Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [123]
“It is good of you, Hawthorne, so very agreeable of you to come at such a summons and leave the children and your dear wife. I shall not forget it in a hurry.”
When he looked up at me from the ground where he was kneeling, one of my dripping boots still in his hands, I saw that Saxton appeared pallid, as if he had been sitting up many nights—as he had done before Edward Saxton’s death. At that instant, nothing of his usual gaiety of manner remained to him. I wondered about his sorrow for his brother: surely grief for a twin was less consolable than most, the two siblings being joined, as it were, metaphysically, one being the enfleshed reflection of the other.
“Indeed, I shall not forget,” he said softly. He gave a small shiver, but in another instant he smiled again, and the old joking Theron Saxton I knew peeped out of his face.
“What’s the matter, my friend?” I gripped his arm, leaning forward.
“Let’s have your cloak,” he said; “you must be soaked, scaling that infernal hill in the dark. You’re encrusted in snow! You’ll be lucky not to take sick, traveling so late.”
“It was a fine night for a tramp—the stars out, and wisps of the northern lights.” I studied his face as he lifted my ice-sequined cloak and draped it over the back of a Windsor chair that, drawn near the fire, did service as a drying rack.
He turned toward the flames, adjusting a rickety eight-legged fire screen that might have been steady on its wrought-iron lion’s feet in the days of Flavel Saxton.
“What is it?” My voice came in a whisper; I felt the quickening pulse of an unreasoning alarm.
“There’s time enough to explain in the morning,” he said, his eyes going to the grandfather clock. “Surely you are exhausted from travel. Mail coach, was it?”
I nodded, watching him, my sense of something amiss only increasing. Well, I was certainly weary, but I hadn’t rushed from home and launched my one-man boat into the teeth of a gale only to take harbor between clean sheets.
“Here’s Mrs. Molebury, best of housekeepers,” he cried as the old lady appeared in the doorway, balancing candle and toddy on a pewter tray that must have been as old as the fire screen, so crude and massy did it appear. “Doubtless with her famous buttered brandy and cider toddy, doctored with the brown spices and a twist of dried peel, and magically thrown together in a trice.”
“Ah, go on with you. There were kitchen coals aplenty to heat a drop for the gentleman.” She handed me the drink and stood drowsily looking at the master of the house, the long crimson shawl over her nightgown like a vivid splotch of blood in the dark. “Poor Mr. Theron Saxton, he’s had a mort of trouble,” she said, “and it’s so hard to see him without Mr. Edward Saxton by his side.”
“Yes, that is a difficulty,” Saxton muttered. He met my eyes then, his expression elusive—an element of something like black humor playing in the midst of some unhappiness.
The toddy warmed me as the fire had not; I felt not sleepier but more wakeful and now looked about me. One thing struck me as strange: the mirrors were still covered in black cloth as though his brother had just died. I mentioned this peculiarity, and the housekeeper shook her head.
“It’s a queer freak of the younger Mr. Saxton,” she said softly. “He can’t bear the sight of his own face. Who can blame him? It must be like seeing his elder brother, the two were so alike.”
“We were,” Saxton said, “but no more. Now we are quite different, the inhabitants of several worlds. Thank you very much for taking pains with the hot drink, Mrs. Molebury. I can depend on your care no matter how wild the hour, it seems.”
She gave a bob of pleasure, smiling drowsily, and slipped away through the door. We could see the flare of candlelight wavering down the hall; then it vanished.
“Tell me,” I said, nodding at the hangings that shrouded the great mirror above the mantelpiece. “Some dread has captured you, I believe—some secret fear. Why these signs of our mortality that are more than mourning?”
He shook his head as if he would