The House Of A Thousand Candles/Chapter 9

Wind and rain rioted in the wood, and occasionally both fell upon the library windows with a howl and a splash. The tempest had wakened me; it seemed that every chimney in the house held a screaming demon. We were now well-launched upon December, and I was growing used to my surroundings. I had offered myself frequently as a target by land and water; I had sat on the wall and tempted fate; and I had roamed the house constantly expecting to surprise Bates in some act of treachery; but the days were passing monotonously. I saw nothing of Morgan—he had gone to Chicago on some errand, so Bates reported—but I continued to walk abroad every day, and often at night, alert for a reopening of hostilities. Twice I had seen the red tam-o’-shanter far through the wood, and once I had passed my young acquaintance with another girl, a dark, laughing youngster, walking in the highway, and she had bowed to me coldly. Even the ghost in the wall proved inconstant, but I had twice heard the steps without being able to account for them.

Memory kept plucking my sleeve with reminders of my grandfather. I was touched at finding constantly his marginal notes in the books he had collected with so much intelligence and loving care. It occurred to me that some memorial, a tablet attached to the outer wall, or perhaps, more properly placed in the chapel, would be fitting; and I experimented with designs for it, covering many sheets of drawing-paper in an effort to set forth in a few words some hint of his character. On this gray morning I produced this:

I had drawn these words on a piece of cardboard and was studying them critically when Bates came in with wood.

“Those are unmistakable snowflakes, sir,” said Bates from the window. “We’re in for winter now.”

It was undeniably snow; great lazy flakes of it were crowding down upon the wood.

Bates had not mentioned Morgan or referred even remotely to the pistol-shot of my first night, and he had certainly conducted himself as a model servant. The man-of-all-work at St. Agatha’s, a Scotchman named Ferguson, had visited him several times, and I had surprised them once innocently enjoying their pipes and whisky and water in the kitchen.

“They are having trouble at the school, sir,” said Bates from the hearth.

“The young ladies running a little wild, eh?”

“Sister Theresa’s ill, sir. Ferguson told me last night!”

“No doubt Ferguson knows,” I declared, moving the papers about on my desk, conscious, and not ashamed of it, that I enjoyed these dialogues with Bates. I occasionally entertained the idea that he would some day brain me as I sat dining upon the viands which he prepared with so much skill; or perhaps he would poison me, that being rather more in his line of business and perfectly easy of accomplishment; but the house was bare and lonely and he was a resource.

“So Sister Theresa’s ill!” I began, seeing that Bates had nearly finished, and glancing with something akin to terror upon the open pages of a dreary work on English cathedrals that had put me to sleep the day before.

“She’s been quite uncomfortable, sir; but they hope to see her out in a few days!”

“That’s good; I’m glad to hear it.”

“Yes, sir. I think we naturally feel interested, being neighbors. And Ferguson says that Miss Devereux’s devotion to her aunt is quite touching.”

I stood up straight and stared at Bates’ back—he was trying to stop the rattle which the wind had set up in one of the windows.

“Miss Devereux!” I laughed outright.

“That’s the name, sir,—rather odd, I should call it.”

“Yes, it is rather odd,” I said, composed again, but not referring to the name. My mind was busy with a certain paragraph in my grandfather’s will:

“Your grandfather was very fond of her, sir. She and Sister Theresa were abroad at the time he died. It was my sorrowful duty to tell them the sad news in New York, sir, when they landed.”

“The devil it was!” It irritated me to remember that Bates probably knew exactly the nature of my grandfather’s will; and the terms of it were not in the least creditable to me. Sister Theresa and her niece were doubtless calmly awaiting my failure to remain at Glenarm House during the disciplinary year,—Sister Theresa, a Protestant nun, and the niece who probably taught drawing in the school for her keep! I was sure it was drawing; nothing else would, I felt, have brought the woman within the pale of my grandfather’s beneficence.

I had given no thought to Sister Theresa since coming to Glenarm. She had derived her knowledge of me from my grandfather, and, such being the case, she would naturally look upon me as a blackguard and a menace to the peace of the neighborhood. I had, therefore, kept rigidly to my own side of the stone wall. A suspicion crossed my mind, marshaling a host of doubts and questions that had lurked there since my first night at Glenarm.

“Bates!”

He was moving toward the door with his characteristic slow step.

“If your friend Morgan, or any one else, should shoot me, or if I should tumble into the lake, or otherwise end my earthly career—Bates!”

His eyes had slipped from mine to the window and I spoke his name sharply.

“Yes, Mr. Glenarm.”

“Then Sister Theresa’s niece would get this property and everything else that belonged to Mr. Glenarm.”

“That’s my understanding of the matter, sir.”

“Morgan, the caretaker, has tried to kill me twice since I came here. He fired at me through the window the night I came,—Bates!”

I waited for his eyes to meet mine again. His hands opened and shut several times, and alarm and fear convulsed his face for a moment.

“Bates, I’m trying my best to think well of you; but I want you to understand”—I smote the table with my clenched hand—“that if these women, or your employer, Mr. Pickering, or that damned hound, Morgan, or you— damn you, I don’t know who or what you are!—think you can scare me away from here, you’ve waked up the wrong man, and I’ll tell you another thing,—and you may repeat it to your school-teachers and to Mr. Pickering, who pays you, and to Morgan, whom somebody has hired to kill me,—that I’m going to keep faith with my dead grandfather, and that when I’ve spent my year here and done what that old man wished me to do, I’ll give them this house and every acre of ground and every damned dollar the estate carries with it. And now one other thing! I suppose there’s a sheriff or some kind of a constable with jurisdiction over this place, and I could have the whole lot of you put into jail for conspiracy, but I’m going to stand out against you alone,—do you understand me, you hypocrite, you stupid, slinking spy? Answer me, quick, before I throw you out of the room!”

I had worked myself into a great passion and fairly roared my challenge, pounding the table in my rage.

“Yes, sir; I quite understand you, sir. But I’m afraid, sir—”

“Of course you’re afraid!” I shouted, enraged anew by his halting speech. “You have every reason in the world to be afraid. You’ve probably heard that I’m a bad lot and a worthless adventurer; but you can tell Sister Theresa or Pickering or anybody you please that I’m ten times as bad as I’ve ever been painted. Now clear out of here!”

He left the room without looking at me again. During the morning I strolled through the house several times to make sure he had not left it to communicate with some of his fellow plotters, but I was, I admit, disappointed to find him in every instance busy at some wholly proper task. Once, indeed, I found him cleaning my storm boots! To find him thus humbly devoted to my service after the raking I had given him dulled the edge of my anger. I went back to the library and planned a cathedral in seven styles of architecture, all unrelated and impossible, and when this began to bore me I designed a crypt in which the wicked should be buried standing on their heads and only the very good might lie and sleep in peace. These diversions and several black cigars won me to a more amiable mood. I felt better, on the whole, for having announced myself to the delectable Bates, who gave me for luncheon a brace of quails, done in a manner that stripped criticism of all weapons.

We did not exchange a word, and after knocking about in the library for several hours I went out for a tramp. Winter had indeed come and possessed the earth, and it had given me a new landscape. The snow continued to fall in great, heavy flakes, and the ground was whitening fast.

A rabbit’s track caught my eye and I followed it, hardly conscious that I did so. Then the clear print of two small shoes mingled with the rabbit’s trail. A few moments later I picked up an overshoe, evidently lost in the chase by one of Sister Theresa’s girls, I reflected. I remembered that while at Tech I had collected diverse memorabilia from school-girl acquaintances, and here I was beginning a new series with a string of beads and an overshoe!

A rabbit is always an attractive quarry. Few things besides riches are so elusive, and the little fellows have, I am sure, a shrewd humor peculiar to themselves. I rather envied the school-girl who had ventured forth for a run in the first snow-storm of the season. I recalled Aldrich’s turn on Gautier’s lines as I followed the double trail:

A pretty autograph, indeed! The snow fell steadily and I tramped on over the joint signature of the girl and the rabbit. Near the lake they parted company, the rabbit leading off at a tangent, on a line parallel with the lake, while his pursuer’s steps pointed toward the boat-house.

There was, so far as I knew, only one student of adventurous blood at St. Agatha’s, and I was not in the least surprised to see, on the little sheltered balcony of the boat-house, the red tam-o’-shanter. She wore, too, the covert coat I remembered from the day I saw her first from the wall. Her back was toward me as I drew near; her hands were thrust into her pockets. She was evidently enjoying the soft mingling of the snow with the still, blue waters of the lake, and a girl and a snow-storm are, if you ask my opinion, a pretty combination. The fact of a girl’s facing a winter storm argues mightily in her favor,—testifies, if you will allow me, to a serene and dauntless spirit, for one thing, and a sound constitution, for another.

I ran up the steps, my cap in one hand, her overshoe in the other. She drew back a trifle, just enough to bring my conscience to its knees.

“I didn’t mean to listen that day. I just happened to be on the wall and it was a thoroughly underbred trick—my twitting you about it—and I should have told you before if I’d known how to see you—”

“May I trouble you for that shoe?” she said with a great deal of dignity.

They taught that cold disdain of man, I supposed, as a required study at St. Agatha’s.

“Oh, certainly! Won’t you allow me?”

“Thank you, no!”

I was relieved, to tell the truth, for I had been out of the world for most of that period in which a youngster perfects himself in such graces as the putting on of a girl’s overshoes. She took the damp bit of rubber—a wet overshoe, even if small and hallowed by associations, isn’t pretty—as Venus might have received a soft-shell crab from the hand of a fresh young merman. I was between her and the steps to which her eyes turned longingly.

“Of course, if you won’t accept my apology I can’t do anything about it; but I hope you understand that I’m sincere and humble, and anxious to be forgiven.”

“You seem to be making a good deal of a small matter—”

“I wasn’t referring to the overshoe!” I said.

She did not relent.

“If you’ll only go away—”

She rested one hand against the corner of the boat-house while she put on the overshoe. She wore, I noticed, brown gloves with cuffs.

“How can I go away! You children are always leaving things about for me to pick up. I’m perfectly worn out carrying some girl’s beads about with me; and I spoiled a good glove on your overshoe.”

“I’ll relieve you of the beads, too, if you please.” And her tone measurably reduced my stature.

She thrust her hands into the pockets of her coat and shook the tam-o’-shanter slightly, to establish it in a more comfortable spot on her head. The beads had been in my corduroy coat since I found them. I drew them out and gave them to her.

“Thank you; thank you very much.”

“Of course they are yours, Miss—”

She thrust them into her pocket.

“Of course they’re mine,” she said indignantly, and turned to go.

“We’ll waive proof of property and that sort of thing,” I remarked, with, I fear, the hope of detaining her. “I’m sorry not to establish a more neighborly feeling with St. Agatha’s. The stone wall may seem formidable, but it’s not of my building. I must open the gate. That wall’s a trifle steep for climbing.”

I was amusing myself with the idea that my identity was a dark mystery to her. I had read English novels in which the young lord of the manor is always mistaken for the game-keeper’s son by the pretty daughter of the curate who has come home from school to be the belle of the county. But my lady of the red tam-o’-shanter was not a creature of illusions.

“It serves a very good purpose—the wall, I mean—Mr. Glenarm.”



She was walking down the steps and I followed. I am not a man to suffer a lost school-girl to cross my lands unattended in a snow-storm; and the piazza of a boat-house is not, I submit, a pleasant loafing-place on a winter day. She marched before me, her hands in her pockets—I liked her particularly that way—with an easy swing and a light and certain step. Her remark about the wall did not encourage further conversation and I fell back upon the poets.

I quoted. Quoting poetry in a snow-storm while you stumble through a woodland behind a girl who shows no interest in either your prose or your rhymes has its embarrassments, particularly when you are breathing a trifle hard from the swift pace your auditor is leading you.

“I have heard that before,” she said, half-turning her face, then laughing as she hastened on.

Her brilliant cheeks were a delight to the eye. The snow swirled about her, whitened the crown of her red cap and clung to her shoulders. Have you ever seen snow-crystals gleam, break, dissolve in fair, soft, storm-blown hair? Do you know how a man will pledge his soul that a particular flake will never fade, never cease to rest upon a certain flying strand over a girlish temple? And he loses—his heart and his wager—in a breath! If you fail to understand these things, and are furthermore unfamiliar with the fact that the color in the cheeks of a girl who walks abroad in a driving snow-storm marks the favor of Heaven itself, then I waste time, and you will do well to rap at the door of another inn.

“I’d rather missed you,” I said; “and, really, I should have been over to apologize if I hadn’t been afraid.”

“Sister Theresa is rather fierce,” she declared. “And we’re not allowed to receive gentlemen callers,—it says so in the catalogue.”

“So I imagined. I trust Sister Theresa is improving.”

“Yes; thank you.”

“And Miss Devereux,—she is quite well, I hope?”

She turned her head as though to listen more carefully, and her step slackened for a moment; then she hurried blithely forward.

“Oh, she’s always well, I believe.”

“You know her, of course.”

“Oh, rather! She gives us music lessons.”

“So Miss Devereux is the music-teacher, is she? Should you call her a popular teacher?”

“The girls call her”—she seemed moved to mirth by the recollection—“Miss Prim and Prosy.”

“Ugh!” I exclaimed sympathetically. “Tall and hungry-looking, with long talons that pound the keys with grim delight. I know the sort.”

“She’s a sight!”—and my guide laughed approvingly. “But we have to take her; she’s part of the treatment.”

“You speak of St. Agatha’s as though it were a sanatorium.”

“Oh, it’s not so bad! I’ve seen worse.”

“Where do most of the students come from,—all what you call Hoosiers?”

“Oh, no! They’re from all over—Cincinnati, Chicago, Cleveland, Indianapolis.”

“What the magazines call the Middle West.”

“I believe that is so. The bishop addressed us once as the flower of the Middle West, and made us really wish he’d come again.”

We were approaching the gate. Her indifference to the storm delighted me. Here, I thought in my admiration, is a real product of the western world. I felt that we had made strides toward such a comradeship as it is proper should exist between a school-girl in her teens and a male neighbor of twenty-seven. I was—going back to English fiction—the young squire walking home with the curate’s pretty young daughter and conversing with fine condescension.

“We girls all wish we could come over and help hunt the lost treasure. It must be simply splendid to live in a house where there’s a mystery,—secret passages and chests of doubloons and all that sort of thing! My! Squire Glenarm, I suppose you spend all your nights exploring secret passages.”

This free expression of opinion startled me, though she seemed wholly innocent of impertinence.

“Who says there’s any secret about the house?” I demanded.

“Oh, Ferguson, the gardener, and all the girls!”

“I fear Ferguson is drawing on his imagination.”

“Well, all the people in the village think so. I’ve heard the candy-shop woman speak of it often.”

“She’d better attend to her taffy,” I retorted.

“Oh, you mustn’t be sensitive about it! All us girls think it ever so romantic, and we call you sometimes the lord of the realm, and when we see you walking through the darkling wood at evenfall we say, ‘My lord is brooding upon the treasure chests.’ ”

This, delivered in the stilted tone of one who is half-quoting and half-improvising, was irresistibly funny, and I laughed with good will.

“I hope you’ve forgiven me—” I began, kicking the gate to knock off the snow, and taking the key from my pocket.

“But I haven’t, Mr. Glenarm. Your assumption is, to say the least, unwarranted,—I got that from a book!”

“It isn’t fair for you to know my name and for me not to know yours,” I said leadingly.

“You are perfectly right. You are Mr. John Glenarm —the gardener told me—and I am just Olivia. They don’t allow me to be called Miss yet. I’m very young, sir!”

“You’ve only told me half,”—and I kept my hand on the closed gate. The snow still fell steadily and the short afternoon was nearing its close. I did not like to lose her,—the life, the youth, the mirth for which she stood. The thought of Glenarm House amid the snow-hung wood and of the long winter evening that I must spend alone moved me to delay. Lights already gleamed in the school-buildings straight before us and the sight of them smote me with loneliness.

“Olivia Gladys Armstrong,” she said, laughing, brushed past me through the gate and ran lightly over the snow toward St. Agatha’s.