THE tramp, who was, as you have seen, not without some small means to make himself respected, paused for a moment in front of the tavern before deciding what direction he would take. Then he went east, or, to make matters clearer to my reader, followed the direction young Polly Earle had taken an hour or so before.
Being bent and old he walked slowly, but as the tavern from which he had emerged was near the end of the street, it was not long before he came upon the big church at the corner, beyond which was the open country and circling highroad.
“They spoke of a graveyard,” murmured he, pausing and gazing about him with eyes which seemed to have lost none of their penetration, however bent his figure or aged his face. “Ah! I think I see it!” And he rambled on in the darkness till he came to a picket fence. But this fence enclosed a dwelling-house, whose large and imposing bulk rose in deepest shadow beyond him, and he had to walk several rods farther before he came to the spot of glimmering headstones and drooping willows. A faint moon lent a ghostly light to the place, and as he stopped and bent his head over the intervening wall, weird glimpses were given him of snowy shafts and rounded hillocks, which may have accounted for the length of time he clung there without movement or sound.
But finally the dog whining at his heels, or the gleam of a light shining in the distance, recalled him to himself, and he moved, taking the direction of that light, though it led him over the cemetery wall and across such of the graves as lay along the border of the yard adjoining the large house of which I have previously spoken. The dog, who had not left him a moment since he joined him at the cave, shrank as he climbed the wall, and the old man took his course alone, treading as softly as he could, but yet making some noise as a broken twig snapped under his foot or he pressed down some tiny aspiring bush in his rude advance.
He was making for the light which shone from the window near the ground in the huge side of the great and otherwise unilluminated house he had passed a few minutes before. He had expected to be met by a fence like the one in front, but to his surprise he soon saw that the graveyard pressed close up to the house, and that there was a monument not ten yards from the very window he was approaching. He had paused at this monument, and was vainly trying to read the inscription which was cut deeply into the side turned toward the moon, when he heard a sudden sound, and, looking toward the house, saw that a door had opened in the blank side of the wall, and that the light had shifted from the window to this open square, where it was held high above the head of a remarkable looking man who was looking directly his way.
Convinced that this was Dr. Izard, he held his breath, and slunk as much into the shadow of the shaft as possible. Meanwhile he stared at the picture presented to his notice, and noted every outline of the noble head and small but finely proportioned form, that filled the illuminated gap before him. The face he could not see, but the attitude was eloquent, and conveyed so vividly an expression of strained listening and agitated doubt, that this by no means careless observer felt that his step had been heard, and that something more than common curiosity had drawn the doctor to the spot.
A sudden sense of his position among the graves, or the chill imparted by his close contact with the stone shaft against which he had flung himself, made the aged wanderer shiver, but his emotion, however occasioned, did not last long, for with a sigh that could be plainly heard across the short space, Dr. Izard withdrew his head and closed the door, leaving nothing to be seen in the dim blackness of the houseside but the one square of light which had previously attracted the stranger’s attention.
With careful step and bated breath, the latter left the tomb by which he had sought refuge, and advanced to this same wall, along which he crept till he reached this uncurtained window. A glimpse of the interior was what he wanted, but, as he stopped to listen, he found that he was likely to obtain more than this, for plainly to be heard in the almost death-like quiet, came the sound of two voices conversing, and he knew, perhaps by instinct, perhaps by ready reasoning, that they were the voices of the doctor and the pretty new heiress, Polly Earle.
To listen might have been a temptation to any man, but to this one it was almost a necessity. His first desire, however, was to see what was before him, and so, with more skill than one would expect, he bent a branch of the vine swaying about him, and, from behind its cover, peered into the shining panes that opened so invitingly beside him.
The first thing he saw was the room with its shelves upon shelves of books, piled high to the ceiling. As it answered the triple purpose of doctor’s office, student’s study, and a misanthrope’s cell, it naturally presented an anomalous appearance, which was anything but attractive at first sight. Afterward, certain details stood out, and it became apparent that those curious dangling things which disfigured the upper portion of the room belonged entirely to the medical side of the occupant’s calling, while the mixture of articles on the walls, some beautiful, but many of them grotesque if not repellant, bespoke the man of taste whose nature has been warped by solitude. A large door painted green filled up a considerable space of the wall on the left, but judging from the two heavy bars padlocked across it, it no longer served as a means of communication with the other parts of the house. On the contrary it had been fitted from top to bottom with shelves, upon which were ranged a doctor’s usual collection of phials, boxes, and surgical appliances, with here and there a Chinese image or an Indian god. A rude settle showed where he slept at night, and on the table in the middle of the room, a most incongruous litter of books, trinkets, medicines, clothing, sewing materials, and chemical apparatus proclaimed the fact, well known in the village, that no woman ever set foot in the place, save such as came for medical advice or on some such errand as had drawn hither the pretty Polly.
At the table and in full view of the peering intruder sat the genius of the place, Dr. Izard. His back was to the window and he was looking up at Polly, who stood near, twirling as usual her sunbonnet round her dainty forefinger. It was his profile, therefore, which the curious wayfarer saw, but this profile was so fine and yet so characteristic that it immediately imprinted itself upon the memory like a silhouette and the observer felt that he had known it always. Yet it was not till one had been acquainted with the doctor long that all the traits of his extraordinary countenance became apparent. Its intelligence, its sadness, its reserve and the beauty which gave to all these qualities a strange charm which was rather awe-inspiring than pleasurable, struck the mind at once, but it was not till after months of intercourse that one saw that the spell he invariably created about him was not due to these obvious qualities but to something more subtle and enigmatic, something which flashed out in his face at odd times or fell from his voice under the strain of some unusual emotion, which while it neither satisfied the eye nor the ear, created such a halo of individuality about the man that dread became terror or admiration became worship according to the mental bias of the person observant of him.
In age he was nearer fifty than forty, and in color dark rather than light. But no one ever spoke of him as young or old, light or dark. He was simply Dr. Izard, the pride and the dread of the village, the central point of its intellectual life, on whose eccentricities judgment was suspended because through him fame had come to the village and its humble name been carried far and wide.
Polly, who feared nobody, but who had for this man, as her rather unwilling benefactor, a wholesome respect, was looking down when the stranger first saw her. The smile which was never long absent from her lips lingered yet in the depths of the dimple that was turned toward the doctor, but the rest of her face showed emotion and a hint of seriousness which was by no means unbecoming to her poetic features.
“You are very good,” she was saying. “I have often wondered why you were so good to such a little flyaway as I am. But I shall surely remember all you have said and follow your advice as nearly as possible.”
There was unexpected coldness in the doctor’s reply:
“I have advised nothing but what any friend of yours must subscribe to. The woman with whom you are staying is a good woman, but the home she can give you is no longer suitable for a girl who has come, as you say you have, into possession of considerable property. You must find another; and since the house over our heads is a good one, I have ventured to offer it to you for a sum which your man of business certainly will not regard as high, considering its advantages of size and location.”
“By location do you mean its close proximity to the graveyard?” she inquired, with a na?ve inclination of her coquettish head. “I should say, myself, though I never fear anything, that its location is against it.”
His eye, which had wandered from hers, came back with a stern intentness.
“Since I have lived here for twenty years with no other outlook than the graves you see, I cannot be said to be a good judge of the matter. To me the spot has become a necessity, and if you should make the arrangement I suggest, it must be with the understanding that this room is to be reserved for my use as long as I live, for I could never draw a free breath elsewhere.”
“Nor would anyone wish you to,” said she. “This solitary room, with its dangling skulls and queer old images, its secrecy and darkness, and the graves pressing up almost to your window, seems a part of Dr. Izard. I could not imagine you in a trim office with a gig at the door and a man to drive it. No, it would rob us of half our faith in you, to see you enjoying life like other folks. You must stay here if only because my mother, lying over there in her solitary grave, would be lonely were your face to fail to appear every night and morning in your open doorway.”
Her hand, which had paused in its restless action, pointed over her shoulder to the silent yard without. The physician’s eye followed it, and the words of reproof died upon his tongue.
“You think me frivolous,” she cried. “Well, so I am, at times. But you make me think; and if this sudden accession to fortune fills me with excitement and delight, the sight of you sitting here, and the nearness of my mother’s tomb, gives me some sober thoughts too, and—and—Dr. Izard, will you tell me one thing? Why do people stare when they hear the exact amount of the money left me? It is not because it is so large; for some say it is anything but a large fortune. Is it—” she hesitated a little, probably because it was always hard to talk to Dr. Izard—“for the reason that it is so near the sum my father was said to have carried away with him, when he left me so suddenly?”
The wind was fluttering the vines, and the doctor turned his head to look that way. When he glanced back he answered quietly, but with no irritation in his voice:
“It is hard to tell what causes the stare of ignorant people. What was the amount which has been left you? I do not think you have mentioned the exact figure.”
“Twenty thousand dollars,” she whispered. “Isn’t it splendid,—a lordly fortune, for such a poor girl as I am?”
“Yes,” he acquiesced, “yes.” But he seemed struck just as others had been who heard it.
“And was not that just what was paid papa by the French government just before mamma died?”
“I have heard it so said,” was the short reply.
“And don’t you know?” she asked.
The pout on her lips bespoke the spoiled child, but her little hands were trembling, and he seemed to see only that.
“Polly,”—he spoke harshly, for he did not like young girls, or women at all for that matter,—“I knew many things which I have let slip from my memory. When your father and I were young we were more or less intimate, being both of us students and ambitious of doing something worth while in this world. But after his disappearance and the unfortunate surmises to which it gave rise, I made a business of forgetting any confidential communications with which he may have entrusted me, and I advise you not to stir up old griefs by driving me to recall them now.”
“But you were my mother’s physician and saw my father just before he went away.”
“Yes.”
“And did he have twenty thousand dollars in money? They say so, but it seems incredible to me, who only remember my father as looking worried and poor.”
“Twenty thousand dollars was paid him two weeks before your mother died.”
“And he carried all that away with him and never left a dollar to his little motherless child? Oh, I know that some people say he was foully dealt with and that it was not of his own free will that he left me to the mercies of the town. But I never believed that. I have always thought of him as alive, and many is the night I have waked up crying—Oh, I can cry at night and in the darkness, if I do laugh all day when the sun shines—because I dreamt he was enjoying himself in foreign lands while I—” she stopped, looking inquiringly at Dr. Izard, and he, startled, looked inquiringly at her, then for the second time he rose up, and taking the light, went out to search up and down the ghostly waste before him, for what he rather felt than knew was near.
“Oh, how late it is getting!” cried the little maiden, peering over his shoulder. “Did you think you heard someone sigh? I thought I did, but who would come creeping up to this spot? Do you know,” she exclaimed, drawing him in just as he was about to turn his attention to the side of the house against which they stood, “that I believe it’s that horrid green door which gives people the shivers when they come here. Why is it there and what is on the other side of it that you bar it up like that?”
The doctor, lifting his abstracted gaze, stared at the door for a moment, then turned moodily away. “It was the old way of going upstairs,” he remarked. “Why shouldn’t I bar it, since I have no further use for the rest of the house?”
“But its color,” she persisted; “why do you not paint it white?”
“When I fit up my den for a bride, then I will,” he retorted, and the audacious little thing became dumb on this subject, though she showed no inclination for dropping the other.
“Dear Dr. Izard,” she pursued, “I know I ought to be going home, but I have something more to ask, and it isn’t always that you allow me to speak to you. Our house—you know what I mean, my father’s and mother’s house,—is it really haunted, and is that why it is shut up, even from me?”
“Do you want to go into it, Polly?”
“No—and yet I have sometimes thought I should like to. It must be full of relics of my parents, and if it has not been disturbed since my father went away, why, I might almost see the prints of his feet on the floors, and the pressure of his form in the old lounges and chairs.”
“You are too imaginative!” cried the doctor. “They will have to marry you to some practical man.”
She flushed, drew back and seemed on the point of uttering some violent protest or indignant reproach, but instead of that she returned to the original topic.
“I should like to hear from your lips, which never exaggerate or add the least bit of romance to anything you say, just the story of my father’s departure and that sudden shutting up of the house. I think I ought to know now that I am a grown woman and have money of my own.”
“Will you go, after I have told you all that there is to know?” he asked, with just a touch of impatience in his naturally severe tone.
“Yes,” she laughed, irresistibly moved by his appearance of ill-nature. “I won’t stay one minute longer than you wish me to. Only,” she added, with the sobriety more in accordance with the theme they were discussing, “do make the whole thing clear to me. I have heard so many stories and all of them so queer.”
He frowned, and his face underwent an indescribable change.
“You are a silly slip of a girl and I have a mind to turn you out of the house at once. But,” and his eyes wandered away to his books, “your curiosity is legitimate and shall be satisfied. Only not here,” he suddenly cried, “I will tell you as we walk toward your home.”
“Or in the graveyard outside,” she murmured. “I am not afraid of the place with you near me. Indeed, I think I should like to hear my mother’s story, standing by her tomb.”
“You would!” The doctor, astonished, agitated almost, by this untoward sentiment uttered by lips he had only seen parted in laughter, rose, and leaning on the table looked over it at her, with eyes whose effect only was visible to the straining pair without. “Well, you shall have your wish. I will tell you her story, that is, as much as I know of it, standing by her grave without.” And with a grim smile, he took up his hat and stepped quickly before her toward the door. She followed him, with an eager gesture, and in a minute their two shadows could be dimly seen in the moonlight falling over the face of that very shaft behind which the stranger had taken refuge an hour or so before. The vines that swayed about the window ceased their restless rustling and seemed to cling with heavier shadow than usual to the dismal wall.
“Your father,” said the doctor, “was a man of one idea, but that idea was a valuable one and it paid its projector well. The invention which he conceived, perfected, and made practical, was an important one, suited to large governmental undertakings and meeting the wants of France especially. It was bought, as I have said, from your father for the sum of twenty thousand dollars. But this good fortune, while deserved, had not come early, and your mother, who had been overburdened in her youth, was on her deathbed when the favorable news came. It comforted her, but it almost maddened your father, if I may judge from the frenzied expressions he used in my hearing. He did not touch the money, and when she died he locked himself up in a room, from which he only emerged to attend her funeral. This I tell you that you may see that his paternal instinct was not as great as his conjugal one, or he would not have forgotten you in his grief. Did you speak?”
“No, no; but it is gloomy here, after all; let us go on into the highway.”
But the man clinging to the wall was not forced to move. The doctor did not heed her entreaty, or if he did he ignored it, for his voice went coldly and impassively on: “The night after your mother was buried, your father was seen looking from one of the windows of his house. The next morning he was missing. That is all I can tell you, Polly. No one knows any more than that.”
“But wasn’t there somebody in the house besides himself? Where was I?”
“Oh, you were there, and an old woman who had been looking after you in your mother’s illness. But you were too young to realize anything, and the woman—she has since died—had nothing to say, but that she was sure she heard your father go out.”
“And the money?”
“Went with him.”
“Oh, I have heard it all before,” came after a moment’s silence, in sharp and plaintive tones. “But I was in hopes you could tell me something different, something new. Did they look for my father as I would have done had I been old enough to understand?”
“I headed the search myself, Polly; and later the police from Boston came down, and went through the town thoroughly. But they met with no results.”
“And now a stranger leaves me twenty thousand dollars! Dr. Izard, I should like to know something about that stranger. He died in the Chicago Hospital, I am told.”
“I will make inquiries.”
“If—if he had anything to do with my father’s disappearance——”
“You will never know it; the man is dead.”
A silence followed these few words, during which the agitated breathing of the young girl could be heard. Then her quivering voice rose in the impatient cry: “Yes, yes; but it would be such a relief to know the truth. As it is, I am always thinking that each stranger I see coming into town is he. Not that it makes me timid or melancholy; nothing could do that, I think; but still I’m not quite happy, nor can this money make me so while any doubts remain as to my father’s fate.”
“I cannot help you,” the doctor declared. “For fourteen years you have borne your burden, little one, and time should have taught you patience. If I were in a position like yours I would not allow old griefs to fret me. I should consider that a man who had been missing most of my lifetime was either dead or so indifferent that I ran but little chance of seeing him again. I myself do not think there is the least likelihood of your ever doing so. Why then not be happy?”
“Well, I will,” she sighed. “I’m sure it’s not my nature to be otherwise. But something either in these dismal trees, or in yourself or in myself makes me almost gloomy to-night. I feel as if a cloud, hung over me. Am I very foolish, doctor, and will you be taking me back to the office to give me a dose of some bitter, black stuff to drive away the horrors? I had rather you would give me a fatherly word. I’m so alone in the world, for all my friends.”
He may have answered this appeal by some touch or sympathetic move, but if he did, the listener was not near enough to catch it. There was a rustling where they stood and in another instant the bare head of the young girl was visible again in the moonlight.
“I think I will be going home,” said she, and turned towards the gateway. The doctor followed her and together they left the cemetery and entered the high-road. When the sound of their voices had died away in the distance, a deep and heavy shadow separated itself from the side of the house near the window and resolving itself again into the image of the man through whose ears we have listened to the broken dialogue we have endeavored to transcribe, took up its stand before the still lighted window and for several minutes studied the peculiar interior most diligently. Then it drew off, and sliding down the path which followed the side of the house, emerged upon the road and took its own course to the village.
Something which he did not see and something which he did not hear, took place at the other end of the town before a cheerfully lighted mansion. Dr. Izard and Polly had traversed the length of the street, and had nearly reached the cottage in which she was at present living, when the former felt the little hand now thrust confidingly into his arm, flutter and shift a trifle. As the girl had regained her spirits and was now chatting in quite a merry way upon indifferent topics, he looked up to see what it was that had affected her, and saw nothing save the lights of the Unwin place and a figure which must have been that of young Unwin sitting on the shadowy veranda. As he had reasons of his own for not liking to pass this house, he stopped and glanced at the young girl inquiringly. She had ceased speaking and her head was hanging so low that the curls dropped against her cheek, hiding her eyes and the expression of her mouth.
“I think,” she whispered, “if you don’t mind, that I will walk on the other side of you. It is very late for me to be out, even with you, and Clarke——”
The doctor, drawing in his breath, turned his full face on her and stood so long gazing into her drooping countenance that she felt frightened and attempted to move on. Instantly he responded to her wish and they passed the house with quick and agitated steps, but when the shadows of the next block had absorbed them, they both paused as it were simultaneously, and the doctor said with something more than his usual feeling in his thin, fine voice, “Do you care for Clarke Unwin, little one?”
Her answer struck him.
“Do I care for breath, for life? He has been both to me ever since I could remember anything. And now he cares for me.”
The doctor, lost in some overwhelming dream or thought, did not answer her for several minutes. Then he suddenly lifted her face by its dainty chin, and in a deep, controlled tone, totally different from the one he had used a short time before, he solemnly remarked:
“For fourteen years I have taken an interest in you and done for you what I have done for nobody else in the town. I hope that my care has made a good girl of you, and that under all your fanciful ways and merry antics there hides a true woman’s heart.”
“I don’t know,” she whispered. “I know that I would rather give up my fortune than one little memory connected with these last three weeks.”
“And he—he loves you? You are sure of it, little one?”
The lift of her head was eloquent; the doctor wished he could see her face, but the darkness was too thick for that.
“May Heaven bless you!” faltered on his tongue; but the words were too unusual to the ascetic’s cold lips for them to pass into speech, and the girl thought his manner more distant and unsympathetic than common.
“It is a secret I have told you,” she murmured, and being then within a few steps of her own gate, she slid from his grasp and vanished in the darkness.
He, with a sigh that seemed to rend the icy bonds which years of repression had bound about his breast, remained for a moment with his head bent, gazing on the ground at his feet. Then he drew himself up, and passed quickly back over the road he had come.