The Chief Legatee
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Distressed, but no longer the prey of distracting doubt, he again examined the inscription before him and this time noticed its peculiarities. Alfred Francesco, only son of Georgian Toritti afterwards Georgian Hazen. Afterwards! What was meant by that afterwards? That the woman had been married twice, and that this Alfred Francesco was the son of her first husband rather than of the one whose name he bore? It looked that way. There was a suggestion of Italian parentage in the Francesco which corresponded well with the decidedly Italian Toritti.
Perplexed and not altogether satisfied with his discoveries, he turned to leave the place when he found himself in the presence of a man carrying a kit of tools and wearing on his face a harsh and discontented expression. As this man was middle-aged and had no other protection from the rain than a rubber cape for his shoulders, the cause of his discontent was easy enough to imagine; though why he should come into this place with tools was more than Mr. Ransom could understand.
"Hello, stranger." It was this man who spoke. "Interested in the Hazen monument, eh? Well, I'll soon give you reason to be more interested yet. Do you see this inscription—On June 7, 1885; Anitra, aged six, and the rest of it? Well, I cut them letters there fifteen years ago. Now I'm to cut 'em out. The orders has just come. The youngster didn't die it seems, and I'm commanded to chip the fifteen-year-old lie out. What do you think of that? A sweet job for a day like this. Mor'n likely it'll put me under a stone myself. But folks won't listen to reason. It's been here fifteen years and seventeen days and now it must come out, rain or shine, before night-fall. 'Before the sun sets,' so the telegram ran. I'll be blessed but I'll ask a handsome penny for this job."
Mr. Ransom, controlling himself with difficulty, pointed to the little mound. "But the child seems to have been buried here," he said.
"Lord bless you, yes, a child was buried here, but we all knew years ago that it mightn't be Hazen's. The schoolhouse burned and a dozen children with it. One of the little bodies was given to Mr. Hazen for burial. He believed it was his Anitra, but a good while after, a bit of the dress she wore that day was found hanging to a bush where some gipsies had been. There were lots of folks who remembered that them gipsies had passed the schoolhouse a half hour before the fire, and they now say found the little girl hiding behind the wood-pile, and carried her off. No one ever knew; but her death was always thought doubtful by every one but Mr. and Mrs. Hazen. They stuck to the old idee and believed her to be buried under this mound where her name is."
"But one of the children was buried here," persisted Ransom. "You must have known the number of those lost and would surely be able to tell if one were missing, as must have been the case if the gipsies had carried off Anitra before the fire."
"I don't know about that," objected the stone-cutter. "There was, in those days, a little orphan girl, almost an idiot, who wandered about this town, staying now in one house and now in another as folks took compassion on her. She was never seen agin after that fire. If she was in the schoolhouse that day, as she sometimes was, the number would be made up. No one was left to tell us. It was an awful time, sir. The village hasn't got over it yet."
Mr. Ransom made some sympathetic rejoinder and withdrew towards the gateway, but soon came strolling back. The man had arranged his tools and was preparing to go to work.
"It seems as if the family was pretty well represented here," remarked Ransom. "Is it the girl herself,—Anitra, I believe you called her,—who has ordered this record of her death removed?"
"Oh, no, you don't know them Hazens. There's one of 'em who has quite a story; the twin of this Anitra. She lived to grow up and have a lot of money left her. If you lived in Sitford, or lived in New York, you'd know all about her; for her name's been in the papers a lot this week. She's the great lady who married and left her husband all in one day; and for what reason do you think? We know, because she don't keep no secrets from her old friends. She's found this sister, and it's her as has ordered me to chip away this name. She wants it done to-day, because she's coming here with this gal she's found. Folks say she ran across her in the street and knew her at once. Can you guess how?"
"From her name?"
"Lord, no; from what I hear, she hadn't any name. From her looks! She saw her own self when she looked at her."
"How interesting, how very interesting," stammered Mr. Ransom, feeling his newly won convictions shaken again. "Quite remarkable the whole story. And so is this inscription," he added, pointing to the words Georgian Toritti, etc. "Did the woman have two husbands, and was the Alfred Hazen, whose death at sea is commemorated here, the son of Toritti or of Hazen?"
"Of Toritti," grumbled the man, evidently displeased at the question. "A black-browed devil who it won't do to talk about here. Mrs. Hazen was only a slip of a gal when she married him, and as he didn't live but a couple o' months folks have sort o' forgiven her and forgotten him. To us Mrs. Hazen was always Mrs. Hazen; and Alf—well, he was just Alf Hazen too; a lad with too much good in him to perish in them murderous waters a thousand miles from home."
So they still believed Hazen dead! No intimation of his return had as yet reached Sitford. This was what Ransom wanted to know. But there was still much to learn. Should he venture an additional question? No, that would show more than a stranger's interest in a topic so purely local. Better leave well enough alone and quit the spot before he committed himself.
Uttering some commonplace observation about the fatality attending certain families, he nodded a friendly good-by and made for the entrance.
As he stepped below the brow of the hill he heard the first click of the workman's hammer on the chisel with which he proposed to eliminate the word Anitra from the list of the Hazen dead.
CHAPTER IX
HUNTER'S INN
When Mr. Ransom re-entered the hotel, which he did under a swoop of wind which turned his umbrella inside out and drenched him through in an instant, it was to find the house in renewed turmoil, happily explained by the landlady, whom he ran across on the stairs.
"Oh, Mr. Johnston!" she cried as she edged by him with a pile of bed-linen on her arm. "Please excuse all this fuss. Another guest is coming—I have just got a telegram. A famous lawyer from New York. Our house will be full to-night."
"Where will you put him?" inquired Mr. Ransom with a good-natured air. "There seem to be no unoccupied rooms on this hall."
"More's the pity," she sighed, with a half-inquiring, half deprecatory look at this fortunate first comer. "I shall have to put him below, poor man. I'm afraid he won't like it, but—" Mr. Ransom remained silent. "But," she went on with sudden cheerfulness, "I will make it up in the supper. That shall be as good a one as our kitchen will provide. Four city guests all in one day! That's a good many for this quiet hotel."
"Four!" retorted Mr. Ransom as he turned towards his own door. "The number has grown by two since I went out."
"Oh, I didn't tell you. The lady—her name's Mrs. Ransom—brings her sister with her. The little girl who—yes, I am coming." This latter to some perplexed domestic down the hall, who had already called her twice. "I mustn't stand talking here," she apologized as she hurried away. "But do take care of yourself. You are dreadful wet. How I wish the weather would clear up!"
Mr. Ransom wished the same. To say nothing of his own inconvenience, it was a source of anxiety to him that she should have to ride these inevitable ten miles in such a chilling downpour. Besides, a storm of this kind complicated matters; gave him less sense of freedom, shut him in, as it were, with the mystery he was there to unravel, but which for some reason, hardly explainable to himself, filled him with such a sense of foreboding that he had moments in which he thought only of escape. But his part must be played and he prepared himself to play it well. Having changed his clothes and warmed himself with a draft of whisky, he sat down at his table and was busy writing when the maid came in to ask if he would wait for his supper till the coach came, or have it earlier and served in his own room.
With an air of petulance, he looked up, rapped on the table, and replied:
"Here! here! I'm too busy to meet strangers. An early supper and an early bed. That's the way I get through my work."
The girl stared and went softly out. Work!—that? Sitting at a table and just putting words on paper. If it was beds he had to drag around now, or a dozen hungry, clamoring men to feed all at once, and all with the best cuts, or stairs to run up fifty times a day, or—but I need not fill out her thought. It made her voluble in the kitchen and secured him the privacy which his incognito demanded.
His supper over, he waited feverishly for the coach, which ordinarily was due at seven in the evening. To-night it bade fair to be late, owing to the bad condition of the roads and the early darkness. The wind had gone down, but it still rained. Not quite so tempestuously as when he roamed the cemetery, but steadily enough to keep eaves and branches dripping. The sound of this ceaseless drip was eerie enough to his strained senses, waiting as he was for an event which might determine the happiness or the misery of his life. He tried to forget it and wrote diligently, putting down words whose meaning he did not stop to consider, so that he had something to show to prying eyes if such should ever glance through his papers. But the sound had got on his brain, and presently became so insistent that he rose again and flung his window up to see if he were deceived in thinking he heard a deep roar mingling with the incessant patter, a roar which the wind had hitherto prevented him from separating from the general turmoil, but which now was apparent enough to call for some explanation.
He had made no mistake; a steady sound of rushing water filled the outside air. A fall was near, a fall by means of which, no doubt, the factories were run.
Why had he not thought of this? Why had its sound held a note of menace for him, awakening feelings he did not understand and from which he sought to escape? A factory fall swollen by the rain! What was there in this to make his hand shake and cause the deepening night to seem positively hateful to him? With a bang he closed the window; then he softly threw it up again. Surely he had heard the noise of wheels splashing through the pools of the highway. The coach was coming! and with it—what?
His room was in the gable end facing the road. From it he could look directly down on the porch of entrance, a fact which he had thankfully noted at his first look. As he heard the bustle which now broke out below, and caught the gleam of a lantern coming round the corner of the house, he softly stepped to his lamp and put it out, then took his stand at the window. The coach was now very near; he could hear the straining of the harness and the shouts of the driver. In another moment it drew lumberingly up. A man from the hotel advanced with an umbrella; a young lady was helped out who, standing one moment in the full glare of the lights thrown upon her from the open door, showed him the face and form he knew so well and loved—yes, loved for all her mystery, as he knew by the wild beating of his heart, and the irresistible impulse he felt to rush down and receive her in his arms, to her great terror doubtless, but to his own boundless satisfaction and delight. But strong as the temptation was, he did not yield to it. Something in her attitude, as she stood there, talking earnestly to the driver, held him spellbound and alert. All was not right; there was passion in her movements and in her voice. What she said drew the heads of landlady and maid from the open door and caused the man with the lantern to peer past her into the coach and backward along the road. What had happened? Nothing that concerned the lawyer. Mr. Ransom could see him disentangling himself from the coverings in front where he had ridden with the driver, but the sister was not there. No other lady got out of the coach even after his young wife had finished her conversation with the driver and disappeared into the house.
"How can I stand this?" thought Mr. Ransom as the coach finally rattled and swished away towards the stable. "I must hear, I must see, I must know what is going on down there."
This because he heard voices in the open hall. Crossing to his own doorway, he listened. His wife and Mr. Harper had stepped into the office close by the front door. He could hear now and then a word of what they said, but not all. Venturing a step further, he leaned over the balustrade which extended almost up to his own door. This was better; he could now catch most of the words and sometimes a sentence. They all referred to the sister. "Temper—her own way—deaf—would walk in all the rain and slush.—A strange character—you can't imagine," and other similar phrases, uttered in a passionate and half-angry voice. Then ejaculations from Mrs. Deo, and a word or two of caution or injunction in the polished tones of the lawyer, followed by a sudden rush towards the staircase, over which he was leaning.
"Show me my room," rang up in Georgian's bell-like tones; "then I'll tell you what to do about her. She isn't easily managed."
"But she'll get her death!" expostulated Mrs. Deo; "to say nothing of her losing her way in this dreadful darkness. Let me send—"
"Not yet," broke in his young wife's voice, with just the hint of asperity in it. "She must trudge out her tantrum first. I think her idea was to show that she remembered the old place and the lane where she used to pick blackberries. You needn't worry about her getting cold. She's lived a gipsy life too many years to mind wind and wet. But it's different with me. I'm all in a shiver. Which is my room, please?"
She was now at the head of the stairs. Mr. Ransom had closed his door, but not latched it, and as she turned to go down the hall, followed by the chattering landlady, he swung it open for an instant and so caught one full glimpse of her beloved figure. She was dressed in a long rain-coat and had some sort of modish hat on her head, which, in spite of its simplicity, gave her a highly fashionable air. A woman to draw all eyes, but such a mystery to her husband! Such a mystery to all who knew her story, or rather her actions, for no one seemed to know her story.
Events did not halt. He heard her give this and that order, open a door and look in; say a word of commendation, ask if the key was on her side of the partition, then shut the door again and open another.
"Ah, this looks comfortable," she exclaimed in great satisfaction. "Is that my bag? Put it down, please. I'll open it. Now, if you'll leave me a moment alone, I'll soon be ready. But you mustn't expect me to eat till Anitra comes. I couldn't do that. Oh, she's a dreadful trial, Mrs. Deo; you have a motherly face, and I can tell you that the girl is just eating up my life. If she weren't my very self, deafened by hard usage, and rendered coarse and wilful by years of a miserable and half-starved life, I couldn't bear it, especially after what I've sacrificed for her. I've parted with my husband—but I can't talk, I can't. I would not have said so much if you hadn't looked so kind."
All this her husband heard, followed by a sob or two, quickly checked, however, by a high strained laugh and the gay remark:
"I'm wet enough, but she'll be dripping. I'm afraid she'll have to have her supper in her room. She got out at the new schoolhouse and started to come through the lane. It must be a weltering pool. If I'm dressed in time I'll come down and meet her at the door. Meanwhile don't wait for us; give Mr. Harper his supper."
Her door closed, then suddenly opened again. "If she don't come in ten minutes, let some one go to the head of the lane. But be sure it's a careful person who won't startle her. I've got to put on another dress, so don't bother me. I'll hear her when she enters her own room and will speak to her then—if I dare; I'm not sure that I shall." And the door shut to again, this time with a snap of the lock. Quiet reigned once more in the hall save for Mrs. Deo's muttered exclamations as she made her laborious way down-stairs. Had this good woman been less disturbed and not in so much of a hurry, she might have noted that the door of her literary guest's room was ajar, and stopped to ask why the lamp remained unlit.
For five minutes, for ten minutes, he watched and listened, passing continually to and fro from door to window. But his vigilance remained unrewarded by any further movement in the hall, or by the sight of an approaching figure up the road. He began to feel odd, and was asking himself what sort of fool-work this was, when a clatter of voices rose below, followed by heavy steps on the veranda. One or two men were going out, and as it seemed to him the landlady too, for he heard her say just as the door closed:
"Let me on ahead; she must see a woman's kind face first, poor child, or we shall not succeed in getting her in. I know all about these wild ones."
PART II
The Call of the Waterfall
CHAPTER X
TWO DOORS
The enthusiasm, the expectation in Mrs. Deo's voice were unmistakable. This good woman believed in this rescued waif of turbulent caprices and gipsy ways, and from this moment he began to believe in her too, and consequently to share some of the excitement which had now become prevalent all through the house.
His suspense was destined to be short. While he was straining his eyes to see what might be going on down the road, a small crowd of people came round the corner of the house. In their midst walked a woman with a shawl or cape over her head—a fierce and wilful figure which shook off the hand kind Mrs. Deo laid on her arm, and shrank as the great front door fell open, sending forth a flood of light which, to one less wedded to wild ways and outdoor living, promised a hospitable cheer.
"Georgian's form!" muttered Ransom involuntarily to himself. "And Georgian's face!" he felt obliged to add, as the light fell broadly across her. "But not Georgian's ways and not Georgian's nature," he impetuously finished as she slipped out of sight.
Then the mystery of the brother came rushing over him and he yielded himself again to the wonder of the situation till he was reawakened to realities by the shuffling of feet on the stairway and the raised tones of Mrs. Deo as she tried to make herself understood by her new and somewhat difficult guest. A maid followed in their wake, and from some as yet unexplored region below there rose the sound of clattering dishes.
It was a trying moment for him. He longed for another glimpse of the girl, but feared to betray his own curiosity to the two women who accompanied her. Should he be forced to allow her to enter her room unseen? Might he not better run some small risk of detection? He had escaped discovery before; wasn't it possible for him to escape it again? He finally compromised matters by first flinging his door wide open and then retreating to the other end of the room where the shadows appeared heavy enough to hide him. From this point he cast a look down the hall which was in a direct line from his present standpoint, and was fortunate enough to catch a glimpse of the girl with her face turned in his direction. Her companions, on the contrary, were standing with their backs to him, one beside the door she had just thrown open, the other at his wife's door on which she had just given a significant rap.
Such was the picture.
The girl absorbed all his attention. The shawl—a gay one with colors in it—had fallen from her head and was trailing, wet and bedraggled, over an equally bedraggled skirt. Soused with wet, her hair disheveled, and all her garments awry with the passion of her movements, she yet made his heart stand still, as, with a sullen look at those about her, she rushed into the room prepared for her use and slammed the door behind her with a quick cry of mingled rage and relief. For with all these drawbacks of manner and appearance she was the living picture of Georgian; so like her, indeed, that he could well understand now the shock which his darling received when, in the unconsciousness of possessing a living sister, she had encountered in street or store, or wherever they had first met, this living reproduction of herself.
"No wonder she became confused as to her duty," he muttered. "I even feel myself becoming confused as to mine."
"Bring me up something to eat," he now heard this latest comer shout from her doorway. "I don't want tea and I don't want soup; I want meat, meat. And I shan't go down afterward, either. I'm going to stay right here. I've seen enough of people I don't know. And of my sister too. She was cross to me because I hated the coach and wanted to walk, and she shan't come into my room till I tell her to. Don't forget; it's meat I want, just meat and something sweet. Pudding's good."
All shocking to Mr. Ransom's taste, but more so to his heart. For notwithstanding the coarseness of the expressions, the voice was Georgian's and laden with a hundred memories.
He was still struggling with the agitation of this discovery when he heard Mrs. Deo give another tap on his wife's door. This time it was unlocked and pushed softly open, and through the crack thus made some whispered orders were given. These seemed to satisfy Mrs. Deo, for she called the maid to her and together they hurried down the hall to a rear staircase, communicating with the kitchen. This was fortunate for him, for if they had turned his way he would have had to issue from his room and take open part in the excitement of the moment.
A few minutes of quiet now supervened. During these he decided that if he must keep up this watch—and nothing now could deter him from doing so—he must take a position consistent with his assumed character. Detection by Georgian was what he now feared. Whatever happened, she must not get the smallest glimpse of him or be led by any indiscretion on his part to suspect his presence under the same roof as herself. Yet he must see all, hear all that was possible to him. For this a continuance of the present conditions, an open door and no light, were positively requisite. But how avert the comment which this unusual state of things must awaken if noticed? But one expedient suggested itself. He would light a cigar and sit in the window. If questioned he would say that he was engaged in deciding how he would end the story he was writing; that such contemplation called for darkness but above all for good air; that had the weather been favorable he would have obtained the latter by opening the window; but it being so bad he could only open the door. Certain eccentricities are allowable in authors.
This settled, he proceeded to take a chair and envelope himself in smoke. With eyes fixed on the dimly-lighted vista of the hall before him, he waited. What would happen next? Would his wife reappear? No; supper was coming up. He could hear dishes rattling on the rear stairway, and in another moment saw the maid coming down the hall with a large tray in her hands. She stopped at Anitra's door, knocked, and was answered by the harsh command:
"Set it down. I'll get it for myself."
The maid set it down.
Next instant Mrs. Ransom's door opened.
"Don't be too generous with me," he heard her call softly out. "I can't eat. I'm too upset for much food. Tea," she whispered, "and some nice toast. Tell Mrs. Deo that I want nothing else. She will understand."
The maid nodded and disappeared down the hall just as a bare arm was thrust out from Anitra's door and the tray drawn in. A few minutes later the other tray came up and was carried into Mrs. Ransom's room. The contrast in the way the two trays had been received struck him as showing the difference between the two women, especially after he had been given an opportunity, as he was later, of seeing the ferocious way in which the food brought to Anitra had been disposed of.
But I anticipate. The latter tray had not yet been pushed again into the hall, and Mr. Ransom was still smoking his first cigar when he heard the lawyer's voice in the office below asking to have pen and ink placed in the small reception-room. This recalled him to the real purpose of his wife's presence in the house, and also assured him that the opportunity would soon be given him for another glimpse of her before the evening was over. It was also likely to be a full-face one, as she would have to advance several steps directly towards him before taking the turn leading to the front staircase.