The Cinder Buggy (26 page)

Thane was pushing through.

“He wants to die upstairs,” he said.

Instantly on speaking of it he became aware that the situation had an irrational aspect; and he wondered how he should clear them out of the room in which Enoch wished to die and keep them out,—for of course they would follow. He could not help that. With a resolve if necessary to throw them all downstairs he crossed the threshold. The alienist from Philadelphia and the two Wilkes-Barre consultants fell back. It was not their case. The family doctor barred Thane’s way at the foot of the staircase.

“You must be crazy,” he shouted, waving his arms. “This simply cannot be permitted. As his physician I order you to take him back.”

“Stand aside,” said Thane.

“You will kill him,” said the doctor. “Do you hear that? This will kill him. I forbid it.”

Thane seemed not at all impressed. Probably he would have pursued his purpose in a straight line but that his mind was arrested by a startling change in the heft and feeling of his burden.

It became suddenly so much heavier that he almost lost his balance. And as he looked to see what this could mean there rose out of Enoch a groan unlike any sound concerned with life. With that the body underwent a violent muscular commotion and threw itself into a state of rigid extension. Thane needed all his strength to hold it. Immediately there was another change. The body began slowly to go limp.

“It’s over,” said the Philadelphia alienist.

What Thane held in his arms was no longer Enoch, but a distasteful object, fallen in one breath from the first person
I,
from the second person
you,
to the state of a pronominal third thing which is spoken of—
that!

Thane carried it back to the bed.

All of this had taken place in less than half an hour. Thane found Agnes as he had left her, on an iron bench in the maple shade.

“He is dead,” she said, on looking at him.

He answered by sitting by her side in silence.

She asked him nothing about the end, and he was glad, for it had been extremely harrowing. Still, he was surprised at her want of curiosity, and had a moment of thinking her callous. He had somehow mysteriously arrived at an understanding of Enoch, was shaken by a sense of loss, even grief, and yearned to share his emotion with Agnes.

Having been for some time withdrawn in thought she started slightly. “Did you promise?” she asked. “Was there time for that?”

“Yes,” he said. “Don’t let it upset you,” he continued gently. “You won’t have to think about it. I’ve got it worked out in my mind. There can be funeral services here like they have sometimes when nobody goes to the grave or when there ain’t going to be any burial. Then I can go alone with him to the mill. There’s nobody at the mill, you know. It’s shut.”

She regarded him with a troubled, unbelieving expression.

“Alone!” she said.

“I’d rather to,” he said, “with everybody being so superstitious about it.”

“But I shall go,” she said.

“May take a long time,” he said uneasily. “I’ll have the furnace going, of course, but it’s got to be kept going and watched I don’t know how long.”

She met these difficulties with a scornful gesture.

“All right,” he said. “He’ll be pleased you feel that way.”

L
ATE that night Thane was telling John how Enoch died and how his remains were to be disposed of. He had to tell someone. It was a weight on his mind and he was tormented with misgivings about his own conduct. When he came to the key he remembered having it in his pocket still and produced it associatively. John took it out of his hand and continued to regard it thoughtfully long after the narrative was finished.

“Was I right?” Thane asked, anxiously.

“Admirable!” said John, a little off the point as it seemed to Thane. He added thoughtfully: “The fate that amuses itself with our lives knew what it wanted when it tangled you in.”

“Seems there’s a lot as I don’t know,” said Thane, a faint edge to his voice.

“It’s hard to get at,” said John. He continued: “This place, if you know, was founded by General Woolwine, my great grandfather, whose partner was a younger man named Christopher Gib, this Enoch’s father.”

So he began, as if opening a book. Some of it was missing, parts were illegible, yet the shape of the drama stood vividly forth. When he came to the end—to where the invisible writing stopped,—it was sudden and for a moment bewildering, almost as if they had forgotten who they were and had been unexpectedly let down in the middle of a story. They sat a while musing.

“To be continued by the three of us,” said John. “I should like to know what is in that room.”

“Let’s go see,” said Thane.

He had come to the hotel only to talk to John and was returning to the mansion. John went with him.

Enoch’s body lay where it was in the second floor bed chamber. They passed it without stopping and went on to the third floor. On the landing was a little table with a lighted glass lamp, which John took up.

“That would be it,” he said, indicating a certain doorway. The key fitted the lock, but to their surprise the bolt was already drawn. John held the light. Thane went first. He had but crossed the threshold when he started back, recoiled rather, with a movement so sudden and involuntary that John immediately behind him was thrown off his balance, and dropped the lamp, which burst and harmlessly petered out. They were then in darkness. There was no other light on that floor.

“Match,” said Thane, now standing quietly.

John had matches and he divided them by a sense of touch. Each struck one and held it out.

What had startled Thane was the figure of a woman. As they saw her now in the flickering light of their matches she stood at the other side of the room, her back to the wall, facing them. John recognized her at once as the woman who met him in the front doorway, holding an oil light over her head, the night he carne seeking Agnes and encountered Enoch at the gate. She was dishevelled. Her thick black hair had fallen on one side and her face was distorted and swollen from weeping. Her eyes were alight with a kind of wild animal defiance. As they approached her she began to move along the wall, sideways, her arms a little spread. In one hand she held a coil of small rope.

“Who are you?” Thane asked.

She did not speak, but continued slowly to edge along the wall, staring at them angrily. They lit fresh matches from the dying ones and pursued her in this way, asking her who she was and what she did there, and she answered only with that wild look, until with more presence of mind than they were able to summon she had worked herself to a position between them and the open door. Their matches gave out and she disappeared in the dark. They heard her go down the back stairway.

“We’ll have to get a light,” said John.

They groped their way downstairs, both absurdly unnerved, found some candles and returned to the room. Both had the same thought. From what they had glimpsed of the interior in the light of their matches by a kind of marginal vision it seemed quite empty. And so it was. There was no trace of what had been there, except dust, which on the floor showed evidence of much moving about. The only object of any kind was a key that evidently the woman had dropped. It was a duplicate of the one in Thane’s possession. They examined the room with silent curiosity. The walls gave a dead, solid sound to the rap of their knuckles. The windows were double and grated inside with iron bars.

Now they went in search of the woman, knowing nothing about her, not even her name. She was probably the housekeeper. Agnes would know. But they hated to disturb Agnes. She was at the other side of the mansion and it was very late. Besides, they had a feeling that the sequel might be distressing.

The woman had vanished. They could find no trace of her, nor could they raise any servants indoors, for the reason afterward disclosed that latterly Enoch’s menage had consisted of three persons,—housekeeper, gardener and stable man.

“Let’s try the stable,” John suggested. “There must be somebody alive.”

On their way to the stable they stared curiously at a great unsightly heap of ashes, still smoking and glowing in spots, on the back terrace, as if a miscellaneous lot of things had been gathered hastily together and burned.

“Strange place for a fire,” said Thane, with an unspoken intuition that John shared.

The stable-man was sitting up, smoking, with the look of a man whose eyes have seen more than mind can grasp. He knew Thane and seemed comforted by the advent of human society.

“Nobody in the house. What’s the matter?” Thane asked.

“I ain’t the housekeeper,” said the stable-man. “No, thank God, I ain’t her. She’s on her way.”

“Way where?”

“Wherever,” he said, with the air of a man who for cause has newly resolved not to meddle with things that will be.

“What do you know about her?” John asked.

They had only to listen and piece it together. He was full of it. The woman’s name was Ann Sibthorp and she came from nobody knew where,—most likely from some place where they had ceased to speak well of her. She had been Enoch’s housekeeper for many years and at last his only house servant. She was not a woman you could get acquainted with. You wouldn’t if you could. So it wasn’t that anybody cared, but that she gave herself airs about her station, became oppressive and drove the help away. She did much that Enoch probably knew nothing about. Yet she had her way, even with him, and it got so nobody dared to cross her. For several days she had been going strange. When the old man died she seemed to lose her mind. She looked without seeing. There was no sense in her eyes. A little while before dark she began to carry things from the house and pile them out there on the terrace. He could not say exactly what they were,—some pieces of furniture, a chair, a bed no doubt; yes, and some clothes, a pair of white slippers and little what-not objects. When he saw her pouring oil on them he protested. She didn’t hear him. She wasn’t natural and he was afraid to do anything except to draw a lot of water in case something caught fire. Then she lighted the pile and watched it burn, fairly standing in the flames, poking them with a stick, rubbing her hands in them, taking on like a witch. It made a God-fearing person sick to see her. After that she went in and he didn’t see her again until just now when she rushed out of the house and disappeared among the trees.

“She’s a going to do herself a damage, that woman,” he predicted, calmly. “Found this in the edge of the ashes,” he remembered, drawing from his pocket a small square brown case, badly singed at one corner. “Maybe you would know what it is.”

It was a daguerreotype in a faded leather case. Thane opened it and held it for John to see in the light of the stable lantern.

“I recognize it,” said John. Thane gave it to him.

That was all from the stable-man. And that was all that was ever known about Ann Sibthorp. She was never seen again, dead or alive.

“You know the picture?” Thane asked, as they were parting at the gate.

“It’s a portrait of my mother,” John answered.

“Esther that you just told me about?”

“Yes.”

A
T daybreak smoke was seen curling out of one of the cold mill stacks. Everybody in New Damascus knew that Enoch’s body was to be burned in a puddling furnace.

“There he goes!” one said. “There goes old Enoch now.”

“Not yet,” said another. “Take a hotter fire than that. Don’t you see it’s just started. That’s his puddler son-in-law getting it ready for him.”

It takes eight or ten hours, starting with it cold, to get the maw of a puddling furnace white hot. In this case it would take even longer since Thane had it all to do alone and would be unable to stoke the fire steadily. There were other duties. Simple obsequies would take place at the mansion in the afternoon. That was all the public was permitted to know. Only Thane and Agnes knew at what hour the cremation would begin. The point of keeping it secret was obvious.

All day long people watched the smoke with fascinated horror. Crowds gathered on the mountainside and at points overlooking the mill to witness this weird translation of the symbol that was Enoch,—symbol of iron, symbol of indestructibility. There were many who believed he would not burn.

After the funeral services had taken place at the mansion interest in the smoke became intense. Changes in its color or density or in the way it twisted out of the top of the stack evoked exclamations of horrendous wonder and cries of “Look! Look! That’s the image of him. That’s Enoch going up. Don’t you see him?” Then news would come, seemingly by a telepathic impulse, that that had been only the son-in-law poking up the fire; the body was still at the mansion. Again it would be rumored that a previous rumor was positively true. The remains had been got into the mill unobserved. Everybody had been fooled. Enoch had got the last laugh. He had been burning up for more than an hour and had already very largely vanished into the sky.... So the whole afternoon and the early evening passed.

An hour after sunset the stable-man drove a spring wagon to the Enoch portal of the Gib mansion. He tied the horse to the ring in the hand of the ironboy hitching post and went indoors. Presently the front door swung open. Thane, the gardener and the stableman appeared bearing the coffin. They slid it into the bed of the wagon over the tailboard. Agnes followed with a black drape. Thane covered the coffin with it. Then he helped Agnes up over the high front wheel, took the lines from the stable-man, got up beside her, and they drove away at a walk.

At the entrance to the mill yard Agnes held the lines while Thane got down to unlock the gate. A number of people were idly gathered there in separate knots, pretending to be non-existent. News of the body’s arrival would travel fast. That couldn’t be helped. What Thane had counted on was that darkness would cheat the eye of morbidity. But he had forgotten the moon; it was full and coming up. The whorl of smoke rising from the stack looked even more ghost-like by moonlight than in daytime and the watchers, now sure of their spectacle and of Enoch’s presence in the smoke, were more gruesomely thrilled than they had hoped to be.