ms, these give
the quality of all my Bromstead memories. The crowning one of them all
rises to desolating tragedy. I remember now the wan spring sunshine of
that Sunday morning, the stiff feeling of best clothes and aggressive
cleanliness and formality, when I and my mother returned from church to
find my father dead. He had been pruning the grape vine. He had
never had a ladder long enough to reach the sill of the third-floor
windows--at house-painting times he had borrowed one from the plumber
who mixed his paint--and he had in his own happy-go-lucky way contrived
a combination of the garden fruit ladder with a battered kitchen table
that served all sorts of odd purposes in an outhouse. He had stayed up
this arrangement by means of the garden roller, and the roller had at
the critical moment--rolled. He was lying close by the garden door with
his head queerly bent back against a broken and twisted rainwater pipe,
an expression of pacific contentment on his face, a bamboo curtain rod
with a tableknife tied to end of it, still gripped in his hand. We had
been rapping for some time at the front door unable to make him hear,
and then we came round by the door in the side trellis into the garden
and so discovered him.

"Arthur!" I remember my mother crying with the strangest break in her
voice, "What are you doing there? Arthur! And--SUNDAY!"

I was coming behind her, musing remotely, when the quality of her voice
roused me. She stood as if she could not go near him. He had always
puzzled her so, he and his ways, and this seemed only another enigma.
Then the truth dawned on her, she shrieked as if afraid of him, ran a
dozen steps back towards the trellis door and stopped and clasped her
ineffectual gloved hands, leaving me staring blankly, too astonished for
feeling, at the carelessly flung limbs.

The same idea came to me also. I ran to her. "Mother!" I cried, pale to
the depths of my spirit, "IS HE DEAD?"

I had been thinking two minutes before of the cold fruit pie that
glorified our Sunday dinner-table, and how I might perhaps get into the
tree at the end of the garden to read in the afternoon. Now an immense
fact had come down like a curtain and blotted out all my childish world.
My father was lying dead before my eyes.... I perceived that my mother
was helpless and that things must be done.

"Mother!" I said, "we must get Doctor Beaseley,--and carry him indoors."

CHAPTER THE THIRD ~~ SCHOLASTIC

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