Part 9 (2/2)
Caley's door.”
She left him abruptly, and, standing alone in the dark, he cursed himself for a fool for letting her go--a boy's trick. But then the whole affair did not desperately engage him. He sat in the comfortable chair, and lit a cigarette, s.h.i.+elding it with his hand so that she would not see it, recognize in its triviality his detachment. A wave of weariness swept over him; the night was like a blanket on the land. Minutes pa.s.sed without her return; soon he would go in search of her; he would find her ... in the dark house.... He shut his eyes for a moment, and opened them with an effort. The whippoorwills never for a moment ceased their melancholy calling; they seemed to draw nearer to him; then retreat, far away. His head fell forward upon his breast.
Lettice Hollidew! little fool; but what was that beyond her, blacker than night?
He stirred, sat up sharply, his eyes dazzled by a blaze of intolerable brilliancy. It was the sun, a full two hours above the horizon. He had slept through the night. His muscles were cramped, his neck ached intolerably. He rose with a painful effort and something fell to the floor. It was a rose, wilted, its fragrance fled. He realized that Lettice had laid it on his knee, last night, when the bud had been fresh. He had slept while she stood above him, while the rose had faded. On the step the fish lay, no longer brightly colored, in a dull, stiff heap. The house was still; through the open door the sun fell on a strip of rag rug. He turned and hurried down the steps, unlatched the gate, and almost ran across the fields to the cover of a wood, fleeing from an unsupportably humiliating vision.
XXV
He made his way to where Greenstream village lay somnolent beneath the refulgent day. The chairs before the office of the _Bugle_ were unoccupied, from within came the monotonous, sliding rattle of the small footpress. Gordon sat absently revolving the possibilities held out by the near future. Hay, he knew was still being made in the valley, but the prospect of long, arduous, days in the open fields, in the hot, dry chaff of the sere gra.s.s, was forbidding. He might take his gun and a few personal necessities and disappear into such wild as yet remained, contracting steadily before the inexorable, smooth advance of civilization. He was aware that he could manage a degree of comfort, adequate food. But the thoughtless resiliency of sheer youth had deserted him, the desire for mere, picturesque adventure had fled during the past, comfortable years. He dismissed contemptuously the possibility of clerking in a local store. There was that still in the Makimmon blood which balked at measuring ribbands, selling calico to captious women.
The large, suave figure of the Universalist minister, in grey alpaca coat and black trousers, approached leisurely over the street, and stopped before Gordon. The minister had a conspicuously well-fed paunch, his smooth face expressed placid self-approval, his tones never for a moment lost the unctuous echo of the pulpiteer.
”You have not wors.h.i.+pped with us lately,” he observed. ”Remiss, remiss.
Our services have been stirring--three souls redeemed from everlasting torment at the Wednesday meeting, two adults and a child sealed to Christ on Sunday.”
”I'll drop in,” Gordon told him pacifically.
”A casual phrase to apply to the Mansion of the Son,” the minister observed, ”more humility would become you.... G.o.d, I pray Thee that Thy fire descend upon this unhappy man and consume utterly away his carnal envelope. What are you doing?” he demanded abruptly of Gordon.
”Nothing particular just now.”
”There are some small occupations about the parsonage--a board or so loose on the ice house, a small field of provender for the animal. Let us say a week's employment for a ready man. I could pay but a modest stipend ... but the privilege of my home, the close communion with our Maker. You would be as my brother: what do you say?”
Gordon was well aware of the probable extent of the ”small occupations,”
the minister's reputation for exacting monumental labors in return for the ”modest stipend” mentioned. However, the proposal furnished Gordon with a solution for immediate difficulties; it secured him a bed and food, an opportunity for the maturing of further plans.
He rose, queried, ”Shall I go right along?”
”Admirable,” the other approved. ”My beloved helpmate will show you where the tools are kept, when you can begin immediately.”
Gordon made his way past Simmons' store to the plaster bulk of the Universalist Church, its lawn shared by the four-square, s.h.i.+ngled roof of the parsonage. Back of both structures reached a small field of heavy gra.s.s, where Gordon labored for the remainder of the day.
Late in the afternoon an aged, gaunt man drove an incongruous, two wheeled, breaking cart into the stable yard behind the parsonage. After hitching an aged, gaunt white horse, he approached the field's edge, where Gordon was harvesting. It was the minister's father-in-law, himself a clergyman for the half century past, a half century that stretched back into strenuous, bygone days of circuit riding. His flowing hair and a ragged goatee were white, oddly stained and dappled with lemon yellow, his skin was leather-like from years of exposure to the elements, to the bitter mountain winters, the ruthless suns of the August valleys. He was as seasoned, as tough, as choice old hickory, and had pale, blue eyes in which the flame of religious fervor, of incandescent zeal, were scarcely dimmed.
A long supper table was spread in a room where a sideboard supported a huge silver-plated pitcher swung on elaborately engraved supports, a dozen blue gla.s.ses traced with gold, and a plate that pictured in a grey, blurred fas.h.i.+on the Last Supper. The gathering ranged variously from the aged circuit rider to the minister's next but one to the youngest: he had fourteen children, of which nine were ravenously present. The oldest girl at the table, a possible sixteen years, had this defiant detachment under her immediate charge, acquitting herself notably by a constant stream of sharp negations opposed to a varied clamor of proposals, attempted forages upon the heaped plates, sly reprisals, and a sustained, hysterical note which threatened at any time, and in any youthful individual, to burst into angry wails.
Opposite Gordon Makimmon sat a slight, feminine figure, whom he recognized as the teacher of the past season's local school. She had a pallid face, which she rarely raised, compressed lips, and hands which attracted Gordon by reason of their white deftness, the precise charm of their pointed fingers. During a seemingly interminable grace, p.r.o.nounced in a rapid sing-song by the circuit rider, Gordon saw her flash her gaze about the table, the room; and its somber, resentful fire, its restrained fury of impatience, of disdain, of hatred, coming from that fragile, silent shape, startled him.
The Universalist minister addressed the company in sonorous periods, which, however, did not prevent him from a.s.similating a prodigious amount of food. Between forkfuls of chicken baked in macaroni, ”I rejoice that my ministrations are acceptable to Him,” he p.r.o.nounced; ”three souls Wednesday last, two adults and a child on Sunday.”
The aged evangelist could scarcely contain his contempt at this meager tally. ”What would you say, Augustus,” he demanded in eager, tremulous triumph, ”to two hundred lost souls roaring up to the altar, casting off their wickedness like snakes shed their skins? Hey? Hey? What would you say to two hundred dipped in the blood of the lamb and emerging white as the Dove? Souls ain't what they were,” he muttered pessimistically; ”it used to be you could hear the Redeemed a spell of miles from the church, now they're as confidential as a man borrowing money. The Lord will in no wise acknowledge the faint in spirit.” Suddenly, ”Glory! Glory!” he shouted, and his old eyes flamed with the inextinguishable blaze of his enthusiasm.
The minister's wife inserted in the door from the kitchen a face bright red from bending over the stove. ”Now, pa,” she admonished, ”you'll scare them children again.”
XXVI
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