The dark fantastic (10 page)

Mr. Jameson purposed to speak to Will Tomlinson after church, but before he could reach him the young man was out of the building. When the minister finally made his handshaking way to the door, only the schoolteacher was in sight. She had come back for a reticule left in the pew.

"Miss Amory—if you please—just a moment "

"Oh, good morning, Mr. Jameson. You'll pardon my haste. The others are waiting for me in the surrey."

"I wanted to inquire about Miss Abigail. How is she?"

"Too ill to come out this morning, Mr. Jameson."

"Is it anything serious?"

For a moment the minister saw—or fancied he saw—a look of guilt in the young woman's eyes. And then it was gone and her gaze was clear and candid.

"We hope not, Mr. Jameson, though we're all worried about her."

He expressed his sympathy and concern and said that he would be out to see her. Miss Amory thanked him and said that she was sure a visit from her pastor would do Mrs. Tomlinson good.

The minister watched with curious interest the trim figure of the schoolmistress as she crossed the church lawn and climbed into the Tomlinson buggy. There was an odd exuberance in her walk, a touch of proprietorship in the way she took her place on the back seat with Richard's children. The little girl who was the subject of all this controversy was on the front seat with young Will.

And then Mr. Jameson realized that other people were waiting to shake his hand. He was forced to put the Tomlinsons out of his mind.

CHAPTER 8

The Christmas season was upon them. Under ordinary circumstances the house would have been filled with company and much time and thought devoted to the festivities for which Timberley was noted. But this year there were neither guests nor merrymakings.

Judith, with the help of young Will, arranged a tree at the schoolhouse to which all the neighborhood flocked, bringing gifts for each other to hang upon its branches. There was also a larger tree at the church in Woodridge on Christmas night. Again it was Judith and Will Tomlinson, in company with the Turners and Mitchells, who took the children to see Santa Claus. He came in through the basement (on account of the stovepipe) and bore a remarkable resemblance to Jesse Moffat.

But at Timberley there was neither tree nor Santa Claus. There was only the abundant feast-day dinner, for which the weary, sorely tried family had little appetite and of which Abigail refused to partake.

From the moment of her alarm on that fateful Friday evening she had failed rapidly. For Richard still refused to send

Thorne away. And Judith continued to support him in the stand he was taking.

"If you give in to her now you will be a slave for the rest of your life. There is no tyranny like that of the chronic invalid. When your wife realizes you can't be coerced she'll begin eating again and get well."

"You don't think she's in any real danger?" He asked this question repeatedly. Judith always reassured him.

Once he told her, "I feel as if you were the only friend I had left."

His entire family—mother, brother, sisters, and brothers-in-law—were beginning to urge him to get rid of the child who seemed, by some strange alchemy, to be responsible for his wife's condition. Judith alone upheld him in his determination.

"I don't know what I'd do without you," he said.

These were precious days to Judith. In a house where gloom and anxiety darkened every face, where laughter was hushed because a woman lay wasting away, the lonely schoolteacher lived in a world of secret happiness. Heretofore Richard Tomlinson had turned, in all the trials of his hfe, to his mother. Now he turned to a woman he barely knew.

If Ann Tomlinson felt any resentment, she did not show it. She was too generous to feel jealousy, too honestly concerned for her son to add to his distress by any word of her ovm. She did not understand her daughter-in-law's condition. She accepted the doctor's diagnosis that there was nothing physically wrong with Abigail. But Miss Ann had seen too many people die not to recognize the face of death afar off.

She appealed, in her usual direct manner, to Judith.

"I know you're doing what you think is right. Miss Judith, in befriending a homeless child."

Judith had taken Thorne into her own room since the night she had talked with Richard.

"None of us has any feeling against the girl," Miss Ann went on, "nor do we begrudge her a home. But under the circumstances, she ought not to be here. You're making it difficult for the rest of us."

"I'm only doing what Mr. Richard asked me to," said Judith.

His mother replied, "But he doesn't understand that his wife is dying. You and I do."

The two women looked at each other in silence. Then the eyes of the younger woman fell.

All this time Abigail lay upon her bed, refusing to eat, growing thinner day by day, until it seemed that nothing but the clawlike hands and burning eyes and dark red braids of hair remained of the wasted body under the bed quilts. She was proud of her quilts, some of which were made entirely of silk and satin pieces hoarded for years. They were usually kept in a big oak chest with some of her family heirlooms. But now she had them all brought out and piled upon her bed because she complained of being cold. There was a fire in the room day and night, but the snows of January were now piled thick upon the window ledges, and her starved body was always cold.

The January snows thawed under the first pale suns of February. The false spring froze in the icy blasts of March. But Abigail never rose from her bed after the night Thorne made the cucumber cow.

Some of the family sat in her room all the time. They took turns sitting with Abigail. All except Thorne. Great care was taken that Thorne's face was never glimpsed by the woman lying in the tall oak bed. Thorne was forbidden to pass by the windows on that side of the house. She was made to go round by the road when returning from school, instead of taking the short cut through the lane. Her name was never mentioned. Her presence in the house was tacitly ignored.

But Abigail knew she was there.

Day after day, to each member of the family, she put the question: "She's still here, isn't she?"

Being Tomlinsons, they did not lie. "The child is not bothering you, Abigail. She keeps out of your way."

"She doesn't have to see me to kill me. All she needs do is torture that doll. If she isn't doing things to that doll, why won't she tell you where it is?"

The disappearance of the doll was a mystery. Thorne insisted that she had never seen it since the evening she brought it to Rodgie. The little boys were questioned. A thorough search of the house failed to produce it. But Abigail's imagination licked ceaselessly at the doll as a dog's tongue licks at a sore.

She had other company besides the family: neighbors from the countryside, members of the church where she had once been an active leader, and the minister, Mr. Jameson. As time went on she took a morbid pleasure in having visitors, for to all who came she talked about the doll and how she was dying from witchcraft as Henry Schook's cow had died. It was very embarrassing to the family.

Henry Schook himself came one afternoon, a tall gaunt scarecrow of a man, clean-brushed as though for Sunday, and with him his lean work-worn wife, wearing her best bonnet. The Schooks had had nothing but ill luck since coming into the state, and the loss of their cow was a serious calamity. Privately they were ready to believe that not only Flossie but their whole enterprise was bewatched. But they had heard of Abigail's strange obsession and they had come out of the kindness of their hearts to explain that their cow had undoubtedly eaten poisonweed before coming to the Timberley pasture.

"We lost three cows from it before putting Flossie on your land. Miss Abigail," said Henry Schook. "I said to Marthy then, 'Maybe we can save Flossie.' And she said, Trovided she ain't already got the weed in her belly.' Those were her very words. Weren't they, Marthy?"

"I said stomach," corrected his spouse. "But the cow had weed sickness on her. That I am sure."

Abigail fixed her hollow eyes on the well-meaning pair and demanded, "How much did my husband pay you for coming over here and telling me this tale?"

The Schooks were hurt and embarrassed. They took their departure soon after.

The minister happened to be calling that same afternoon. He had been a witness of the Schooks' kindly effort and dismal failure to relieve Abigail's fear. He appeared to be unmoved by either. He sat silent throughout, watching the schoolteacher, who had brought her work downstairs and was grading papers at a small table near the window.

When the other visitors had gone Mr. Jameson said, "I wonder whatever became of that doll Mrs. Tomlinson seems so distressed about?"

The schoolmistress, apparently absorbed in her task, started nervously and dropped a sheaf of papers.

Then she answered coolly enough, "I'm sure I don't know, Mr. Jameson," and went on with her work.

But the minister had surprised a look in her eyes he had seen there once before.

Abigail had days when her flickering strength revived and she would ask to be propped up in bed and given her piecework. This was her favorite employment and consisted in cutting out quilt pieces with a pair of very sharp scissors. She found the same enjoyment in slicing odd shapes from a scrap of cloth that a child finds in cutting out paper dolls. She liked to display her skill in this handiwork to Judith.

The schoolteacher was still her choice of companions. She no longer looked upon her as an ally against Thorne, for nothing escaped her eyes and ears, and she knew that Judith was upholding Richard in his stand. But she derived a perverse satisfaction from discussing with the schoolmistress the inevitability of her own death.

"I'm dying. You know I'm dying," she would say, grimly

triumphant, almost as though she were wilhng to die to prove her point. "I'm worse than I was yesterday. You can't deny it."

Judith would answer dogmatically, "If you persist in thinking you are worse you create conditions for it. Have you forgotten what I read to you yesterday?"

With Richard's permission she was reading to Abigail from the books in her father's trunk, in the hope that the invalid might be made to understand the power of mental suggestion.

"You read me the book on black magic yesterday."

"To show you how the victim's mind can trick him into anything."

"Do you think my mind can trick me into thinking I'm choking?"

This choking sensation was Abigail's latest symptom. It dated from one afternoon when Judith had described rather vividly the sufferings of a woman she had once known who was dying of a malignant throat ailment.

"Certainly your mind can trick you. There's nothing wrong with your throat."

"I'm having the same symptoms that woman had."

"Of course you are. I tried that story out on you just to see how impressionable you were. This proves it's all in your mind. Because you never had those symptoms until I told you how that woman complained of a sensation like a string around her throat choking her to death."

Abigail's eyes grew cunning. "I'll bet if we could find that doll we'd find a string tied round its neck so tight it's choking me.

Judith said, "That's just another symptom of hysteria," and smiled almost complacently.

"You think I'm crazy," said Abigail, "but you'll see. Wait till she begins practicing her tricks on you."

When her listener refused to snap at this bait she went on:

"You're befriending her because you want to please Richard. But the time will come when you'll hate her—just as I do."

A sharp slash of the scissors punctuated every phrase. "Then you'll try to get rid of her—as I did. And she'll put a hex on you. You'll begin choking and dying, just as I'm choking and dying, because she won't let you breathe."

The failing voice was indescribably eerie. Judith said firmly, "I'm not going to read to you any more," and she talked persistently of cheerful things.

But at night, in her bed, she would remember the words of the dying woman and she would be acutely conscious of the little girl sleeping beside her. It was a huge bed; the feather mattress made billowy hills between the two sleepers, so that neither touched the other. Yet she found it increasingly difficult to sleep because of Thorne's presence in the bed.

This was due to her lifelong habit of sleeping alone, undoubtedly. It was in no wise the result of Abigail's direful croakings. But she began wishing some circumstance might arise to relieve her of her strange bedfellow.

It came one night unexpectedly.

The children were in the habit of undressing by the downstairs fire because the upper rooms were unheated. One night when the two little boys had already scampered upstairs with their grandmother, Richard came from the sickroom to find Thorne, in her flannel nightgown, huddled on the living-room hearth. When he told her she'd better get to bed before she caught cold she surprised him by asking if she could sleep downstairs in the trundle bed.

"Why do you want to sleep down here. Cricket?"

She had always complained that the trundle bed was too short for her.

But when urged to give a reason for changing, she said she'd rather sleep on the floor than spend another night with Miss Judith.

"Wliy, Thorne! Aren't you ashamed?" Richard was so astonished that he was rather short with her. "When Miss Judith has been so kind to you!"

''It's not me, Richard. It's her. She doesn't like sleeping with me."

"Did she say so?"

"No. But I can tell."

Richard sighed. He was very tired. "You're entirely too sensitive, Thorne, Miss Judith is the only friend you have in this house."

Thorne's eyes flashed through sudden tears. "She's not my friend. You are. I don't want any friend but you."

Richard, worn to a thin edge, spoke sharply. "If it hadn't been for Miss Judith you'd have been shipped out of here by now. Why should she take your part if she disliked you?"

Ann Tomlinson had come back downstairs. She had heard the colloquy by the fire. She heard her son's question and Thorne's retort, flung back with a childish sob: