This story was published as Part III of Oscar Morrill Heath, Composts of Tradition (Chicago: O.M. Heath, 1913), pp. 121-157. The fictional setting is as follows: the narrator was supposedly boarding at the American House Hotel, in Milford, Maine, during the winter of 1860-1861, when the landlord, Mr. Van Dyne, related some local stories which he himself had heard many years before from visitors to his hotel, one of whom was known as the Midget, later revealed to be the son of the founder of the nearby town of Bucksport, Jonathan Buck. What follows is the Midget's tale.
My earliest remembrances are a strange medley of detached fragments, without inter-relationship, association or consecutive arrangement. They are like a multitude of isolated pieces of a mosaic, scattered helter-skelter in my mind, the original design for which is irremediably lost. Sometimes the confused ensemble presents itself to my imagination. Sometimes a single piece emphasizes its demand for recognition.
It is less than forty miles from this hotel that my birthplace may be located, on the pinnacle of a little hill which is now the center of interest in a cemetery in Bucksport. The native born citizen shrinks from passing this hill after nightfall and no traveler from other regions ever enters the village without visiting the scene. It is a famous spot because of the infamy associated with it. It is a private cemetery surrounded by a high iron fence, within the limits of which no foot except those of the surviving owners is allowed to trespass.* And yet the symbol of my mother's betrayal may be seen and shall be seen forever by the passerby upon the adjacent street.
* The cemetery referred to is at present nearly surrounded by dwellings.
It is a magnificent spot, overlooking the so-called east branch of the Penobscot river. Beyond the river an observer may behold directly south a beautiful wooded island several miles in extent which is owned by two orphans and which is, by this token, known as Orphans’ Isle*. Between the mainland on which Bucksport is situated and this island, the Penobscot ebbs and flows; at high tide a grand old river; at low tide a silver thread winding in and out between broad expanses of uncovered mud flats. A mile to the west one may see the graceful curve of a pine-clad promontory, jutting out into the river, known as Indian Point, opposite which arise the lofty hills of Prospect. To the east, the river is lost to view in a sweeping meander, amidst the gorgeous blend of overhanging evergreens. To the north is the primeval forest through which lead only Indian trails and in which dwell only the woodland beast and bird.
* The present town of Verona is located on this island.
This little hill, upon which stood my mother's log cabin, is about a quarter of a mile east of the present village of Bucksport, on the north side of a turnpike known as the Orland Road. From this eminence, one may behold a magic panorama of changing mountain, hill, woodland, and river, unsurpassed for witchery anywhere in the world.
For many years in the early colonial days my mother's hut commanded this prospect unchallenged. Here I passed a solitary childhood. I say solitary because I enjoyed no companionship except that of vagrant, begging Indians and of my mother who was often so preoccupied that for days, sometimes for weeks, I was left entirely to my own devices. My mind, receiving no stimulus from any social environment, created its own imaginary associations and I became preternaturally mature because deprived of the usual amusements and employments of childhood. Accursed is he who knows no childhood! The children of the village avoided the spot as if it were afflicted with the plague and neither man, woman, nor child from among the settlers were ever seen by me, except in awful and inexplicable nightmare, within the walls of that hut, and even in nightmares only one.
Whenever my mother visited the village in order to procure the necessities of life from the market, I accompanied her and always a crowd of foul-mouthed urchins would follow at a safe distance, hailing her as the scarlet woman of Babylon and me as Uriah's wife's bastard. I knew not then the meaning of their allusions, for no Bible ever occupied space in the home of my birth. (In fact, the only token of civilization in the cottage was a small hand-painted picture of the devil with a strangely familiar face with his horse's hoofs and bull's horns and forked tail, which always hung upon the wall above my mother's bunk.) I only sensed that there was some inexplicable opprobrium lurking in their offensive tones. Well educated in applicable Bible love were these Puritan New Englanders even from the cradle.
During the day time my mother and I were always alone, always alone, except for the occasional visit of an Indian begging a venison steak or a draught of wine. We were always provided with plenty to eat of the choicest viands and plenty to drink of the most delicious vintage from some mysterious source and yet my mother toiled not except in the performance of the customary household tasks. Her purchases at the market were limited to meagre supplies of corn and molasses and other equally simple necessities but there was always the meat of bear and venison in the pantry and cider and wines in the cellar.
I liked not to remain in the hut during the day, for my mother ever sat by the window looking down upon the highway beneath and sighing or else reclining in her chair while her eyes stared in fixed glassiness across the river to the wooded slopes of Orphans' Isle or farther west to the lofty hills of Prospect. Little did she say ever but oft would she clasp me in her arms in a hug of animal fury and sob yet never weep, until I longed to escape into the great, wild forest outside and make my abode with the wolves and bears.
Yet always the coming of the twilight would find me back again, for had not my mother taught me that Col. Jonathan Buck had established the curfew and that after its summons rang from the belfry of the village church, man, woman, and child must be within doors under penalty of a day in the stocks?
Often in the night, after I had fallen into a deep sleep, I would seem to feel in my dreams the presence of a stranger, and I would seem to hear confused whisperings and half muttered exclamations and unintelligible snatches of conversations and strange weird chanting, the meaning of which became known to me only long afterwards. Sometimes the disturbance would be so vivid as to seem like an actual occurrence and I would rouse up in my bunk, when my mother would place her warm, plump, bare arms about me and kiss me with, Oh! such humid kisses, such as she never gave me in the daytime, and I would wish it were always night that I might enjoy those silent evidences of a mother’s love. Then she would bid me dream no more and I would again sink into slumber. Sometimes, in these dreams, I would imagine I saw a shadowy outline in the dim shadows of the room and sometimes the door would seem to open and a misshapen form would appear to glide out and stealthily creep away into the night. Whenever I would mention it to mother, she would always call me 'silly boy!' and would bid me tell my foolish fancies to no one, as if I could repeat them, I, having neither companions nor friends and seeing no one but guttural, monosyllabic Indians.
And thus the first eight years of my life passed away in that sombre hut or in the adjacent wilderness. The village to the west, although but a quarter of a mile distant, was an unknown region clothed in impenetrable mystery except for the market place. The lofty, pointed steeple, arising from an eminence on the north side, and plainly visible from my mother's yard, was an object of aversion to me, for was it not thence that the hated curfew rang each night, calling me away from the allurements of the woodland? Thence, too, its wailing knell malevolently invaded the stillness of the sabbath mornings, apparently summoning to town a handful of settlers, who lived in a little colony a mile east on the Orland road, an uncanny rabble who moved like automatons in a weird group, past our hut one day in seven with averted heads and with gaze diagonally riveted on the distant slopes of Orphans' Isle, their tall, truncated cone hats stiffly harmonizing with their melancholy gait. Their brats, more awkwardly awful than themselves, were but miniature reproductions abnormally emphasized.
I learned much during those eight years of the mysteries and pleasures of the natural world but naught of humanity. I knew the haunts and habits of bird and beast. I learned their craft and acquired a man's thought. I played with the cubs of wolves and bears and, like Gibbons, even suckled the dams. I swam in the river among the wild ducks and geese and tamed them at will. The birds of the forest clustered around me in my lonely rambles and picked the worms from the turf which I overturned for their foraging. The doe followed me home that she might obtain a moiety of salt. And yet, with all the abundance of forest and river at our disposal, my mother's larder was never replenished therefrom.
A few weeks before my eighth birthday there came a change. My beautiful mother's usual preoccupation of mind changed to moroseness. Her days were passed in weeping and my nights in troubled dreams. In my sleep I would seem to hear my mother remonstrating with some one in reproachful tones and a voice as strangely familiar as the painted devil's face, sometimes angrily, sometimes threateningly, sometimes importuningly seemed to be urging her to fly away. But always as I would sit up, my mother was by my side with her arms about me and her reassuring kisses on my lips and the shadowy intruder would fade away as I relapsed into unconsciousness.
It was the night before that awful day when I ceased growing, when my body was stunted in its development and when I began to be the horrible object that I am today. The curfew had rung and my mother had tucked me in my bunk. Her hands trembled and her body shook with extraordinary agitation and I felt her feverish breath burning hot as she pressed her ice-cold lips upon my cheek.
That night I could not fall asleep. I lay upon my side, my eyes pried open and staring into the darkness of the room where nothing was visible but where I could hear my mother’s footsteps as she paced back and forth, back and forth through the dreary hours. Along in the night the door noislessly opened and by the dim light thereby admitted I was able to discern, standing just within the room, the devil himself, big as a man, as if the picture above my mother's bunk had grown large and had become alive and had stepped down from the wall. The door closed and this horrible object was lost in the darkness of the room. I was paralyzed with an incomprehensible dread. My mother's voice, strangely harsh and strident gasped in a hoarse frightful whisper:
'So, Satan! yet again you come to bring me the consolations of hell. Begone, fiend of unrighteousness!'
And a voice replied, low, tauntingly, menacingly:
'Satan calls. Since Satan only is thy friend, bid him be welcome. Great risks hath he taken to visit thee this night. The curfew, wise provision of a farseeing law giver, keeps the layman from prowling about and from prying into the secrets of the night but it keeps not the godly pastor from the bedside of a dying saint. Even now, the saint may be singing 'hallelujah' on the pearly streets of heaven and the pastor may be plowing up the dust of the Orland road on his return.'
That voice! I recognized it as one does some vague and far off memory and yet I could not determine when or where I had heard it before. Could it be that I had become acquainted with it in those troubled dreams of the past few months!
'Yea, saints may die and be at peace but devils live to tempt and to destroy. Justice, I want that only from God and man and thee. I plead no more for mercy. I hope for neither from thee nor man. I dare not ask it from my God from whose grace I fell into the licentious arms of Satan.'
'Sweet temptress,' spake the voice.
'Foul tempter! It was not sufficient to thee that thou shouldst debauch my purity with thy beguiling blandishments but thou must needs also send my husband to feed the monsters of the sea, leaving me, an unnameable thing, to be an outcast without protection save from the originator of my ruin. And even now, thy second hell spawn quick within my womb, thou comest to gloat upon thy victim and to drive her forth into the unknown wilderness. I will not go. For the last time I affirm it. I will not go. Here shall I remain and show the virtuous village folk that sin may thrive and prosper.'
'Thou speakest madness. Know who I am and that I may command. The devil reigns in Bucksport. Thou must depart. Safe convoy have I offered to another colony and a letter of recommendation from Col. Jonathan Buck to the pastor thereof. As an esteemed widow, recently bereaved and desirous of forgetting thy grief in the oblivion of new places and with an assured competence for life, thou mayst thrive and prosper, but not here. In that far colony, who will know that thy husband, many years ago, experienced the fortunes of those who go down to the sea in ships? Thy letter of recommendation will emphasize his recent death. New friends, renewed associations with humanity, and an opportunity to rear thy children, mine also, I admit, in a becoming way, are not these sufficiently weighty considerations?'
'My honor has no price. I gave it to thee freely and gladly. Aye, gladly, wretched woman that I am! Thou canst not purchase it now. I will not go.'
There was an incontrovertible finality in my mother’s voice.
'Thy blood be on thy head and on the heads of thy children!'
The door opened. Again I saw the devil as he passed out. With a shriek I leaped from my bunk and rushed after him. I ran through the yard towards the road, but 'ere I reached it, I beheld a sight which checked my headlong flight. Kneeling in the dust of the road with both hands raised to the stars was the pastor of the village church and above him, with finger pointing toward the village stood the devil.
This tableau of midnight was all I had time to behold for my mother clutched my arm and dragged me back into the darkness of the hut.
The next morning, a mob of men and women, an awful horde of hell furies, came swarming up the path leading to our hovel. My mother trembled like a poplar leaf as she saw them advancing and wrung her hands in an agony of terror. They tore her from her own home and dragged her to the church. I followed the mob in agonizing dread.
Within, in the obscure light, I saw a lofty platform upon which were seated, the rich men of the village, whom I had often seen in my visits to the market place. Slightly in advance of the others sat Col. Jonathan Buck, his eyes sanctimoniously fixed on the ceiling. In the pulpit stood the pastor.
Up in front of this platform they dragged my mother. I wriggled through the mob until I could grasp her tattered skirt.
The pastor raised his hand.
'Let us pray,' he said in solemn tones.
The crowd, just now a hellish crew, fell on its knees in a silence undisturbed. The group on the raised platform alone broke the stillness. With groans which harmonized with the tones of the pastor, they seemed to encourage him to louder and more terrible vociferations. My mother stood erect and gazed with blazing eyes.
At length, the tones of the pastor’s voice changed. The people arose. The pastor, looking upon my mother, said:
'Thou scarlet woman of Babylon, confess now thy guilt that thou mayst receive the forgiveness of the Most High before expiating thy foul sin upon the stake. Confess thy most wicked machinations and thy correspondence with the prince of darkness. I pause to receive thy confession and to witness thy penitence, before thy justly invoked doom shall be pronounced.'
And then my mother spake:
'Oh, thou holy minister of the gospel of the Jesus of Mary of Magdalene!'
'Blaspheme not!' admonished the pastor.
'And thou, Jonathan Buck, founder of this town and known through the colonies for thy renowned piety; and thou, fathers of this village, and all ye others; behold, if I be guilty, it is not with Satan that I have held correspondence but with his delegate who sits in your midst. When curfew rings, know ye, good people, that the devil's representative walks the deserted streets of Bucksport and does the deeds of darkness.' Her eyes, blazing defiance, seemed to burn into the very soul of Jonathan Buck as he writhed in his chair.
'Witch!' he shrieked with choking articulation, spasmodically clinching his fists.
'Witch!' exclaimed my mother, 'for indeed so hast thou called me in compliment, in the still hours of the night, when only thou and I remained awake. I have known the ecstasies of the agonies of passion in thy arms. Thou hast bedevilled me with thy wiles until I joyously accepted exile from my fellow man only that I might possess thee in the hours of the night. The Songs of Solomon hast thou chanted in my ear whilst thou didst say in thy delirium that only Solomon and thou hadst ever drunk the cup of love. Yea! but the dregs are in my cup!' Exhausted, she fell and lay, a trembling heap upon the floor.
The Colonel struggled to his feet and stood pale and staggering on the platform.
'Brethren,' he began, in faltering and uncertain tones, his purple face twitching convulsively. 'I know not what this sinful woman means. Ye know that Satan is a subtile monster even from Eden until the present day. Mayhap he has taken my form and appearance and mayhap he hath appeared to this woman in the hours of the night in my guise. Last night, as our godly pastor was returning from ministering at the bedside of a holy departing soul, in front of the home of this wretched woman, he was accosted by Satan himself and, by virtue of his holy prayers, the foul fiend vanished in an awful explosion of fire and brimstone.'
The pastor seemed to be struggling to remonstrate against this invention of the Colonel's fertile imagination but the Colonel, gazing in restraining glance upon him, continued. 'That Satan visited her last night cannot be gainsaid. That he hath been her paramour is beyond any doubt. Let her be burned for her sorcery.'
My mother, struggling to a sitting position, exclaimed, 'Yea, burn me at the stake, but in the judgment day, when the books shall be unsealed and when all the dead shall become quick and stand before God's awful bar, I shall be there. Thou, holy minister, shalt be there. Thou, Col. Jonathan Buck, shalt be there; and ye others, we all shall stand face to face and God shalt say "Thou harlot of Babylon, depart with thy consort to thine own place." I await the penalty.'
A shudder ran through the assembly at this blasphemy. Col. Jonathan Buck fixed his saintly eyes upon my mother, who again lay upon the floor quivering with agony. And thus the pious gentleman began:
'Oh wicked woman! Shalt thou be allowed to live to be a shame to the virtuous womanhood of this town! Shalt thou, already large with child and near to thy delivery, be permitted to continue in the body until thy whelp, hell-fathered, shall breathe the breath of life in this community, which I have founded for the extension of the gospel of righteousness and the promotion of the will of the Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Nay, witch, thou has conjured the devil forth from the fires of hell to be thy paramour. Thou, who hast passed days and nights in the embrace of the foul fiend, thou must expiate thy wicked offence in purging flame. I, as the magistrate of this community, condemn thee to death by burning as a witch, whom no act of Christian mercy can reach.'
My mother raised herself upon her elbow. She spake. So long as memory shall endure, her last words will ring in my ears: 'And I curse thee, Jonathan Buck, and with my last breath, I shall curse thee. Thy life on earth shall be torments and in thy grave thou shalt not be at peace. I shall haunt thee living, awake or sleeping. Thy conscious labors shall not bear fruit and thy dreams shall torture thee; and so long forever as a monument shall stand above thy filthy carcass or a tomb contain thy bones, so long shall my curse be upon thee and my sign upon thy tombstone!'
An unbroken silence greeted this final outburst, a silence portentous of condemnation.
Again the voice of Colonel Buck disturbed this silence.
'Let this witch be bound to the door of her own house. Let fagots of pitch pine be heaped about her. I, myself, will apply the torch.'
Back through the village and up the hill they dragged my almost unconscious mother, I following, dumb with terror.
'Let her be stripped naked, that the world may see her shame and know that we are justified in inflicting the scriptural penalty!' It was the cold, metallic voice of Colonel Buck.
Men vied with women in the execution of the command. The last vestige of clothing was stripped from her body and willing hands bound her to her own door. The forests around were scoured for dry pine. The pyre was heaped high upon my mother's naked body and the cruel wood bruised her tender flesh.
As Colonel Buck approached with a burning torch, I felt myself released as from a spell. With a wild shriek, I climbed over the pile of wood and pressed my lips to my mother's, which responded feebly and for the last time forever.
I was dragged away and the Colonel applied the torch. The flames leaped lightly over the lower wood but caught immediately about the fagots heaped around the victim's breasts and head and beautiful hair. A single groan escaped from her lips and even as she died, the pains of delivery seized her. Her body gave a convulsive shudder and hung limp and immovable above the devouring flames. Fiercer and still fiercer they burned about her head and breast and her upper trunk was entirely consumed by the blaze now bursting forth from the doomed hut before her lower limbs were even scorched. As the flames burned lower, her legs fell apart, one dropping into the flames and the other at my feet. I grasped it, still quivering, and turned to face the mob.
'Hell child!' thundered the Colonel. 'Throw that accursed limb to join its mate upon the pyre!'
And then my tongue unloosened. Then the remembrances of my dreams, and the shadowy visitor, and the fragments of conversation, and the weird chanting rushed through my mind and I screeched with such hellish intensity that the mob itself fell back and left me face to face with Colonel Buck.
'I remember now! I remember thy voice now, Colonel Buck, in the dark night when only the forest animals made noises without. In my dreams it was always thou who didst come. It was always thou who didst tell my mother how beautiful she was. It was thou who didst say that Venus envied her and that David would have forgotten Uriah's wife had she then dwelt in Jerusalem. It was thou who didst assert that thou didst fear the wood nympths would deprive her of her shapely limbs.' And with all my frenzied strength I smote the horrified Colonel upon the hip with the quivering limb and felled him to the ground. Then, still grasping it in my arms, I fled back into the black forests and ran and ran, all breathless, until I could hear no more the crackling flames and could no more catch the lurid glare through the branches.
All night I wandered deeper and deeper into the pathless woods, always clinging to the gruesome relic of my mother. As the morning sunlight broke through the branches of the primeval forest, I sank exhausted to the ground and slept a dreamless sleep with that poor, charred relic clasped always to my breast.
It was night again when I regained consciousness. The chill of the evening air had awakened me. My burden was still in my arms but icy cold and stiff.
My memory was a blank. I could remember nothing of my situation. I only knew that I held in my arms a nameless terror that I could not identify and that I was alone in pitch blackness, a victim of some unfathomable horror.
In this predicament I must have swooned. My next consciousness must have been at noon of the following day, for the hot sun poured down from an almost vertical position. I sprang to my feet, still clinging to that awful thing. The odor had begun to be unbearable. With instinctive disgust, I cast it from me and as it bounced from a ledge of rock into a thicket, my memory returned with a suddenness that well nigh bereft me of reason. My whole life came back in those detached mosaic fragments which are to this day the sole remnants of my first eight years.
My first impulse when memory returned was destined to control my activities for all the long years during which Colonel Buck was still to live. It was an impulse to return to the scene of the tragedy and to remain there forever. Coupled with this desire was the dread of remaining in the hut nights, to see that shadowy visitor of my former dreams and to have no protecting mother there to lull me to sleep. I did not realize that the same flame, which I had seen consume almost the entire form of my mother had also destroyed her abode. In some vague way, my frenzied fancy told me that if I could find my way back and could conceal all that remained of her somewhere in the cabin, it would act as a protection from that dreadful demon who formerly intruded in my dreams. I accordingly again possessed myself of my awful burden and stealthily pursued my way back through the pathless forests. My knowledge of woodcraft and my physical strength, acquired in my forest life, were a material assistance to me on my return journey although I did not attain the desired goal that night.
All through the long, hot summer’s afternoon I toiled slowly back, faint with hunger and weary with the weight of my burden. At length, as the sun was setting, I sank senseless upon the ground to pass yet another night in utter oblivion.
When I recovered consciousness the next morning, I discovered that my burden was missing. I searched the immediate vicinity with frantic eagerness. Then I ran back in the direction whence I thought I had come. My instinct was true. It was but the toil of a few minutes when I found the object of my search beneath a clump of low bushes. The black ants had found it and it was literally covered with them. With my remaining strength, I brushed away the carnivorous insects and staggered a few steps on my return trail when I fell prostrate to the ground.
Providence had guided this fall. Within a foot of my head as I lay, powerless to arise,was a bird's nest on a branch of a small shrub, and within the nest were four tiny robins not yet fledged. I eyed that nest with indescribable fascination. I could not yet exercise the necessary effort to reach forth my hand to lift the tiny birds from the nest, even although I should starve within sight, yea even within reach, of food.
The forest trees above me seemed to be whirling and the world beneath me seemed to be turning over, and for the last time I lost my senses. When I again awoke, my eyes were staring at the nest. With one agonizing effort, I reached for it and attained it. One of the tiny birds was scarcely a single mouthful and yet I had the utmost difficulty in devouring it. It must have taken hours to dispose of all four, I do not know. Time existed not for me.
The tiny morsels restored me to sufficient strength so that I could sit up, but for a long time further exertion was impossible. It was only the sight of another nest a few feet away that stimulated renewed efforts. Partly crawling on hands and knees, partly rolling on the ground, I achieved this one and dispatched its contents. My strength began slowly to return. After a little I found myself able to arise and to extend my foraging manoeuvres about a greater area. I found an abundance of nests and a spring of ice cold water. Another night found me still in the depths of the forest but sufficiently initiated as to gain a livelihood. I passed this night in probably the first natural sleep I had had since the awful event which had driven me into the woods.
The next morning I again took up my burden and returned as near as I could calculate towards the hut. Another day's travel, sustained by young birds and the succulent shoots of ferns and another night in the forest and still a part of another day passed before I emerged upon the Orland Road about a mile east of my native hill.
As I thrust my head through the shrubbery that bordered the road, I saw a group of men and women coming up the road from the east. My long sojourn in the forests, naturally also influenced by my last experiences with humanity, had affected me with a feeling of revulsion from all mankind. I slunk back into the forest until the crowd should pass.
As they approached nearer, I could hear them conversing in agitated discourse. The uproar of many voices all talking at once grew louder. When they were nearly opposite my place of concealment, they all stood still and one voice arose above that of the others. It was the voice of the Minister.
'Dearly beloved: let us not judge lest we be judged. On this holy Sabbath morning let us have charity. Brother Buck has promised that at this morning's service, he will give us the evidence of his innocence. Let us withhold our judgment for Christ's sake.' As he moved on up the road towards my hill, his voice broke forth in a psalm tune and the voices of the men and women joined in.
And so the throng passed my hiding place. I understood in part at least the meaning. It was Sunday morning and the part of the congregation which lived east of the village were on their way to church with their minister who had passed the night previous with some member of his flock. I could also understand the allusion to Colonel Buck but I could not comprehend what evidence of innocence his hellish brain was devising.
I ran rapidly towards the village through the tall timber near the road, passed the people on the road and arrived in view of the clearing where my only home had stood. A heap of ashes alone greeted me. Overwhelmed I sank to the ground and again the crowd passed on.
It was my intention to arrive at the rear of the church and to crawl under it, where I might hear all that occurred above through the thin, split log floor. But what to do with my burden in the meantime!
As I gazed upon the heap of ashes, an inspiration seized me. I could conceal it temporarily there until a more favorable and secure place could be determined upon. No sooner planned than executed. I scooped out a deep hole in the ashes and placed it there, carefully scraping the ashes over the place so as to leave no trace. Then I slunk by back paths to the church. The inhabitants of the entire village were congregated within. During a psalm I had no difficulty in gaining a position under the church where I could hear all that occurred within.
The regular church service was followed. The long, dreary prayer, the songs and the never-ending sermon. For hours I lay there. At length the ordinary service ended and a silence, almost uncanny, followed. Then the voice of the minister again arose.
'Brother Buck, the last time that we met in this house of God, it was to pronounce a just penalty upon one whom we deemed a witch. Whether she were witch or not, a most wicked and lustful woman has been removed from our midst by the mercy of God, for which let us render Him due thanks. The accusations of that hair-brained boy, whom God, in His infinite mercy, hath led away into the wilderness to die and become a prey to the wild beast, for which let us render thanks; the accusations of that boy, may God have mercy on his soul, hath led sundry of our brethren to whisper ill-advised and unseemly evil report about thee, the founder of this community and the chief pillar and support of this house of God. Stand forth, Brother Buck, and face thy neighbors and before God and in the presence of this holy congregation, declare the truth.'
I heard halting steps as of a lame man limping towards the platform. I heard a solemn serpent-like voice, that of the Colonel.
'Let us pray.'
For an interminable period he continued his prayer. He prayed for sinners living and dead. He prayed for saints living and dead. He prayed for the colonies. He prayed for his most christian Majesty, George II. He prayed for the repose of my mother's soul and mine. And finally, with one final outburst of climactic oratory, amidst the resounding 'Amens' of the congregation, he concluded 'Oh, Lord God, come down through this roof this morning. Come down through this roof. We need Thee here in Bucksport.'
My God, how I wished that a French cannon ball could fall through that roof, punctuating his blasphemy.
Then he proceeded with his evidence. The simple people of that superstitious age accepted it with approbation.
'Brethren: this is the test of my innocence as a witness to thee and to all coming generations. I will build a marble tomb for myself upon the spot where that wretched, wicked woman expiated her foul sin and there ye may bury me when I shall pass to my reward among the saints of God, and if I be guilty may her sign appear upon my tomb as she said, and may it remain there forever and forever, amen.'
'So let it be,' assented the congregation and they broke forth into a burst of triumphant song, during which I made my escape back to the ash heap which contained all that was left of her for whom Colonel Buck had foresworn himself.
If the Colonel should have the temerity to carry out his declaration, evidently the ash heap was no safe place in which to conceal my treasure, and fearing its loss, I disinterred it and again betook myself to the woodland. There, beside a gigantic granite boulder, a spot selected so that I might forever identify it, deep, deep down in the ground I pawed out a hole and there I placed the poor limb, to remain, as I then hoped, until the crack of doom.
My task was barely completed when I heard voices followed by singing in the direction of the clearing and I stealthily crept back. Surrounding the site of the burnt hut was the entire congregation. Colonel Buck was driving down a stake by the time I arrived, marking out as he explained, the cornerstone of the tomb which he proposed to construct for himself. Then limping from position to position, he drove three other stakes, indicating the location of the remaining corners.
A year passed away. I had been adopted into a tribe of Indians who were secretly allied with the French, but nominally friendly to the English. They knew my story and had no fear of betrayal. We had been far to the north country during the year and had wandered back to their ancient camping ground on a promontory overlooking the river west of the village, still known as Indian Point.
From this point, one could see beyond the waters of a curving bay the hill east of the river upon which arose the magnificent tomb just completed by Colonel Buck. Its marvelous whiteness glittered in the moonlight of the first night of our encampment. By a strange coincidence, it was the anniversary of the day of my mother’s death.
An irresistible unrest possessed my soul to visit the spot where she had paid the penalty demanded by the villagers and to view again the grave which I had provided by the granite rock. I slipped into one of the canoes and noiselessly paddled across. I drew my canoe out among the reeds at the water's edge and climbed the well known hillside. My heart throbbed as if to awaken even the dead.
I crossed the Orland Road and entered what was, only one short year since, the yard of my mother’s hut. Before me gleamed the great white tomb, as large as the hut had been. But what was that object so near it! Could it be my naked mother haunting the scene of her life and death! At least I feared her not. If it were she, we would make our home in that tomb until it was opened to receive the dead body of Colonel Buck; and her spirit should lull me to sleep as in the olden times and I would fear no more any shadowy presences within the tomb.
I drew nearer. It was not my mother. My God! It was Colonel Buck, naked, standing there with one hand resting on the door of the tomb and the other apparently at work upon the white wall of the tomb beside the door. With horrible fascination I drew nearer, unable to resist the magnetic attraction. Horror upon horrors! Hanging on the wall by the side of the door was my mother’s leg and the Colonel was softly touching it with a tiny brush. I shrieked in terror but he heard me not. In my agony, I rushed up to him, midget that I was, but he observed me not. Then only I discovered the mystery. The Colonel was painting a picture of that leg on that tomb and he was painting it in blood. And the blood was his own. Even as I stood frozen to the spot, I saw him dip the brush in a bleeding gash on his naked bosom and again apply himself to the task. With what horrible minuteness he traced even the peculiar shape of the toes. At length, apparently satisfied, he turned from his task, opened the door of the tomb and in a few moments emerged again, fully dressed in that awful devil's garb. He limped straight by me, standing in the full moonlight, and with staring, obtruding but sightless eyes, went down the hill to the Orland Road and turned towards the village.
The awful presence was gone. The phantom of my childhood's dreams, the originator of my only woe was gone. I knew no more. I remembered no more. Whether I completed my original purpose of visiting the granite boulder beside which my mother's leg lay buried, I know not. I only know that when I again became conscious, I was in the Indian camp and there was a terrible turmoil going on. How I arrived there I never knew.
Col. Buck and a company of soldiers from the fort had surrounded the camp and were demanding the surrender of the miscreant who had defiled the Colonel's tomb. Some wakeful inhabitant of Orphans' Isle had seen a canoe leave the bank beneath the tomb and had seen it paddled across the little bay to our encampment. The next morning, an early rising farmer, on his way out to his potato patch east of the tomb, had discovered the depredation and had returned and reported it to Col. Buck. The testimony of the islander shortly afterwards had fixed the guilt upon my tribe.
I was so small that I was entirely overlooked in the investigation. In fact I kept silence, not through fear of punishment but because I could not convince myself, in the broad light of the day, that I had gone through the experience of the night before. It must have been another of my foolish dreams.
The protestations of innocence upon the part of the Indians were met with jeers of derision by the Colonel and before I could make even a vain attempt to save my tribe, the flintlocks of the whites spoke fire and my companions of the past year dropped by ones and two and threes and groups dead upon the ground. The whites rushed in and massacred the squaws and papooses save only me. 'Ere I could even feel afraid Col. Buck had seized me and shouted, 'I spare this wizened ape to be my personal body guard.'
Merciful heavens, my troubles and Indian life combined had changed me in one year so that not even Col. Buck knew me. Inscrutable providence had made me the property of the villian I hated.
Let time move on.
Ten years passed away. During all this dreary time I had been the despised slave of a hated maniacal master. We mutually loathed each other and yet we were bound together by an invisible bond which each perceived and yet which he, at least, could not understand but which neither could break. He would fly into violent passions of rage and beat me until my body was a quivering mass of bruised and bleeding pulp and I would curse him to his face until he became purple with unrestrained and ungovernable anger. And still, during all these years, I did not disclose my identity nor did the Colonel discover it. He abhorred the very sight of me; the very air I breathed seemed to poison him; the ground I trod appalled him and yet he would not permit me to wander from his side day or night. I accompanied him on all his trips about the settlement; I was his unwilling yet constant shadow when he was hunting, fishing, or fighting Indians, when he attended church or sat in judgment in his capacity of magistrate and my couch at night was always where he could reach out his hand and touch me.
His sons, of whom he had two by a wife dead these thirty years, shrank from entering his mansion and indeed very rarely and only when urgent necessity compelled, did they come at all. Their wives and children never came. The village folk avoided his pretentious palace as assiduously as they ever had my mother's despicable hut. Cause there must have been, but so closely was I bound to the Colonel's side that I never heard the faintest breath of the village gossip.
Even though my body did not grow, yet my mind was abnormally forced. The Colonel was, himself, a graduate from Oxford and was a most erudite scholar and antiquarian. Latin, Greek and Hebrew he knew as he did English and he compelled me to acquire all his great store of ancient lore so that at nineteen, I was as highly educated as many a hoary old professor of the universities of Europe.
Well do I remember my first lesson in Latin, when the Colonel stripped me to the waist because of my inattention and struck me with a scourge which caused the blood to squirt, at the same time repeating amo, amas, amat, and compelling me to repeat it after him, and then, because I could not recite the whole conjugation in one lesson, he rubbed my bleeding wounds with salt. And thus the classics were lashed into me and I became shrewder and wiser and uglier, until the villagers called me Buck’s educated ape.
In all those ten years, the marvelous occurrence at the tomb was not duplicated. It would seem that I was what Aristotle would call a catharsis for his turbulent moral temperament and that he relieved his own torture by inflicting misery on me. And I, on my part, gloated over his halting gait, induced by the blow I had given him, and my power to render him wretched.
The section of the front wall of the tomb upon which the Colonel had traced in his own blood the symbol of his sin was replaced a few days after the occurrence by a new wall. The Colonel had tried at first to have the stone cutters scour the awful object off but the deeper they scoured and polished, the more flesh-like and natural became the appearance. They had then tried removing a rectangular section of the marble with the intention of fitting in a new piece. As if by design, the block removed left an aperture in the wall shaped like a coffin, in the bottom of which lay that awful object. I did not know until near the close of the ten years' period about which I am now speaking the reason for the Colonel's blood permeating the marble so deeply. The Colonel revealed the mystery to me himself. His blood had become transformed into a peculiar acid which would eat its way through the thickest marble and yet retain all the properties of ordinary blood in the performance of the usual physiological functions.
The coffin-like receptacle on the side of the tomb with the vivid contents set the Colonel in a rage and he ordered the whole wall removed and a new one built. This new wall remained in all its pristine whiteness during these ten years.
The Colonel had quieted the apprehensions of the villagers by ascribing the original appearance to witch craft upon the part of some one of the Indians, and as it did not recur, the gossip gradually died out. In the meantime other and greater issues were troubling the colonies. The French and Indians were encroaching on the frontiers and a great war was impending, in fact the war which eventually gave England the control of all eastern North America, and in the presence of this threatening peril, the activities of Buck and his ape attracted but minor attention.
It was the year that his Most Christian Majesty George II died and that his reprobate son, George III ascended the throne that the colonies, partially freed from their dread of the French and Indians, because of Wolfe's victory at Quebec, that our settlement received its second and almost unbelievable shock. It happened in this wise:
In the tenth year of my service as slave and pupil of Col. Buck, in the nineteenth year of my life, the Colonel sickened and died, cursing me with his dying breath and yet holding me in his iron grasp until his life was extinct and until his fingers were forcibly unclasped by the attendants. And even as he cursed me, I cursed him.
'Let her sign appear upon his tomb forever!' were my farewell words as the breath left his body. The attendants shuddered as they freed me from his grasp. His sons dragged me away into another room and bade me begone forever, but I cursed them too and fought them with uncanny strength. I invoked the fiends of hell to put upon them and their descendants forever the curse of their father's halting gait, and refused to budge and they, in their superstition, dreading to evict forcibly such an uncanny object as they deemed me until after their father's funeral, allowed me to remain.
The Colonel had been dead two days. His body had reposed in a great stone coffin in the great front parlor awaiting the day of the funeral, which was set for the third after his demise. His Sons and servants refused to stay in the house during the interim and I was left in undisputed possession.
How I gloated over his dead body day and night! How I delighted to open the shroud and gaze upon that ugly scar upon his chest and what thrills of inexpressible delight it gave me to run my fingers over that scar and to gloat over the occasion for it.
A hell-born thought came to me. I would search out the grave which contained the grewsome relic which I had buried by the granite rock years ago, which spot my union with the Colonel had prevented my ever having visited, and I would disinter that relic probably by this time only a decaying mass of bones and I would conceal it in the bottom of the Colonel's coffin so that it might be buried with him and might arise with him on the judgment day to confront him.
In the stillness of the second night, I stole through the village, searched and found the spot and disinterred, not the bones but the limb itself, preserved by the mineral solution in the ground in its original size, shape and appearance.
For the last time I was to bear this burden, this time through the streets of the sleeping town to the Colonel's house and into the parlor. I opened the coffin, and, rolling the corpse upon its side, I placed the limb in the bottom and rolled the corpse back.
As the Colonel's body touched the limb, it gave a shudder and he sat up in his coffin in the gloomy room lighted by a single candle.
I thought that the contact had brought the Colonel back to life and I exulted in the idea that I could again be his perpetual torment. I took a step towards him preparatory to renewing my long seated pleasure but I was interrupted by the hollow, cavernous voice of the Colonel, so unlike his ordinary querelous tone of command.
'Boy! my son, for thou art my son. Now that I am dead I know it. I always hated and feared thee from the day when I sent thy mother's husband to be food for the fishes when thou didst yet lie in thy mother's womb. I dreaded and hated thee when I saved thee from the massacre on Indian Point, 'though I recognized thee not. Death is a great revealer of mysteries. I am dead. Try my pulse. Place a mirror above my mouth. Boy, I am dead. Two acts of penance I must perform tonight. One of these acts I must repeat forever, so long as a tomb arises above the body of Jonathan Buck.
Know, then, that twenty years ago thy mother was the innocent wife of a fearless sea captain whose ship sailed from this port. Know, then, that during one of his absences, I beguiled and betrayed thy mother; I Jonathan Buck, founder of this town and its magistrate, great and glorious in the eyes of thy mother, did win her foolish fancy. Know, then, that when thy mother's husband returned from one of his voyages, thy mother was pregnant. Know, then, that I loaded his ship with merchandise for Africa, much rum for the converted negroes. Know, then, that in the night before he sailed, while he lay at home in the arms of his unsuspected wife, while his ship lay at wharf high and dry at the low-tide, I crept along the beach beneath her and with an auger, bored holes in her bottom, which I filled with mud and pasted over with putty which the long voyage and the ocean waves would loosen, causing his ship to sink and himself and crew to be lost in the briny deep. Know, then, that the next morning, on the high tide, this doughty captain sailed away from his unfaithful wife, never more to be heard of in this world. Though I am dead, I have not yet met him. I expect to soon. Know, then, that the women of the village, more wily than men, computed the time of thy birth, and knew that thou wast not begotten by thy mother’s husband yet knew not who, indeed, thy father was; and many an innocent and godly man, who had done favors to the buxom wife of the sailor during his frequent absences from home, was suspected by his wife, much to the lasting discontent of both. Understand, then, why thy mother was an outcast.
The rest thou knowest.
My second act of penance must be repeated forever, so long as tomb shall hold my ashes or tombstone arise to mark the site, whenever the sign shall be removed therefrom. Attend me, boy, for the last time, that thou mayst be able to explain to all who may ever dwell in this colony.'
He arose from his coffin and east aside his shroud. The flickering light from the torch was reflected back from the gash in his side as if from a mirror.
He limped to the fireplace and removed a brick, he released a spring, whereupon one wall of the fireplace opened like a door upon a hinge, disclosing a hitherto hidden recess. Thence he drew forth a suit of clothes, a devil's suit, such as I had seen the eve of my mother's murder. He put it on. Then he fumbled in the recess for a moment and produced a small dagger and a tiny artist's brush, which he bestowed in one of the pockets of his coat.
He limped forth into the night, beckoning me to follow. Horrified, I obeyed. He leading, I following, we made out way to the tomb. Standing by its door, he threw open his devil's coat and slashed his naked breast with the dagger. Then, with his brush, dipped in the trickling blood, he painted for the second time, in horrible minuteness of detail, the perfect picture of my mother's leg upon the glistening whiteness of the wall.
I know not how it happens, but to this day, although the Colonel's sons demolished the tomb long years ago and raised a simple marble monument upon the site, yet upon this the symbol still appears and his superstitious sons dare no further interfere. A tale is current, said to have originated with the pastor himself, who has long since slept with the village forefathers in the regular cemetery on Oak Hill, that the godly man, returning from ministering to a dying member of his flock, one night at midnight, saw the devil, all radiant in phosphorescent light, painting the new tombstone. However that may be, I know only what I have myself beheld.
The Colonel, having completed his task, surveyed it with fiendish satisfaction. Then, turning to me, he explained the miraculous properties of the acid in his blood. Then he returned, I at his heels, to the village to his own house and limped into the parlor. He placed the devil's suit, the dagger and the artist's brush in the bottom of the coffin by the side of the limb, apparently unaware of its presence. He put on the shroud and climbed into the coffin and lay down. He drew the shroud about him and folded his hands upon his breast:
'Close the lid, boy!' were the last words of Jonathan Buck."