Part 13 (1/2)
But she was watching still--watching with small, gold-crowned head nodding heavily, eyes half-veiled with sinking lids--when that half-shaded window in the dark house glowed suddenly yellow with the light behind it. She was still hoping, praying dumbly that it might be, when Young Denny lifted the black-chimneyed lamp from its bracket on the kitchen wall that night, after he had stood and listened with a smile on his lips to Old Jerry's hurried departure, and carried it into the front room which he scarcely ever entered except upon that errand.
At first she did not believe. She thought it was only a trick of her brain, so tired now that it was as little capable of connected thought as her worn-out body was of motion. Hardly breathing she stared until she saw the great blot of his body silhouetted against the pane for a moment as he crowded between the lamp, staring across at her, she knew.
She rose then, rose slowly and very cautiously as though she feared her slightest move might make it vanish. Young Denny's bobbing lantern, swinging in one hand as he crossed before the house and plunged into the thicket that lay between them, was all that convinced her--made her believe that she had seen aright.
”I can't go--I can't!” she breathed. And then, lifting her head, vehemently, as if he could hear:
”I want to--oh, you know I want to! But I can't come to you tonight--not until I've had a little longer--to think.”
Almost before she had finished speaking another voice answered, a soft, dreamy voice that came so abruptly in the quiet house that it made her wheel like a startled wild thing. She had forgotten him for the time--that little, stooped figure at its bench in the back room workshop. For hours she had not given him a thought, and he had made not so much as a motion to make her remember his presence. She could not even remember when his sing-song, unending monologue had ceased, but she realized then that he had been more silent that night than ever before.
Earlier in the evening when she had lighted his lamp for him and set out his lump of moist clay, and helped him to his place on the high stool, she had thought to notice some difference in him.
Usually John Anderson was possessed of one or two unvarying moods.
Either he plunged contentedly into his task of reproducing the mult.i.tude of small white figures around the walls, or else he merely sat and stared up at her hopelessly, vacantly, until she put the clay herself into his hands. Tonight it had been different, for when she had placed the damp ma.s.s between his limp fingers he had laid it aside again, raised astonis.h.i.+ngly clear eyes to hers and shaken his head.
”After a little--after a little while,” he had said. ”I--I want to think a little first.”
It had amazed her for a moment. At any other time it would have frightened her, but tonight as she stroked his bowed head, she told herself that it was nothing more than a new vagary of his anchorless mind.
But that same strangely clear, almost sane glow which had puzzled her then was still there when she turned. It was even brighter than before, and the slow words which had startled her, for all their dreamy softness, seemed very sane as well.
”You have to go,” John Anderson answered her faltering, half-audible whisper. ”You have to go--but you'll be back soon. Oh, so soon! And I'll be safe till you come!”
Dryad flashed forward a step, both hands half-raised to her throat as he spoke, almost believing that the miracle for which she had ceased even to hope had come that night. And then she understood--she knew that the bent figure which had already turned back to its bench had only repeated her words, parrotlike; she knew that he had only pieced together a recollection of the absence which her vigil before the window had meant on a former occasion and repeated her own words of that other night.
And yet her brain clamored that there was more behind it all than mere witless repet.i.tion. John Anderson was smiling at her, too, smiling like a benevolent wraith. She saw that his pile of clay was still untouched, but there was no hint of petulant perplexity in his face, nothing of the terrified impotence which the inactivity of his fingers had always heralded before. He was just smiling--vaguely to be sure and a little uncertainly--but smiling in utter contentment and satisfaction, for all that.
Very slowly--wonderingly, she crossed to him and put both arms about his white head and drew it against her.
”I think you knew,” she said to him, unsteadily. ”I think you are able to understand better than I can myself. And I know, too, now. I do have to go--I must go to him. But he need not even know, until I tell him some day--that I was with him tonight.”
The old man pulled away from her clasp, gently but very insistently.
And he nodded--nodded as though he had understood. She paused and looked back at him from the doorway, just as she had always hesitated. He was following her with his eyes. Again he shook his head, just as positively as he might have, had he been the man he might have been.
”Some day,” he reiterated, serenely, ”some day! And she'll know then--some day I'll tell her--that I was with her tonight.”
She had forgotten the rain. It was coming down heavily, and it was dark, too--very, very dark. She stopped a while, as long as she dared, and waited with the rain beating cold upon her uncovered head and bare throat until her eyes saw the path a little more clearly. It took her a long time to feel her way forward that night. And even when she came within sight of Denny's lantern, even when she was near enough to see him through the thicket ahead of her, in the little patch of light, she had not decided what she meant to do.
But with that first glimpse of him squatting there in the small cleared s.p.a.ce it came to her what her course should be. She realized that if it was an impossibility for her to go to him, she could at least let him know she had been there--let him know that he had not been entirely alone while he waited. She even smiled to herself--smiled with wistful, half-sad, elfen tenderness as she, too, huddled down without a sound, there in the wet bushes opposite him, and decided how she would tell him.
Denny Bolton never quite knew how long he waited in the rain before he was certain that there was no use waiting longer. More than half the night had dragged by when he reached finally into the pockets of his coat and searched for a sc.r.a.p of paper. Watching from her place in the thicket near him, she recognized the small white card which he discovered--she even reached out one hand instinctively for her invitation from the Judge, which she had told him had never arrived and for which she had hunted in vain throughout the following days.
With an unaccountable gladness because he knew straining at her throat, she watched him draw the lantern nearer and read again the words it bore before he turned it over and wrote, laboriously, with the thick pencil that he used to check logs back in the hills, some message across its back.
It was a message to her, she knew; and she knew, too, that he was going now. Deliberately she reached out then and found a rotten branch beside her. Young Denny's head shot up as it cracked between her hands--shot swiftly erect while he stared hard at that wall of darkness which hid her. And swiftly as she fled, like some noiseless night creature of the woods, his sudden, plunging rush almost discovered her.
Back in the safety of the blackness she stood and saw him bend over the place where she had been crouching; she saw him put his hand upon the patch of dead ferns which her body had crushed flat, and knew that he found it still warm. She even held up her face, as though she were giving him her lips--she reached out her arms to him--when she saw him rise from an examination of her foot-prints in the mold, smiling his slow, infinitely grave smile as he nodded his head over what he had seen.