The Eye of Dread

When Mary Ballard came home from church, she found her little daughter up in her room on her knees beside her bed, her arms stretched out over the white counterpane, asleep. She had suffered until nature had taken her into her own soothing arms and put her to sleep through sheer weakness. Her cheeks were still burning and her eyelids red from weeping. Mary thought her in a fever, and gently helped her to remove the pretty muslin dress and got her to bed.

Betty drew a long sigh as her head sank back into the pillow. “My head aches; don’t worry, mother, dear.” She thought her heart was closed forever on her terrible secret.

“Mother’ll bring you something for it, dear. You must have eaten something at the picnic that didn’t agree with you.” She kissed Betty’s cheek, and at the door paused to look back on her, and a strange misgiving smote her.

“I can’t think what ails her,” she said to Martha. “She seems to be in a high fever. Did she sleep well last night?”

“Perfectly, but we talked a good while before we went to sleep. Perhaps she got too tired yesterday. I thought she seemed excited, too. Mrs. Walters always makes her coffee so strong.”

Peter Junior came in to dinner, buoyant and happy. He was disappointed not to see Betty, and frankly avowed it. He followed Mary into the kitchen and begged to be allowed to go up and speak to Betty for only a minute, but Mary thought sleep would be the best remedy and he would better leave her alone. He had been to church with his father, and all through the morning service as he sat at his father’s side he had meditated how he could persuade the Elder to look on his plans with some degree of favor–enough at least to warrant him in going on with them and trust to his father’s coming around in time.

Neither he nor Richard were at the Elder’s at dinner, and the meal passed in silence, except for a word now and then in regard to the sermon. Hester thought continually of her son and his hopes, but as she glanced from time to time in her husband’s face she realized that silence on her part was still best. Whenever the Elder cleared his throat and looked off out of the window, as was his wont when about to speak of any matter of importance, her heart leaped and her eyes gazed intently at her plate, to hide the emotion she could not restrain. Her hands grew cold and her lips tremulous, but still she waited.

It was the Elder’s custom to sleep after the Sunday’s dinner, which was always a hearty one, lying down on the sofa in the large parlor, where the closed blinds made a pleasant somberness. Hester passed the door and looked in on him, as he lay apparently asleep, his long, bony frame stretched out and the muscles of his strong face relaxing to a softness they sometimes assumed when sleeping. Her heart went out to him. Oh, if he only knew! If she only dared! His boy ought to love him, and understand him. If they would only understand!

Then she went up into Peter Junior’s room and sat there where she had sat seven years before–where she had often sat since–gazing across at the red-coated old ancestor, her hands in her lap, her thoughts busy with her son’s future even as then. If all the others had lived, would the quandary and the struggle between opposing wills have been as great for each one as for this sole survivor? Where were those little ones now? Playing in happy fields and waiting for her and the stern old man who also suffered, but knew not how to reveal his heart? Again and again the words repeated themselves in her heart mechanically: “Wait on the Lord–Wait on the Lord,” and then, again, “Oh, Lord, how long?”

Peter Junior returned early from the Ballards’, since he could not see Betty, leaving the field open for Martha and her guest, much to the guest’s satisfaction. He went straight to the room occupied by Richard whenever he was with them, but no Richard was there. His valise was all packed ready for his start on the morrow, but there was no line pinned to the frame of the mirror telling Peter Junior where to find him, as was Richard’s way in the past. With a fleeting glance around to see if any bit of paper had been blown away, he went to his own room and there he found his mother, waiting. In an instant that long ago morning came to his mind, and as then he went swiftly to her, and, kneeling, clasped her in his arms.

“Are you worried, mother mine? It’s all right. I will be careful and restrained. Don’t be troubled.”

Hester clasped her boy’s head to her bosom and rested her face against his soft hair. For a while the silence was deep and the moments burned themselves into the young man’s soul with a purifying fire never to be forgotten. Presently she began speaking to him in low, murmuring tones: “Your father is getting to be an old man, Peter, dear, and I–I am no longer young. Our boy is dear to us–the dearest. In our different ways we long only for what is best for you. If only it might be revealed to you and us alike! Many paths are good paths to walk in, and the way may be happy in any one of them, for happiness is of the spirit. It is in you–not made for you by circumstances. We have been so happy here, since you came home wounded, and to be wounded is not a happy thing, as you well know; but it seemed to bring you and me happiness, nevertheless. Did it not, dear?”

“Indeed yes, mother. Yes. It gave me a chance to have you to myself a lot, and that ought to make any man happy, with a mother like you. And now–a new happiness came to me, the other day, that I meant to speak of yesterday and couldn’t after getting so angry with father. It seemed like sacrilege to speak of it then, and, besides, there was another feeling that made me hesitate.”

“So you are in love with some one, Peter?”

“Yes, mother. How did you guess it?”

“Because only love is a feeling that would make you say you could not speak of it when your heart is full of anger. Is it Betty, dear?”

“Yes, mother. You are uncanny to read me so.”

She laughed softly and held him closer. “I love Betty, too, Peter. You will always be gentle and kind? You will never be hard and stern with her?”

“Mother! Have I ever been so? Can’t you tell by the way I have always acted toward you that I would be tender and kind? She will be myself–my very own. How could I be otherwise?”

Again Hester smiled her slow, wise smile. “You have always been tender, Peter, but you have always gone right along and done your own way, absolutely. The only reason there has not been more friction between you and your father has been that you have been tactful; also you have never seemed to desire unworthy things. You have been a good son, dear: I am not complaining. And the only reason why I have never–or seldom–felt hurt by your taking your own way has been that my likings have usually responded to yours, and the thing I most desired was that you should be allowed to take your own way. It is good for a man to be decided and to have a way of his own: I have liked it in you. But the matter still stands that it has always been your way and never any one’s else that you have taken. I can see you being stern even with a wife you thought you wholly loved if her will once crossed yours.”

Peter Junior was silent and a little hurt. He rose and paced the room. “I can’t think I could ever cross Betty, or be unkind. It seems preposterous,” he said at last.

“Perhaps it might never seem to you necessary. Peter, boy, listen. You say: ‘She will be myself–my very own.’ Now what does that mean? Does it mean that when you are married, her personality will be merged in yours, and so you two will be one? If so, you will not be completed and rounded out, and she will be lost in you. A man does not reach his full manhood to completion until he has loved greatly and truly, and has found the one who is to complete him. At best, by ourselves, we are never wholly man or wholly woman until this great soul completion has taken place in us. Then children come to us, and our very souls are knit in one, and still the mystery goes on and on; never are we completed by being lost–either one–in the will or nature of the other; but to make the whole and perfect creature, each must retain the individuality belonging to himself or herself, each to each the perfect and equal other half.”

Peter Junior paused in his walk and stood for a moment looking down on his mother, awed by what she revealed to him of her inner nature. “I believe you have done this, mother. You have kept your own individuality complete, and father doesn’t know it.”

“Not yet, but my hand will always be in his, and some day he will know. You are very like him, and yet you understand me as he never has, so you see how our oneness is wrought out in you. That which you have in you of your father is good and strong: never lose it. The day may come when you will be glad to have had such a father. Out in the world men need such traits; but you must not forget that sometimes it takes more strength to yield than to hold your own way. Yes, it takes strength and courage sometimes to give up–and tremendous faith in God. There! I hear him walking about. Go down and have your talk with him. Remember what I say, dear, and don’t get angry with your father. He loves you, too.”

“Have you said anything to him yet about–me–mother?”

“No. I have decided that it will be better for you to deal with him yourself–courageously. You’ll remember?”

Peter Junior took her again in his arms as she rose and stood beside him, and kissed her tenderly. “Yes, mother. Dear, good, wise mother! I’ll try to remember all. It would have been easier for you, maybe, if ever father’s mother had said to him the things you have just said to me.”

“Life teaches us these things. If we keep an open mind, so God fills it.”

She stood still in the middle of the room, listening to his rapid steps in the direction of the parlor. Then Hester did a thing very unusual for her to do of a Sunday. She put on her shawl and bonnet and walked out to see Mary Ballard.

No one ever knew what passed between Peter Junior and his father in that parlor. The Elder did not open his lips about it either at home or at the bank.

That Sunday evening some one saw Peter Junior and his cousin walking together up the bluff where the old camp had stood, toward the sunset. The path had many windings, and the bluff was dark and brown, and the two figures stood out clear and strong against the sky of gold. That was the last seen of either of the young men in the village. The one who saw them told later that he knew they were “the twins” because one of them walked with a stick and limped a little, and that the other was talking as if he were very much in earnest about something, for he was moving his arm up and down and gesticulating.

CHAPTER XII

MYSTERIOUS FINDINGS

Monday morning Elder Craigmile walked to the bank with the stubborn straightening of the knees at each step that always betokened irritation with him. Neither of the young men had appeared at breakfast, a matter peculiarly annoying to him. Peter Junior he had not expected to see, as, owing to his long period of recovery, he had naturally been excused from rigorous rules, but his nephew surely might have done that much out of courtesy, where he had always been treated as a son, to promote the orderliness of the household. It was unpardonable in the young man to lie abed in the morning thus when a guest in that home. It was a mistake of his wife to allow Peter Junior a night key. It induced late hours. He would take it from him. And as for Richard–there was no telling what habits he had fallen into during these years of wandering. What if he had come home to them with a clear skin and laughing eye! Was not the “heart of man deceitful above all things and desperately wicked”? And was not Satan abroad in the world laying snares for the feet of wandering youths?

It was still early enough for many of the workmen to be on their way to their day of labor with their tin dinner pails, and among them Mr. Walters passed him, swinging his pail with the rest, although he was master of his own foundry and employed fifty men. He had always gone early to work, and carried his tin pail when he was one of the workmen, and he still did it from choice. He, too, was a Scotchman of a slightly different class from the Elder, it is true, but he was a trustee of the church, and a man well respected in the community.

He touched his hat to the Elder, and the Elder nodded in return, but neither spoke a word. Mr. Walters smiled after he was well past. “The man has a touch of the indigestion,” he said.

When the Elder entered his front door at noon, his first glance was at the rack in the corner of the hall, where, on the left-hand hook, Peter Junior’s coat and hat had hung when he was at home, ever since he was a boy. They were not there. The Elder lifted his bushy brows one higher than the other, then drew them down to their usual straight line, and walked on into the dining room. His wife was not there, but in a moment she entered, looking white and perturbed.

“Peter!” she said, going up to her husband instead of taking her place opposite him, “Peter!” She laid a trembling hand on his arm. “I haven’t seen the boys this morning. Their beds have not been slept in.”

“Quiet yourself, lass, quiet yourself. Sit and eat in peace. ‘Evil communications corrupt good manners,’ but when doom strikes him, he’ll maybe experience a change of heart.” The Elder spoke in a tone not unkindly. He seated himself heavily.

Then his wife silently took her place at the table and he bowed his head and repeated the grace to which she had listened three times a day for nearly thirty years, only that this time he added the request that the Lord would, in his “merciful kindness, strike terror to the hearts of all evildoers and turn them from their way.”

When the silent meal was ended, Hester followed her husband to the door and laid a detaining hand on his arm. He stood and looked down on that slender white hand as if it were something that too sudden a movement would joggle off, and she did not know that it was as if she had laid her hand on his very heart. “Peter, tell me what happened yesterday afternoon. You should tell me, Peter.”

Then the Elder did an unwonted thing. He placed his hand over hers and pressed it harder on his arm, and after an instant’s pause he stooped and kissed her on the forehead.

“I spoke the lad fair, Hester, and made him an offer, but he would none of it. He thinks he is his own master, but I have put him in the Lord’s hands.”

“Has he gone, Peter?”

“Maybe, but the offer I made him was a good one. Comfort your heart, lass. If he’s gone, he will return. When the Devil holds the whip, he makes a hard bargain, and drives fast. When the boy is hard pressed, he will be glad to return to his father’s house.”

“Richard’s valise is gone. The maid says he came late yesterday after I was gone, and took it away with him.”

“They are likely gone together.”

“But Peter’s things are all here. No, they would never go like that and not bid me good-by.”

The Elder threw out his hands with his characteristic downward gesture of impatience. “I have no way of knowing, more than you. It is no doubt that Richard has become a ne’er-do-weel. He felt shame to tell us he was going a journey on the Sabbath day.”

“Oh, Peter, I think not. Peter, be just. You know your son was never one to let the Devil drive; he is like yourself, Peter. And as for Richard, Peter Junior would never think so much of him if he were a ne’er-do-weel.”

“Women are foolish and fond. It is their nature, and perhaps that is how we love them most, but the men should rule, for their own good. A man should be master in his own house. When the lad returns, the door is open to him. That is enough.”

With a sorrowful heart he left her, and truth to tell, the sorrow was more for his wife’s hurt than for his own. The one great tenderness of his life was his feeling for her, and this she felt rather than knew; but he believed himself absolutely right and that the hurt was inevitable, and for her was intensified by her weakness and fondness.

As for Hester, she turned away from the door and went quietly about her well-ordered house, directing the maidservant and looking carefully over her husband’s wardrobe. Then she did the same for Peter Junior’s, and at last, taking her basket of mending, she sat in the large, lace-curtained window looking out toward the west–the direction from which Peter Junior would be likely to come. For how long she would sit there during the days to come–waiting–she little knew.

She was comforted by the thought of the talk she had had with him the day before. She knew he was upright, and she felt that this quarrel–if it had been a quarrel–with his father would surely be healed; and then, there was Betty to call him back. The love of a girl was a good thing for a man. It would be stronger to draw him and hold him than love of home or of mother; it was the divine way for humanity, and it was a good way, and she must be patient and wait.

She was glad she had gone without delay to Mary Ballard. The two women were fond of each other, and the visit had been most satisfactory. Betty she had not seen, for the maiden was still sleeping the long, heavy sleep which saves a normal healthy body from wreck after severe emotion. Betty was so young–it might be best that matters should wait awhile as they were.

If Peter Junior went to Paris now, he would have to earn his own way, of course, and possibly he had gone west with Richard where he could earn faster than at home. Maybe that had been the grounds of the quarrel. Surely she would hear from him soon. Perhaps he had taken their talk on Sunday afternoon as a good-by to her; or he might yet come to her and tell her his plans. So she comforted herself in the most wholesome and natural way.

Richard’s action in taking his valise away during her absence and leaving no word of farewell for her was more of a surprise to her. But then–he might have resented the Elder’s attitude and sided with his cousin. Or, he might have feared he would say things he would afterwards regret, if he appeared, and so have taken himself quietly away. Still, these reasons did not wholly appeal to her, and she was filled with misgivings for him even more than for her son.

Peter Junior she trusted absolutely and Richard she loved as a son; but there was much of his father in him, and the Irish nature was erratic and wild, as the Elder said. Where was that father now? No one knew. It was one of the causes for anxiety she had for the boy that his father had been lost to them all ever since Richard’s birth and his wife’s death. He had gone out of their lives as completely as a candle in a gale of wind. She had mothered the boy, and the Elder had always been kind to him for his own dead sister’s sake, but of the father they never spoke.

It was while Hester Craigmile sat in her western window, thinking her thoughts, that two lads came hurrying down the bluff from the old camp ground, breathless and awed. One carried a straw hat, and the other a stout stick–a stick with an irregular knob at the end. It was Larry Kildene’s old blackthorn that Peter Junior had been carrying. The Ballards’ home was on the way between the bluff and the village, and Mary Ballard was standing at their gate watching for the children from school. She wished Jamie to go on an errand for her.

Mary noticed the agitation of the boys. They were John Walters and Charlie Dean–two chums who were always first to be around when there was anything unusual going on, or to be found. It was they who discovered the fire in the foundry in time to have it put out. It was they who knew where the tramps were hiding who had been stealing from the village stores, and now Mary wondered what they had discovered. She left the gate swinging open and walked down to meet them.

“What is it, boys?”

“We–we–found these–and–there’s something happened,” panted the boys, both speaking at once.

She took the hat of white straw from John’s hand. “Why! This is Peter Junior’s hat! Where did you find it?” She turned it about and saw dark red stains, as if it had been grasped by a bloody hand–finger marks of blood plainly imprinted on the rim.

“And this, Mrs. Ballard,” said Charlie, putting Peter Junior’s stick in her hand, and pointing to the same red stains sunken into the knob. “We think there’s been a fight and some one’s been hit with this.”

She took it and looked at it in a dazed way. “Yes. He was carrying this in the place of his crutch,” she said, as if to herself.

“We think somebody’s been pushed over the bluff into the river, Mrs. Ballard, for they’s a hunk been tore out as big as a man, from the edge, and it’s gone clean over, and down into the river. We can see where it is gone. And it’s an awful swift place.”

She handed the articles back to the boys.

“Sit down in the shade here, and I’ll bring you some sweet apples, and if any one comes by, don’t say anything about it until I have time to consult with Mr. Ballard.”

She hurried back and passed quickly around the house, and on to her husband, who was repairing the garden fence.

“Bertrand, come with me quickly. Something serious has happened. I don’t want Betty to hear of it until we know what it is.”

They hastened to the waiting boys, and together they slowly climbed the long path leading to the old camping place. Bertrand carried the stick and the hat carefully, for they were matters of great moment.

“This looks grave,” he said, when the boys had told him their story.

“Perhaps we ought to have brought some one with us–if anything–” said Mary.

“No, no; better wait and see, before making a stir.”

It was a good half hour’s walk up the hill, and every moment of the time seemed heavily freighted with foreboding. They said no more until they reached the spot where the boys had found the edge of the bluff torn away. There, for a space of about two feet only, back from the brink, the sparse grass was trampled, and the earth showed marks of heels and in places the sod was freshly torn up.

“There’s been something happened here, you see,” said Charlie Dean.

“Here is where a foot has been braced to keep from being pushed over; see, Mary? And here again.”

“I see indeed.” Mary looked, and stooping, picked something from the ground that glinted through the loosened earth. She held it on her open palm toward Bertrand, and the two boys looked intently at it. Her husband did not touch it, but glanced quickly into her eyes and then at the boys. Then her fingers closed over it, and taking her handkerchief she tied it in one corner securely.

“Did you ever see anything like it, boys?” she asked.

“No, ma’am. It’s a watch charm, isn’t it? Or what?”

“I suppose it must be.”

“I guess the fellah that was being pushed over must ’a’ grabbed for the other fellah’s watch. Maybe he was trying to rob him.”

“Let’s see whether we can find anything else,” said John Walters, peering over the bluff.

“Don’t, John, don’t. You may fall over. It might have been a fall, and one of them might have been trying to save the other, you know. He might have caught at him and pulled this off. There’s no reason why we should surmise the worst.”

“They might ha’ been playing–you know–wrestling–and it might ’a’ happened so,” said Charlie.

“Naw! They’d been big fools to wrestle so near the edge of the bluff as this,” said the practical John. “I see something white way down there, Mrs. Ballard. I can get it, I guess.”

“But take care, John. Go further round by the path.”

Both boys ran along the bluff until they came to a path that led down to the river. “Do be careful, boys!” called Mary.

“Now, let me see that again, my dear,” and Mary untied the handkerchief. “Yes, it is what I thought. That belonged to Larry Kildene. He got it in India, although he said it was Chinese. He was a year in the British service in India. I’ve often examined it. I should have known it anywhere. He must have left it with Hester for the boy.”

“Poor Larry! And it has come to this. I remember it on Richard’s chain when he came out there to meet us in the grove. Bertrand, what shall we do? They must have been here–and have quarreled–and what has happened! I’m going back to ask Betty.”

“Ask Betty! My dear! What can Betty know about it?”

“Something upset her terribly yesterday morning. She was ill and with no cause that I could see, and I believe she had had a nervous shock.”