The Indian Drum by William MacHarg (classic english novels txt) 📕

A servant's voice came from the door, startling him.

"Mrs. Sherrill wishes you told she is waiting, Miss Sherrill."

"I'll be there at once." Constance, also, seemed startled and confused; but she delayed and looked back to Alan.

"If—if we fail to find 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, remembering the book which he held, he drew a chair up to the light, and read the short, dry biography of his father printed on the page opposite the portrait. It summarized 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 part, he saw, merely of lists of ships, their kind, their size, the date when they were built, and their owners. Under this last head he saw some score of times 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 "Disasters of the Year," and he read some of them; they were short accounts, drily and unfeelingly put, but his blood thrilled to these stories of drowning, freezing, blinded men struggling against storm and ice and water, and conquering or being conquered by them. Then he came to his father's picture and biography once more and, with it, to pictures of other lakemen and their biographies. He turned to the index and looked for Sherrill's name, and then Spearman's; 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 had, the most of them, no tradition of seamanship, such as Sherrill had told him he himself had had. They had been sons of lumbermen, of farmers, of mill hands, miners, or fishermen. They had been very young for the most part, when they had heard and answered the call of the lakes—the ever-swelling, fierce demand of lumber, grain, and ore for outlet; and they had lived hard; 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 comparatively, had survived; by daring, by enterprise, by taking great chances, they had thrust their heads above those of their fellows; they had come to own a half dozen, a dozen, perhaps 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 thoughtful. He felt strongly the immensity, the power, the grandeur of all this; but he felt also its violence and its fierceness. 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 clock in the hall struck nine. He got up and went out into the hall and asked for his hat and coat. When they had been brought him, he put them on and went out.

The snow had stopped some time before; a strong and increasing wind had sprung up, which Alan, with knowledge of the wind across his prairies, recognized as an aftermath of the greater storm that had produced it; for now the wind was from the opposite direction—from the west. He could see from the Sherrills' door step, when he looked toward the lighthouse at the harbor mouth winking red, white, red, white, at him, that this offshore wind was causing some new commotion and upheaval among the ice-floes; they groaned and labored and fought against the opposing pressure 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 stopped under a street-lamp, looking up at the big, stern old mansion questioningly. It had taken on a different look for him since he had heard Sherrill's account of his father; there was an appeal to him that made his throat grow tight, in its look of being 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 disrepair about it. He waited many minutes, 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 call 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 was that in itself any more remarkable than that he should be the guest, the friend of such people as the Sherrills? No one as yet, since Sherrill had told him he was Corvet's son, had called him by name; when they did, what would they call him? Alan Conrad still? Or Alan Corvet?

He noticed, up 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 them "father" and "mother" any more—and tell them what he had discovered as soon as he arrived. He could not tell them that, but he could write them at least that he had arrived safely and was well. He bought a postcard 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 and turned back to Astor Street; and he walked more swiftly now, having come to his decision, and only shot one quick look up at the house as he approached it. With what had his father shut himself 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 unlocked the outer door. Holding this door open to get the light from the street lamp, he fitted the key into the inner door; then he closed the outer door. For fully a minute, with fast beating heart and a sense of expectation of he knew not what, he kept his hand upon the key before he turned it; then he opened the door and stepped into the dark and silent house.

Alan, standing in the darkness of the hall, felt in his pocket for his matches and struck one on the box. The light showed the hall in front of him, reaching back into some vague, distant darkness, and great rooms with wide portièred doorways gaping on both sides. He turned into the room upon his right, glanced to see that the shades were drawn on the windows toward the street, then found the switch and turned on the electric light.

As he looked around, he fought against his excitement and feeling of expectancy; it was—he told himself—after all, merely a vacant house, though bigger and more expensively furnished than any he ever had been in except the Sherrills; and Sherrill's statement to him had implied that anything there might be in it which could give the reason for his father's disappearance would be probably only a paper, a record of some kind. It was unlikely that a thing so easily concealed as that could be found by him on his first examination of the place; what he had come here for now—he tried to make himself believe—was merely to obtain whatever other information it could give him about his father and the way his father had lived, before Sherrill and he had any other conversation.

Alan had not noticed, when he stepped into the hall in the morning, whether the house then had been heated; now he appreciated that it was quite cold and, probably, had been cold for the three days since his father had gone, and his servant had left to look for him. Coming from the street, it was not the chilliness of the house 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 dropped his hat on a chair in the hall; he unbuttoned his overcoat but kept it on, and stuffed his gloves into his pocket.

A light in a single room, he thought, would not excite curiosity or attract attention from the neighbors or any one passing in the street; but lights in more than one room might do that. He resolved to turn off the light in each room as he left it, before lighting the next one.

It had been a pleasant as well as a handsome house, if he could judge by the little of it he could see, before the change had come over his father. The rooms were large with high ceilings. The one where he stood, obviously was a library; bookshelves reached three quarters of the way to the ceiling on three of its walls except where they were broken in two places by doorways, and in one place on 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. A leather-cushioned Morris chair—a 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 his father, which Sherrill had not been able to make him feel, came to Alan as he reflected how many days and nights Benjamin Corvet must have passed reading or thinking in that chair before his restless feet could have worn away the tough, Oriental fabric of the rug.

There were several magazines on the top of the large desk, some unwrapped, some still in their wrappers; Alan glanced at them and saw that they all related to technical and scientific subjects. The desk evidently had been much used and had many drawers; Alan pulled one open and saw that it 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 until he had looked more thoroughly about the house.

He went to the door of the connecting room and looked into it. This room, dusky in spite of the light which shone past him through the wide doorway, 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 built 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 in the front room,