VII
The Rock Again
Then there was silence. Lanark sat his tired roan and gazed at Enid, rather hungrily, but only a segment of his attention was for her. The silence crowded in upon him. His unconscious awareness grew conscious—conscious of that blunt, pure absence of sound. There was no twitter of birds, no hum of insects. Not a breath of wind stirred in the leafless branches of the trees. Not even echoes came from afar. The air was dead, as water is dead in a still, stale pond.
He dismounted then, and the creak of his saddle and the scrape of his boot-sole upon the bald earth came sharp and shocking to his quiet-filled ears. A hitching-rail stood there, old-seeming to be in so new a country as this. Lanark tethered his horse, pausing to touch its nose reassuringly—it, too, felt uneasy in the thick silence. Then he limped up a gravel-faced path and stepped upon a porch that rang to his feet like a great drum.
Enid Mandifer came through the door and closed it behind her. Plainly she did not want him to come inside. She was dressed in brown alpaca, high-necked, long-sleeved, tight above the waist and voluminous below. Otherwise she looked exactly as she had looked when she bade him goodbye beside the ravine, even to the strained, sleepless look that made sorrowful her fine oval face.
“Here I am,” said Lanark. “I promised that I’d come, you remember.”
She was gazing into his eyes, as though she hoped to discover something there. “You came,” she replied, “because you could not rest in another part of the country.”
“That’s right,” he nodded, and smiled, but she did not smile back.
“We are doomed, all of us,” she went on, in a low voice. “Mr. Jager—the big man who was one of your soldiers—”
“I know. He lives not far from here.”
“Yes. He, too, had to return. And I live—here.” She lifted her hands a trifle, in hopeless inclusion of the dreary scene. “I wonder why I do not run away, or why, remaining, I do not go mad. But I do neither.”
“Tell me,” he urged, and touched her elbow. She let him take her arm and lead her from the porch into the yard that was like a surface of tile. The spring sun comforted them, and he knew that it had been cold, so near to the closed front door of Persil Mandifer’s old house.
She moved with him to a little rustic bench under one of the dead trees. Still holding her by the arm, he could feel at the tips of his fingers the shock of her footfalls, as though she trod stiffly. She, in turn, quite evidently was aware of his limp, and felt distress; but, tactfully, she did not inquire about it. When they sat down together, she spoke.
“When I came home that day,” she began, “I made a hunt through all of my stepfather’s desks and cupboards. I found many papers, but nothing that told me of the things that so shocked us both. I did find money, a small chest filled with French and American gold coins. In the evening I called the slaves together and told them that their master and his son were dead.
“Next morning, when I wakened, I found that every slave had run off, except one old woman. She, nearly a hundred years old and very feeble, told me that fear had come to them in the night, and that they had run like rabbits. With them had gone the horses, and all but one cow.”
“They deserted you!” cried Lanark hotly.
“If they truly felt the fear that came here to make its dwelling-place!” Enid Mandifer smiled sadly, as if in forgiveness of the fugitives. “But to resume; the old aunty and I made out here somehow. The war went on, but it seemed far away; and indeed it was far away. We watched the grass die before June, the leaves fall, the beauty of this place vanish.”
“I am wondering about that death of grass and leaves,” put in Lanark. “You connect it, somehow, with the unholiness at Fearful Rock; yet things grow there.”
“Nobody is being punished there,” she reminded succinctly. “Well, we had the chickens and the cow, but no crops would grow. If they had, we needed hands to farm them. Last winter aunty died, too. I buried her myself, in the back yard.”
“With nobody to help you?”
“I found out that nobody cared or dared to help.” Enid said that very slowly, and did not elaborate upon it. “One Negro, who lives down the road a mile, has had some mercy. When I need anything, I carry one of my gold pieces to him. He buys for me, and in a day or so I seek him out and get whatever it is. He keeps the change for his trouble.”
Lanark, who had thought it cold upon the porch of the house, now mopped his brow as though it were a day in August. “You must leave here,” he said.
“I have no place to go,” she replied, “and if I had I would not dare.”
“You would not dare?” he echoed uncomprehendingly.
“I must tell you something else. It is that my stepfather and Larue—his son—are still here.”
“What do you mean? They were killed,” Lanark protested. “I saw them fall. I myself examined their bodies.”
“They were killed, yes. But they are here, perhaps within earshot.”
It was his turn to gaze searchingly into her eyes. He looked for madness, but he found none. She was apparently sane and truthful.
“I do not see them,” she was saying, “or, at most, I see only their sliding shadows in the evening. But I know of them, just around a corner or behind a chair. Have you never known and recognized someone just behind you, before you looked? Sometimes they sneer or smile. Have you,” she asked, “ever felt someone smiling at you, even though you could not see him?”
Lanark knew what she meant. “But stop and think,” he urged, trying to hearten her, “that nothing has happened to you—nothing too dreadful—although so much was promised when you failed to go through with that ceremony.”
She smiled, very thinly. “You think that nothing has happened to me? You do not know the curse of living here, alone and haunted. You do not understand the sense I have of something tightening and thickening about me; tightening and thickening inside of me, too.” Her hand touched her breast, and trembled. “I have said that I have not gone mad. That does not mean that I shall never go mad.”
“Do not be resigned to any such idea,” said Lanark, almost roughly, so earnest was he in trying to win her from the thought.
“Madness may come—in the good time of those who may wish it. My mind will die. And things will feed upon it, as buzzards would feed upon my dead body.”
Her thin smile faded away. Lanark felt his throat growing as dry as lime, and cleared it noisily. Silence was still dense around them. He asked her, quite formally, what she found to do.
“My stepfather had many books, most of them old,” was her answer. “At night I light one lamp—I must husband my oil—and sit well within its circle of light. Nothing ever comes into that circle. And I read books. Every night I read also a chapter from a Bible that belonged to my old aunty. When I sleep, I hold that Bible against my heart.”
He rose nervously, and she rose with him. “Must you go so soon?” she asked, like a courteous hostess.
Lanark bit his mustache. “Enid Mandifer, come out of here with me.”
“I can’t.”
“You can. You shall. My horse will carry both of us.”
She shook her head, and the smile was back, sad and tender this time. “Perhaps you cannot understand, and I know that I cannot tell you. But if I stay here, the evil stays here with me. If I go, it will follow and infect the world. Go away alone.”
She meant it, and he did not know what to say or do.
“I shall go,” he agreed finally, with an air of bafflement, “but I shall be back.”
Suddenly he kissed her. Then he turned and limped rapidly away, raging at the feeling of defeat that had him by the back of the neck. Then, as he reached his horse he found himself glad to be leaving the spot, even though Enid Mandifer remained behind, alone. He cursed with a vehemence that made the roan flinch, untied the halter and mounted. Away he rode, to the magnified clatter of hoofs. He looked back, not once but several times. Each time he saw Enid Mandifer, smaller and smaller, standing beside the bench under the naked tree. She was gazing, not along the road after him, but at the spot where he had mounted his horse. It was as though he had vanished from her sight at that point.
Lanark damned himself as one who retreated before an enemy, but he felt that it was not as simple as that. Helplessness, not fear, had routed him. He was leaving Enid Mandifer, but again he promised in his heart to return.
Somewhere along the weed-teemed road, the silence fell from him like a heavy garment slipping away, and the world hummed and sighed again.
After some time he drew rein and fumbled in his saddlebag. He had lied to Jager about his late breakfast, and now he was grown hungry. His fingers touched and drew out two hardtacks—they were plentiful and cheap, so recently was the war finished and the army demobilized—and a bit of raw bacon. He sandwiched the streaky smoked flesh between the big square crackers and ate without dismounting. Often, he considered, he had been content with worse fare. Then his thoughts went to the place he had quitted, the girl he had left there. Finally he skimmed the horizon with his eye.
To north and east he saw the spire of Fearful Rock, like a dark threatening finger lifted against him. The challenge of it was too much to ignore.
He turned his horse off the road and headed in that direction. It was a longer journey than he had thought, perhaps because he had to ride slowly through some dark swamp-ground with a smell of rotten grass about it. When he came near enough, he slanted his course to the east, and so came to the point from which he first approached the rock and the house that had then stood in its shadow.
A crow flapped overhead, cawing lonesomely. Lanark’s horse seemed to falter in its stride, as though it had seen a snake on the path, and he had to spur it along toward its destination. He could make out the inequalities of the rock, as clearly as though they had been sketched in with a pen, and the new spring greenery of the brush and trees in the gulley beyond to the westward; but the tumbledown ruins of the house were somehow blurred, as though a gray mist or cloud hung there.
Lanark wished that his old command rode with him, at least that he had coaxed Jager along; but he was close to the spot now, and would go in, however uneasily, for a closer look.
The roan stopped suddenly, and Lanark’s spur made it sidle without advancing. He scolded it in an undertone, slid out of the saddle and threaded his left arm through the reins. Pulling the beast along, he limped toward the spot where the house had once stood.
The sun seemed to be going down.