Part 17 (1/2)
”I know it,” she interrupted, with a half-impatient, half uneasy putting away of the subject with her little hand--”there--don't go all over it again. Paw and Maw have been at me about it all night--ever since those Harrisons in their anxiousness to make up their quarrel, rushed over with the news. I'm tired of it!”
For an instant he was staggered. How much had she learned! With the same awkward indirectness, he said vaguely, ”But it might have been YOUR letters, you know?”
”But it wasn't,” she said, simply. ”It OUGHT to have been. I wish it had”--She stopped, and again regarded him with a strange expression.
”Well,” she said slowly, ”what are you going to do?”
”To find out the scoundrel who has done this,” he said firmly, ”and punish him as he deserves.”
The almost imperceptible shrug that had raised her shoulders gave way as she regarded him with a look of wearied compa.s.sion.
”No,” she said, gravely, ”you cannot. They're too many for you. You must go away, at once.”
”Never,” he said indignantly. ”Even if it were not a cowardice. It would be more--a confession!”
”Not more than they already know,” she said wearily. ”But, I tell you, you MUST go. I have sneaked out of the house and run here all the way to warn you. If you--you care for me, Jack--you will go.”
”I should be a traitor to you if I did,” he said quickly. ”I shall stay.”
”But if--if--Jack--if”--she drew nearer him with a new-found timidity, and then suddenly placed her two hands upon his shoulders: ”If--if--Jack--I were to go with you?”
The old rapt, eager look of possession had come back to her face now; her lips were softly parted. Yet even then she seemed to be waiting some reply more potent than that syllabled on the lips of the man before her.
Howbeit that was the only response. ”Darling,” he said kissing her, ”but wouldn't that justify them”--
”Stop,” she said suddenly. Then putting her hand over his mouth, she continued with the same half-weary expression: ”Don't let us go over all that again either. It is SO tiresome. Listen, dear. You'll do one or two little things for me--won't you, dandy boy? Don't linger long at the school-house after lessons. Go right home! Don't look after these men TO-DAY--to-morrow, Sat.u.r.day, is your holiday--you know--and you'll have more time. Keep to yourself to-day as much as you can, dear, for twelve hours--until--until--you hear from me, you know. It will be all right then,” she added, lifting her eyelids with a sudden odd resemblance to her father's look of drowsy pain, which Ford had never noticed before.
”Promise me that, dear, won't you?”
With a mental reservation he promised hurriedly--preoccupied in his wonder why she seemed to avoid his explanation, in his desire to know what had happened, in the pride that had kept him from asking more or volunteering a defence, and in his still haunting sense of having been wronged. Yet he could not help saying as he caught and held her hand:--
”YOU have not doubted me, Cressy? YOU have not allowed this infamous raking up of things that are past and gone to alter your feelings?”
She looked at him abstractedly. ”You think it might alter ANYBODY'S feelings, then?”
”n.o.body's who really loved another”--he stammered.
”Don't let us talk of it any more,” she said suddenly stretching out her arms, lifting them above her head with a wearied gesture, and then letting them fall clasped before her in her old habitual fas.h.i.+on. ”It makes my head ache; what with Paw and Maw and the rest of them--I'm sick of it all.”
She turned away as Ford drew back coldly and let her hand fall from his arm. She took a few steps forward, stopped, ran back to him again, crushed his face and head in a close embrace, and then seemed to dip like a bird into the tall bracken, and was gone.
The master stood for some moments chagrined and bewildered; it was characteristic of his temperament that he had paid less heed to what she told him than what he IMAGINED had pa.s.sed between her mother and herself. She was naturally jealous of the letters--he could forgive her for that; she had doubtless been twitted about them, but he could easily explain them to her parents--as he would have done to her. But he was not such a fool as to elope with her at such a moment, without first clearing his character--and knowing more of hers. And it was equally characteristic of him that in his sense of injury he confounded her with the writer of the letters--as sympathizing with his correspondent in her estimate of his character, and was quite carried away with the belief that he was equally wronged by both.
It was not until he reached the schoolhouse that the evidences of last night's outrage for a time distracted his mind from his singular interview. He was struck with the workmanlike manner in which the locks had been restored, and the care that had evidently been taken to remove the more obvious and brutal traces of burglary. This somewhat staggered his theory that Seth Davis was the perpetrator; mechanical skill and thoughtfulness were not among the lout's characteristics. But he was still more disconcerted on pus.h.i.+ng back his chair to find a small india-rubber tobacco pouch lying beneath it. The master instantly recognized it: he had seen it a hundred times before--it was Uncle Ben's. It was not there when he had closed the room yesterday afternoon.
Either Uncle Ben had been there last night, or had antic.i.p.ated him this morning. But in the latter case he would scarcely have overlooked his fallen property--that, in the darkness of the night, might have readily escaped detection. His brow darkened with a sudden conviction that it was Uncle Ben who was the real and only offender, and that his simplicity of the previous night was part of his deception. A sickening sense that he had been again duped--but why or to what purpose he hardly dared to think--overcame him. Who among these strange people could he ever again trust? After the fas.h.i.+on of more elevated individuals, he had accepted the respect and kindness of those he believed his inferiors as a natural tribute to his own superiority; any change in THEIR feelings must therefore be hypocrisy or disloyalty; it never occurred to him that HE might have fallen below their standard.
The arrival of the children and the resumption of his duties for a time diverted him. But although the morning's exercise restored the master's self-confidence, it cannot be said to have improved his judgment.
Disdaining to question Rupert Filgee, as the possible confidant of Uncle Ben, he answered the curious inquiries of the children as to the broken doorlock with the remark that it was a matter that he should have to bring before the Trustees of the Board, and by the time that school was over and the pupils dismissed he had quite resolved upon this formal disposition of it. In spite of Cressy's warning--rather because of it--in the new att.i.tude he had taken towards her and her friends, he lingered in the school-house until late. He had occupied himself in drawing up a statement of the facts, with an intimation that his continuance in the school would depend upon a rigid investigation of the circ.u.mstances, when he was aroused by the clatter of horses' hoofs. The next moment the school-house was surrounded by a dozen men.
He looked up; half of them dismounted and entered the room. The other half remained outside darkening the windows with their motionless figures. Each man carried a gun before him on the saddle; each man wore a rude mask of black cloth partly covering his face.
Although the master was instinctively aware that he was threatened by serious danger, he was far from being impressed by the arms and disguise of his mysterious intruders. On the contrary, the obvious and glaring inconsistency of this cheaply theatrical invasion of the peaceful school-house; of this opposition of menacing figures to the scattered childish primers and text-books that still lay on the desks around him, only extracted from him a half scornful smile as he coolly regarded them. The fearlessness of ignorance is often as una.s.sailable as the most experienced valor, and the awe-inspiring invaders were at first embarra.s.sed and then humanly angry. A lank figure to the right made a forward movement of impotent rage, but was checked by the evident leader of the party.