I

I

Mrs. Slater moved, a black silhouette, across the yellow glow of the kerosene-lamp, bearing in chubby hands the last of the supper dishes. She kicked the kitchen door open with a grunt and disappeared. It was silent in the room. Walden Slater, having removed his boots with the elastic sides, drifted almost surreptitiously to the back porch, his gray woollen socks touching the floor soundlessly. Reaching his haven he sank with a hoarse sigh of relief into the broken rocker. Dreeme could see his bent form against the misty light of evening whenever the door to the kitchen flapped open. He sat there and rocked to the faint creak-creak of the chair; his talon-like hands grasping the arms of the rocker. He was a personification of a certain aspect of this New England. He was the tired man reeking with dried sweat, earth, and barnyard odors sitting in the quiet evening and drawing in hoarse and throbbing lung-fulls of fresh air. His bones were tired. His flesh crawled sluggishly with an old weariness. The hinges of his knees were stiff. He was a finality in himself, a period put to a long sentence of history. The kitchen door swung to and fro and Dreeme ceased to look at the farmer. He looked out of the window instead, into the dark side-yard where the Slater children sat huddled together on a broken barrow and talked soberly in low tones. Their voices sounded thin and far away, pinched sounds, words rolled between huge fists. The low light of the evening fell across the sides of their faces. Small impish profiles turned to the brooding night. A dark form passed between Dreeme’s eyes and the children’s faces and the young doctor saw the figure of the reverend George Burroughs, skinny hands clasped behind the frayed skirts of his musty coat, stalk off into the darkness. It was like a brief eclipse, an instant’s impenetrable blackness, and then it was gone. Light footsteps died almost instantaneously in the direction of the Leeminster Road.

Dreeme looked back into the room⁠ ⁠… well⁠ ⁠… he progressed slowly toward the kitchen door.

“Where is your niece?” he asked Mrs. Slater with a directness that was unusual in Marlborough where people talked by inference. The woman’s eyes fluttered wildly at this unexpected question.

“Deborah⁠ ⁠… well, Deborah.⁠ ⁠…” She hurried toward the kitchen door with a massed pillar of plates, a sort of leaning tower of Pisa that threatened to dissolve into fragments at every step. At the door she turned. She said:

“Helping out.⁠ ⁠… They needed somebody to help out.⁠ ⁠…”

Her voice drifted back through the door.

“Mrs. Westcott⁠ ⁠… sent for her.⁠ ⁠…”

Dreeme brooded upon this for an instant, fumbled in his pocket for his pipe, and then sauntered slowly toward the kitchen. Mrs. Slater, at the sink, her sleeves rolled back over her short plump arms, observed him with a suspicious concern, her head cocked on one side, an eye turned back. It was like the eye of a querulous parrot. Dreeme leaned against the wall, and, watching her, filled his pipe.

“Has Mrs. Westcott been here?” he asked.

Mrs. Slater turned to her dishes. She said:

“Oh, no!”

It was inconceivable, of course.

Dreeme waited for a moment as he lighted his pipe.

“Who has?” he inquired.

Mrs. Slater looked reproachfully at him as she fumbled for certain words in her throat.

“We thought we’d have Deborah with us⁠ ⁠… especially since.⁠ ⁠…” A clashing of dishes drowned a few words. “But the preacher said⁠ ⁠… he saw Mrs. Westcott.⁠ ⁠…”

“You mean Burroughs had your niece sent over to the Westcott farm as hired girl?” broke in Dreeme.

Mrs. Slater did not like the word.

“She’s going to help out⁠ ⁠… until Mr. Westcott is better.⁠ ⁠…”

She actually glowered at Dreeme.

“In that lonely hole,” thought Dreeme aloud.

“It’s hard enough to live⁠ ⁠…” began Mrs. Slater.

“It is,” said the doctor strongly.

Well, it was none of his business. The poor relation. Go where you are sent. All the same⁠ ⁠… it was a shame. Cloven head and his malignant eyes. Eyes like wet violets. “Rock of Ages.” Now why had he thought of that? He opened his mouth to speak again to Mrs. Slater, thought better of it, and turned back into the lamp-lit room. He had wanted to talk to the girl, to find out what she thought of things and how this valley had affected her young mind. But now.⁠ ⁠… Why she might as well be in Timbuktu. The Westcott farm-gate opened into.⁠ ⁠… “All hope abandon.⁠ ⁠…” He picked up his hat from the little side table and walked slowly through the hall and into the yard. The hushed voices of the Slater children sounded like a faint drone. He could hear the rocker on the back porch. Creak-creak. The dew was heavy. It was better to keep to the gravel path. Creak-creak. He reached the street and turned toward his own house. Creak-creak. Shine, moon. He looked up at a murky sky. No moon. It was too early for the moon. Creak. “Stars of the summer night.” Longfellow. “Far in yon azure.⁠ ⁠…” Creak. He fumbled (creak) at the knob to his door, pushed it open, and entered the small hall. To go upstairs. Bed. But he was not sleepy. He would go into the back study and read for a while. Or mull over Humphrey Lathrop’s conversation. Humphrey knew.⁠ ⁠… He felt his way along the dark hall and pushed the door open into the study. The minute he entered the room he knew that there was somebody there. He was not frightened. He leaned back against the door and said softly: “Who is it?”

A throat cleared noisily.

“Wagner,” replied a hoarse voice.

“Are you by the table? There is a lamp there. Light it,” said Dreeme.

The match spurted like a tiny firework and great shadows sprang up on all sides. A dancing ring of Djinns. Wagner’s red beard hung like a sultry smoke above the chimney. The man lowered his head and peered at Dreeme across the table.

“What is it, Wagner?” inquired the doctor. “Is Westcott’s leg bad?”

The shaggy head shook slowly.

“That’s all right,” he replied. “I wash it now. I’m real good at it.”

His eyes narrowed under his bushy brows and his yellow teeth glowed through the mass of hair.

“She said you was to meet her by ten in the back room of the burned mill,” he said slowly in his rusty sepulchral voice. “She told me to tell you.”

A faint throb of anticipation tugged at the doctor’s mind.

“Deborah?” he asked. Wagner said:

“Missus Westcott.”

Dreeme’s mind stopped dead. Automatically he said:

“Tell her I won’t come.”

“She said she guessed you would all right,” replied the hoarse voice.

To think now. Leaning over the well. The white nape of her neck. Heavy boots dragged across the floor.

“What does she want?” he asked softly. There was no response. Boots dragging. A puffing. Dreeme floundered in a sea of amazement. He repeated his question loudly.

“What does she want, I say?”

This silence! Collecting his wits, he peered about the dimly lighted study. Empty, of course. He had gone out. Gone right by him. Dreeme walked over to the table and sat down in the easy chair by it. A tiny white moth dipped and volplaned about the smoky chimney. Now what was this? He would have to think about it. He leaned back in his chair and pulled at his cold pipe.

The faint ticking of the clock was like the tiny regular beating of a miniature tomtom. The minutes danced to it, shaking their small feet in an unending circle. They tripped by him, hands joined, and infinitesimal tapping heels maintaining a regular time that measured off the softly-flowing hours. He watched the vain moth dashing its white wings desperately against the smoky chimney. Sooner or later it would get scorched and flutter to the table, a charred and crumbling pinch of powder. Life was a curious thing. Breathed into a bit of dust it became a moth. Or a man. Something was happening to him now. His two years of dreary silence were breaking down and he was beginning to grow morbid about things in general. He was getting nervous, acutely aware of invisible tentacles that seemed to reach out of this darkness that encircled him on all sides and touch him softly. Humphrey Lathrop had said that it was nerves. But perhaps it was more than that. Perhaps it was a sixth sense slowly coming to birth inside him, a sense nourished by his loneliness that was reaching out into new dimensions. He was pursuing phantoms, hunting through the sun-shot fields about Marlborough for invisible essences that drifted deliberately and had a particular semblance of their own. He was going to solve an intense and formidable riddle. He was going to track down the secret of an atmosphere, the aura of a community. It sounded absurd enough but it was only the absurd things that mattered greatly after all if a man desired to be more than an eating, sleeping, laboring animal. To be a man, and all that that meant, was to walk arm in arm with phantoms, to discourse with shadowy substances, to resolve high mystical riddles. Ah! The moth shrivelled against the hot glass and dropped to the table. So that was that! He turned it over tenderly with a paper-knife and then pushed it to the floor.

Now then! He looked at the ticking clock from which the joined minutes were tripping their fantastic and regular dance. It was nine-thirty. Then it would be in half an hour. His thoughts, held tightly by the leash of his will, were set free and they sprang forward like a pack of ravenous hunting dogs. Up the Leeminster Road they sped and his spectral self followed them as an eager hunter follows his baying hounds. For an instant the face of Deborah flashed in the dark air and then it disappeared, left far behind by this rout of yelping coursers. He had said that he would not go. But she knew that he would, that his curiosity would carry him as far as the mill at least. What she wanted he did not know but he could suspect it. She was assuredly a lonely caged-in creature. She stood at windows and watched the night-sky and wondered about the life that went boiling so turbulently by on the great highroads to the west and the east of her locked doors. She sat in a room lined with books beside a cloven-headed man and a secret sat there with them and she had nobody to share that secret with her, no one, that is, except the man himself who was the secret. Perhaps she wanted to tell him things, to pour out the subterranean stream of her consciousness. He could imagine her muffled voice speaking in the darkness of the mill. It was not strange that she had sent for him, after all. It would have been stranger if she had maintained her silence. Dreeme rose slowly from his chair and blew the light out. Well.⁠ ⁠…