10 Enid Mandifer Again
The silence was not so deadly the following noon as Lanark and Jager dismounted at the hitching-rack in front of Enid Mandifer’s; perhaps this was because there were two horses to stamp and snort, two bridles to jingle, two saddles to creak, two pairs of boots to spurn the pathway toward the door.
Enid Mandifer, with a home-sewn sunbonnet of calico upon her head, came around the side of the house just as the two men were about to step upon the porch. She called out to them, anxiously polite, and stood with one hand clutched upon her wide skirt of brown alpaca.
“Mr. Lanark,” she ventured, “I hoped that you would come again. I have something to show you.”
It was Jager who spoke in reply: “Miss Mandifer, perhaps you may remember me. I’m Parson Jager, I live south of here. Look.” He held out something—the Long Lost Friend book. “Did you ever see anything of this sort?”
She took it without hesitation, gazing interestedly at the cover. Lanark saw her soft pink lips move, silently framing the odd words of the title. Then she opened it and studied the first page. After a moment she turned several leaves, and a little frown of perplexity touched her bonnet-shaded brow. “These are receipts—recipes—of some kind,” she said slowly. “Why do you show them to me, Mr. Jager?”
The ex-sergeant had been watching her closely, his hands upon his heavy hips, his beard thrust forward and his head tilted back. He put forth his hand and received back the Long Lost Friend.
“Excuse me, Miss Mandifer, if I have suspected you unjustly,” he said, handsomely if cryptically. Then he glanced sidewise at Lanark, as though to refresh a memory that needed no refreshing—a memory of a living-dead horror that had recoiled at very touch of the little volume.
Enid Mandifer was speaking once more: “Mr. Lanark, I had a dreadful night after you left. Dreams... or maybe not dreams. I felt things come and stand by my bed. This morning, on a bit of paper that lay on the floor——”
From a pocket in the folds of her skirt, she produced a white scrap. Lanark accepted it from her. Jager came close to look.
“Writing,” growled Jager. “In what language is that?”
“It’s English,” pronounced Lanark, “but set down backward—from right to left, as Leonardo da Vinci wrote.”
The young woman nodded eagerly at this, as though to say that she had already seen as much.
“Have you a mirror?” Jager asked her, then came to a simpler solution. He took the paper and held it up to the light, written side away from him. “Now it shows through,” he announced. “Will one of you try to read? I haven’t my glasses with me.”
Lanark squinted and made shift to read:
“‘Any man may look lightly into heaven, to the highest star; but who dares require of the bowels of Earth their abysmal secrets?’”
“That is my stepfather’s handwriting,” whispered Enid, her head close to Lanark’s shoulder.
He read on: “‘The rewards of Good are unproven; but the revenges of Evil are great, and manifest on all sides. Fear will always vanquish love.’”
He grinned slightly, harshly. Jager remembered having seen that grin in the old army days, before a battle.
“I think we’re being warned,” Lanark said to his old sergeant. “It’s a challenge, meant to frighten us. But challenges have always drawn me.”
“I can’t believe,” said Enid, “that fear will vanquish love.” She blushed suddenly and rosily, as if embarrassed by her own words. “That is probably beside the point,” she resumed. “What I began to say was that the sight of my stepfather’s writing—why is it reversed like that?—the sight, anyway, has brought things back into my mind.”
“What things?” Jager demanded eagerly. “Come into the house, Miss Mandifer, and tell us.”
“Oh, not into the house,” she demurred at once. “It’s dark in there—damp and cold. Let’s go out here, to the seat under the tree.”
She conducted them to the bench whither Lanark had accompanied her the day before.
“Now,” Jager prompted her, and she began:
“I remember of hearing him, when I was a child, as he talked to his son Larue and they thought I did not listen or did not comprehend. He told of these very things, these views he has written. He said, as if teaching Larue, ‘Fear is stronger than love; where love can but plead, fear can command.’”
“A devil’s doctrine!” grunted Jager, and Lanark nodded agreement.
“He said more,” went on Enid. “He spoke of ‘Those Below,’ and of how they ‘rule by fear, and therefore are stronger than Those on High, who rule by weak love.’”
“Blasphemy,” commented Jager, in his beard.
“Those statements fit what I remember of his talk,” Lanark put in. “He spoke, just before we fought the guerrillas, of some great evil to come from flouting Those Below.”
“I remember,” nodded Jager. “Go on, young woman.”
“Then there was the box.”
“The box?” repeated both men quickly.
“Yes. It was a small case, of dark gray metal, or stone—or something. This, too, was when I was little. He offered it to Larue, and laughed when Larue could not open it.”
Jager and Lanark darted looks at each other. They were remembering such a box.
“My stepfather then took it back,” Enid related, “and said that it held his fate and fortune; that he would live and prosper until the secret writing within it should be taken forth and destroyed.”
“I remember where that box is,” Lanark said breathlessly to Jager. “In the old oven, at——”
“We could not open it, either,” interrupted the preacher.
“He spoke of that, too,” Enid told them. “It would never open, he told Larue, save in the ’place of the Nameless One’—that must be where the house burned—and at midnight under a full moon.”
“A full moon!” exclaimed Lanark.
“There is a full moon tonight,” said Jager.