“My people came from Salem,” she began, “but that was a long time ago. It was back in the days of Cotton Mather. I was named for my first ancestor—Martha Carrier. When I was a young girl I used to lie in bed and dream about that woman whose name I bear. Once I actually saw her. I do not think it was a dream. She really came into the room and stood beside my bed and there was a pale light all about her. She was a tall dark woman with a secret mouth and she walked like a queen. She leaned over the bed and said something to me but I forget the words if, indeed, I ever heard them. When she bent above me I saw a red stripe about her white neck and knew that she had been hanged. I was frightened at the sight and hid my face in the pillow but not before I heard a mingled sound of voices muttering and shouting and caught a glimpse of shadowy shapes swinging against the moon. I didn’t know, then, what it was all about but I know now. I was to learn all these things in the years that followed while I grew up alone in the valley here. My father died on the day that I was born, Peleg Carrier his name was, and so, of course, I never saw him. My mother died when I was three years old. She was a shadow, something that I cannot catch in my memory, strive as hard as I may. When my father died Jeffrey Westcott appeared in the valley and took charge of everything. He had been a friend to my father in those days when he had been a student in Germany. I was brought up by Jeffrey Westcott. We lived out on the Leeminster Road in an old house very near where the farm is now.”
Her eyes softened and she appeared to be turning back in memory to that house. Dreeme, whose faculties had quickened as her husky voice proceeded with her tale, had automatically drawn his pipe out and was filling it. She said:
“I carry that house about inside me. It was an old rambling structure. It must have been centuries old. My forefathers had lived in it since the first one came into the valley and raised it. It was a house that was full of the Past, full of the essence of times gone. When I wandered through the many rooms and the floors creaked beneath my feet and the shadows leaped out of the yawning closets and the huge stone fireplace. I seemed to be constantly accompanied by shapes in steeple-crowned hats and muffling cloaks. These shapes were always trying to say something to me, to whisper some secret, to tell me, perhaps, of a treasure that was hidden somewhere in the musty recesses of the building. There were so many things in that house, so many reminders of the past, that it was a haunted house. Jeffrey Westcott and myself lived there for thirteen years and it was rarely that we saw anyone. There were not so many people in the valley then and Jeffrey did all the housework until I was old enough to take it over. Until I was thirteen or fourteen years old I was free, free to roam about as I pleased, and I became a wild creature. I loved to wander in the woods and along the bank of the Saccarac River and down the muddy roads. I was never lonely for I seemed to find living spirits in the river, the trees, the few houses. I could sit and converse with these invisible beings. Each season brought me something, a deposit of mystical knowledge. In the winter everything was mantled in white and the trees, covered with a crystal coating of ice, stood like crazy shapes blown out of glass. The wind roared down the valley and the branches rattled and clashed like pendants. The shivering deer trooped along the river bank and there were bears in those days. The thought came to me that the heart of nature was a frozen thing and that the natural state of the earth was cruelty, that only light and heat and fructification meant anything at all. Then the spring would come and the ice on the river would crack, split into whirling sheets, and vanish, and the earth became black again and tiny shoots of pale green would thrust out on the stark branches. There were early flowers and the pale sun would give out a thin warmth. Here, I thought, is the vague beginning of passion, the indomitable urge to live pushing against the ice of Time, the defiant gesture of the earth against itself. After that the full-flushed madness of the summer would descend on the valley and the wide fields would bear their yield and the heat would buzz in the air. August was a feverish madman running through lush grass and waving his fiery torch. This season became to me the end and purpose of being, the complete passion of the sensual earth, the triumphant vindication of self. The earth became a ruddy murderer standing above the pale shadow of itself and sucking its warm passion from its own secret heart. Out of the dead body came forth the living body. And then came autumn wearing a colored blanket striped with red and yellow and brown, walking through the flowers like a proud Indian chief in full headdress of tufted feathers. In his eyes was a gray sadness and there was a mist about his mouth. The smoke from his pipe of peace curled over the valley. He was a tired man stirred by the last embers of passion. This was to me the period of weariness after the full flame of passion had died down.
