“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
