The Ghost Feeler (22 page)

The Deacon looked up sharply, an incredulous smile pinching his thin lips. ‘A spell?'

‘That's what I said: he's bewitched.'

Again the three visitors were silent; then Bosworth, more at ease or less tongue-tied than the others, asked with an attempt at humour: ‘Do you see the word in the strict Scripture sense, Mrs Rutledge?'

She glanced at him before replying: ‘That's how
he
uses it.'

The Deacon coughed and cleared his long rattling throat. ‘Do you care to give us more particulars before your husband joins us?'

Mrs Rutledge looked down at her clasped hands, as if considering the question. Bosworth noticed that the inner fold of her lids was of the same uniform white as the rest of her skin, so that when she dropped them her rather prominent eyes looked like the sightless orbs of a marble statue. The impression was unpleasing, and he glanced away at the text over the mantelpiece, which read:

The Soul That Sinneth It Shall Die
.

‘No,' she said at length, ‘I'll wait.'

At this moment Sylvester Brand suddenly stood up and pushed back his chair. ‘I don't know', he said, in his rough bass voice, ‘as I've got any particular lights on Bible mysteries; and this happens to be the day I was to go down to Starkfield to close a deal with a man.'

Mrs Rutledge lifted one of her long thin hands. Withered and wrinkled by hard work and cold, it was nevertheless of the same leaden white as her face. ‘You won't be kept long,' she said. ‘Won't you be seated?'

Farmer Brand stood irresolute, his purplish underlip twitching. ‘The Deacon here – such things is more in his line ...'

‘I want you should stay,' said Mrs Rutledge quietly; and Brand sat down again.

A silence fell, during which the four persons present seemed all to be listening for the sound of a step; but none was heard, and after a minute or two Mrs Rutledge began to speak again.

‘It's down by the old shack on Lamer's pond; that's where they meet,' she said suddenly.

Bosworth, whose eyes were on Sylvester Brand's face, fancied he saw a sort of inner flush darken the farmer's heavy leather skin. Deacon Hibben leaned forward, a glitter of curiosity in his eyes.

They –
who
, Mrs Rutledge?'

‘My husband, Saul Rutledge ... and her ...'

Sylvester Brand again stirred in his seat. ‘Who do you mean by
her?'
he asked abruptly, as if roused out of some far-off musing.

Mrs Rutledge's body did not move; she simply revolved her head on her long neck and looked at him.

‘Your daughter, Sylvester Brand.'

The man staggered to his feet with an explosion of inarticulate sounds. ‘My – my daughter? What the hell are you talking about? My daughter? It's a damned lie ... it's ... it's ...'

‘Your daughter
‘Ora
, Mr Brand,' said Mrs Rutledge slowly.

Bosworth felt an icy chill down his spine. Instinctively he turned his eyes away from Brand, and they rested on the mildewed countenance of Deacon Hibben. Between the blotches it had become as white as Mrs Rutledge's, and the Deacon's eyes burned in the whiteness like live embers among ashes.

Brand gave a laugh: the rusty creaking laugh of one whose springs of mirth are never moved by gaiety. ‘My daughter
Ora?'
he repeated.

‘Yes.'

‘My
dead
daughter?'

‘That's what he says.'

‘Your husband?'

‘That's what Mr Rutledge says.'

Orrin Bosworth listened with a sense of suffocation; he felt as if he were wrestling with long-armed horrors in a dream. He could no longer resist letting his eyes return to Sylvester Brand's face. To his surprise it had resumed a natural imperturbable expression. Brand rose to his feet. ‘Is that all?' he queried contemptously.

‘All? Ain't it enough? How long is it since you folks seen Saul Rutledge, any of you?' Mrs Rutledge flew out at them.

Bosworth, it appeared, had not seen him for nearly a year; the Deacon had only run across him once, for minute, at the North Ashmore post-office, the previous autumn, and acknowledged that he wasn't looking any too good then. Brand said nothing, but stood irresolute.

‘Well, if you wait a minute you'll see with your own eyes; and he'll tell you with his own words. That's what I've got you here for – to see for yourselves what's come over him. Then you'll talk different,' she added, twisting her head abruptly towards Sylvester Brand.

The Deacon raised a lean hand of interrogation.

‘Does your husband know we've been sent for on this business, Mrs Rutledge?'

Mrs Rutledge signed assent.

‘It was with his consent, then –?'

She looked coldly at her questioner. ‘I guess it had to be,' she said. Again Bosworth felt the chill down his spine. He tried to dissipate the sensation by speaking with an affectation of energy.

‘Can you tell us, Mrs Rutledge, how this trouble you speak of shows itself ... what makes you think ...?'

She looked at him for a moment; then she leaned forward across the rickety bead-work table. A thin smile of disdain narrowed her colourless lips. ‘I don't think – I know.'

‘Well – but how?'

She leaned closer, both elbows on the table, her voice dropping. ‘I seen 'em.'

In the ashen light from the veiling of snow beyond the windows the Deacon's little screwed-up eyes seemed to give out red sparks. ‘Him and the dead?'

‘Him and the dead.'

‘Saul Rutledge and – and Ora Brand?'

‘That's so.'

Sylvester Brand's chair fell backward with a crash. He was on his feet again, crimson and cursing. ‘It's a God-damned fiend-begotten lie ...'

‘Friend Brand ... Friend Brand ...' The Deacon protested.

‘Here, let me get out of this. I want to see Saul Rutledge himself, and tell him –'

‘Well, here he is,' said Mrs Rutledge.

The outer door had opened; they heard the familiar stamping and shaking of a man who rids his garments of their last snowflakes before penetrating to the sacred precincts of the best parlour. Then Saul Rutledge entered.

II

As he came in he faced the light from the north window, and Bosworth's first thought was that he looked like a drowned man fished out from under the ice – ‘self-drowned', he added. But the snow-light plays cruel tricks with a man's colour, and even with the shape of his features; it must have been partly that, Bosworth reflected, which transformed Saul Rutledge from the straight muscular fellow he had been a year before into the haggard wretch now before them.

The Deacon sought for a word to ease the horror. ‘Well, now, Saul – you look's if you'd ought to set right up to the stove. Had a touch of ague, maybe?'

The feeble attempt was unvailing. Rutledge neither moved nor answered. He stood among them silent, incommunicable, like one risen from the dead.

Brand grasped him roughly by the shoulder. ‘See her, Saul Rutledge, what's this dirty lie your wife tells us you've been putting about?'

Still Rutledge did not move. ‘It's no lie,' he said.

Brand's hand dropped from his shoulder. In spite of the man's rough bullying power he seemed to be undefinably awed by Rutledge's look and tone.

‘No lie? You've gone plumb crazy, then, have you?'

Mrs Rutledge spoke. ‘My husband's not lying, nor he ain't gone crazy. Don't I tell you I seen 'em?'

Brand laugh again. ‘Him and the dead?'

‘Yes.'

‘Down by the Lamer pond, you say?'

‘Yes.'

‘And when was that, if I might ask?'

‘Day before yesterday.'

A silence fell on the strangely assembled group. The Deacon at length broke it to say to Mr Brand: ‘Brand, in my opinion we've got to see this thing through.'

Brand stood for a moment in speechless contemplation: there was something animal and primitive about him, Bosworth thought, as he hung thus, lowering and dumb, a little foam beading the corners of that heavy purplish underlip. He let himself slowly down into his chair. ‘I'll see it through.'

The two other men and Mrs Rutledge had remained seated. Saul Rutledge stood before them, like a prisoner at the bar, or rather like a sick man before the physicians who were to heal him. As Bosworth scrutinized that hollow face, so wan under the dark sunburn, so sucked inward and consumed by some hidden fever, there stole over the sound healthy man the thought that perhaps, after all, husband and wife spoke the truth, and that they were all at that moment really standing on the edge of some forbidden mystery. Things that the rational mind would reject without a thought seemed no longer so easy to dispose of as one looked at the actual Saul Rutledge and remembered the man he had been a year before. Yes; as the Deacon said, they would have to see it through ...

‘Sit down then, Saul; draw up to us, won't you?' the Deacon suggested, trying again for a natural tone.

Mrs Rutledge pushed a chair forward, and her husband sat down on it. He stretched out his arms and grasped his knees in his brown bony fingers; in that attitude he remained, turning neither his head nor his eyes.

‘Well, Saul,' the Deacon continued, ‘your wife says you thought mebbe we could do something to help you through this trouble, whatever it is.'

Rutledge's grey eyes widened a little. ‘No; I didn't think that. It was her idea to try what could be done.'

‘I presume, though, since you've agreed to our coming, that you don't object to our putting a few questions?'

Rutledge was silent for a moment; then he said with a visible effort: ‘No, I don't object.'

‘Well – you've heard what your wife says?'

Rutledge made a slight motion of assent.

‘And – what have you got to answer? How do you explain ...?'

Mrs Rutledge intervened. ‘How can he explain? I seen 'em.'

There was a silence; then Bosworth, trying to speak in an easy reassuring tone, queried: ‘That so, Saul?'

‘That's so.'

Brand lifted up his brooding head. ‘You mean to say you ... you sit here before us all and say ...'

The Deacon's hand again checked him. ‘Hold on, friend Brand. We're all of us trying for the facts, ain't we?' He turned to Rutledge. ‘We've heard what Mrs Rutledge says. What's your answer?'

‘I don't know as there's any answer. She found us.'

‘And you mean to tell me the person with you was ... was what you took to be ...' The Deacon's thin voice grew thinner: ‘Ora Brand?'

Saul Rutledge nodded.

‘You knew ... or thought you knew ... you were meeting with the dead?'

Rutledge bent his head again. The snow continued to fall in a steady unwavering sheet against the window, and Bosworth felt as if a winding-sheet were descending from the sky to envelop them all in a common grave.

‘Think what you're saying! It's against our religion! Ora ... poor child ... died over a year ago. I saw you at her funeral, Saul. How can you make such a statement?'

‘What else can he do?' thrust in Mrs Rutledge.

There was another pause. Bosworth's resources had failed him, and Brand once more sat plunged in dark meditation. The Deacon laid his quivering fingertips together and moistened his lips.

‘Was the day before yesterday the first time?' he asked.

The movement of Rutledge's head was negative.

‘Not the first? Then when ...'

‘Nigh on a year ago, I reckon.'

‘God! And you mean to tell us that ever since –?'

‘Well ... look at him,' said his wife. The three men lowered their eyes.

After a moment Bosworth, trying to collect himself, glanced at the Deacon. ‘Why not ask Saul to make his own statement, if that's what we're here for?'

‘That's so,' the Deacon assented. He turned to Rutledge. ‘Will you try and give us your idea ... of ... of how it began?'

There was another silence. Then Rutledge tightened his grasp on his gaunt knees, and still looking straight ahead, with his curiously clear unseeing gaze: ‘Well,' he said, ‘I guess it begun away back, afore even I was married to Mrs Rutledge ...' He spoke in a low automatic tone, as if some invisible agent were dictating his words, or even uttering them for him. ‘You know,' he added, ‘Ora and me was to have been married.'

Sylvester Band lifted his head. ‘Straighten that statement out first, please,' he interjected.

‘What I mean is, we kept company. But Ora she was very young. Mr Brand here he sent her away. She was gone nigh to three years, I guess. When she come back I was married.'