The dark fantastic (8 page)

Impulsively Judith spoke. "No. You must stay with your friends. Let me take the tray in. I can get her to eat."

He looked at Judith with a curious mingling of gratitude and desperation.

"Do you suppose you could?"

"I can try. She seems to like me."

"Yes, I've noticed that." He spoke in an odd tone, as though the fact puzzled him.

"But Miss Judith shouldn't be allowed to spoil her own supper waiting on Abigail," said his mother.

"No, of course not," he said quickly. "Though I appreciate your kindness. Miss Judith."

It was not her supper which Judith was loath to miss, but the enjoyment of dining with Richard and his friends. Nevertheless, she insisted:

"Your place is in here. Please let me take the tray to Miss Abigail. We can eat our suppers together."

In the end he acquiesced.

She found the invalid lying flat on her back, hands crossed on her breast, looking as much like a corpse as possible. When she set the tray on a table by the bed Abigail demanded:

"Where's Richard?"

"He's taking care of his friends. Don't you hear them?"

Already the sound of mascuhne voices and laughter floated down the hall. Judith drew a chair to the bedside and spread a napkin over Abigail's nightgown.

"Would you like to hold your own plate, or shall I feed you? I know it's hard to feed oneself in bed," said Judith tactfully.

But Abigail would neither eat nor be fed.

"I told him I wouldn't eat any supper. I'll show him."

For a second Judith contemplated the exquisite pleasure it would afford her to strangle the woman on the bed.

She set the plate back on the table and picked up her own knife and fork.

"I hope you don't mind if I go on with my own supper. I've had a busy day. I'm hungry."

Judith began eating with as keen an appetite as though the sick woman were not lying there watching her like the death's-head at the feast.

When she had finished her meal she tried once more.

"Shall I have your supper warmed up for you? I'm afraid it's getting cold."

Abigail said, "I don't want anything. Take it away."

Judith pushed the table back against the wall.

Abigail's hands still lay folded upon her shrunken breast. Her eyes stared at the ceiling. She said in a hollow tone, "I'm dying. He'll see. When I'm dead he'll believe I knew what I was talking about."

Her face in the lamplight was bloodless. For a moment Judith felt a thrill of alarm.

Then Abigail flopped on her side and with reassuring spitefulness demanded, "Where's that girl?"

"What girl?"

"You know what girl. The one you whipped."

"Oh, you mean Thorne? She's at the Mitchells' this week."

"She hasn't been around here?"

"I haven't seen her."

A look of satisfaction stole over the sick woman's face.

'"Have you whipped her any more?"

A feeling of revulsion swept Judith. She felt something akin to abhorrence for the woman on the bed.

"No, Mrs. Tomlinson, I have not whipped Thorne. She hasn't needed it. She's not a bad girl. She's just—a little different."

''That's because she's a witch!"

Judith remained silent, too exasperated to argue.

"Yon don't believe in witches, do you?" said Abigail.

''Certainly not."

"That's because you don't read your Bible." Abigail rose on her elbow and reached for the well-worn Testament on the stand. "Here, read Luke 8:2 if vou think I'm crazy."

Judith took the book and turned the silky pages till she came to the passage:

" 'And certain women, which had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities, Mary called Magdalene, out of whom went seven devils . . .' "

"There!" Abigail interrupted triumphantly. "Do you believe the Bible, or don't you?"

Judith laid the book back on the table.

"Devils, as referred to in the Orient," she said, "mean nothing more nor less than epilepsy. Is Thorne an epileptic?"

"She's a witch. Like those witches in the play Richard read to us." Abigail, who frowned upon all profane literature, had been avidly interested in the reading of Macbeth. "They weren't epileptics, were they? Neither were the witches in the Bible epileptics. I haven't got an Old Testament here"—she was sitting up in bed now in her excitement—"but just you read the story of Saul and the witch of Endor. First Book of Samuel 28:7."

Judith had read the story. She inquired, "Is Thorne a mistic?"

This was a strange word in Abigail's vocabulary, "What do you mean?"

"The witch of Endor was a medium. She called up the spirit of Samuel and let Saul talk to him. Does Thorne claim to get messages from people who are dead?"

Abigail lay back on her pillow with a disgruntled sniff.

"I don't know. I wouldn't be surprised. She's full of tricks."

"What kind of tricks?" asked Judith curiously. She had often wondered what went on behind Thorne's big geography in school to cause such distraction among the pupils.

"Devilish tricks," said Abigail. "I've seen her make a rose bloom right out of thin air. And once she took a live baby chick out of Jesse Moffat's cap when he had just taken it off his head."

Judith was suddenly enlightened. "But that's not witchcraft! That's sleight of hand. I saw a man in Chicago do that sort of thing. Where did Thorne learn such tricks?"

"That's what I want to know. Nobody could do things like that unless they were in league with the devil."

But Judith was thinking rapidly.

"How did Thorne come to live here?" she asked.

"There was a terrible storm one night and the bridge over Little Raccoon went out. A covered wagon went with it. Richard was coming home from the Debating Society and saw the accident. Everybody in the wagon was drowned except this girl. At least, that's the story he told. Though it always seemed funny to me that no trace of wagon, horses, or drowned bodies was ever found."

"And he brought the child home with him?"

"Yes," said Abigail shortly. "I was sitting in the front room with Miss Ann—my own two babies asleep in the trundle—when he came in. He had this girl in his arms, wrapped up in his coat like a drowned puppy. All she could tell about herself was that her folks had been moving to Kansas."

"How long ago was that?" asked Judith.

"More than a year ago."

Thorne must have been about twelve then. She couldn't be much over thirteen now.

Abigail went on bitterly: "He promised that he would find a home for her. Right away. But she's still here."

"It isn't always easy to find a home for an orphan."

"He won't try. He refused to give her to a family in Wood-ridge who wanted a girl to work for her board and keep."

No, thought Judith, it would have taken a harder man than Richard Tomlinson to have given that elfin child into servitude.

Abigail continued bitterly: "She's bewitched him. He won't let her be treated as one of the help. He gives her his name and sends her to school and treats her like his own child—except that she's much too old to be his child. He thinks more of her than of his sons. He thinks more of her than he does of me."

Aye, there was the rub!

Judith said discreetly, "I can see how you might have found it inconvenient to take another child to raise when you already had two of your own. But of course she's not a witch."

But Abigail's gloom did not lighten. "I've been ill ever since she came here. How do you explain that?"

Judith might have explained that jealousy was slow poison, but she only smiled.

"That's just a coincidence. You're not really ill. Only nervous. You'd be well in no time if you'd start eating again. Come, let's begin now. I'm going to take your supper out to the kitchen and warm it up. Then I'm coming back and sit with you while you eat."

Abigail made no protest as Judith carried out the tray.

CHAPTER 6

The dining room was deserted except for the children. Male voices mingled with the sound of the piano indicated that Richard and his friends had adjourned to the front room. The supper table was cleared, but at one end of it three heads were bent over some toy or game. As Judith passed through with Abigail's tray she said pleasantly, "Hello, Thorne. I didn't know you were here," and the dark head came up in startled alarm.

"She's staying with us while Aunt Jane and Uncle Alec go to choir practice," explained Ricky.

"I just came," said Thorne quickly.

She had worn Jane's scarlet hood, and it still hung by its strings about her shoulders. Her eyes were bright and her cheeks rosy from her run through the crisp night air—the Mitchells had dropped her at the lane—and she seemed alert with some happy expectancy.

Judith, fresh from her talk with Abigail, wondered if Richard knew the child had come.

"Does anyone know you are here, Thorne?"

"Gran'ma knows," said Ricky. "It's all right."

"You won't tell Miss Abigail?" said Thorne anxiously.

Judith shook her head. "Don't make any noise though, or she'll hear you."

"We won't," was the solemn promise, and the three heads bent once more over some object in Thorne's lap.

Judith, curious, paused behind Thorne's chair. The object on her lap was a remarkably homely rag doll. A scrap of flowered challis was pinned to its cotton body, and on its blank muslin face unspeakably leering features had been worked in darning cotton, Thorne was stitching a wad of auburn hair combings to its shapeless head.

"My goodness, Thorne, can't you make something prettier than that?"

"It isn't finished, Miss Judith. The dress is only pinned on."

It wasn't the dress that made it hideous. It was the grotesque face and the homemade wig.

"Where did you get the hair?" asked Judith.

"From the little china box in Mama's room," five-year-old Rodgie piped up. "Millie was going to empty it in the trash, but I saved it for my dolly. It is my dolly, isn't it, Thorne?"

"It is not, it's mine," said his older brother. "I got the dress, didn't I, from Mama's piece bag?"

They were still arguing ownership of the doll as Judith went down the covered passage to the kitchen.

Miss Ann was setting yeast for Saturday's baking, while Millie washed the vast array of supper dishes piled on the zinc-topped table. Judith explained her errand, which Miss Ann immediately vetoed.

"My dear, you're not going to spend your entire evening with Abigail. Just set the tray down on the oilcloth table and as soon as I get my hands out of this yeast I'll warm some soup and take it in to her. You've done enough by sitting with her while the rest of us ate supper."

Judith made but a halfhearted protest. She had had enough of Abigail for one evening.

"Isn't there something else that I can do? You seem to have your hands pretty full."

"You can take some cider in to the front room if you like. It's already been brought up from the cellar. In that jug there, under the pump, keeping cool. Just pour some in that blue pitcher. And you'll find glasses on the shelf in the cupboard. There's another tray, too, on top of the safe—reach it down for her, Millie—and that plate of gingerbread goes

with it. Jesse Moffat hasn't brought the apples up yet. When he does we'll take a bowl of them in too. Now, have you got everything?" asked Miss Ann briskly as Judith hesitated, tray in hand.

''Do you suppose it's all right for me to go in there?" She felt a sudden reluctance to crash the all-male gathering.

"To be sure it's all right." Ann Tomlinson's blue eyes twinkled. "Lucius Goff was disappointed when he didn't see you at supper."

It was not Lucius Goff whom Judith feared to offend, but she could riot explain that to Richard Tomlinson's mother.

She went back through the covered passage to the dining room, where she paused to rest her heavy tray and compose herself before entering the front room. She felt unaccountably warm and flushed.

Giggles from the foot of the table were quickly smothered at her reappearance. She wondered irritably why children always reacted to a schoolma'am as though she were an ogre. She wanted Richard's children to like her, not fear her. So she asked brightly how the doll was coming on.

Ricky cried eagerly, "Oh, I've got something better'n a doll. I've got a cow and she " and then choked and sputtered as Thorne's hand clapped over his mouth, extinguishing his enthusiasm.

"What about the cow?" asked Judith.

"Nothing," said Thorne. "I just made him a cow so he wouldn't want Rodgie's doll."

Judith went closer to look at the cow. It stood on toothpick legs in a flat saucer, looking exactly what it was, a ripe cucumber with a small potato stuck on one end. But the eyes of the potato gave it a ludicrously lifelike appearance, just as there had been something queerly expressive about the features of the doll.

"Her name's Flossie," said Ricky, " 'cause she's got a face just like Mr. Schook's Flossie that stays in our pasture."

Henry Schook had been pasturing his cows at Timberley until he got rid of the wild turnip that was infesting his own land.

Judith laughed at the cow and asked Thorne where she had found a cucumber so late in the season. She had brought it with her, she explained, from the Mitchells'. It was the last cucumber on the vine.

Stealthy quiet settled behind Judith's back as she went out of the dining room. She wondered what the little imps were up to now; then forgot all about the children as she paused outside the door to the front room.

Here, too, all was quiet. Where a short time before there had been laughter and music, there was now not even the murmur of conversation. The children back in the dining room were no more ominously hushed than were the men in the front of the house.

There was no answer to Judith's knock. After a second knock she quietly opened the door. The light from the hall lamp fell upon a room that was in darkness except for the glow of the fire.

Richard Tomlinson stood with his back to the hearth. John Barclay sat on the piano stool. Both were intently watching a small table at which sat Lucius Goff and Doc Baird. The hands of these two were lightly resting on the table.