Part 10 (2/2)

It was Pompey Hollidew himself, cold, still, on the floor. Gordon entered, looking outside for a.s.sistance: no one was in sight. Pompey Hollidew wore the familiar, greenish-black coat, the thread-bare trousers and faded, yellow s.h.i.+rt. The battered derby had rolled a short distance across the floor. The dead man's face was a congested, olive shade, with purple smudges beneath the up-rolled eyes, and lips like dried leaves. His end, it was apparent, had been as sudden as it was natural.

Old Pompey ... dead! Gordon straightened up. Simultaneously two ideas flashed into his mind--Lettice and Hollidew's gold. Then they grew coherent, explicable. Lettice and the gold were one; she was the gold, the gold was Lettice. He recalled now, appositely, what Bartamon had told him but a few days before ... Hollidew would consent to make no will; there were no other children. The money would automatically go, princ.i.p.ally, to Lettice, without question or contest. If he had but considered before, acted with ordinary sense ... the girl had been in love with him; he might have had it all. He gazed cautiously, but with no determined plan of action, out over the street--it lay deserted in the ambient sunlight.

He quickly left the house, the old man sprawling grotesquely across the bare hall, forcing himself to walk with an a.s.sumed, deliberate ease over the plank walk, past Simmons' corner. As he progressed a plan formulated in his mind, a plan obvious, promising immediate, practicable results ... Lettice had told him that she would remain for two weeks at the farm. It was evident that she was still there. His gait quickened; if he could reach her now, before any one else.... He wished that he had closed the door upon the old man's body; any one pa.s.sing as he had pa.s.sed could see the corpse; a wagon would be sent for the girl.

He commenced, outside the village, to run, pounding over the dusty way with long-drawn, painful gasps, his chest oppressed by the now unaccustomed exercise, the rapid motion. When he came in sight of the farmhouse that was his objective, he stopped and endeavored to remove all traces of his haste; he rubbed off his shoes, fingered his necktie, mopped his brow.

There was a woman on the porch; it proved to be Mrs. Caley, folded in a shawl, pale and gaunt. Suddenly the possibility occurred to him that Lettice had driven into church. But she was in the garden patch beyond, Mrs. Caley said. Gordon strolled around the corner of the house as hastily, as slowly, as he dared.

He saw her immediately. She wore a blue linen skirt, a white waist, and her sleeves were rolled up. The sun glinted on her uncovered hair, blazed in the bright tin basin into which she was dropping scarlet peppers. She appeared younger than he had remembered her; her arms were youthful and softly dimpled; her brow seemed again the calm, guileless brow of a girl; her eyes, as she raised them in greeting, were serene.

”I wanted to explain to you,” he began obliquely, ”about that--that falling asleep. It's been worrying me. You see, I hadn't had any rest for three or four nights, I had been bothering about my affairs, and about something more important still.”

Bean poles, covered with bright green verdure, made a background of young summer for her own promise of early maturity. She placed the basin on the ground, and stood with her arms hanging loosely, gazing at him expectantly, frankly.

”The most important thing in my life,” he added, then paused. ”I thought for a while that I had better go away without saying anything to you, and more particularly since I have lost everything.” He could hear, coming over the road, the regular hoof-beats of a trotting horse, and he had the feeling that it must be a messenger from the village, dispatched in search of Lettice with the news of her father's death. For a moment the horse seemed to be stopping; he was afraid that his opportunity had been lost; but, after all, the hoof-beats pa.s.sed, diminished over the road.

Then, ”Since I have lost everything,” he repeated.

”Please tell me more,” she demanded, ”I don't understand--”

”But,” he continued, in the manner he had hastily adopted, ”when the time came I couldn't; I couldn't go away and leave you. I thought, perhaps, you might be different from others; I thought, perhaps, you might like a man for what he was, and not for what he had. I would come to you, I decided, and tell you all this, tell you that I could work, yes, and would, and make enough--” He paused in order to observe the effect of his speech upon her. She was gazing clear-eyed at him, in a sort of s.h.i.+ning expectancy, a grave, eager comprehension, appealing, incongruous, to her girlhood.

”But why?” she queried.

”Because I'm in love with you: I want to marry you.”

Her gaze did not falter, but her color changed swiftly, a rosy tide swept over her cheeks, and died away, leaving her pale. Her lips trembled. A palpable, radiant content settled upon her.

”Thank you,” she told him seriously; ”it will make me very happy to marry you, Gordon.”

With a fleeting, backward glance he moved closer to her, his arm fell about her waist, he pressed a hasty, ill-directed kiss upon her chin.

”Will you marry me now?” he asked eagerly. ”You see, others wouldn't understand, you remember what your father said about the Makimmon breed?

They would repeat that I had nothing, or even that I was marrying you for old Pompey's money. You know better than that, you know he wouldn't give us a penny.”

”It wouldn't matter now what any one said,” she returned serenely.

”But it would be so much easier--we could slip off quietly somewhere, and come back married, all the fuss avoided, all the say so's and say no's shut up right at the beginning.”

”When do you want to be--be married?”

”Right away! now! to-day!”

”Oh ... oh, Gordon, but we couldn't! I haven't even a white dress here. I might go into Greenstream, be ready to-morrow--”

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