The dark fantastic (29 page)

"And we believe you," said Richard. "No one accuses you."

"Except Judith," said Thorne.

"Judith is ill. When she's well again she'll be your friend, just as she's always been."

She looked at him strangely, as though seeking to learn whether he believed his own words.  He flushed and said hurriedly that she'd better be getting to bed. But his eyes followed her as she left the room. And he was no more aware of what he had revealed to Dr. Caxton than he was of the depth of devotion which she aroused in him.

He said, as though dismissing the whole matter, "Judith suffers from too much imagination. She's been bothered with her old throat trouble lately—I think she had another of those paroxysms—and, being already keyed up, fainted from sheer fright."

The doctor said, "Has it struck you, Richard, that she's having the same symptoms that Abigail had? When I saw her tonight I got a shock, she looked so damned much like your first wife."

Richard nodded gloomily. He, too, had noted the queer similarity.

"It's a plain case of hysteria," the doctor went on. ''She probably feels guilty about marrying you so soon after Abigail's death. I'd say the best treatment she could have would be—ahem!—a little more affection on your part."

When Richard went into his wife's room shortly before noon the next day he found her sitting in front of the dresser combing her hair. She greeted him normally.

"Why didn't you wake me sooner, dear?"

He tried to conceal his surprise. "You were sleeping so soundly, I thought you needed the rest." He looked at her anxiously. She was wearing a most becoming boudoir wrapper. "You look better this morning."

"Better? You talk as though I had been ill."

"Don't you remember Dr. Caxton coming last night?"

"Why, Richard, what are you talking about? I never felt better in my life."

He had the strangest feeling that she was dissembling; that she remembered the doctor's visit but preferred to ignore it.

"Well, you look fine this morning, Judith. I guess all you needed was a good night's rest." His eyes met hers in the mirror, and there was relief in his smile. The specter of another ordeal by invalidism had been removed.

"Richard, what has become of that friend of yours who used to come out from Woodridge—such an unusual person— a blacksmith, wasn't he?"

"You mean Doc Baird?"

"That's the one. He was so interesting. Why don't we have him out to supper sometime?"

Richard's astonishment was so great he could scarcely conceal it. Of all his acquaintances, the blacksmith was the one on whom Judith had most definitely turned thumbs down.

''I thought you didn't care for Doc Baird."

"Why, dear, whatever gave you such an idea? I like all your friends." She turned from the mirror brightly as she rose. "If you can get word to Mr. Baird, why not have him out tonight?"

"You really mean that?"

"Of course I mean it."

He was boyishly pleased. "I'm going in to Woodridge today. I'll bring Doc back with me."

"Good." She kissed him, her delicately scented hands framing his face. Her kisses always reduced him to helpless confusion. Last night he had faced stark fear for her sanity. A moment ago he had faced, almost as disturbingly, suspicion that she was not dealing honestly with him. But when she kissed him his mind was washed blank.

He muttered, "I have work to do," and tried to break away. But she held him, with her arms and her lips.

"The work can wait. Stay with me," she coaxed.

"There's the trip to town "

"You'll have time for that—afterward "

He put his hand behind him and closed the door.

"The trouble is," said Judith, "we've never been able to discuss these things because Richard always loses his temper," And she smiled indulgently at her husband, as at a retarded child.

They were sitting in the front room after supper, Judith and Richard and Doc Baird. Judith had some dainty needlework in her white hands. Richard, watching her, tried be-wilderedly to identify the gracious lady who had just spoken with the hagridden woman of the night before or the beguiling hussy who had lured him, a busy farmer, to bed in mid-morning.

"I thought, Mr. Baird, you might be able to explain to Richard how that trundle bed had been made to dance by the same principle by which you used to make tables move."

How the subject of the trundle bed had come up, Richard could not have said. It was weeks since the incident had been mentioned, and Judith's revival of the topic puzzled and disturbed him.

Doc Baird explained to her: "In table tipping, the hands must rest upon the table. Was anyone touching the bed when you saw it dance?"

"I couldn't tell," said Judith. ''A draft had blown out the candles."

Richard looked at his friend significantly. "The candles were burning all the while. No one but Judith saw the bed do anything."

"That's because you were all watching me," said Judith. She explained to the blacksmith, "I screamed, very foolishly, and distracted everyone's attention from the trick that was being performed."

"No trick was being performed," said Richard.

"Tricks were being performed all evening."

"But not with the trundle bed."

Voices of husband and wife were rising.

Doc Baird interrupted, "You're sure no one was touching the bed?"

"Thorne wasn't." Richard brought the name forth boldly, looking straight at Judith.

She asked, "How do you know whether or not she was touching it?"

"I had hold of her hands."

A bright flush drenched Judith's face. She bent low over her work.

Doc Baird said, "If no one was touching the bed, it couldn't have been animal magnetism. There has to be physical contact to establish the current." He spread his huge hands with justifiable pride. On this subject he was something of an authority.

"What I object to," said Richard, "is not a frank discussion of these disturbing experiences of Judith's, but the implication that Thorne is king when she says she has nothing to do with them."

The suggestion That Judith longed to make and dared not was unexpectedly offered by Doc Baird.

"Of course, there's one way to clear Thorne."

"What's that?"

"If she were sent awav for a while and Judith continued to be frightened in her absence, Thorne's innocence would be proved beyond doubt."

"And suppose Judith were not frightened in her absence," said Richard coldly, "should that be taken as proof of her guilt?"

Doc Baird did not remain long after that. When he rose to take his departure he was not asked to stay the night. He was offered, instead, the loan of a horse to ride back to town.

But his visit had far-reaching consequences.

"What do you think of Doc's suggestion?" Judith asked her husband as they were preparing for bed.

"What suggestion?" Richard was sitting in a low chair, taking off his boots.

"About sending Thorne away."

He sat up in shocked alertness. She went quickly on before he could speak:

"She could go to Kentucky and stay with your sister Annie. She's not doing well in school here. Perhaps she'd do better there."

He said, "You're talking like Abigail," and bent once more to his boots, so that he failed to see the fear that leaped to Judith's eyes. For a second she looked as she had the night before.

Then she continued: "I'm making a reasonable suggestion.

As Doc Baird said, with Thorne away we can determine whether or not it is she who is trying to frigliten me. These annoyances are no longer trivial, Richard. My experience yesterday might have been fatal. I think I've a right to know who made that attempt on my life."

At last he saw through her strategy. The evening's talk had been a base from which to launch a criminal charge against Thorne. Not in hysteria, but in cool-considered reason, Judith was accusing the girl of murderous assault.

Shocked, horrified, and angry as Judith had never seen him, he told her in unmistakable language that Thorne was not going anywhere. Timberley was her home. ''And I warn you right now, if she leaves this house, I leave it!"

His unexpected violence so alarmed Judith that had he stopped with those words he would have left her in a state of apprehension which might have insured peace for all time. But because his anger held the fury of the disciplined man driven beyond control, he had to go on, shouting in his rage:

"No attempt was made on your life. You had a fit of hysterics; the doctor said so. But if there's any more talk of Thorne's guilt in this matter I'll give people cause to have hysterics. And that goes for every last mother's son of you!"

As there was no one else present but Judith—and she was certainly no mother's son—the absurdity of this last threat struck her as humorous and restored her equanimity.

"You shouldn't make speeches in your underdrawers, darling. They distract the attention of your audience."

Without another word he picked up his boots and his breeches and marched downstairs to sleep in the alcove. Judith blew out her candle and climbed into bed. She was not troubled by his temper. It was more reassuring than his silence.

She would let him sweat a little as a matter of discipline. It would be all the better when he came back. It always was, after a quarrel.

What she never dreamed was that this time he would not come back.

CHAPTER 22

It was several days later that Richard came upon Thorne dragging a small hair trunk out of the back hall closet. He had been out in the fields all day and his boots were mired with spring mud, so that he entered the house through the kitchen and went straight to the back closet for dry shoes. There he found Thorne shoving and pushing at the trunk.

''What on earth are you doing, Cricket?"

"I thought it would be easier to pack this if I pushed it out into the hall."

"Who's packing it?"

"I am."

"Who for?"

"Myself. I'm going to boarding school."

Richard put an end to the trunk moving by sitting down on the trunk.

"Who said you were going to boarding school?"

"I said it." Thorne blew the dust off her hands with remarkable coolness, but she avoided Richard's eyes. "I've thought it over and I've decided that's what I want to do."

"Oh! You've thought it over, have you? And who helped you think it over?"

There was no reply to this. Thorne had stooped to examine a pile of old copybooks that lay upon the floor.

"What put the idea of going to boarding school in your head?"

"Well, you know I never have liked Timberley school. I've no head for numbers."

"And what do you expect to find at boarding school that you'll like better?"'

"Judith says I can study music and elocution and maybe Shakespeare."

"Oh, she does!"

"And you know yourself, Richard, I wasn't so stupid when you used to read us Shakespeare." She was sitting on the floor now, her lap piled full of copybooks.

"Look at me, Thorne."

She was too busy searching for a clean book among the castoffs to lift her eyes. "I thought I might keep a diary," she explained.

"Don't change the subject! Do you really want to go away? Do you think you'd be happier at boarding school than at home?"

She looked at him then seriously. "Do you think anyone in this house has been very happy lately?"

He said, "You're going away because you've got a silly notion it's the way to prove your innocence about these things that haye been frightening Judith. I think I know who gave you the idea."

Thorne said carefully, as though striving for perfect fairness, "Judith has always been a friend to me, Richard. We must remember that." Unconsciously she allied herself and Richard against the woman of whom they were speaking.

"Listen, Cricket. Your running away won't prove anything. It is quite conceivable that with you away nothing would happen to disturb her. I have you forgotten how she never saw the bricks when you could account for your whereabouts? Whoever or whatever is doing this—I still believe the motive is to drive you from home."

"You mean—Abigail?"

"I don't know—I honestly don't know. But there are people—living people—who have never liked you, Thorne. Take Otis Huse. He's always been unfair to you because he doesn't like me. You see, he expected to marry his cousin Abigail before I came along. He'd stop at nothing to hurt me, even the persecution of an innocent " Remembering his last talk with the hostile attorney, Richard's voice failed.

"I don't see how Mr. Huse could have played these tricks," said Thorne. "He hasn't even been around here, except that one time."

"I don't mean that I think he's the culprit." Richard frowned. He dared not put into words his fear regarding Otis Huse. "I'm just trying to show you that running away will be taken as an admission of guilt by those who would like to prove you guilty."

They argued this point pro and con. Thorne said finally, "Maybe you're right. I hadn't looked at it that way before."

"Certainly I'm right. So let's hear no more about going off to school. I can teach you college English here at home."

Satisfied that he had settled the question, Richard changed to dry shoes and went in search of his wife. He was thoroughly out of temper with what he considered female duplicity in going behind his back to engineer a course upon which he had emphatically set his veto less than a week ago.

He found the women in the dining room, Judith and his mother and Henry Schook's wife, who had come on an errand, they were trying out the new sewing machine, which Martha Schook had not yet seen.

"How much thread do you suppose it'll use in a year. Miss Ann?"

"If you don't do any sewing it won't use any thread," said Ann Tomlinson dryly. Then seeing her son glowering from the doorway, she asked quickly, "What's wanted, Richard?"

He said bluntly, "I'd like to speak to you and Judith alone. Mother."

This curt speech, so lacking in his usual courtesy, was the signal for Mrs. Schook's precipitate departure and subsequent report to her husband that Richard Tomlinson was a changed man and no doubt the Timberley witch was at him again. Which gossip was in general circulation within forty-eight hours.