The Ghost Feeler (24 page)

‘That's so,' the Deacon agreed. ‘ It's a worm in the brain, solitude is.'

‘Well, we'll know this time tomorrow, maybe,' said Bosworth. He scrambled into his sleigh, and was driving off in his turn when he heard his companion calling after him. The Deacon explained that his horse had cast a shoe; would Bosworth drive him down to the forge near North Ashmore, if it wasn't too much out of his way? He didn't want the mare slipping about on the freezing snow, and he could probably get the blacksmith to drive him back and shoe her in Rutledge's shed. Bosworth made room for him under the bearskin, and the two men drove off, pursued by a puzzled whinny from the Deacon's old mare.

The road they took was not the one that Bosworth would have followed to reach his own home. But he did not mind that. The shortest way to the forge passed close by Lamer's pond, and Bosworth, since he was in for the business, was not sorry to look the ground over. They drove on in silence.

The snow had ceased, and a green sunset was spreading upward into the crystal sky. A stinging wind barbed with ice-flakes caught them in the face on the open ridges, but when they dropped down into the hollow by Lamer's pond the air was as soundless and empty as an unswung bell. They jogged along slowly, each thinking his own thoughts.

‘That's the house ... that tumbledown shack over there, I suppose?' the Deacon said, as the road drew near the edge of the frozen pond.

‘Yes: that's the house. A queer hermit-fellow built it years ago, my father used to tell me. Since then I don't believe it's ever been used but by the gypsies.'

Bosworth had reined in his horse, and sat looking through pine-trunks purpled by the sunset at the crumbling structure. Twilight already lay under the trees, though day lingered in the open. Between two sharply patterned pine-boughs he saw the evening star, like a white boat in a sea of green.

His gaze dropped from that fathomless sky and followed the blue-white undulations of the snow. It gave him a curious agitated feeling to think that here, in this icy solitude, in the tumbledown house he had so often passed without heeding it, a dark mystery, too deep for thought, was being enacted. Down that very slope, coming from the graveyard at Cold Corners, the being they called ‘Ora' must pass towards the pond. His heart began to beat stiflingly. Suddenly he gave an exclamation: ‘Look!'

He had jumped out of the cutter and was stumbling up the bank towards the slope of snow. On it, turned in the direction of the house by the pond, he had detected a woman's footprints; two; then three; then more. The Deacon scrambled out after him, and they stood and stared.

‘God – barefoot!' Hibben gasped. ‘Then it
is
... the dead ...'

Bosworth said nothing. But he knew that no live woman would travel with naked feet across that freezing wilderness. Here, then, was the proof the Deacon had asked for – they held it. What should they do with it?

‘Supposing we was to drive up nearer – round the turn of the pond, till we get close to the house,' the Deacon proposed in a colourless voice. ‘Mebbe then ...'

Postponement was a relief. They got into the sleigh and drove on. Two or three hundred yards farther the road, a mere lane under steep bushy banks, turned sharply to the right, following the bend of the pond. As they rounded the turn they saw Brand's cutter ahead of them. It was empty, the horse tied to a tree-trunk. The two men looked at each other again. This was not Brand's nearest way home.

Evidently he had been actuated by the same impulse which had made them rein in their horse by the pond-side, and then hasten on to the deserted hovel. Had he, too, discovered those spectral footprints? Perhaps it was for that very reason that he had left his cutter and vanished in the direction of the house. Bosworth found himself shivering all over under his bearskin. ‘I wish to God the dark wasn't coming on,' he muttered. He tethered his own horse near Brand's, and without a word he and the Deacon ploughed through the snow, in the track of Brand's huge feet. They had only a few yards to walk to overtake him. He did not hear them following him, and when Bosworth spoke his name, and he stopped short and turned, his heavy face was dim and confused, like a darker blot on the dusk. He looked at them dully, but without surprise.

‘I wanted to see the place,' he merely said.

The Deacon cleared his throat. ‘Just take a look ... yes ... We thought so ... But I guess there won't be anything to
see ...
' He attempted a chuckle.

The other did not seem to hear him, but laboured on ahead through the pines. The three men came out together in the cleared space before the house. As they emerged from beneath the trees they seemed to have left night behind. The evening star shed a lustre on the speckless snow, and Brand, in that lucid circle, stopped with a jerk, and pointed to the same light footprints turned towards the house – the track of a woman in the snow. He stood still, his face working. ‘Bare feet ...' he said.

The Deacon piped up in a quavering voice: ‘The feet of the dead.'

Brand remained motionless. ‘The feet of the dead,' he echoed.

Deacon Hibben laid a frightened hand on his arm. ‘Come away now, Brand; for the love of God come away.'

The father hung there, gazing down at those light tracks on the snow – light as fox or squirrel trails they seemed, on the white immensity. Bosworth thought to himself: ‘The living couldn't walk so light – not even Ora Brand couldn't have, when she lived ...' The cold seemed to have entered into his very marrow. His teeth were chattering.

Brand swung about on them abruptly. ‘
Now
!' he said, moving on as if to an assault, his head bowed forward on his bull neck.

‘Now – now? Not in there?' gasped the Deacon. ‘What's the use? It was tomorrow he said –' He shook like a leaf.

‘It's now,' said Brand. He went up to the door of the crazy house, pushed it inward, and meeting with an unexpected resistance, thrust his heavy shoulder against the pane. The door collapsed like a playing-card, and Brand stumbled after it into the darkness of the hut. The others, after a moment's hesitation, followed.

Bosworth was never quite sure in what order the events that succeeded took place. Coming in out of the snow-dazzle, he seemed to be plunging into total blackness. He groped his way across the threshold, caught a sharp splinter of the fallen door in his palm, seemed to see something white and wraith-like surge up out of the darkest corner of the hut, and then heard a revolver shot at his elbow, and a cry –

Brand had turned back, and was staggering past him out into the lingering daylight. The sunset, suddenly flushing through the trees, crimsoned his face like blood. He held a revolver in his hand and looked about him in his stupid way.

‘They
do
walk, then,' he said and began to laugh. He bent his head to examine his weapon. ‘Better here than in the churchyard. They shan't dig her up
now
,' he shouted out. The two men caught him by the arms, and Bosworth got the revolver away from him.

IV

The next day Bosworth's sister Loretta, who kept house for him, asked him, when he came in for his midday dinner, if he had heard the news.

Bosworth had been sawing wood all the morning, and in spite of the cold and the driving snow, which had begun again in the night, he was covered with an icy sweat, like a man getting over a fever.

‘What news?'

‘Venny Brand's down sick with pneumonia. The Deacon's been there. I guess she's dying.'

Bosworth looked at her with listless eyes. She seemed far off from him, miles away. ‘Venny Brand?' he echoed.

‘You never liked her, Orrin.'

‘She's a child. I never knew much about her.'

‘Well,' repeated his sister, with the guileless relish of the unimaginative for bad news, ‘I guess she's dying.' After a pause she added: ‘It'll kill Sylvester Brand, all alone up there.'

Bosworth got up and said: ‘I've got to see to poulticing the grey's fetlock.' He walked out into the steadily falling snow.

Venny Brand was buried three days later. The Deacon read the service; Bosworth was one of the pall-bearers. The whole countryside turned out, for the snow had stopped falling, and at any season a funeral offered an opportunity for an outing that was not to be missed. Besides, Venny Brand was young and handsome – at least some people thought her handsome, though she was so swarthy – and her dying like that, so suddenly, had the fascination of tragedy.

‘They say her lungs filled right up ... Seems she'd had bronchial troubles before ... I always said both them girls was frail ... Look at Ora, how she took and wasted away! And it's colder'n all outdoors up there to Brand's ... Their mother, too,
she
pined away just the same. They don't ever make old bones on the mother's side of the family ... There's that young Bedlow over there; they say Venny was engaged to him ... Oh, Mrs Rutledge, excuse
me
... Step right into the pew; there's a seat for you alongside of grandma ...'

Mrs Rutledge was advancing with deliberate step down the narrow aisle of the bleak wooden church. She had on her best bonnet, a monumental structure which no one had seen out of her trunk since old Mrs Silsee's funeral, three years before. All the women remembered it. Under its perpendicular pile her narrow face, swaying on the long thin neck, seemed whiter than ever; but her air of fretfulness had been composed into a suitable expression of mournful immobility.

‘Looks as if the stonemason had carved her to put atop of Venny's grave,' Bosworth thought as she glided past him; and then shivered at his own sepulchral fancy. When she bent over her hymn book her lowered lids reminded him again of marble eyeballs; the bony hands clasping the book were bloodless. Bosworth had never seen such hands since he had seen old Aunt Cressidora Cheney strangle the canary-bird because it fluttered.

The service was over, the coffin of Venny Brand had been lowered into her sister's grave, and the neighbours were slowly dispersing. Bosworth, as pall-bearer, felt obliged to linger and say a word to the stricken father. He waited till Brand had turned from the grave with the Deacon at his side. The three men stood together for a moment; but not one of them spoke. Brand's face was the closed door of a vault, barred with wrinkles like bands of iron.

Finally the Deacon took his hand and said: ‘The Lord gave–'

Brand nodded and turned away towards the shed where the horses were hitched. Bosworth followed him. ‘Let me drive along home with you,' he suggested.

Brand did not so much as turn his head. ‘Home? What home?' he said; and the other fell back.

Loretta Bosworth was talking with the other women while the men unblanketed their horses and backed the cutters out into the heavy snow. As Bosworth waited for her, a few feet off, he saw Mrs Rutledge's tall bonnet lording it above the group. Andy Pond, the Rutledge farm-hand, was backing out the sleigh.

‘Saul ain't here today, Mrs Rutledge, is he?' one of the village elders piped, turning a benevolent old tortoise-head about on a loose neck, and blinking up into Mrs Rutledge's marble face.

Bosworth heard her measure out her answer in slow incisive words. ‘No. Mr Rutledge he ain't here. He would 'a' come for certain, but his aunt Minorca Cummins is being buried down to Stotesbury this very day and he had to go down there. Don't it sometimes seem zif we was all walking right in the Shadow of Death?'

As she walked towards the cutter, in which Andy Pond was already seated, the Deacon went up to her with visible hesitation. Involuntarily Bosworth also moved nearer. He heard the Deacon say: ‘I'm glad to hear that Saul is able to be up and around.'

She turned her small head on her rigid neck, and lifted the lids of marble.

‘Yes, I guess he'll sleep quieter now – And
her
too, maybe, now she don't lay there alone any longer,' she added in a low voice, with a sudden twist of her chin towards the fresh black stain in the graveyard snow. She got into the cutter, and said in a clear tone to Andy Pond: ‘'S long as we're down here I don't know but what I'll just call round and get a box of soap at Hiram Pringle's.'

A Bottle of Perrier