The Sherwood Ring (21 page)

"You're a perishing marvel yourself, you know, Peggy," he said softly. "I like to see you dealing with a crisis. That notion about the waiter would never have occurred to me. Whatever made you think of it so quickly?"

"You'd be surprised," I informed him.

I WAS CURLED UP miserably on the south window seat in the library, trying to read a book I had found on one of the back shelves. It was a very old book, bound in musty calf with ornate brass clasps holding it together at the corners. It had been published in London in 1616. I had taken it down because I was attracted by the title:
A Treatise of Apparitions and Spirits Walking the Earth,
by "that Learned and Excellent Minister of the Gospel, Doctor Abraham Potter." Facing the title page was an engraved portait of the author himself, wearing a large ruff and a small black skullcap, his quill pen poised over a sheet of paper and his eyes lifted to heaven as if waiting for the spirits and apparitions to come down and inspire him.

The learned and excellent Doctor Potter had gone into his subject very thoroughly. The first chapter consisted of a long dissertation on the nature of spirits and apparitions in general, with a great many quotations in Latin and Greek from the Bible, the classics, the Fathers of the Church, and a number of Renaissance authorities whose very names were unfamiliar to me. The following chapter took up the question: "Whether and upon what Occasions the Spirits of the Dead may be Verily Asserted to Revisit Those yet Living." These spirits all seemed to be quite different from the sort to which I had become accustomed at Rest-and-be-thankful. There were ghosts who could not rest because they had been secretly murdered — ghosts who were trying to reveal where they had hidden some treasure — ghosts who rose to warn their country's leaders of some approaching revolution or catastrophe — false ghosts who were actually devils in disguise — ghosts who . . . ghosts who . . .

It was no use. I could not concentrate. Try as I might, I kept turning my head every minute or so to look down the drive for some sign of the doctor's car. The doctor had already called once at Rest-and-be-thankful during the morning, but he had said something just before he left about dropping in again on his way back to New Jerusalem when he had finished his afternoon round.

Uncle Enos was very sick.

Poor Uncle Enos! After doing his best to live like a fine old traditional eighteenth-century gentleman all his life, he had at last come down with a fine old traditional disease — the sort of thing which eighteenth-century novelists would have described as a wasting fever. Dr. Lewis had talked very impressively about the possibility of a virus infection complicated by fatigue and overexertion, but that made no difference. It still looked like a plain case of wasting fever to me.

At first I had thought that he was only worn out after all the excitement of the Independence Day Ball. He had somehow managed to drag himself downstairs the following morning, and we had all been so tired and so busy with the cleaning-up ourselves that we did not pay very much attention to him. The next morning he did not come to breakfast; and when Christopher Seven went up to call him, his room was empty and the bed had not been slept in. I finally found him in his study, at the desk with his head down on a pile of scattered papers, where he had apparently been sitting ever since the night before.

Even then he had stubbornly refused to let us send for the doctor and had shut himself up in his own room for the rest of the day, insisting that he would be perfectly all right if we would only have the sense to leave him alone. The day afterwards he was too ill to protest when I called in the doctor on my own responsibility.

By the time he came Uncle Enos was running a very high temperature and had begun to toss restlessly about in the big four-poster bed. Nothing that the doctor was able to do seemed to help very much. The fever would not go down, and even sedatives apparently had little or no effect on the restlessness. He could not sleep, and he could not eat, and he could not seem to remain quiet for an instant. He hardly ever spoke, and — this terrified me more than anything else — he never uttered a word of complaint. He only lay there growing weaker every hour and tossing continually as if he were trying to struggle free from some invisible weight that was smothering him.

"Do you happen to know if there's anything weighing on his mind, Miss Grahame?" said the doctor rather anxiously at the end of the first week. "Of course, virus infections can do very odd things sometimes, and your uncle has never been what I'd call a good patient, but he ought to be responding to treatment more than he is. I'm beginning to think that at least part of the trouble must be nervous tension. Has he had any particular difficulty worrying him lately? I don't mean just the Independence Day Ball — but something really serious?"

I could only shake my head. "He never told me anything at all about himself," I admitted wretchedly. "Only to run along and stop bothering him sometimes. He hated anything that looked like curiosity or meddling or interfering with his private business."

"Well, whatever it is, he ought to get it off his mind and be done with it," said the doctor. "He can't go on like this much longer. If he'd only relax and let the sedative take hold, he might have a chance. If he'd even give in and tell me what's worrying him, we might be able to do something about it. But you might just as well argue with a stone wall."

"There's old Mrs. Cunningham," I suggested tentatively. "Do you think it would do any good to ask her? She took him off to the library to talk to him about something the night of the Independence Day Ball. Maybe she was the one who upset him."

But old Mrs. Cunningham, sweeping up to the door in an incredible Rolls-Royce only one step removed from a coach, could do little except repeat what the doctor had already said in her own words, which were considerably more picturesque but equally unhelpful.

"Of course Enos has been up to mischief, that's perfectly obvious," she remarked, rapping her cane and looking more like the Bad Fairy than ever. "He broke my silver lustre cream pitcher when he was a boy, and hid the pieces, and then went home and was sick in bed for a week. I don't mean that he was a cowardly child who couldn't stand the idea of a whipping. It was just that he always took the most absurdly lofty view of himself, and when he was tripped up by the devil like anybody else, he simply couldn't bear to admit it. The trouble was, he couldn't live with himself afterwards either. Your dear father was the only Grahame I ever met who didn't have a tendency to suffer from ingrown conscience anyway" — she spoke as if a conscience were a particularly inconvenient form of toenail — "but Enos always seemed to get it especially hard whenever he got it at all. He ran his temperature up to a hundred and five that time before I found the pieces where he'd buried them under the Rose-of-Sharon in the shrubbery . . . No, I can't tell you what's the matter with him now. That born fool Alison Douglas came rushing up to us in the dining room before I could get it out of him. I suppose he must have been sickening with it for a long time, and then this virus infection coming on top of everything else brought him down with a crash. It's something to do with the Thorne boy, of course. Why don't you come over on Sunday and see what he knows about it? I've sent him a note inviting him to tea at five if that ridiculous Ford of Ted Lowry's will hold together till then."

There was no way I could tell old Mrs. Cunningham that Pat knew nothing whatever and could not possibly be of any help to us, and I felt bereft of my last hope as I thanked her for her kindness and watched the Rolls-Royce go creaking majestically off down the drive. It had already occurred to me that the "particular difficulty" worrying Uncle Enos was tied up somehow with his treatment of Pat. I could still remember only too clearly how he had collapsed in his chair that first afternoon whispering, "What shall I do now? What on earth shall I do?" and the white, drawn, miserable look on his face. But it did no good to feel certain about the cause of the trouble as long as I could not discover what the trouble itself was. Asking Uncle Enos point-blank in his present condition would have been perfectly useless and would only have made matters worse. All I could do was try to find out for myself — and so far I had completely failed to think of anything which poor, dear, fantastic, maddening Uncle Enos could conceivably have on his conscience. And meanwhile he went on tossing feverishly upstairs on the same big four-poster bed where the haughty, suffering little boy had once lain and also tossed because he could not live with himself any longer, and nobody could find the broken bits of silver lustre he had carried away and hidden in the shrubbery.

"Maybe it will come to me if I just don't keep worrying at it so hard," I whispered to myself, smoothing a few tear splashes off the musty pages of Abraham Potter and doing my best to concentrate my attention on him again. There was nothing else I could do. Dr. Lewis was trying a new sedative to make Uncle Enos sleep, and had ordered us all to keep out of his room. Christopher Seven was sitting outside the door in the hall upstairs.

"And there be some scholars," I made myself read on:

— some scholars (and among them men eminent for their wisdom and holiness) who maintain that there are yet another sort of spirits who may return to the earth: and these not to uncover secret murder, nor yet to reveal hidden treasure, nor yet for any purpose hitherto set down — but rather out of pure charity to give what help and comfort they may to such of their descendants who continue to dwell in the same house.

I straightened up and began to read more carefully. Abraham Potter was becoming interesting at last.

True it is, that the ingenious Johannes Calovius argues very learnedly that this is but a notion or fantastical opinion drawn out from those fables of attendant spirits which the heathen relate, or the guardian angels concerning which the Papists fondly dispute. Yet for myself I rather believe that such visitations do verily occur, though indeed (as I allow) they must needs happen but seldom, and this for the following reason, viz. to wit: that these spirits do never show themselves except to young maidens who are sorely neglected by their own kin, and more especially to those who are so unfortunate that they have never in all their days received from them the smallest caress or token of favor: no, not so much as a kiss from their own fathers and mothers, Wherefore (it is said) the shades of their family are permitted by the mercifyil providence of God to do what they can to cheer them in their need: and that need being satisfied, they depart away again and are seen no more.

"Well, Peggy," said a familiar voice on the other side of the room, "is it any clearer to you now?"

Barbara Grahame had come back again and was standing over by the study, with one hand on the knob of the door. She looked a little older than she did the last time I had seen her. She was no longer wearing the crimson riding cloak, but instead a soft flowing dress of deep rose that shimmered delicately as it caught the light. She had a locket or something of the sort on a thin fine chain around her neck, but I could not see exactly what it was because it had slipped in under the lace ruffles at the edge of her bodice.

"Yes, it's all clear, but — oh, I am so glad to see you! You don't know how I've needed you. Uncle Enos is sick, and we can't find out what he's got on his mind, and I wondered if you could possibly tell me — "

But Barbara Grahame was shaking her head.

"No, my dear," she said gently but very decidedly. "That you must work out for yourself."

"But you can stay with me a little while, anyway?" I begged. "You won't go, will you? Everything's so horrible, and I haven't got anybody else."

Barbara Grahame gave a soft, half rueful little laugh. Her eyes had the same amused, secret look which Copley had caught in the portrait. "No, I won't go," she said. "Don't you remember? It's only when your need is satisfied that I — how did he put it? — depart away again and am seen no more."

"Why is it that I see you more than any of the others?" I asked curiously. "This is the third time now. Dick and Eleanor and Peaceable have only come once."

Barbara Grahame laughed again. "I suppose it's really because we're both so much alike," she answered. "The difficulties we seem to get into with young men from England!"

"Oh, but that isn't the same at all," I objected hurriedly. "Not in the least. There's never been the remotest question of my marrying Pat."

"I remember saying something of the sort myself about Peaceable."

"But did you really marry him in the end?"

Peaceable usually got what he wanted (said Barbara Grahame), even when it was a matter of waiting a long time for it. And it
was
a long time, too. He had gone back to his own army, of course, and the fighting dragged on and on, and there was never any chance of even hearing from him. I once met somebody who thought he'd had a glimpse of him during a skirmish somewhere in the South, but that was the only word I had. It couldn't actually have been more than three years altogether, I suppose, counting from Christmas to Christmas, but they seemed more like centuries — and when Dick came up from New York that night in December and said the peace treaty was signed at last, it was a moment before I could bring myself to believe it.

"But it's true, I tell you!" Dick insisted. "I heard it from a man who was just off the first ship from London with the news. They were ringing every bell in the city last night before I left. The war's really over. You can take that preposterous ring off that chain under your bodice where you fondly suppose you've been concealing it all these years, and put it on your finger if you like."

"What ring are you talking about?"

"Oh, my dear sister!" Dick retorted. "I may be ninety-seven years old and falling more into decay with every hour, but I was young myself once, and somewhere a faint gleam of intelligence still flickers among the ashes." He pulled me to my feet and kissed me affectionately. "Don't look so white, Barbara! The war's really over at last — and I wish you joy with all my heart. I even brought you a bride gift all the way from New York to mark the occasion. You'll find it waiting for you downstairs in the treasure room."