-trance and he opened his eyes, scowling vaguely at the milky blur of ceiling. The horse stopped with a rough grating of hoofs below the window and the doctor sighed. Marlborough was like that. It was undoubtedly another farmer with a pain in his back who might just as well wait until morning. It was at night that his taciturn neighbors were most obsessed with the somber consequences of their lonely ailments. In daylight they would bear them with the dumb equanimity of animals, sitting behind drawn curtains or plodding painfully over their stony fields. But they were horribly afraid of dying at night. The bell clanked feebly. The doctor threw back his quilted coverlet of great square patches, rose in the darkness of the room, and strode over to the window. He leaned out, straining his eyes to see who stood in the gray mist of the moon outside his door.

“Who is it?” he called sharply. “Who, in the name of Heaven⁠ ⁠… at this time of night.⁠ ⁠…”

A boyish treble answered him.

“Doctor Dreeme? I’m Miles, Jeffrey Westcott’s hired boy. Mr. Westcott’s taken something awful. He wants for you to come and help him right away. He’s shot himself and.⁠ ⁠…”

“I’ll be right down,” snapped the doctor.

He fumbled about the room, lit a kerosene oil-lamp, and hastily dressed himself, drawing his trousers on over his rumpled pyjamas. Pausing an instant before the cracked mirror he smoothed back his tousled hair and dashed some cold water from the china bowl upon his sleep-warm face. It was a square-cut visage, young, thin-lipped, and with long narrow eyes that stared back briefly at him. Two years’ arduous practice in Marlborough, a relentless precision of deaths and births and ailments, had etched tiny lines about his mouth and eyes and forehead, lines of watchfulness and concentration, but he was still surprisingly youthful in appearance and alert in action. He grasped his black bag and hurried down the stairs, slipping the bolt and stepping into the dim lane where the huge farm-horse pawed impatiently at the ground. The blank windows of the Slater house stared down at him gloomily as he turned to the boy, Miles, who perched like a small monkey on his mount.

“Are you sure that Jeffrey Westcott wants me to come?” asked Dreeme as he climbed to a seat on the blanket that served for a saddle. There was a minor note of amazement in his voice.

The boy said nothing but chirped to his horse and the huge beast swung in the lane and mounted the hill, slowly at first and then at a smart canter as the ascent eased its sharp angle. The blurred moon flew with them, trailing long bat-like wings of milky opacity across the crumbling stone walls and the buildings with their lurching outhouses. Beside them swept their broad shadow, a two-torsoed centaur, indistinct and formidable in outline. Looking back Dreeme could see the little town of Marlborough stretched out like a conglomeration of dark tombs. A cool air tingling with the freshness of impending rain flowed by his face. Low trees flung chunky green arms across the twisting fences at him. They were black in the dimmed moonlight. The shaggy hoofs of the horse thudded heavily on the sand-road. Suddenly the boy answered Dreeme’s question.

“He told me to fetch you, anyway,” he remarked to the darkness before him.

The doctor said nothing and the boy, turning his head, observed him fleetingly. Dreeme caught the flash of a small, dark, imp-like face and two dull-green eyes.

So far as the doctor knew nobody ever called at the Westcott farm. It was avoided territory, forbidden to children wandering through the byways between Marlborough and Leeminster and skirted hastily by the taciturn farmers who dwelt in its vicinity. Dreeme had observed the rambling whitewashed buildings from the road often enough as he had passed on his way to various patients and occasionally he had seen Jeffrey Westcott ride into town for supplies, but that was all. The Westcotts took no part in the life of Marlborough. Indeed, they seemed frankly to court an ostracism that had long ago been willingly granted them by the unusual breed of natives who dwelt in this part of New England. Dreeme, curious and observant when he first arrived in Marlborough and took up the practice of his father’s old friend, Humphrey Lathrop, had asked questions about the Westcotts, as, indeed, he had about all the farmers in the neighbourhood, for he believed in mixing as much psychological insight as possible with his medicinal treatments, but he soon discovered that questions were not welcome in the town. An excessive reticence possessed these leather-skinned delvers in the soil, these small-shopkeepers, and even the brief scattering of professional men who conducted the affairs of Marlborough. Therefore, as Dreeme was an astute and adaptable young man, he speedily learned to keep his mouth shut and, at least outwardly, to suppress his curiosity. It was enough to serve as well as he could when he was called upon and to expend whatever mental energies he might have in the study of various profound books on medicine and psychology. Although time passed slowly it passed agreeably for loneliness did not obsess Dreeme. He was New England enough himself to slip naturally into a rut of reticence and to occupy himself with his own thoughts. Still there were many times when of all the curious folk in his environment he let his cogitations wander to the Westcotts.

They were unusual in their abandonment of the common intercourse of daily life. Apparently they had no friends, not even those cursory friends who met in the Post Office and General Store and discussed in brief bursts of monosyllables the politics and phenomena of the day. They were decidedly sufficient unto themselves. Dreeme always thought of the Westcotts as a plural number although he had never laid eyes on Mrs. Westcott. He knew that she existed and that was all. This, of course, was extraordinary in a small New England town where every individual might be supposed to know intimately the smallest details of a neighbor’s life; where, as a rule, the women, at least, maintained a sharp and malicious watch on one another. But this, after all, was an unusual New England town as Humphrey Lathrop had insisted to the young man when Dreeme first ventured upon Marlborough.

“You have seen New Englanders all your life,” the older doctor had said, “and you know their usual characteristics, reticence tinged with curiosity, religious fervor jaundiced with personal hypocrisy, an old pride bolstered by a stony soil, a nasal twang possibly induced by generations of psalm-singing through the nose, a stubborn zeal in labor and an inborn stinginess. You have seen that type of New Englander and I do not go so far as to say that you will not find it here; but there is a type of New Englander in this place that you have never seen before and of which I knew nothing until I came here. Marlborough and, to a lesser degree, Leeminster are cul-de-sacs into which an ancient backwash of old blood has flowed. It has been unrelieved by any new influx for two hundred years or more. It is not easy to get up here, you know, and once here there is little to hold an ambitious man. That is why you will go away some day. These people have dwelt here in this valley so opportunely surrounded by the Florida mountains and have intermarried for generations. Some day, perhaps the day when you leave forever, I will tell you what curious breed of Puritan drifted into this valley and established these communities. You will be amazed, for they are a breed of which you catch but furtive glances and hints in Pilgrim and Puritan chronicles. A curious intermixture of ethical and Dionysiac madness produced the forefathers of these people to whom you must administer as wisely as you can and with a minimum of words and questions.” The old doctor cleared his throat with a tremendous harrumph, his elephantine body quivering like a great jellyfish, and Dreeme decided that he had been told nothing at all. If he was to solve the mystery of Marlborough⁠—and there was a mystery, for he felt it like two huge dark wings hovering over the entire community⁠—he must do it all by himself.

For two years now the mystery had stood just outside his door, a dark and disquieting impalpability that teased him into fruitless suppositions, that revealed itself fleetingly in the swift sidelong glitter of cautious eyes, that threaded the valley and the town with a dim muffled sense of something unearthly. And yet the sun shone brightly enough, the farmers went about their business with the usual grim doggedness of men who scrape a difficult living from miserly soil, and the thin-faced women, scrawny-armed and bowed in the shoulders, existed as women do in a small world of ceaseless irritating tasks. There were moments when Dreeme decided that there was no mystery at all, that his imagination was playing tricks with him, and that his intuitions were the idle outgrowths of a mind too much concerned with itself and revolving inwardly and creating vague bogies for lack of other occupations. But after such moments of doubt would come still days when the lurching houses seemed to watch him maliciously and when the still trees, flinging their black shadows across the yellow glitter of deserted roads, would stand as symbols of some invisible prowling specter that patrolled the valley and observed him with blank lidless eyes. His flesh crawled on his bones and it was only by an effort that he put the obsession from him. He would say to himself that it was ennui, that it was a morbid reaction to his existence in a small world where, in spite of his ministrations, he was an outsider, that it was nerves, but, considering the matter deliberately, he knew that it was none of these likely causes. He possessed no nerves; he was not weary of his loneliness; his mind was not too idle. It was something outside of him pushing gently against his mind.