For they know not what they do

== FOR THEY KNOW NOT WHAT THEY DO ==
=== by Wilbur Daniel Steele ===
From The Best Stories of Wilbur Daniel Steele 1946 
When Christopher Kain told me his story, sitting late
in his dressing room at the Philharmonic, I felt that I ought to say something,
but nothing in .the world seemed adequate. It was one of those times when words
have no weight; mine sounded like a fly buzzing in the tomb of kings. And after
all, he did not hear me; I could tell that by the look on his face as he sat
there staring into the light, the lank, dark hair framing his waxen brow, his
shoulders hanging forward, his lean, strong, sentient fingers wrapped around
the brown neck of "Ugo," the 'cello, tightly. 
Agnes Kain was a lady, as a lady was before the light
of that poor worn word went out. Quiet, reserved, gracious, continent, bearing
in face and form the fragile beauty of a rose petal come to its fading on a
windless ledge, she moved down the years with the steadfast sweetness of the
gentlewoman— gentle, and a woman. 
They did not know much about her in the city, where
she had come with her son. They did not need to. Looking into her eyes, into
the transparent soul behind them, they could ask no other credential for the
name she bore and the lavender she wore for the husband of whom she never
spoke. 
She spoke of him, indeed, but that was in privacy, and
to her son. As Christopher grew through boyhood, she watched him; in her
enveloping eagerness she forestalled the hour when he would have asked, and
told him about his father, Daniel Kain. 
It gave them the added bond of secret sharers. The
tale grew as the boy grew. Each night when Christopher crept into his mother's
bed for the quiet hour of her voice, it was as if he crept into another world,
the wind-blown, sky-encompassed kingdom of the Kains, Daniel, his father, and
Maynard, his father, another Maynard before him, and all the Kains— and the
Hill and the House, the Willow Wood, the Moor under the cloud, the Beach where
the gray seas pounded, the boundless Marsh, the Lilac Hedge standing against
the stars. 
He knew he would have to be a man of men to measure up
to that heritage, a man strong, grave, thoughtful, kind with the kindness that
never falters, brave with the courage of that dark and massive folk whose blood
ran in his veins. Coming as it did, a world of legend growing up side by side
with the matter-of-fact world of Concord Street, it was made to fit in with all
things natural, and it never occurred to him to question. He, the boy, was not
massive, strong, or brave; he saw things in the dark that frightened him, his
thin shoulders were bound to droop, the hours of practice on his violin left
him with no blood in his legs and a queer pallor on his brow. 
Nor was he always grave, thoughtful, kind. He did not
often lose his temper; the river of his young life ran too smooth and deep. But
there were times when he did. Brief passions swept him, blinded him, twisted
his fingers, left him sobbing, retching, and weak as death itself. He never
seemed to wonder at the discrepancy in things, how- ever, any more than he
wondered at the look in his mother's eyes, as she hung over him, waiting, in
those moments of nausea after rage. She had not the look of the gentlewoman
then; she had more the look, a thousand times, of the prisoner led through the
last gray corridor in the dawn. 
He saw her like that once when he had not been angry.
It was on a day when he came into the front hall unexpectedly as a stranger was
going out of the door. The stranger was dressed in rough, brown homespun; in
one hand he held a brown velour hat, in the other a thorn stick without a
ferrule. Nor was there anything more worthy of note in his face, an
average-long face with hollowed cheeks, sunken gray eyes, and a high forehead,
narrow, sallow, and moist. 
No, it was not the stranger that troubled Christopher.
It was his mother's look at his own blundering entrance, and, when the man was
out of hearing, the tremulous haste of her explanation. 
"He came about some papers, you know." 
"You mean our Morning Posts?" Christopher
asked her. 
She let her breath out all at once, and color flooded
her face. 
"Yes," she told him. "Yes, yes." 
Neither of them said anything more about it. 
It was that same day, toward evening, that Christopher
broke one of his long silences, reverting to a subject always near to them
both. 
"Mother, you've never told me where it is— on the
map, I mean." 
She was looking the other way. She did not turn
around. 
"I— Chris— I— I haven't a map in the house."
He did not press the matter. He went out into the back
yard presently, under the grape trellis, and there he stood still for a long
time, staring at nothing in particular. 
He was growing up. 
He went away to boarding school not long after this,
taking with him the picture of his adored mother, the treasured epic of his
dark, strong fathers, his narrow shoulders, his rare, blind bursts of passion,
his newborn wonder, and his violin. At school they thought him a queer one. 
The destinies of men are unaccountable things. Five
children in the village of Deer Bay came down with diphtheria. That was why the
academy shut up for a week, and that was what started Christo- pher on his way
home for an unexpected holiday. And then it was only by one chance in a
thousand that he should glimpse his mother's face in the down train halted at
the Junction where he himself was changing. 
She did not see him till he came striding along the
aisle of her coach, his arms full of his things, face flushed, eyes brimming
with the surprise and pleasure of seeing her, lips trembling questions. 
"Why, Mother, what on earth? Where are you going?
I'm to have a week at least, Mother; and here you're going away, and you didn't
tell me, and what is it, and everything?" 
His eager voice trailed off. The color drained out of
his face, and there was a shadow in his eyes. He drew back from her the least
way. 
"What is it, Mother? Mother!" 
Somewhere on the platform outside the conductor's
droning " board''' ran along the coaches. Agnes Kain opened her white
lips. 
"Get off before it's too late, Christopher. I
haven't time to explain now. Go home, and Mary will see you have everything.
I'll be back in a day or so. Kiss me, and go quickly. Quickly!" 
He did not kiss her. He would not have kissed her for
worlds. He was too bewildered, dazed, lost, too inexpressibly hurt. On the
platform outside, had she turned ever so little to look, she might have seen
his face again for an instant as the wheels ground on the rails. Color was
coming back to it again, a murky color like the shadow of a red cloud. 
They must have wondered, in the coach with her, at the
change in the calm, unobtrusive, well-gowned gentlewoman, their fellow pas-
senger. Those that were left after another two hours saw her get down at a
barren station where an old man waited in a carriage. The halt was brief, and
none of them caught sight of the boyish figure that slipped down from the
rearmost coach to take shelter for him- self and his dark, tempest-ridden face
behind the shed at the end of the platform. . . . 
Christopher walked out across a broad, high, cloudy
plain, follow- ing a red road, led by the dust feather hanging over the distant
carriage. 
He walked for miles, creeping antlike between the
immensities of the brown plain and the tumbled sky. Had he been less
implacable, less intent, he might have noticed many things: the changing con-
formation of the clouds, the far flight of a gull, the new perfume and texture
of the wind that flowed over his hot temples. But as it was, the sea took him
by surprise. Coming over a little rise, his eyes focused for another long, dun
fold of the plain, it seemed for an instant as if he had lost his balance above
a void; for a wink he felt the passing of a strange sickness. He went off a
little way to the side of the road and sat down on a flat stone. 
The world had become of a sudden infinitely simple, as
simple as the inside of a cup. The land broke down under him, a long, naked
slope fringed at the foot by a ribbon of woods. Through the upper branches he
saw the shingles and chimneys of a pale gray village clinging to a white beach,
a beach which ran up to the left in a border flight of cliffs, showing on their
crest a cluster of roofs and dull green gable ends against the sea that lifted
vast, unbroken, to the rim of the cup. 
Christopher was fifteen, and queer even for that queer
age. He had a streak of the girl in him at his adolescence, and, as he sat
there in a huddle, the wind coming out of this huge new gulf of life seemed to
pass through him, bone and tissue, and tears rolled down his face. 
The carriage bearing his strange mother was gone, from
sight and from mind. His eyes came down from the lilac-crowned hill to the
beach, where it showed in white patches through the wood, and he saw that the
wood was of willows. And he remembered the plain behind him, the wide, brown
moor under the cloud. He got up on his wobbly legs. There were stones all about
him in the whispering wire grass, and like them the one he had been sitting on
bore a blurred inscription. He read it aloud, for some reason, his voice borne
away faintly on the river of air: 
MAYNARD KAIN, ESQUIRE 1809-1839 
This Monument Erected in His Memory 
by His Sorrowing Widow, 
Harriet Burnam Kain 
"The windy Gales of the West Indies 
Laid Claim, to His Noble Soul And Took him on High to
his Creator Who made him Whole? 
His gaze went on to another of those worn stones. 
Here Lie The Earthly Remains Of 
MAYNARD KAIN, SECOND 
Born 1835— Died 1863. For the Preservation of the
Union. 
There was no moss or lichen on this wind-scored slope.
In the falling dusk the old white stones stood up like the bones of the dead
themselves, and the only sound was the rustle of the wire grass creeping over
them in a dry tide. The boy had taken off his cap; the sea wind moving under
the mat.of his damp hair gave it the look of some somber, outlandish cowl. With
the night coming on, his solem- nity had an elfin quality. He found at last
what he was looking for, and his fingers had to help his eyes: 
DANIEL KAIN 
Beloved Husband of Agnes Willoughby Kain 
Born 1860-Died 1886 
"Forgive them, for they know not what they
do." 
Christopher Kain told me that he left the naked
graveyard repeat- ing it to himself, "Forgive them, for they know not what
they do." conscious less of the words than of the august rhythm falling in
with the pulse of his exaltation. 
The velvet darkness that hangs under clouds had come
down over the hills and the great marsh stretching away to the south of it.
Agnes Kain stood in the open doorway, one hand on the brown wood, the other
pressed to her cheek. 
"You heard it that time, Nelson?" 
"No, ma'am." The old man in the entrance
hall behind her shook his head. In the thin, blown light of the candelabra
which he held high, the worry and doubt of her deepened on his singularly
unlined face. 
"And you might well catch your death in that
draft, ma'am." 
But she only continued to stare out between the
pillars where the lilac hedge made a wall of deeper blackness across the night.
"What am I thinking of?" she whispered, and
then: 
"There!" 
And this time the old man heard it; a nearer,
wind-blown hail. 
"Mother! Oh, Mother!" 
The boy came striding through the gap of the gate in
the hedge. 
"It's I, Mother! Chris! Aren't you
surprised?" 
She had no answer. As he came she turned and moved
away from the door, and the old man, peering from under the flat candle flames,
saw her face like wax. And he saw the boy, Christopher, in the door- way, his
hands flung out, his face transfigured. 
"Mother! I'm here! Don't you understand?" 
He touched her shoulder. She turned to him, as it were
lazily. 
"Yes," she breathed. "I see." 
He threw his arms about her, and felt her shaking from
head to foot. But he was shaking, too. 
"I knew the way!" he cried. "I knew it,
Mother, I knew it! I came down from the Moor and there was the Willow Wood, and
I knew the way home. And when I came, Mother, it was like the trees bow- ing
down their branches in the dark. And when I came by the Beach, Mother, it was
like a roll of drums, beating for me, and when I came to the Hill I saw the
Hedge standing against the sky, and I came, and here I am!" 
She expressed no wonder, asked no question. 
"Yes," was all she said, and it was as if
she spoke of a tree coming to its leaf, the wind to its height, the tide to its
flood. 
Had he been less rapt and triumphant he must have
wondered more at that icy lassitude, and at the cloak of ceremony she wrapped
about her to hide a terror. It was queer to hear the chill urbanity of her:
"This is Christopher, Nelson; Christopher, this is your father's servant,
Nelson." It was queerer still to see the fastidious decorum with which she
led him over this, the familiar house of his fathers. 
He might have been a stranger, come with a guidebook
in his hand. When he stood on his heels in the big drawing room, staring up
with all his eyes at the likenesses of those men he had known so well, it was
strange to hear her going on with all the patter of the gallery attendant,
names of painters, prices, dates. He stood before the portrait of Daniel Kain,
his father, a dark-skinned, longish face with a slightly protruding nether lip,
hollow temples, and a round chin, deeply cleft. As in all the others, the eyes,
even in the dead pigment, seemed to shine with an odd, fixed luminosity of
their own, and like the others from first to last of the line, it bore upon it
the stamp of an imperishable youth. And all the while he stood there, drinking
it in, detail by detail, his mother spoke, not of the face, but of the frame,
some obscure and unsuspected excellence in the gold leaf on the frame. 
More than once in that stately tour of halls and
chambers he found himself protesting gaily, "I know, Mother! I know, I
know!" 
But the contagion of his glory did not seem to touch
her. Nothing seemed to touch her. Only once was the fragile, bright shell of
her punctilio penetrated for a moment, and that was when Christopher, lagging,
turned back to a door they were about to pass and threw it open with the happy
laugh of a discoverer. And then, even before she could have hushed him, the
laughter on his lips died of itself. 
A man lay on a bed in the room, his face as colorless
and still as the pillow behind it. His eyes were open, but they did not move
from the three candles burning on the high bureau, and he seemed unconscious of
any intrusion. 
"I didn't know!" Christopher whispered,
shocked, and shamed. 
When the door was closed again his mother explained.
She ex- plained at length, concisely, standing quite still, with one frail,
fine hand worrying the locket she wore at her throat. Nelson stood quite still
too, his attention engrossed in his candlewicks. And Christopher stood quite
still, and all their shadows. . . . That man was the caretaker, the man,
Christopher was to understand, who had been looking after the place. His name
was Sanderson. He had fallen ill, very ill. In fact he was dying. And that was
why Christopher's mother had to come down, posthaste, without warning. To see
about some papers. Some papers. Christopher was to understand . . . 
Christopher understood. Indeed there was not much to
under- stand. And yet, when they had gone on, he was bothered by it. Already,
so young he was, so ruthless, and so romantic, he had begun to be a little
ashamed of that fading, matter-of-fact world of Concord Street. And it was with
just that world which he wished to forget that the man lying ill in the
candlelit chamber was linked in Christopher's memory. For it was the same man
he had seen in the doorway that morning months ago, with a brown hat in one
hand and a thorn stick in the other. 
Even a thing like that may be half put aside, though—
for a while. And by the time Christopher went to his room for the night, the
thought of the interloper had returned into the back of his mind, and they were
all Kains there on the Hill, inheritors of Romance. He found himself bowing to
his mother with a courtliness he had never known, and an "I wish you a
good night," sounding a century old on his lips. He saw the remote,
patrician figure bow as gravely in return, a petal of color as hard as paint on
the whiteness of either cheek. He did not see her afterward, though— when the
merciful door was closed. 
Before he slept he explored the chamber, touching old
objects with reverent finger tips. He came on a leather case like an absurdly
overgrown beetle, hidden in a corner, and a violoncello was in it. He had seen
such things before, but he had never touched one, and when he lifted it from
the case he had a moment of feeling very odd at the pit of his stomach. Sitting
in his underthings on the edge of the bed, he held the wine-colored creature in
the crook of his arm for a long time, the look in his round eyes, half
eagerness, half pain, of one pursuing the shadow of some ghostly and elusive
memory. 
He touched the C string by and by with an adventuring
thumb. I have heard "Ugo" sing, myself, and I know what Christopher
meant when he said that the sound did not come out of the instru- ment, but
that it came in to it, sweeping home from all the walls and corners of the
chamber, a slow, rich, concentric wind of tone. He felt it about him,
murmurous, pulsating, like the sound of surf borne from some far-off coast. 
And then it was like drums, still farther off. And
then it was the feet of marching men, massive, dark, grave men with luminous
eyes, and the stamp on their faces of an imperishable youth. 
He sat there so lost and rapt that he heard nothing of
his mother's footsteps hurrying in the hall; knew nothing till he saw her face
in the open doorway. She had forgotten herself this time; that fragile defense
of gentility was down. For a moment they stared at each other across a gulf of
silence, and little by little the boy's cheeks grew as white as hers, his hands
as cold, his lungs as empty of breath. 
"What is it, Mother?" 
"Oh, Christopher, Christopher Go to bed,
dear." 
He did not know why, but of a sudden he felt ashamed
and a little frightened, and, blowing out the candle, he crept under the
covers. 
The afternoon was bright with a rare sun, and the
world was. quiet. Christopher lay full-spread on the turf, listening idly to
the "clip-clop" of Nelson's shears as the old man trimmed the hedge. 
"And was my father very strong?" he asked
with a drowsy pride. 
"No, not so very." Nelson stopped clipping
and was immediately lost in the past. 
"Only when he was that way five strong men
couldn't turn him. I'll say that. No, if they had to get him with a shotgun
that day, 'twas nobody's fault nor sin. If Guy Bullard seen Daniel there on the
sand with an ax in his hand and foam-like on his lips, and the little ones
cornered where he caught them between cliff and water- Guy's own baby amongst
them— and knowing the sickness of the Kains as he and everybody else did— why,
I'm free and willing to say 'twas his bounden duty to hold a true aim and pull
a steady trigger on Daniel, man of his though I was, and man of his poor father
before him. . . ." 
Nelson was a queer fellow. His age was really greater
than his unlined face would have told, and his mind, laden with the burden of
misty years, had grown tired. It is charitable to think that, once launched on
the river of memory, the dreaming fellow forgot where he was and to what
audience he spoke, that audience lying quiet, so very quiet, in the deep grass
behind his back. 
"No, I can't make it right to lay blame on any
man for it, no more than I can on them, his brother officers, that broke
Maynard's neck with their tent pegs the night after Gettysburg. No, no . .
." 
It was evidently a time-worn theme, an argument, an
apologia, accepted after years of bitterness and self-searching. He went on
with the remote serenity of age that has escaped the toils of passion, pursuing
the old, worn path of his mind, his eyes buried in vacancy. 
"No, 'twas a mercy to the both of them, father
and son, and a man must see it so. 'Twould be better of course if they could
have gone easier, same as the old Maynard went, thinking himself the Lord our
God to walk on the water and calm the West Indy gale. That's better, better for
all hands round. But if it had to come so, in violence and fear, then nobody
need feel the sin of it on his soul- nobody excepting the old man Bickers, him
that told Daniel. For 'twas from that day he began to take it on. 
"I saw it myself. There was Daniel come home from
other parts where his mother had kept him, out of gossip's way, bright as you
please and knowing nothing wrong with the blood of the Kains. And so I say the
sin lays on the loose-wagging tongue of Bickers, for from the day he let it out
to Daniel, Daniel changed. 'Twas like he'd heard his doom, and went to it.
Bickers is dead a long time now, but may the Lord God lay eternal damnation on
his soul!" 
Even then there was no heat; the curse had grown a
formula. Having come to the end, the old man's eyes tumbled down pain- lessly
out of the void and discovered the shears in his hand. 
"Dear me, that's so," he said to himself.
One thought was enough at a time. He fell to work again. The steady
"clip-clip-clip" moved off slowly along the hedge. Not once did he
remember; not once as the indefatigable worker shuffled himself out of sight
around the house did he look back with any stirring of recollection at the
boyish figure lying there as still as a shadow cast in the deep grass. 
A faintly lopsided moon swam in the zenith. For three
days now that rare clarity had hung in the sky, and for three nights the moon
had grown. Its benign, poisonous illumination flowed down steeply through the
windows of the dark chamber where Christopher hud- dled on the bed's edge,
three pale, chill islands spread on the polished floor. 
Once again the boy brought the bow home across the
shivering strings, and, as if ears could be thirsty as a drunkard's throat, he
drank his fill of the 'cello's deep, full-membered chord. The air was heavy
with the resonance of marching feet, ghostly feet marching and marching down
upon him in slow, inexorable crescendo as the tides ebbed later among the
sedges on the marsh and the moon grew big. And above the pulse of the march he
seemed to hear another cadence, a thin laughter. 
He laughed too, giving himself up to that spectral
contagion. He saw the fat, iridescent bubble with the Hill in it, the House of
his dreams, the Beach and the Moor and the Willow Wood of fancy, and all the
grave, strong, gentle line of Kains to whom he had been made bow down in
worship. He saw himself taken in, soul and body, by a thin-plated fraud, a
cheap trick of mother's words, as, before him, his father had been. And the
faint exhalations from the moon patches on the floor showed his face contorted
with a still, set grimace of mirth. 
Anger came over him in a white veil, twitching his
lips and his toes and bending his fingers in knots. Through the veil a sound
crept, a sound he knew well by this time, secret footfalls in the hall,
faltering, retreating, loitering, returning to lag near the door. 
How he hated her! It is curious that not once did his
passion turn against his blighted fathers; it was against the woman who had
borne him, the babe, and lied to him, the boy— against her, and against that
man, that interloper, dying in a room below. 
The thought that had been willing to creep out of
sight into the back country of his mind on that first night came out now like a
red, devouring cloud. Who was that man? 
What was he dying of— or supposed to be dying of? What
had he been doing that morning in Concord Street? What was he doing here, in
the house of the men who would never grow old? Why had his mother come down
here, where he was, so queerly, so secretly, so frightened? 
Christopher would have liked to kill that man. He
shivered and licked his lips. He would have liked to do something bloody and
abominable to that face with the hollow cheeks, the sunken gray eyes, and the
forehead, high, sallow, and moist. He would have liked to take an ax in his
hand and run along the thundering beach and catch that face in a corner
somewhere between cliff and water. The desire to do this thing possessed him
and blinded him like the kiss of lightning. 
He found himself on the floor at the edge of the
moonlight, full of weakness and nausea. He felt himself weeping as he crawled
back to the bed, his cheeks and neck bathed in a flood of painless tears. He
threw himself down, dazed with exhaustion. 
It seemed to him that his mother had been calling a
long while. "Christopher! What is it? What is it, boy?" 
He had heard no footsteps, going or coming; she must
have been there all the time, waiting, listening, her ear pressed to the thick
old paneling of the door. The thought was like wine; the torment of her
whispering was sweet in his ears. 
"Oh, Chris, Chris! You're making yourself
sick!" 
"Yes," he said. He lifted on an elbow and
repeated in a voice which must have sounded strange enough to the listener
beyond the door. "Yes!" he said. "Yes! 
"Go away!" he cried of a sudden, making a
wide, dim, imperious gesture in the dark. 
"No, no," the imploring whisper crept in.
"You're making yourself sick— Christopher— all over nothing— nothing in
the world. It's so foolish— so foolish— foolish! Oh, if I could only tell you,
Christopher —if I could tell you " 
"Tell me what?" He shuddered with the
ecstasy of his own irony. "Who that man is? That 'caretaker'? What he's
doing here? What you're doing here?" He began to scream in a high, brittle
voice: "Go away from that door! Go away!" 
This time she obeyed. He heard her retreating,
soft-footed and frightened, along the hall. She was abandoning him— without so
much as trying the door, just once again, to see if it was still bolted against
her. 
She did not care. She was sneaking off— down the stairs.
Oh yes, he knew where. 
His lips began to twitch again, and his fingernails
scratched on the bedclothes. If only he had something, some weapon, an ax, a
broad, keen, glittering ax! He would show them! He was strong, incredibly
strong! Five men could not have turned him back from what he was going to do—
if only he had something. 
His hand, creeping, groping, closed on the neck of the
'cello lean- ing by the bed. He laughed. 
Oh yes, he would stop her from going down there; he
would hold her, just where she was on the dark stair, nerveless, breathless, as
long as he liked; if he liked he would bring her back, cringing, begging. 
He drew the bow, and laughed higher and louder yet to
hear the booming discord rocking in upon him from the shadows. Swaying from
side to side, he lashed the hollow creature to madness. They came in the press
of the gale, marching, marching, the wild, dark pageant of his fathers, nearer
and nearer through the moon-struck night. 
"Tell me what?" he laughed.
"What?" 
And abruptly he slept, sprawled crosswise on the
covers, half clothed, disheveled, triumphant. 
It was not the same night, but another, whether the
next or the next but one, or two, Christopher cannot say. But he was out of
doors. 
He had escaped from the house at dusk; he knew that.
He remem- bered the wide, hushed mystery of twilight as he paused on the door-
sill between the fading pillars, the death of day running crimson in the west;
in the east the still, white travail of the sea and the moon— the queer moment.
He had run away, through the hedge and down the back
side of the hill, torn between the two, the death, warm and red like life, and
the birth, pale, chill, and inexorable as death. 
Most of that daft night-running will always be blank
in Chris- topher's mind; moments, and moments only, like islands of clarity,
remain. He brings back one vivid interval when he found himself seated on his
father's gravestone among the whispering grasses, star- ing down into the
pallid bowl of the world. And in that moment he knew what Daniel Kain had felt,
and Maynard Kain before him; a passionate and contemptuous hatred for all the
dullards in the world who never dreamed dreams or saw visions or sang wordless
songs or ran naked-hearted in the flood of the full-blown moon. He hated them
because they could not by any possibility comprehend his mag- nificent
separation, his starry sanity, his— kinship with the gods. And he had a new
thirst to obliterate the whole creeping race of dust dwellers with one wide,
incomparably bloody gesture. 
It was late when he found himself back again before
the house, and an ink-black cloud touched the moon's edge. After the airless
evening a wind had sprung up in the east; it thrashed among the lilac stems as
he came through them and across the turf, silent-footed as an Indian. In his
right hand he had a bread knife, held butt to thumb, daggerwise. Where he had
come by the rust-bitten thing no one knows, least of all himself. In the broken
light his eyes shone with a curious luminosity of their own, absorbed,
introspective. 
All the windows were dark, and the entrance hall, when
he slipped in between the pillars; but across its floor he saw light thrown in
a yellow ribbon from the half-closed door of the drawing room. 
It took his attention, laid hands on his imagination.
He began to struggle against it. 
He would not go into that room. He was going to
another room. To stay him, he made a picture of that other room in his tumbled
mind— the high, bleak walls, the bureau with the three candles burn- ing wanly,
the bed, the face of the man on the bed. And when his rebellious feet,
surrendering him up to the lure of that beckoning ribbon, had edged as far as
the door, and he had pushed it a little farther ajar to get his head in, he saw
that the face itself was there in the drawing room. 
He stood there for some time, his shoulder pressed
against the door jamb, his eyes blinking. 
His slow attention moved from the face to the satin
pillows that wedged it in, and then to the woman that must have been his
mother, kneeling beside the casket with her arms crooked on the shining cover
and her head down between them. And across from her leaned "Ugo," the
'cello, come down from his chamber to stand vigil at the other shoulder of the
dead. 
The first thing that came into his groping mind was a
bitter sense of abandonment. The little core of candlelight hanging in the
gloom left him out. Its unstirring occupants, the woman, the 'cello, and the
clay, seemed sufficient to themselves. His mother had forgotten him. Even
"Ugo," that had grown part and parcel of his madness, had forgotten
him. 
Bruised, sullen, moved by some deep-lying instinct of
the clan, his eyes left them and sought the wall beyond, where there were those
who would not forget him, come what might, blood of his blood and mind of his
own queer mind. And there among the shadowed faces he searched for one in vain.
As if that candlelit tableau, some- how holy and somehow abominable, were not for
the eyes of one of them, the face of Daniel, the wedded husband, had been
turned to the wall. 
Here was something definite, something Christopher
could take hold of, and something that he would not have. 
His mother seemed not to have known he was near till
he flung the door back and came stalking into the light with the rusty bread
knife in his hand. None would have imagined there was blood enough left in her
wasted heart, but her face went crimson when she lifted it and saw him. 
It brought him up short— the blush, where he had
looked for fright. It shocked him, and, shocking him, more than by a thousand
labored words of explanation it opened a window in his disordered brain. He
stood gawking with the effort of thought, hardly con- scious of his mother's
cry. 
"Christopher, I never meant you to know!" 
He kept on staring at the ashen face between the
pillows, long (as his own was long), sensitive, worn; and at the 'cello keeping
in- corruptible vigil over its dead. And then slowly his eyes went down to his
own left hand, to which that same old wine-brown creature had come home from
the first with a curious sense of fitness and authority and right. 
"Who is this man?" 
"Don't look at me so! Don't, Chris!" 
But he did look at her. Preoccupied as he was, he was
appalled at sight of the damage the half-dozen days had done. She had been so
much the lady, so perfectly the gentlewoman. To no one had the outward gesture
and symbol of purity been more precious. No whisper had ever breathed against
her. If there had been secrets be- hind her, they had been dead; if a skeleton,
the closet had been closed. And now, looking down on her, he was not only
appalled, he was a little sickened, as one might be to find squalor and decay
creeping into a familiar and once immaculate room. 
"Who is this man?" he repeated. 
"He grew up with me." She half raised
herself on her knees in the eagerness of her appeal. "We were boy and girl
together at home in Maryland. We were meant for each other, Chris. We were
always to marry— always, Chris. And when I went away, and when I mar- ried your—
when I married Daniel Kain, he hunted and he searched and he found me here. He
was with me, he stood by me through that awful year— and— that was how it
happened. I tell you, Christopher, darling, we were meant for each other. John
Sanderson and I. He loved me more than poor Daniel ever did or could, loved me
enough to throw away a life of promise, just to hang on here after everyone
else was gone, alone with his 'cello and his one little memory. And I loved him
enough to— to — Christopher, don't look at me so!" 
His eyes did not waver. You must remember his age, the
immacu- late, ruthless, mid- Victorian teens; and you must remember his bring-
ing up. 
"And so this was my father," he said. And
then he went on with- out waiting, his voice breaking into falsetto with the
fierceness of his charge. "And you would have kept on lying to me! If I
hadn't happened, just happened to find you here, now, you would have gone on
keeping me in the dark! You would have stood by and seen me— well— go crazy!
Yes, go crazy, thinking I was— well, thinking I was meant for it! And all to
save your precious " 
She was down on the floor again, what was left of the
gentle- woman, wailing. 
"But you don't know what it means to a woman,
Chris! You don't know what it means to a woman!" 
A wave of rebellion brought her up and she strained
toward him across the coffin. 
"Isn't it something, then, that I gave you a
father with a mind? And if you think you've been sinned against, think of me!
Sin! You call it sin! Well, isn't it anything at all that by my 'sin' my son's
blood came down to him clean? Tell me that!" 
He shook himself, and his flame turned to sullenness. 
"It's not so," he glowered. 
All the girl in him, the poet, the hero-worshiping
boy, rebelled. His harassed eyes went to the wall beyond and the faces there,
the ghosts of the doomed, glorious, youth-ridden line, priceless posses- sions
of his dreams. He would not lose them; he refused to be robbed of a tragic
birthright. He wanted some gesture puissant enough to turn back and blot out
all that had been told him. 
"It's not his!" he cried. And reaching out
fiercely he dragged the 'cello away from the coffin's side. He stood for an
instant at bay, bitter, defiant. 
"It's not his! It's mine. It's— it's— ours!"
And then he fled out into the dark of the entrance
hall and up the black stairs. In his room there was no moonlight now, for the
cloud ran over the sky, and the rain had come. 
"It isn't so, it isn't so!" It was like a
sob in his throat. 
He struck on the full strings. And listening,
breathless, through the dying discord he heard— the liquid whispers of the
rain, nothing more. He lashed with a wild bow, time and again. But something
was broken, something was lost; out of the surf of sound he could no longer
fashion the measure of marching feet. The mad Kains had found him out and cast
him out. No longer could he dream them in dreams or run naked-hearted with them
in the flood of the moon, for he was no blood of theirs, and they were gone.
And huddling down on the edge of the bed, he wept. 
The tears washed his eyes and, falling down, bathed
his strength- less hands. And beyond the fantom windows, over the Marsh and the
Moor and the Hill that were not his, the graves of strangers and the lost
Willow Wood, lay the healing rain. He heard it in gurgling rivulets along the
gutters overhead. He heard the soft impact, like a kiss, brushing the reedy
cheeks of the Marsh, the showery shoulder- ing of branches, the aspiration of
myriad drinking grasses, the far whisper of waters coming home to the waters of
the sea— the long, low melody of the rain. 
And by and by he found it was "Ugo," the
'cello, and he was playing. 
They went home the following afternoon, he and his
mother. Or, rather, she went home, and he with her as far as the Junction,
where he changed for school. 
They had not much to say to each other through the
journey. The boy had to be given time. Five years younger, or fifteen years
older, it would have been easier for him to look at his mother. You must
remember what his mother had meant to him, and what, bound up still in the
fierce and somber battle of adolescence, she must mean to him now. 
As for Agnes Kain, she did not look at him, either.
Through the changing hours her eyes rested on the transparent hands lying crossed
in her lap. She seemed very tired and very white. Her hair was done up less
tidily, her lace cuffs were less fresh than they had been wont to be. About her
whole presence there was a troubling hint of letdown, something obscurely
slatternly, a kind of awkward and unlovely nakedness. 
She really spoke to him for the first time at the
Junction, when he stood before her, slim and uncouth under the huge burden of
"Ugo," fumbling through his leave-taking. 
"Christopher," she said, "try not to
think of me— always— as— as- well, when you're older, Christopher, you'll know
what I mean." 
That was the last time he ever heard her speak. He saw
her once again— two days later— but the telegram was delayed and his train was
late, and when he came beside her bed she said nothing. She looked into his
eyes searchingly— for a long while— and died. 
That space stands for the interval of silence that
fell after Chris- topher had told me the story. I thought he had quite
finished. He sat motionless, his shoulders fallen forward, his eyes fixed in
the heart of the incandescent globe over the dressing table, his long fingers
wrapped around the neck of the 'cello. 
"And so she got me through those years," he
said. "Those nip- and-tuck years that followed. By her lie." 
"Insanity is a queer thing," he went on,
still brooding into the light. "There's more of it about than we're apt to
think. It works in so many ways. In hobbies, arts, philosophies. Music is a
kind of insanity. I know. I've got mine penned up in the music now, and I think
I can keep it there now, and save my soul." 
"Yours?" 
"Yes, mine. I know now— now that it's safe for me
to know. I was down at that village by the Beach a year or so ago. I'm a Kain,
of course, one of the crazy Kains, after all. John Sanderson was born in the
village and lived there till his death. Only once that folks could remember had
he been away, and that was when he took some papers to the city for Mrs. Kain
to sign. He was caretaker at the old 'Kain place' the last ten years of his
life, and deaf, they said, since his tenth year— 'deaf as a post.' And they
told me something else. They said there was a story that before my father,
Daniel, married her, my mother had been an actress. An actress! You'll
understand that / needed no one to tell me that! 
"One told me he had heard that she was a great
actress. Dear God, if they could only know! When I think of that night and that
set- ting, that scene! It killed her . . . and it got me over the wall . .
."
Category:Steele
Category:Published