"_No._"
He thought again. "Is it Walter Bartol?"
The answer was joyously instant. "_Yes, yes, yes!_"
"Do you wish to speak to me?"
"_Yes._"
"About your father?"
"_Yes._"
"Through my mother?"
Now came one of those baffling changes. The answer was faintly slow, "Tick, tick," betraying uncertainty--and succeeding queries elicited no response.
Victor, excited and eager, would have gone to his mother for aid had he known where to find her room. The mood for marvels was upon him now, and Altair and Margaret, and all the rest of the impalpable throng, seemed waiting in the dusk and silence to communicate with him. Hopelessly wide awake, he lay, while the big clock on the landing rang its little chime upon the quarter hours, but no further sign was given him of the presence of his intangible visitor; and at last the experience of the day became as unsubstantial as his dreams.
He was awakened by the cackling of fowls and the bleating of calves and lambs. The sun was shining through the leafy top of a tree which lay almost against his window, and happy shadows were dancing like fairies on the coverlet of his bed.
"It sounds like a real farm!" he drowsily murmured, filled with the peace of those cries, which typify the most ancient and unchanging parts of the cottager"s life.
He had known only the poetic side of farm life. He had seen it, heard it, tasted it only as the lad out for a holiday, and it all seemed serene and joyous to him. To his mind the luxury of quietly dozing to the music of a barn-yard was the natural habit of the farmer. He did not attempt to rise till he heard the voice of his host from the lawn beneath his window.
A half an hour later he found Bartol in the barn-yard surveying a span of colts which his farmer was leading back and forth before him. They were lanky, thin-necked creatures, but Victor knew enough of horses to perceive in them signs of a famous breed of trotters.
"You are a real farmer," he said, as he came up to his host.
Bartol seemed pleased. "I made it pay five per cent. last year," he responded, with pride. "Of course that means counting in my time as a farmer, and not as a lawyer. How did you sleep?"
"Pretty well--when I got at it. I was a little excited and didn"t go off as I usually do when I hit the pillow."
"No wonder! I had a restless night myself." He nodded to the hostler.
"That will do," and turned away. "I gave a great deal of thought to your mother"s case. The fact seems to be that the human organism is a great deal more complicated than we"re permitted ourselves to admit, and the tendency of the ordinary man is to make the habitual commonplace, no matter how profoundly mysterious it may be at the outset. Of course at bottom we know very little of the most familiar phenomenon. Why does fire burn and water run? No one really knows."
They were facing the drive, which curved like a lilac ribbon through the green of the lawn, and the estate to Victor"s eyes had all the charm of a park combined with the suggestive music of a farmstead.
"It"s beautiful here!" he exclaimed.
"I"m glad you like it, and I hope you and your mother will stay till we have put you both straight with the world."
"If I could only do something to pay my freight, Mr. Bartol. I feel like a beggar and a fool to be so helpless. I was not expecting to be kicked out of college, and I"m pretty well rattled, I"ll confess."
"You keep your poise notably," the lawyer replied, with kindly glance.
"To be so suddenly introduced to the mystery and the chicanery of the world would bewilder an older and less emotional man."
They breakfasted in a big room filled with the sunlight. Through the open windows the scent of snowy flowers drifted, and the food and service were of a sort that Victor had never seen. A big grape-fruit, filled with sugar and berries; corn-cakes, crisp and golden; bacon delicately broiled, together with eggs (baked in little earthen cups), and last of all, coffee of such fragrance that it seemed to vie with the odor of the flowers without. Each delicious dish was served deftly, quietly, by a sweet-faced maid, who seemed to feel a filial interest in her master.
The service was a revelation of the perfection to which country life can be brought by one who has both wealth and culture; and Victor wondered that any one could be sad amid such radiant surroundings.
"I can"t see why you ever return to the city," he said, with conviction.
Bartol smiled. "That"s the perversity of our human nature. If I were forced to live here all the time the farm might pall upon me, just as if all seasons were spring. As it is, I come back to it from the turmoil of the town with never-cloying appet.i.te. Per contra, these maids and my farm-hands find a visit to the city their keenest delight. To them the parks and the artificial ponds are more beautiful than anything in nature." His tone changed. "In truth, I live on and do my work more from force of habit than from zest. So far as I can, I get back to the simple animal existence, where sun and air and food are the never-failing pleasures. I try to forget that I am a pursuer of criminals. I return to my work in the city, as I say, because it helps to keep my appet.i.te for the rural things. I can"t afford to let silence and green trees pall upon me. If I were a little more of a believer," he smiled, "I would say that you and your mother had been sent to me, for of late I have been in a deeper slough of despair than at any time since the death of my wife.
I am curious to see how all this is going to affect your mother. She may find it very lonely here."
"Oh, I"m sure she will not."
"Well, now, I must be off. But before I go I will show you the catalogues of my library; and perhaps I can bring home some books which will bear on these occult subjects. I have given orders that no information as to you shall go off the place; and your mother is safe here. You may read, or hoe in the garden, or ride a horse."
"I wish I might go to the city with you."
"My judgment is against it. Stay here for a few days till we see which way the wind is blowing." And with a cheery wave of his hand he drove away, leaving Victor on the porch with the feeling of being marooned on an island--a peaceful and beautiful island, but an island nevertheless.
XI
LOVE"S TRANSLATION
To tell the truth, Victor dreaded being left alone with his mother in this way. He was fully aware now of the invisible barrier between them.
No matter what explanation was finally offered, she could never be the same to him again, for whether it was her subconscious self which had cunningly lured them all to the verge of disaster, or some uncontrollable impulse coming from without, in the light any explanation, she was no longer the sweet, gentle, normal mother he had hitherto thought her to be.
It was not a question of being in possession of strange abilities, it was a question of being obsessed by some diabolical power--of being the prey of malignant demons avid to destroy.
The more deeply he thought upon all that had come to him, the more bewildered he became; and to avoid this tumult, which brought no result, he went out and wandered about the farm. His experience was like visiting a foreign country, for the men were either Swiss or German; and the walls of the farm-yard quite as un-American in their ma.s.siveness and their formal arrangement--a vivid contrast to the flimsy structures of the neighboring village. The servants (that is what they were, servants) treated him with the trained deference of those who for generations have touched their caps to the more fortunate beings of the earth, and these signs of subordination were distinctly soothing to the youth"s disturbed condition of mind. Instantly, and without effort, he a.s.sumed the air of the young aristocrat they thought him.
He strolled down the road to the village, which was a collection of small frame cottages in neat lawns, surrounding a few general stores and a greasy, fly-specked post-office. Here was the unimaginative, the prosaic, perfectly embodied. Old men, bent and gray, were gossiping from benches and boxes under the awnings. Clerks in their shirt-sleeves were lolling over counters. A few farmers" teams stood at the iron hitching-posts with drowsy, low-hanging heads. Neither doubt nor dismay nor terror had footing here. The majesty of dawn, the mystery of midnight, did not touch these peaceful and phlegmatic souls. The spirit of man was to them less than an abstraction and the tumult of the city a far-off roar as of distant cataracts.
Furthermore, these matter-of-fact folk had abundant curiosity and no reverence, and they all stared at Victor with round, absorbent gaze, as if with candid intent to take full invoice of his clothing, and to know him again in any disguise. He heard them say, one after the other, as he pa.s.sed along, "Visitor of Bartol"s, I guess." And he could understand that this explanation really explained, for Bartol"s "Castle" was the resting-place of many strange birds of pa.s.sage.
Bartol was, indeed, the constant marvel of Hazel Grove. Why had he bought the place? Why, after it was bought, should he spend so much money on it? And finally, why should he employ "foreigners"? These were a few of the queries which were put and answered and debated in the shade of the furniture store and around the air-tight store of the grocery. His farm was their never-failing wonder tale. The building of a new wall was an excitement, each whitewashing of a picket fence an event. They knew precisely the hour of departure of each blooded ram or bull, and the birth of each colt was discussed as if another son and heir had come to the owner.
Naturally, therefore, all visitors to "Hazeldean" came in for study and comment--especially because it was well known that Bartol stood high in the political councils of the party (was indeed mentioned for senator), and that his guests were likely to be "some punkins" in the world. "This young feller is liable to be the son of one of his millionaire clients,"
was the comment of the patient sitters. "Husky chap, ain"t he?"
Feeling something of this comment, and sensing also the sleepy materialism of the inhabitants, Victor regained much of his own disbelief in the miraculous, and yet just to that degree did the pain in his heart increase, for it made of his mother something so monstrous that the conception threatened all his love and reverence for her. Pity sprang up in place of the filial affection he had once known. He began to make new excuses for her. "It must be that she has become so suggestible that every sitter"s mind governs her. In a sense, that removes her responsibility." And so he walked back, with all his pleasure in the farm and village eaten up by his care.
His mother was waiting for him on the porch, and as he came up, asked with shining face:
"Isn"t this heavenly, Victor?"
"It is very beautiful," he replied, but with less enthusiasm than she expected.
"To think that yesterday I was threatened with the prison, and now--this! We have much to thank Mr. Bartol for."