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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Huron Expositor, 1919-02-21, Page 7AT 214 1919 ,-M.11111"11111„,1".111111.1110t an onlei that. The Not a Benjamin he things Alan had :aw Betjamin Cor- mt he himself did e his father. Be- an had said made did not think the '; for the specter Man look like some Like whom? Ev- lan—now dead for ho had "got" Ben. pinion. Who could yet, was poseible he didlook like some one was—or ' not only by the ntered the house, Corvet as well. he man had cried w? "But you can't dd. "You—with me eur eye!" What did eek) d at the The Sol - purchase riled sol - of uncle - d pow- adicially district Board to have lowest t fazTas able for (tat this tenders of good value, Didier as rises will as been ated charged ding on. ffected oard to [dier be oard, a made tiations tnd sale 'or each ioard cleetarici ! 'beard ER A Y 21. 1919 THEINDIAN 1)RU, 414 1 Ibr WILLIAM MacHARQ• o and : EDWIN BALMER : Thomas Allen, Publisher, Toronto (Continued from Last Week.) What Sherrill had teld Alan of his father had been. iterating itself again and again in Alan's thoughts; now he recalled that Sherrill - had said that his daughter believed that Corvet's disappearance had had something to do with her. Alan had wondered at the moment how that could be; and tie he watched her across the table and now and then exchanged a eminnent With herit puzzled him still more. He had opportunity to ask her, when she Waited with him in the -library, after dinner. was .finished and her mother had gone up -stairs; but he dM not see then how to go about it. "I'm sorry„" she said to him, "thath we can't be home to -night; but pee - haps you would rather be alone?"' He did not answer that. "Have you a picture here, Miss Sherrill, of—my father?" he asked. "Uncle Benny had had very fewa pictures taken; but there is one here."" She went into the study, and can back with a book open at a half-tooe picture of Benjamin Corvet Akin hook it from her and carried it quickly closer to the light. The face that looked up to him from the heavily glazed page was regular of feature, handsome in a way, and forceful. There were imagination and vigor of thought in the broad, smooth 'fore- head: the eyes were strangely moody and brooding; the mouth 'v -as gentle, ki rather kindly; ft was a queerly impel- ling, haunting face. Thee was his father! But, as Alan held the pic- ture, gazing down upon it, the only emotion which ha,me to him was real- ization that he felt none. He had not expected to knew his fhther from strangers on the street; but he had expected, when told that his father was before him, to feel through and through him the call of a common blood. Now, except forconsternation 1, at his own lack of feeling, he had no emotion of any sort; he Could not at- tach to this man, because he bore the name which some one had told .him was his father's, the passions -which, when dreaming of his father, he had felt. As he looked up from the' picture to the girl who had given it to him, startled at himself and believing she must think his lack of feeling strange and unnatural, he sumerised her gaz- ing at him with wetnesh in her eyes. He fancied at first it Must be for his father, and that the picture had brought back poignently her. fears. But he was not looking at the picture, but at him; and - when his eyes, met I - hers, she quickly turned away. His own eyes filled, and he choked. 1 He wanted to thank her for her manner to him in the afternoon, for defend- eing his father and him as she had at -I the dinner table, and new for this unplanned, implusive sympathy when she saw how he had not been able to feel for this man who was his father and how he was dismayed by it. But he could not put his gratitude in words. A servant's voice came from the door, startling him. "Mrs. Sherrill wishes -you' told she. is waiting, Miss Sherrill." "PH be there at once." Constance, also seemed startled and confused; but he delayed and iQoked back to Alan "If—if we fail to And your father," she said, "I want to tell you what a man he was." "Will you?" Alan asked. "Will you?" She left him swiftly, and he heard her mother's voice in the hall. A motor door closed sharply, after a minute or so; then the house door closed. Alan stood still a moment longer, then, remefnberMg the book which he held, he drew a chair up to the light, and read the short, dry bi- ography of his father printed on the page opposite the portrait. It sum- marized in a few hundred words his father's life. He turned to the cover of the book and read its title, "Year Book of the Great Lakes," and a date of five years before; then he looked through it. It consisted in large pert, he saw, merely of lists of ships, their MOTHERS TO BE Should Read Mrs. Monyhan't Letter Published by tier Permission. Mitchell, Ind.—" Lydia t. Pinkhana's Vegetable Compound helped me so much during the time I was lookingforward to the coming of my little one that I tun recommending it to other expectant mothers. Before taking it, some days I suffered with neu- ralgia so badly that I thought I could not live, but after taking three bottles of Lydia P n k - ham's Vegetable Compound I was en- Airely relieved of neuralgia, I had gained in strength and was able to go around and do all ray housework. My baby when Seven months old weighed 1.9 pounds and I feel better than I have for a long time; I never had any medicine do me so much good."—Mrs. PEARL, MONYHAN, Mitchell, Ind. Good health during maternity is a most, important factor to both mother and child, and many letters have been received by the Lydia E. Pinkham Medicine Co, Lynn, Mass., telling of health restored duringthis ling period by the use cf Lydia E. Pinkh m'sYegee table Compound. -.0 kind, their size, the date wheti they• were built, and their owners. Under this last head he saw some score of tunes the name "Corvet, Sherrill and Spearman," There was a separate ;list of engines and boilers, and when they :had been built and by whom. There was a chronological table .of events during the year upon the lakes, Then he came to a part headed "Dis- asters of the Year," and• he read some of them; they were short accounts, drily' and unfeeling put; but his blood thrilled to these stories of drowning, freezing, blinded men struggling a- gainst storm and ice and water, and conquering or being eonquered by thenO Then he came to his father's picture endbiography once more and, with it, to pictures of other lalehmen and their biographies. He tulaied to the index and looked for Sherrill's name, and then Spearman's w' finding they were not in the book, he read some of the other ones / There was a strange similarity, he found, in these biographies, among themselves as well as to that of his father. These men had, the most of them, no traditiiin of seamanship, such as Sherrill had told him he himself had had. They had been sons of lumber- men, of farmers, of mill hands, min- ers en' fishermen. The, had been very young for the most part, when they had heard and answered the call of the lake—the everswelling, fierce demand of lumber, grain, and ore for Outlete and they had lived har • life had been violent, and raw, and brutal to 'them, They had sailed ships, and built ships, and owned and lost them; they- had fought against nature and against man to keep their ships, and to make them profitable, and to get more of them, In the end a few, a very few comparativ-ely, had survived; by daring; by enterprise, by taking great chances, they had trust their heads above those of their fellows; .they had. come to own a half dozen, a dozen, perheps a score of bottoms, and to have incomes of fifty, of a hundred, of two hundred thousand dollars a year. Alan shut the book and sat thought- ful. He felt strongly the immensity, the power, the grandeur of all this; but he feltalso its violence and its fiercezress What might there not have been in the life of his father who had fought up and made a Way for himself through such things. The tall dockiri the hall, strucic nine. He got tip .and went out into the hall and asked for his hat and coat. When they had been brought him, be put them on and *exitoitt The snow had stopped sonie time before; a strong and increasing wind had sprung up, which Alan, with *knowledge of the wind a,crose his prairies, recognized as an aftermath of the geeat storm that had produeed it; for now the wind was from.7the opposite direction—from the west. He could see from the Sherrills' _door- step, when he looked toward the light- house - at the harbor mouth winking red, white, red, white, at hiin, that this offshore wind was causing some new commotion and upheaval among the ice -floes; they groaned and la- bored and fought against the opposing presenre of the waves, under its urging; • • He went down the steps and to the corner and turned west to Astor Street. When he reached the house of ,his father, he stepped under a street -lamp, looking up at the big, stern old mansion questioningli It had taken on a different look for him since he had heard Sherrill's adcount Orf his father; there was an appeal to him that made his throat grow tight, in its look oftbeing unoccupied, in the blank stare of its unlighted windows which contrasted with the lighted windows in the houses on both sides, and in the slight evidences of disre- pair about it. He waited many min- utes, his hand upon the key in his pocket; yet he could not go in, but instead walked on down the street, his thoughts and -feelings in a turmoil. He could not tall up any sense that the house was his, any more than he had been able to when Sherrill had told him of it. He own a house on that street] Yet *as that in itself any more remarkable than that he should be the guest, the friehd of such people as the Sherrills ? No one as yet, since Sherrill had told him he was -Corvet's soo, had called him by name; when they did, what -would they call him? Alan Conrad still? Or -Alan Covet? iiothied, hp a street to the west, the lighted sign of a. drug store and turned up that way; he had promised, he had recollected now, to write to • those in Kansas—he could not call "father" and "mother" any more— and tell them what he had discovered as soon as he arrived He could not tell thein that, but he could 'write them at least that he had arrived safe- ly and was well. He bought a poste card in the drug store, and wrote just, "Arrived safely; am well" to John Welton in Kansas. There was a little vending machine upon the counter, and he dropped in a -penny and got a box of matches and put them in his pocket. He mailed the card andeturried back to Astor Street; and he walked more swiftly now, having come to his dee cision, and only shot one quick look up at the house as he approaehed it. With what_ had his father shut him- self up within that house for twenty years ?. And was it there still? And was it from that:that Benjamin Corvet had fled? He saw no one in the ,street, and was certain no one was observing him as taking the key from his pocket; he ran up the steps and un- locked th4 outer doer.' Holding this 'door open to get the light from the the street lamp, he fitted the key into the inner door; the. he closed the out- er door. For fully a minute, with ! last beating heart and a sense of ex- pectation of he knew not what, he kept his hand upon the key before he turned_ it; then he opened the door mid step- ped- into the darli- and silent house. CHAPTER 'V t An Encounter, Alan standing in the, dar ITOR t peetedness-and the nature of the sound the rooms of his father's wife, stirred the hairaiPon his head, and he Had his father preserved them thus, I started back; ' then he pressed the as she had left them, in the hope that switch- again, and the noise stopped. she Might come back' Permitting him- et0 ° He lighted another match, found the. self to fix no time when he abandoned the hie felt ,trhis pocket for his right sevItch, and turned on the. light. , that hope, or even change them after matches and struck One on the box. Only after discovering two lonie tiers • he had learned that she was dead? The light showed the hall in front of of white and black kers against the Alan thought not; Sherrill had said him, reaching back into some vague, north wall did Alan understand that that Corvet had known from the firo. distant , darknesss, and great rooms with wick, portiered doorways Minh' the wheal must ' control the • motor Wahine separation frein his wife was : working the bellow e of an organ which perinanent. The heel made up, ' the • on 'both hides. He turned into the, had pipes in the. upper hall; it was the other things neglected, and evidentlyt room upon his right, glanced. US see sort of organ that can be played either leoked after or dusted only at long that the shades were drawn on the with fingers or by means of a paper separated periods, looked more as 1 windows toward the street, then feund roll; a bctok of music had fallen upon though Corvet had shiftirilt- from seeing ! the switch and turned on the electric light. the - keys, so that one was pressed them or even' thinkingof them, and 'down, eausingtheinote to sound when had left thein .to be looked after wholly As he looked around, he fought a- • thenubtelhiouwvisuPginalelteudn. by the servant, with ut ever being gainst his excitement and feeling of ted for the sound able to bring hunself to give instruc- expectancy; it was—he told himself did not immediately end the start that tions that they should , be changed. —after all, merely a vacant house, it had given Alan. He had the feel: Alan felt that he would not be sure though bigger and more expensively ing which so often comes to one in anprised to learn that his father never furnished than any he ever had been ' unfamiliar and vaeant house that there had entered these ghostlike rooms in except the Sherrills; and.1i*ehrill's ivas some one io the. house with him since the day H.: "%life had left him. statement to him had implied at , He listened and -seemed to hear an- 1 On the top a a chest of high draw - could give reason for tus father s dis- , step. He went out to the foot of the appearance would be Probably only a • stairs and looked up them, paper, a record of. some kind. It was ! "Is any one here?" he called, Is unlikely that a thing so easily con- anY , h one here?" • Cealed as that could be found by himHis voice brought no response. He .' on his find examination of the place; : went half way up the curve of the what he had come here for now—he . wide, stairway, and called again, and tried to make himself believe—was listened; then be fought down the feel - merely to obtain whatever other in- ' ing he had had; .Sherrill had 'said formation it could five him about his there would be no one in the house, father and the way his . father, had and Alai was ' certain there was no lived, before Sherrill And he had any one. So he went back to the room -other conversation. ''' where he had left the light. Alan had not noticed, when heeetep- The center of this room,like the hed into the hall in the morning, whether the house then had been heat- aom next to it, was occupied by a library table -desk: He pulled open ed; now) he appreciated that it was some of the drawers in it; one or two quite cold and, probably, had been cold had blue prints and technical drawings for the three clays since his father in them; the ethers had only the mis- had gone, and his servant had left to cellany which aecumeilettes in a room look for him. Corning from the street,' much used. There were drawers also it was not the chilliness of the house under the bookcases all around the he 'felt but the stillness of the dead .. air; when a house is heated,. there is always some motion of the air, but this air was stagnant. Alan had drop- ped his hat on a chair in the hall; he unbuttoned his overcoat but ...kept it anything there might be in it *hi& 1 other salmis in the upper hall, a foot- era in a coiner near the dressing table were some papers. Alan went over to look at them; they were invitations, notices of concerts and of plays twenty years old—the mail, probably, of the 'morning she had gone away), left where heremaid or she herself had laid them, and only picked up and put hick there at the times since when the room was dusted. As Alan touch- ed them, he saw that his fingers left marks in the dust on the smooth top of The chest; he noticed that some one else had touched the things and made marks of thee -same sort as he had made. The freshness of these other marks startled him; they had been made within a day or ho. They could not have been made by Sherrill, for Alan had noticed that Sherrill's hands were slender and delicately formed; Corvet, too, was not a large man; Alan's own hand was a good size and powerful, but when he put his fingers over the marks the other man had made, he found that the other 'hand must have been larger and more powerful than his own. Had it been Corvet's servant? It might have been, though the marks seemed too fresh for that; for the servant, Sher. - rill had said, had left the day Corvet's disappearance was discovered. Alan pulled open the drawers to see What the other man might have been after.- it had not been the ser- vant; fdr the contents of the drawers —old heittle lace and woman's cloth- ing—were tumbled as though they had been pulle -I out and roughly and inexpertly pushed Wok; they still showed the folds in which they had lain for years and which recently had been disarranged. This proof that some one had been prying about in the house before him - he could not kill, taking up for dis- self and since Corvet had kone, star - traction one subject of study after an- 1 tied Alan and angered him. It brought other, exhausting each in turn until! him suddenly a sense of possession he could no longer make it engross which he had not been able to feel him, and then absorbing himself in when Sherrill had told him the house the next. ' was his; it brought an impluse of These two rooms evidently hact,been protection of these things about him. the ones most used by his father; the Who had been searching M Benjamin other rooms on this floor, as Alan Corvet's—in Alan's house? He push - went into them .oile by one, he found ed the drawers Shut hastily .and hur- spoke far less ihtimately of Benjamin ried across the hall to the -room op- Corvet. A :din% gerooni was in: the posite. In this roora—plainly Ben - front of the ,60uko to the north sided jamin Corvet's bedroom—were ,no of the hall; a service room opened signs of intrusion. He went to the his father, which Sherrill had not been from it, 'and on thee other side of the -door of the room connecting withit, able to make him feel, came to Alan service room was what appeared to turned on the light, and looked in. as he reflected how many days and be a smaller dining -room The ser- It was a 'smaller room than the Others nights Benjamin Corvet must have vice h90m aphuh *cated both her thinib and contained a roll-top desk affl a cphaesseidberfeoatdeln,ghisorrathaire.skis nfeetiu:Qidhuat .iwhiter.andee h hereth rooms below.ddhbinete the cove of the delk WaS. Alan • tveifte%cg 'ir afar enough:4esed, and the drawers of the,riabinet- have worn ^away the tough, Oriental fabric of the rag. • to see that the rooms below_ were ser- wiere shut andiapparently undisturbed vents'. quarters; thenhe came back, Alan recognized that probable: in this There were several magazines on turned out the light on the first floor, room he would find the most intimate the top of the large desk, some un- struck another match, and Went 'Up and peoeonal things zelating to his wraeliped, some still M their wrappers; Alan glanced at them and saw that the stairs to the 'second story. . . father; but before examining it, he The rooms opening on to the upper turned back to inspect the bedroom. they all related to technical and sci- hall, it was plain to him, though their It was carefully arranged and well- entific subjects. The de.k evidently room; they appeared, when Alan open- ed some of them, to contain pamphlets of various societies, and the scientific correspondence of: which Sherrill had told him. He looked over the titles of some of the books on the shelve— on, and stuffed his gloves into his a multitude of subjects; anthropology, pocket, exploration, cleap-sea fishing, ship - A light in a single room, he thought, building, astronomy. The books in could not excite curiosity, or attract each section of the shelves seemed to attention from the neighbors or any correspond in subject with the pamph- one passing in the street; but lights lets and correspondence in the drawer in more than One room might de that. beneath, and these, by their dates, to He resolved to -turn off the lighti.h. divide(' themSelves into different per - each room as he left it, before light- iods .during the :twenty years that ing the next one.'Benja iin Corvet had lived alone here - It had been a pleasant as well as a A1ai felt that seeing these things handsome house, if he could judge by Was bringing his 'father closer to him; the little of it he could see, before, the they ghve him a little of 'the feeling change had come over his father The he had beer' unable to get when he rooms were large with high ceilings, looked at his father's picture. He The one where he stood, obviously was could irealize better now the' lonely, a library; bookshelves reached three restless man, pursued .by some. ghost quarters ofthe way to the ceiling on three of °its, walls except where they were broken in two places by door- ways, and in one place en the south wall by an open fireplace There was a big library table -desk in the center of the room, and a stand with a shaded lamp upon it nearer the fireplace. k leather-euehioned Morris - chair— lonely, meditative -looking chair,—was by the stand and at an angle toward the hearth; the rug in front of it was quite worn through and showed the floor underneath A sympathy toward had been much used and had many drawers; , Alan pulled one open and saw thatit was full of papers; but. his sensation as he touched the top one made him shut the drawer again and postpone prying of that sort 'un- til he had looked more thoroughly a- bout the house. He went to the door of the connect- ing room and looked into it. This room, dusky in spite of the light which shone past him through the wide door- way, was evidently another library, or rather it appeared to have been the original library, and the front room had been converted into a library to supplement it. The bookcases here were deuilt so high that a little ladder on wheels was required for access to the top shelves. Alan located the light switch in the room; then he returned, switched off the light M the front room, crossed in the darkness intodthe second room, and pressed the switchW Aeird, uncanny, half wail, half doors were closed, were mostly bed- cared -for room, plainly in constant rooms. He put his hand at hazard- use. A reading stand, with a lamp, on the nearest door and opened it As was beside the bed with a book mark - he caught the taste and smell of the ed about the middle. On the dresser air in the room—heavy, colder, and were hair -brushes and a.comb, and a deader even than the air in the rest box of razors, none of which were mis- of the house ---he hesitated; then with sing. When Benjamin Corvet had his match he found the light swifch. gone ,away, he had not taken anything The heoom and the next one which with him, even toilet articles. With communicated with it evidently were the other things on the dresser, was —or had been—a woman's bedroom a silver frame for a, photograph with and boudoid. The hangings, which a cover closed and fastened over the were still swayikgfrom the opening portrait; as Alan took it up and open -- of the door, had taken permanently ed it, the stiffness of the hinges and the folds in which they had hung for the edges of the lid gummed to the many years ,• there were the scores of frame by disuse, showed that it was long-time idleneseh not of use, in the long since it had been opened. The rugs and upholstery of the chairspicture was of a woman of perhaps The bed, however, was freshly made thirty—a beautiful woman, dark -hair - up, as though the bed clothing had ed, dark -eyed, with a refined, sensi- been changed occasionally. Alan, live, spiritual -looking fp.ce. The dress went through the bedroom to the door she wore was the same, Alan sudden - of the boudoir, and_ saw that that too ly recognized, which he had wit and had the same loft of unoccupaney and, -touched ainong the things M the chest disuse. On the low- dressing table of drawers; it gait him a queer feel - were scatterechesuch articles as a wo- ing now to have touched her things. man starting ofi a journey might think Ire felt instinctively, as he held the moan, Paining from the upper hall, . it not Worth nrhile to take with herpicture and studied it, that it could suddenly filled the .house. Its unehd There was no doubt that these ere ,have been no vulgar bickering between' cket 11111111110111 Tea, will go further on infusion and give better satisfaction than any other Tea _ obtainable.. 8 610 Nota shadow of doubt bout this. TRY-iT f JP you rely on the old-fashioned gravity or shallow -pan methods 0i cream separation, you certainly are wasting a big percentage of the high- priced cream your herd is yielding., If you are trying "to get alone with an oil eeparator or a cheep, micrier oile, you ara robbing yourself of profits that your herd to trying togive ho you. -StOi Cream as.e— come into our store the next time you mein tO*Itat34 let us show you bow the Viking skims to the merest trace and makes every cow you own wotth $20 monk ' in butter fat every year. Let us show 3Tou that the Viking is the most scientifically constructed ma* chine, made of the finest materials, in the largest separator factory in the world. Let us show you that the Viking is the easiest rtin. - ning,tbas greater capacity, and Is by far tho easieet separator to dean. • WILLIAM T. GRIEVE WALTON . ONTARW • wife and husband, nor any caprice of a dissatisfied woman, 'that had made her separate herself from her husband. The photographer's name was stamped in one corm; and the date 0-4$94 the year after -Alan had. N3011)041. But Alanfeltthat the picturg and the, condition of herehoedeS:aeross the hall did -not shed any -tight on' the relations between her and Benjamin. Corvet; rather they obscured them; for his father neither had put the picture away from him and devoted her rooms to other uses, Wor had he kept the rooms arranged and ready for her return and her picture ,so that he would seet it. He would have done one ori the other of these things, Alan thought, if It were she his father had wronged—or, at least, if it were only she. Alan reclosed the case, and put the picture down; -then he went into th room with the desk. He tried the cover of the desk, but it appeared- to be locked; after looking around vainlw for a key, he tried again,exerting a little more force, and this time the thp went up easily, tearing away the metal plate into which the claws of the lock clasped and the two long screws which had held' it. He exam - 1 ined the lock, surprised, and saw that the screws must have been merely set into the holes; gears showed where a chisel or some metal implement had been thruet in under the top to ffiree it up. 'The pigeonholes and -little drawers in the upper part of the desk, as he swiftly opened them, he found entirely empty. 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