The Cinder Buggy (16 page)

What happened the third time was apparitional. Suddenly, there was Enoch, behind the gate, looking at them. He had been there all the time in the shadow of the wall. He held a lighted lantern. That also had been concealed. Slowly he raised the latch-bar and swung the gate ajar. Then he held the lantern high and gazed unbelievingly at Thane, who was the first to speak.

“Found her up there in the grass. Was having a bit of a tiff, two of us, me ‘n the Cornishman, ‘n he fell on her when I knocked him out, ‘n hurt her ankle, hiding there so as nobody could see her. She couldn’t walk, so’s I brought her home.”

Agnes neither stirred nor spoke. In the light of the lantern her eyes gleamed with a trapped expression. Enoch did not look at her, not even on hearing that she was hurt, but continued to stare fixedly at his puddler, repeating after him: “In the grass.”

“Don’t you want her?” Thane asked.

At that Enoch lowered the lantern, swung the gate open and stood aside.

“Take her in,” he said.

As the puddler passed, Enoch closed and barred the gate; he followed them up the driveway toward the mansion. The only sound was the crunching of the two men’s feet on the gravel.

Then Enoch laughed. It was an abominable sound, denoting a cruel conclusion in his mind. Agnes shuddered. Her hold around the puddler’s neck involuntarily tightened. So did his hold of her. Thus a subtle sign passed between them. Neither one spoke.

At the entrance Enoch overtook them, opened the door, and walked ahead. There were no servants in sight. In this household servants appeared when summoned and never otherwise.

“In here,” said Enoch, opening the hall door into the back parlor on the ground floor. This was his side of the house. The room was dimly lighted. The puddler put his burden down on a couch and turned to look at Enoch, who stood in the doorway.

“Stay here, both of you, until I return,” he said. With that he closed the door and turned the key from the outside.

Thane in his mill clothes,—iron studded shoes, ankle aprons, trousers, shirt open to the middle of his chest, and cap,—was bewildered and overcome with conscious awkwardness. He looked at things as if they might bark at him and stood with his weight on one leg, having no use for the other. It stuck out from him at a great distance, and terminated absurdly in a performing foot, rocking on its heel and wearing a place in the varnished surface of the floor.

Agnes, who had been straining her faculties to hear what might be taking place outside, became aware of his distress.

“Please sit down and listen,” she said. “Over there,” pointing to an arm chair.

They heard the jangling of bells, the opening and closing of doors, and presently a carriage went off in haste. It must have been waiting. There had not been time to harness a team. Then faintly they heard footsteps patrolling the hallway. They were Enoch’s.

“I haven’t any idea what I’ve got you into,” said Agnes.

“Seem’s it ain’t ready yet,” he said, and smiled at her.

His smile was a revelation, swift and unexpected, like an event in a starlit sky. Agnes had not seen it before. It gave her a start of joy. She smiled back at him and then blushed. That made her angry. She was always angry at herself for blushing because it gave her away. Her defense was to look at him steadily and; that made him self-conscious again. She had discovered that when his thoughts were dynamically engaged, or when his mind was intended to action, instantly all awkwardness left him. Then he was graceful unawares, as children and animals are, never thinking of themselves. She could not bear to see him fidget.

“You don’t seem to care,” she said.

“He bears down hard on you, don’t he, Enoch?” he asked.

“His nature is hard,” she said.

“Maybe you was cuttin’ it an’ here I brought you home. Ain’t that so?”

“No,” she said.

He came half way across the room and regarded her earnestly.

“If that’s it, it ain’t too late now. I’ll take you anywhere you want.” As she did not answer, he added: “Jus take ‘n leave you there so’s you need never see me again.”

“Thank you,” she said, gently. “That wouldn’t be nice, would it,—never to see you again after that?

No. I’m—what was it you said?—I’m standing by.”

He sat down again, disappointed.

“I must tell you what happened,” she said. “I broke out and went to a party in town. That isn’t allowed. I expected a scene when I got home. It might have been very disagreeable for the—for my escort, you know. So, having first run away to go to the party, I next ran away from the party and started home alone. You know the rest.”

“Oh,” said Thane, thoughtfully.

A sudden constraint fell upon them. Their eyes did not meet again.

They were sitting in silence, she in reverie, when a sound of commotion was heard in the hallway. The carriage had returned. Double footsteps approached.

The door opened, admitting Enoch, and with him the Presbyterian minister, a clean, tame, ox-like man with a very large bald head, no eyebrows and round blue eyes. Enoch closed the door. Thane stood up. The minister looked first at him and then at Agnes. Her eyes were full of wonder, tinged with premonition. Enoch spoke.

“We found her in the grass. That’s the man. Marry them.”

The minister, regarding both of them at once in an oblique manner, began to nod his head up and down as if saying to himself, “Oh-ho! So this is what we find?”

Thane was slow to understand Enoch’s words. He had the look of a man in the act of doubting his familiar senses.

Agnes, very pale, lips slightly parted, nostrils distended, sitting very erect, turned her head slowly and gazed at her father. The muscles around her eyes were tense and drawn, her eyes were hard and partially closed as if the sun were in them, and she looked at him so until his countenance fell. But not his wickedness.

“Marry them,” he said.

Thane reacted suddenly. He cleared his throat, swallowed, glanced right and left, and took a step forward, with a tug at his belt.

“You’re supposing what ain’t so,” he shouted at Enoch. “What do you mean by that about finding her in the grass? What does that mean? Me ‘n the Cornishman was racketing up there in the path like I told you at the gate. He ain’t come to yet, so there’s nobody can say as what happened but me ‘n the girl. She oughten have seen it. That’s correct. But there ain’t no harm done—none as you could speak of. If you don’t believe me ask her... You tell them,” he said, turning to Agnes.

“My father is mad,” she said.

Thane began to tell them what had passed on the path and became utterly incoherent. Despairing, he made a move toward Enoch. The minister raised his hand.

“What is your name?”

“Alexander Thane.”

Enoch, who had been standing with his back to the door, opened it, reached around the jamb and drew it back holding a shot gun, the barrel of which he rested on his left arm.

“Marry them, I tell you.” His voice was low. “Make it short.”

Thane made another move toward him. The minister raised his hand again,—a fat, white hand. It fascinated Thane and calmed him.

“Thane,” said the minister, “do you take this woman to be your lawful wife?”

“Not as he says it. Not for that shooting thing as he’s got there in his hand,” said Thane. “Not unless the girl wants it,” he added, as a disastrous and extremely complicated afterthought.

If he had flatly said no, the shape of the climax might have been different. There was no lack of courage. What stopped him was a romantic seizure.

The minister turned to Agnes.

“Will you, Agnes, take this man Thane to be your husband?”

The die was then in her hands. Thane had not meant to pass it. Gladly would he have retaken it if only he had known how to do so. The situation was beyond his resources. Moreover, the question—“Will you, Agnes, take this man Thane to be your husband?”—was so momentous to him that it deprived him of his wits and senses, save only the sense of hearing.

Emotions more dissimilar could scarcely be allotted to three men in a single scene, one of them mad, yet for a moment they were united by a feeling of awe and regarded Agnes with one expression. The woman’s courage surpasses the man’s. This he afterward denies in his mind, saying the difference is that she lacks a sense of consequences.

Agnes was cool and contemplative, and in no haste to answer. She kept them waiting. They could not see her face. Her head was bent over. With one hand she plucked at the pattern of her dress and seemed to be counting. Then slowly she began to nod her head.

“Yes,” she said, distinctly, though in a very far voice, “I will.”

“Stand up, please,” said the minister.

Thane made his responses as one in a dream. Hers were firm and clear, and all the time she was looking at her father as she had looked at him first, with those tight little wrinkles around her eyes.

So they were married.

“That’s all,” said Enoch, to the minister, curtly. “The carriage is at the door.”

The minister bowed and vanished.

Enoch drew a piece of cardboard from his pocket and handed it to Thane. It was a blue ticket,—the token of dismissal.

“Now go,” he said, “and let me never see you again.”

Agnes looked up at Thane.

“I can walk,” she said, taking him by the arm. It was so. She could, with a slight limp. Enoch, seeing it, sneered. He watched them walk into the night and closed the door behind them.

At the gate Thane said: “But you can’t,” and started to pick her up.

“Don’t,” she said.

They had changed places. She was no longer afraid of him. He was afraid of her.

A
LL this time John had been seeking Agnes. First he went the high road to the mansion until he was sure she had not gone that way, for if she had he would have overtaken her. Turning back he began to make inquiries and presently heard of someone, undoubtedly she, who had been seen walking wide of the town, past the mill, toward the mountain. Knowing the path and divining her intention he walked in her footsteps.

The smell of Thane’s pipe was still in the air when he arrived at the place where the fight had taken place. A thing of white in the grass drew his eye. He picked it up and got a bad start. It was a tiny handkerchief. By the light of a match he made out the initials A. G. embroidered in one corner. Looking further he found a scarf that he instantly recognized. He had particularly noticed it on their way to the party. Now in a panic he began to examine the ground closely and discovered extensive evidence of a human struggle. Running up and down the path a short distance each way he came on the Cornishman’s shirt a little to one side where the groggy owner had tossed it away. To John’s disgust it was slimy with something that came off in his hands; as this proved to be blood his disgust gave way to horror.

Without actually formulating the thought, because it was too dreadful to be true, he acted under the tyranny of a fixed idea, which was that Agnes had met with a foul disaster. The possibility was real. Lately there had come to New Damascus a group of mill hands whose ways and morals were alien to the community. They were bestial drinkers and had been making a great deal of trouble.

In a state of frenzy he explored the mountain side, calling her name. His panic rising, it occurred to him to ask at the mill among the men who continually used the path. He found several who had been over it within a hour or so. Someone was missing, he told them. Something unknown had happened. Had they seen or heard anything unusual. They became individually contemplative, made him say it all over again, repeated it after him, thought very hard and shook their heads. Nobody had seen or heard the least thing strange. But somebody did, by a freak of intelligent association, remember the Cornishman. He was out there under the water tank, speechless and weeping, not caring whether Enoch saw him or not. Maybe something had happened to him.

John found him as indicated, with his face in his hands, water dripping on his naked back.

“What happened to you?” John asked, shaking him.

“Gotten m’dam head knocked off,” he groaned, without moving. It was a refrain running through him. John’s attack had made it once audible.

“Up there in the path?”

He grunted.

“Who was it?”

Faintly, though very definitely, the Cornwall beauty expressed a passionate desire to be let alone.

“Was there a girl?” John asked.

“Huh!” said the hulk, instantly penetrated by the sound of that word.

John repeated the question.

The Cornishman stirred painfully, sat up, turned a stupidly grinning face and nodded—yes.

“Who took her away?” John asked, thumping the body to keep the mind afloat. “Tell me,” he said, shaking him by the hair. “Where did they go?” he asked, kicking him in the shins.

But the Cornishman was either slyer or more stupefied than one could imagine. He relapsed. Nothing more could be got out of him.

There now was but one rational thing to do—report to Enoch and raise a general alarm.

From running hard with a load of dread John was almost spent when he arrived at the mansion gate. It was shut and barred; the house was dark and where he had expected to find alarm and commotion everything was strangely still. Foreboding assailed him. Thinking it might be quicker to open the gate than to climb the wall he put his hand through and began to fumble with the latch bar inside. He was so intent upon the effort that a certain indefinable sense one may have of another’s invisible proximity failed to warn him of Enoch’s presence.

There was a swift, noiseless movement in the darkness and a hand clutched him powerfully by the wrist. The physical disadvantage of his position made him helpless. Over the vertical bars of the gate ran a pattern of wrought iron ornamentation in the form of vine and leaves; the interstices were irregular, with sharp edges. It was impossible to use his free arm defensively because there was no other opening through which he could reach far enough in. Besides, if he resisted Enoch could instantly snap the bones of his trapped arm. He was utterly bewildered by the circumstances. Enoch’s gesture was menacing, even terrifying in its sinister precision, and yet John could scarcely imagine that his intentions were destructive. So he submitted his arm passively to the old man’s dangerous grip and spoke.