“Did you sleep well last night, Mrs. Slater?” inquired Dreeme. This was malice aforethought.
“If you worked as hard as I do you’d sleep well,” she replied. The design on the wallpaper enchanted her.
“Well,” said Dreeme, smiling broadly. “You’d better hurry along and get the boys ready for school. It is later than usual, you know.”
Mrs. Slater walked slowly toward the door, small, plump, a bantam of a woman, her eyes fluttering fiercely. When she reached the threshold she paused and turned back.
“I hope you won’t be late for dinner,” she declared. “There’s corn-beef and new cabbage.”
“I’ll be early, then,” announced Dreeme.
She hovered for a moment with fluttering eyes and then walked out, slapping the door to behind her.
Dreeme smiled happily. He was getting to be quite a denizen of Marlborough himself. He could keep his mouth shut and perhaps, after all, it was a good thing. There was strength in silence. There was an advantage in it, too. It was nobody’s business that he had been called to the Westcott farm and he knew in his soul that the natives were all banded together so far as he was concerned. They would tell him nothing. He was a stranger. Although he might live there for fifty years he would still be a stranger. He could open his heart as generously as he might, still he knew that there would be no reciprocity from Marlborough. Even Mrs. Slater (and his daily presence in her house created a sort of inescapable intimacy) kept her own counsels. He was not on the “inside” with anybody.
Finishing his breakfast he rose to his feet and wandered about the small room in a desultory fashion. There was nothing much to see there except his shelves of books and nothing seemed farther away from him at this moment than books or study. He was too restless to read and yet he could hardly define his restlessness. Something spoke to him in the back of his brain but it spoke with a small muffled voice, and he could not understand the words. Without being conscious of it he was brooding about some tangled mystery and he would have to wait until the secret lifted boldly out of the dark waves of his subconsciousness and he could see it in the bright sunshine of understanding. He sensed something. Like a lean dog with dilated nostrils he was aware of a dim carefully-concealed trail that led into the tenebrous gloom of Marlborough. He would have to go to Humphrey Lathrop, he reflected, and force that ancient intellect to divulge the secrets of the community. Humphrey might not know all, but at least he could indicate the right trail, a trail that could be followed to the very end, and at the end of that trail would not be a pot of gold, perhaps, but assuredly a pot of sulphur. It was true that Humphrey had warned him against curiosity, but there were times when curiosity ceased to be a mere impertinence and translated itself into a malady of the soul that could only be cured by the frankest revelation. Dreeme smiled a bit at putting the thought so solemnly to himself, but there it was, and he was forced to admit that his curiosity was steadily developing into a huge monster that would certainly devour him. It was no longer a titillation of the mind, but an agony of the spirit. He had lived in Marlborough for two years now, and he had rigorously caged this curiosity concerning the community, but he had never killed it. It had been drugged by books and the casual meditations of a New England mind, but it had never been put out of the way entirely. There were moments when it had stirred sluggishly behind its bars, rising slowly to its dark feet and peering out into the light with vague green eyes. Now Dreeme felt the fragile bars being snapped one after the other, and he knew that sooner or later the beast would step forth and either destroy him or be destroyed by him. All this, he imagined, was the result of a loneliness that had not preyed too much upon him at first, but which had been there all the time, gathering strength and biding its time. He had not been satisfied all these quiet months. He had been drugged by his own weariness of spirit. And now, at the touch of a hand, he was awake and conscious of a problem looming before him that seemed as high as the Himalayas.
The touch of a hand! Dreeme had been forcing his mind away from the thought that tugged at him, but now he gave way to it as he picked up his hat and walked out of the house and up the lane toward the old burned mill and the bridge over the Saccarac River. His feet fell pleasantly on the dark soil as he strode along. He had been curious before, but he could date the fierce restlessness of his curiosity to that moment the night before when Mrs. Westcott had pressed against him in the rain and listened to noises that were no noises, after all, in the black clouds. As he walked along the narrow rising street bordered with the unblinking windows of the clapboard houses, his thoughts revolved about the Westcotts. He had seen the surly type of New England farmer,
