Part 12 (2/2)
[Ill.u.s.tration: ”WHAT YOU NEED, GENTLEMEN, IS A TRIFLE WIDER READIN'--JUST A TRIFLE! FOR YOU AIN'T BEIN' WELL POSTED ON FACTS!”]
”An' I reckon, too,” he went on deliberately, and there was a wicked fleer of sarcasm tinging the words, ”I reckon I'll hev to kinda apologize to you gentlemen for interruptin' your evenin's entertainment, as you might say. I'm sorry I ain't able to remain, for it's interestin'. I don't know's I've ever heard anything that was jest as excitin' an' thrillin', but I've got something more important needin' my attention this evenin'--meanin' that I ain't got nothin' in particular that's a-callin' me! But it's no more'n my plain duty for me to tell you this: You'd ought to follow the papers a mite closer from now on. It's illuminatin'--it's broadenin'!
What you need, gentlemen, is a trifle wider readin'--jest a trifle--jest a trifle! For you ain't bein' well posted on facts!”
n.o.body moved. n.o.body was capable of stirring even. Old Jerry bowed to them from the doorway--he bowed till the water trickled in a stream from the brim of his battered hat.
And this time, as he pa.s.sed out, he closed the door very gently behind him.
CHAPTER XI
It would have been hard for her to have explained just why it was so, but Dryad Anderson had been sitting there in the unlighted front room of the little once-white cottage before Judge Maynard's boxlike place on the hill, watching hour after hour for that light to blink out at her from the dark window of Denny Bolton's house on the opposite slope. Ever since it had grown dark enough for that signal to be seen, which had called across to her so many nights, she had been waiting before the table in front of the window--waiting even while she told herself that it could not appear. It was not Sat.u.r.day night; there was no real reason why she should be watching, unless--unless it was hope that held her there.
Only in the last few hours since twilight had she admitted to herself the possibility that such a hope lurked behind her vigil. Before then, when the thought had first come to her that Denny might cry out to her through the night, with that half-shuttered light, she had stifled it with a savageness that left her shaking, panting and dizzy from its bewildering intensity.
Time after time she told herself that it would go unheeded by her, no matter how long or how insistently it beckoned, if by the hundredth chance it should flare up beyond the shadows, but as minutes dragged interminably by into equally interminable hours, the strained fierceness of that whispered promise grew less and less knifelike in its hardness--less and less a.s.sured.
Somehow, ever since the first light of that gray day had discovered her sitting there in almost the same position in which she now sat, eyes straining out across the valley, pointed chin cupped in her palms, that fearful, almost insane pa.s.sion which had held each nerve and fiber of her taut as tight-stretched wire through the entire sleepless night, had begun to give way to something even less easy to endure.
All the terror which had checked her that evening when she swung the door open and stood poised on the threshold, a low laugh of sheerest delight in the costume she had worn across for him to see ready to burst from parted lips--all the horror that had held her incapable of motion until Denny had swung around and found her there, and lifted his arms and attempted to speak, had given way, in the first hours that followed, to a flaming scorn, a searing contempt for him and for his weakness that had lost him his fight.
All through that night which followed her panic flight from the huge, heavy-footed figure that had groped out for her, called to her, and dropped asprawl her own small cloak in the doorway, Denny Bolton's blood-soiled face and drunkenly reckless laugh had been with her, feeding that rage which scorched her eyes beneath their lids--that burned her throat and choked her.
Little drops of blood oozed out upon her lips--strangely brilliant crimson drops against that colorless background--where her teeth sank deep in the agony of disillusionment that made each pulse-beat a sledge-hammer blow within her brain. Her small palms were etched blue under the clenched fingers where the nails bit the flesh. And yet--and yet, for all the agony of it which made her lift her blanched face from time to time throughout the night--a face so terribly strained that it was almost distorted--and set her gasping chokingly that she hated him, hated him for a man who couldn't fight and keep on fighting, even when the odds were great--when the light of that new, dreary day had come streaking in across her half-bowed head, something else began to take the place of all that bitterness and scorn.
And throughout the day she had still been struggling against it, struggling with all the tense fierceness of which her spirit was capable--her spirit that was far too big for the slim body that housed it. Yet that thought could not be shaken off. She couldn't forget it, couldn't wipe out the recollection of that great, gaping wound that had dripped blood from his chin. She tried to close her eyes and shut it out as she went from task to task that day, and it would not fade.
Somehow it wasn't that man at all whom she remembered as the afternoon dragged by to its close; it wasn't the big-shouldered body nervelessly asprawl upon the floor that filled her memory. Instead a picture of an awkward, half-grown boy flashed up before her--a big, ungainly, terribly embarra.s.sed boy who turned from watching the mad flight of a rabbit through the brush to smile at her rea.s.suringly, even though his face was torn raw from her own nails.
That was the point at which the tide of her chaotic thoughts began to waver and turn. Long before she realized what she was doing she had fallen to wondering, with a solicitude that made moist and misty once more her tip-tilted eyes and softened the thin line of her lips, whether or not that bruise had been washed out, cleansed and cleanly bandaged.
When she did realize what that thought meant, it had been too long with her to be routed. She was too tired to combat it, anyway, too tired with the reaction of that long, throbbing night to do more than wonder at herself. Twilight came and the gray mist that had been over the hills for hours dissolved into rain. With the first hint of darkness that the storm brought with it she began to watch--to peer out of the window whenever her busy footsteps carried her past it, at the bleak place across the hollow. Before it was fairly night she began to understand that she was not merely watching for the light, but hoping, praying wordlessly that it might s.h.i.+ne. And when her work was finished she had taken her place there, her slim body in its scant black skirt and little white blouse hunched boyishly forward as always across the table.
Even that girl who, after the hours which had been almost cataclysmic for her, could scarcely have been expected to be able to comprehend it clearly yet--even she read the meaning of the slackened cords of her body, of her loosened lips and wet eyes. As long as she could she had fed the flame within her soul--fed it with every bitter thought and harsh judgment which her brain could evolve--and yet that flame had slackened and smouldered and finally died out entirely. Self-shame, self-scorn even, could not rekindle it.
Her lips were no longer white and straight and feverish with contempt; they were damp and full again, and curved and half-open with compa.s.sion. The ache was still there in her breast--a great gnawing pain which it seemed at that moment time could never remove, but it was no longer the wild hatred which made her pant with a desire to make him suffer, too, just as she had suffered that night through.
The pain was just as great, but it was pity now--only pity and an unaccountable yearning to draw that bruised face down against her and croon over it.
In spite of the numbness, in spite of the la.s.situde which that burnt-out pa.s.sion had left behind in brain and body, she knew what it meant. She understood. She had hated his weakness; she still hated his lack of manhood which had made him fail her. That hatred would be a long time dying now--if it ever did perish. But she couldn't hate _him_! She looked that fact in the face, dumb at first at the awakening. She couldn't hate him--not the man he was! There was a distinction--a difference very clear to her woman-brain. She could despise his cowardice; she could despise herself for caring still--but the caring still went on. Half-vaguely she realized it, but she knew the change had come. The girlishness was gone from it forever. She had to care now as a woman always cares--not for the thing he was, but in spite of it.
”I ought to hate him,” she told herself once, aloud. ”I know I ought to hate him, and yet--and yet I don't believe I can. Why, I--I can't even hate myself, as I did a little while back, because I still care!”
It was a habit that had grown out of her long loneliness--those half-whispered conversations with herself. And now only one conviction remained. Again and again she told herself that she could not go to meet him that night--could not go, even if he should call to her. And that, too, she put into whispered words.
”Even if he lights the window, I can't--I couldn't! Oh, not tonight!
He won't--he won't think of it. But I couldn't let him touch me--until--until I've had a little time to forget!”
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