“I lived on a farm, you see,” said Mrs. Goody. “We had the oldest of furniture. And the flowers all grew wild except for the pansies in a garden I planted myself.”
“You had your own garden?” said Willet. “Oh, that must have been nice.”
“Well, yes—it was,” said Mrs. Goody. “Yes, I liked it. I haven’t thought about that garden for years, but now…yes, it was nice. But we all worked very hard, you see, Willet. My father was a farmer and he was in the fields all day from early spring to the end of autumn. I can see him now, going up and down, up and down behind the horse…”
“What kind of horse?” asked Willet.
“Oh, not a fancy horse like your father’s,” she said. “An old, strong, kindly horse with big hooves. He was—I remember him so well—he had a soft nose and he used to nuzzle in your hand when you fed him sugar.”
“I never fed a horse any sugar,” said Willet. “It sounds like fun.”
“Well, it was, I suppose. Yes, of course it was. Although, I always liked the little animals best, the baby lambs and the new little pigs, and…But, Willet, the thing I want you to understand is that we worked very hard. I used to help my mother bake the bread, you know. It had a smell that…Well. But I cleaned the house and helped with the washing and then in the winter we used to have to keep a big fire going in the stove. I can remember how I used to warm my toes on it, and sometimes we would…But, Willet. Don’t you see? My mother grew old in that kitchen, and my father grew old in the fields.”
“Didn’t they like living on the farm?” asked Willet. “Were they very unhappy?”
“Why…” said Mrs. Goody, “I suppose they were happy enough. I didn’t think about that at the time. My father used to play the fiddle. He played it on winter evenings mostly, when he had more time. We used to dance round and round the stove and I remember once…” Then she stopped and the warmth that had lit her face died away. “Willet, it seemed like a hard life. Hard work. You can’t imagine, living in this house.”
“Maybe it was hard,” said Willet, “but you sound as if you liked it anyway, Mama. Your own dog, and the garden and the fiddle and all.”
Mrs. Goody looked away. “Well, anyway,” she said with a sigh, “when we built this house, your father and I, I knew I had left that life behind forever. That my child—you, my love—could live with beautiful things and have the best of everything always. I wanted it that way. We built this house to match all our dreams, dreams for ourselves and you. I did so want you to be happy.”
There was a long silence then. Finally, Willet drew a deep breath and Hercules, sitting on the bed beside him, felt him tremble. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the diamond. “Hercules went down into the tomb, Mama,” he said. “My father isn’t down there. And then Alfresco told us all about everything. He isn’t dead at all. He only ran away. I knew he wasn’t dead, Mama. I always knew it. And I want to go and look for him. Hercules is coming with me, and—I want you to come, too, because…” His voice faltered. Hercules took his hand and squeezed it, and after a moment got an answering squeeze. “Because,” Willet went on at last, “I hate this house and the way we have to live in it. I’m sorry, Mama, if you wanted it for me. I’m really sorry. But—I don’t want it. I don’t like anything about it and—I want to go away.”
Mrs. Goody’s face went white. She clutched the plush dog to her breast as if it were the only thing that could keep her upright. “What do you mean?” she gasped at last, her voice faint with shock. All at once she sat forward in the rocker, every muscle rigid, and her eyes flashed. “That’s nonsense!” she cried. “Nothing but nonsense. You’re only a child. How could you possibly know what’s best for you? This is the only kind of life worth living. How can you say you don’t want it, you foolish boy? Why, this is the most beautiful house in the world! And it’s full of beautiful things. And you have all these toys and fine clothes to wear, and a tutor, and…Why, I’ve given up everything for this, do you hear me? I’ve given up everything!” She stopped. The words hung in the air like the sound of a slap: I’ve given up everything.
As if she were hearing them for the first time, those words that said so much, as if she had been struck by them, Mrs. Goody’s eyes widened and the plush dog dropped from her arms and tumbled to the floor. She stared blankly at Willet. From the bed, Willet stared back at her through a shimmering haze of tears. He was scarcely breathing, and had so tight a grip on his tutor’s hand that Hercules would have winced but for the fact that he was numb with all-consuming hope.
At last the wrenching moment passed. Mrs. Goody shook her head in slow and gentle wonder. “Dear heaven!” she whispered. “What am I saying? But no—it’s true. And more than that, I’ve known it all along. I have given up everything, in order to have—all this. I kept telling myself that beautiful things—they’re supposed to make you happy, aren’t they? But when you try to warm yourself beside them, you see how cold they are. I found that out after your father went away, but I never let myself admit it. Yes, I gave up everything and that means I have nothing left, that I’ve given you—nothing. And here I sit like an idiot, expecting you to be grateful.”
There was silence again in the room, but it was a new kind of silence that seemed to quiver. From somewhere outside the window, a bird called to its mate in a lonely fragment of song that filled the evening for a moment with sad and piercing sweetness and then was hushed. And the crickets, as if the song of the bird had been a signal, took over at once in their own way with their own crisp, rasping song that softened the edges of the silence in Willet’s room as sandpaper softens wood. The three sat quietly, listening, and then at last Mrs. Goody stirred. “Oh, Willet,” she said heavily. “Willet. What a waste. All those years, my love, all those long and empty years.” She leaned back in the rocker and her eyes closed.
Outside the window, over the music of the crickets, the solitary bird called once again. But this time, from farther away, there was an answering snatch of song, a bright, clear string of joyful notes that spilled suddenly into the dusk as from a small heart too full to hold them. Mrs. Goody opened her eyes and the pain that had dulled them was gone. She sat up. “But—Willet!” she cried. “This means that—why, it’s over, Willet! It’s over! We don’t have to pretend any more, not ever. Oh, my love, my dear child, all these years I’ve been shoving my doubts aside, never looking at them squarely, because I thought that you—but you never wanted it in the first place! You never wanted it at all! So—we’re free!”
She sprang up and went to the window again, and when she came back to the rocker, her step was quick and light. “My dears,” she said, “I am a fool! No, don’t say it isn’t so. I am. A perfect fool. Imagine ever trying to believe that anything so cold and…stiff as all this”—and her sweeping gesture included the room where they sat, included the entire house—“anything so cold and stiff as this”—bending over and seizing the plush dog, holding it up and making a face at it—“could possibly stuff up the chinks and stop the drafts in a life all full of holes. You knew it couldn’t, didn’t you, Willet, all by yourself. But now—oh, Willet, now we can go back. At last! And we will. All together.” At the thought of this her cheeks grew pink and she turned to Hercules with a sudden smile of excitement. “To think that you know him, Mr. Feltwright! To think he came here while I was away and asked for you! Mrs. Tidings told me all about it. He sent you to us, didn’t he?”
Hercules stared at her. “But…no! No, Mrs. Goody! I didn’t…that wasn’t…”
But Mrs. Goody wasn’t listening. “Every year, twice a year, since the night he went away, I’ve gone up to the city and I’ve sold off the jewels one by one to keep things going—after all, the bishop did say whoever could steal them could keep them. Your father, Willet, he did what he felt he had to do—he went back and told the whole story. They put him in jail, of course. It wasn’t really his fault that the bishop tripped and fell into that well, but then, of course, it wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t bee
n there for the bishop to chase, so in a way he was responsible. Well, you know all about it already. It’s so strange—I was going to explain everything tonight. He’d been here, and Mr. Feltwright knows him, so it seemed to me that the time had come—but here Alfresco has told it all first. Well, it doesn’t matter now, thank goodness. Only, I hope he’s all right. A five-year term they gave him! That’s a long time. I asked Alfresco to write once, you see. Did he tell you that? Five years! I knew it would happen that way and I didn’t want you to know your father was in jail. Thinking he was dead seemed better than that. But now—I’m proud of him!” she said with sudden fierceness. “It was foolish, all that dressing up and stealing things, and then taking them back like that, just for the excitement. He was a farmer, too, you know, Willet, just like my father, but he was so young and eager for adventure, and it wasn’t until after we were married that I knew about it, anyway. The statue was to have been the last time—a kind of glorious ending—and then he was going to put away that second life forever. But, instead, the bishop drowned and there was no one to take the statue back to, and all of a sudden, when we found it was full of jewels, a third life hung there just waiting to be plucked. To be rich! And easy! Happiness. But it wasn’t. Not for him. That statue opened the Gates of Hell for him. It had three heads, he used to say, just as he did. And he couldn’t go on pretending. And after—after he went away, I put it in the coffin so I’d never have to look at it again. But now—it’s all over! I see what a terrible fool I was to cling to it so long, and he—well, I won’t argue with him ever again when he…but hush! What was that?” She held up a hand, and her eyes, shining with unshed tears, went watchful.
The two mouths of the two on the bed had been slowly dropping open. “Do you mean to say, Mrs. Goody,” gasped Hercules when she paused, “that Midas Goody is really…”
“Hackston Fen!” said Mrs. Goody. “He bought the hat from a hatter there. It will be so good to see Hackston Fen again. Not five miles from the farm, it is. And, oh, Willet, it will be lovely to be our own true selves again…but hush! Don’t you hear something?”
They listened. From the end of the hall came a dull thump.
“What was that?” Mrs. Goody whispered. The thump came again, and after it the unmistakable sound of a window being opened. Mrs. Goody sprang up. “Come!” she cried. “Come quickly! I think—I think it’s happening.” She ran out of the room and down the hall, and Willet and Hercules ran after her. At the door of her bedroom they all stopped and peered in. There before them, climbing in through an open window in the blue glow of dusk, was a man in black cloak and flat black hat, a man whose face was nearly covered by a winding of long red scarf. Hearing them, he jerked up his head and the scarf pulled away from his face. “Ye gods!” he said. “You startled me! Hello, my loves. I’ve come to take you home.”
“Mott Snave!” gasped Hercules.
“But it isn’t!” shouted Willet joyfully. “It’s my very own father! It’s Midas Goody!”
And Mrs. Goody, laughing and weeping both at once, flung out her arms. “Oh, John!” she cried. “John Constant! You’ve come back at last!”
Chapter 15
Reunions in those long gone times were exactly like reunions today, of course. Some things never change. The mood was just as merry, the smiles as tender, and the air had that same expansive lightness which threatened, if you breathed too deeply, to lift you right up off the floor. Hercules Feltwright, embarrassed but pleased, stood apart and drank in borrowed joy, and all at once, with all his soul, he longed for a reunion of his own. The charms of Hackston Fen, so long neglected, rose up in his memory like a siren’s song, sweet and irresistible. “I’ll go home, too,” he promised himself. “Not to be a hatter or a hero or anything foolish, but home, nevertheless. Why, I’ll go home and—start a school, that’s what I’ll do! The Hackston Fen Academy. Or—no. I’ll call it The Feltwright School of Thought and I’ll teach…” He paused and blushed in the sudden realization that everyone was looking at him curiously.
“Wake up, Hercules!” said Willet, laughing. “I’ve said it twice already—come here and meet my father.”
He was, this father of Willet’s, exactly as Alfresco had described him—a big man, a fine man, with hands that were used to work. And he did indeed have a large nose, which now, with the emotion of the moment, he was forced to blow from time to time with an enormous white handkerchief. His yellow beard, trim and full, was so splendid that the blacksmith himself might have envied it. Hercules eyed the beard and, rubbing his own undecorated chin reflectively, wondered if perhaps he might not try one after all. Just to see how it would look. But more than the beard and the nose, he admired the plain delight of this man who had been away so long, the pride in his eyes when he looked at his son, and looked and looked at him, and the eager, grateful clasp of his arm about the shoulder of his wife. “How do you do, Mr. Goody,” said Hercules with satisfaction. “I mean, Mr. Snave. No, it’s Mr. Constant, isn’t it?”
“I’m glad to meet you, Mr. Feltwright,” beamed Willet’s father. “Very glad indeed. And Constant is my name—Constant to begin with and Constant from now on.”
“Never mind pretending, John,” said Mrs. Goody with a severity that her happy face belied. “We know you two have met before. We know all about it.”
This, of course, brought on a long series of explanations, full of interruptions and laughter and such confusion that some things had to be repeated a number of times before everyone understood. For it was quite true: Hercules and John Constant had indeed met before—there on the lawn in the dark, each in his cape, hat, and scarf—though neither of them had realized it at the time, and this, in the telling, caused more confusion and laughter than anything else. But at last it was all made clear, the last of the tangled webs was swept away, and John Constant sank into a chair with his wife and son at his feet. Hercules, who had been told a number of times that he must stay, that he was part of it all, leaned against a bedpost and looked on, aware that he was as pleased as he’d ever been in all his life; pleased with himself, pleased with the three before him, pleased, even, with his mother and father and every soul in Hackston Fen. “In a queer kind of way,” he said to himself, “it’s fitting for me to go home now. The last Labor of Hercules is finished. I’ve gone down to the Gates of Hell and I’ve come to grips with Cerberus, and it’s all over. Even my mother should see that.” And so he stayed and leaned and listened, and was supremely content.
“I’ve been in jail, you know, my loves,” John Constant was saying soberly.
“We know, John,” said Mrs. Goody. “And we’re proud of you.”
“I went back to the farm the moment I was free,” he went on. “It will take a great deal of work to get it going again, I’m afraid. But—I couldn’t wait. I’ve missed you so. I got out the old Mott Snave costume and came down here at once, to see if I could talk you into coming home.”
“Are you going to start being Mott Snave again, Father?” asked Willet.
“Ye gods! Certainly not!” said John Constant. “That’s over forever. It’s just that I knew if anyone here were to see me as myself, it would cause all sorts of ruckus. Why, can’t you imagine what Mrs. Tidings would have done if I’d just walked up to the door?”
“She’d have fainted dead away,” said Mrs. Goody, “or worse.”
“Exactly,” said John Constant. “So I put on the costume and I climbed in through the window so I could meet you again up here, my loves, without any questions or interruptions or people peeking around corners. I came three days ago, as a matter of fact, and I’ve been sneaking about like a regular cutpurse, scared to death I’d be recognized. Where were you, my dear? I was afraid perhaps you’d gone away for good.”
“I was in the city, John,” his wife explained. “Selling off another of the jewels.”
“Oh. Yes,” he sighed. “You’ve had to do that, of course. Yes, there wasn’t any other way. But we’ll leave the rest of those jewels behind, and the
statue, too. For the church, perhaps—that would be best. In a way, it’s where they came from. That is—” he looked at her anxiously, “if you’re willing, if you’re ready to come. Are you? Will you come back to the farm with me, you and Willet? We can get it going again, the three of us; we can do it together. Will you come home?”
Mrs. Goody’s eyes were too bright to tease him successfully, but she tried anyway. She pursed her lips. “We-ell, John, I don’t know. I don’t see how we can, really, when there isn’t so much as a single dog anywhere about up there.”
“We’ll get a dog!” boomed John Constant joyfully. “We’ll get two! Three, if it will bring you home any faster.”
“Very well, John,” she said primly. “Then the answer is yes. We’ll come home.”
“Oh!” cried Willet. “A real dog? For me?”
“Yes, my love,” said his mother emphatically, throwing her arms around him and drawing him close. “A real dog, and a garden too, where you can dig and get dirty and plant anything you like. We’ll have it all, except for the fiddle. I’m afraid I never learned to play the fiddle.”
Willet looked at Hercules over his mother’s arm and gave him a blinding smile. “That’s all right, Mama,” he said.
Chapter 16
“Dora!” said the blacksmith in great surprise as his sister puffed into the shop next morning. “Dora, what’s the matter? What are you doing with all those bundles? Why, bless my soul! Isn’t that your work basket? And your clothes? All your clothes?”
Mrs. Tidings dropped her bundles on the floor of the shop. She stood there with an expression of mingled regret, delight, and anger on her plump face. “Henry,” she said slowly, “Henry, you’ll never believe it. I’ve been sacked, Henry. Mrs. Goody has let me go.”
The blacksmith stared. “What are you saying, Dora?” he cried. “Sacked? Why? What did you do?”