Part 21 (1/2)
The girl stood in the doorway smiling down at him. He couldn't meet her eyes. As it was he felt that their gaze went through and through him. And so he did not see her half lift her arms to him in a sudden quite wonderful gesture of contrite and remorseful rea.s.surance. He did not hear the first of the impulsive torrent of words which she barely smothered behind lips that trembled a little. His head was bowed so that he did not see her eyes, and if he could but have seen them and nothing else, he would have understood, without the words or the gesture.
Instead he stood there, plucking undecidedly at his sleeve.
”Because I--I wouldn't like to hev you go--without seein' you again,”
he went on slowly--”without a chance to tell you something--er--to tell you good-by.”
He didn't wait for her answer. At the far bend in the road, when he looked back, she was still there in the doorway watching him.
He was not quite certain, but he thought she threw up one thin white arm to him as he pa.s.sed out of sight.
CHAPTER XVII
It rained that next day--a dull, steady downpour that slanted in upon a warm, south wind. Old Jerry was glad of the storm. The leaden grayness of the low-hanging clouds matched perfectly his own frame of mind, and the cold touch of the rain soothed his hot head, too, as it swept in under the buggy hood, and helped him to think a little better. There was much that needed readjusting.
Throughout the early hours of that morning he drove with a newspaper spread flat upon his knees--the afternoon edition of the previous day, which, in the face of other matters, he had had neither the necessary time nor enthusiasm to examine until it was an entire twelve hours old. At any other time the contents of that red-headlined sheet would have set his pulses throbbing in a veritable ecstasy of excitement.
For two whole weeks he had been watching for it, scanning every inch of type for the news it brought, but now that account of Young Denny's first match, with a little, square picture of him inset at the column head, fell woefully flat so far as he was concerned.
Not that the plump newspaperman who had written the account of that first victorious bout had achieved anything but a masterpiece of sensationalism. Every line was alive with action, every phrase seemed to thud with the actual shock of contest. And there was that last paragraph, too, which hailed Denny--”The Pilgrim,” they called him in the paper, but that couldn't deceive Old Jerry--as the newcomer for whom the public had been waiting so long, and, toward the end, so hopelessly.
It was really a perfect thing of its kind--but Old Jerry could not enjoy it that morning, even though it was Denny Bolton's first triumph, to be shared by him alone in equal proportion. Instead of sending creepy thrills chasing up and down his spine it merely intensified his doleful bitterness of spirit. Long before noon he breathed a leaden heavy sigh, refolded the sodden sheet and put it away in the box beneath the seat.
The old mare took her own pace that day. In a brain that was already burdened until it fairly ached there was no room for the image of the silver-haired stone-cutter which had made for speed on other occasions. He had plenty to occupy his mind which was of a strictly immediate nature.
A dozen times that morning Old Jerry asked himself what he would tell Dryad Anderson that night, when he stopped at the little drab cottage at the route's end, ostensibly to bid her good-by. He asked himself, in desperate reiteration, _how_ he would tell, for he knew that the long delay in the delivery of Denny's message was going to need more than a little explanation. And when he had wrestled with the question until his eyes stung and his temples throbbed, and still could find no solution for it, he turned helplessly to the consideration of another phase of the problem.
He fell to tormenting himself with the possibility of her having gone already. Everything in those bare rooms had been packed--there was no real reason for the girl to remain another hour. Perhaps she had reconsidered, changed her mind, and departed even earlier than she had planned, and if she had--if she had----
Whenever he reached that point, dumbly he bowed his head.
It was dark when he turned off the main road and started up the long hill toward the Bolton place--not just dark, but a blackness so profound that the mare between the shafts was only a half formless splotch of gray as she plodded along ahead. Even his dread of the place, which formerly had been so acute, did not penetrate the mental misery that wrapped him; he did not vouchsafe so much as one uneasy glance ahead until a glimmer of light which seemed to flash out from the rear of the house fairly shocked him into conscious recollection of it all.
He sprang erect then, spilling a cataract of water from his hat brim in a chill trickle down the back of his neck, and barked a shrilly staccato command at the placid horse. The creaking buggy came to a standstill.
He tried to persuade himself it was a reflection of the village lights upon the window panes which had startled him, but it was only a half-hearted effort. No one could mistake the glow that filtered out of the black bulk of the rear of the house for anything save the thing it was. Half way up the hill he sat there, hunched forward in a hopeless huddle, his eyes protected by cupped palms, and stared and stared.
Once before, the evening of that day when the Judge's exhibition of Young Denny's bruised face had been more than his curiosity could endure, he had approached that bleak farmhouse in fear and trembling, but the trepidation of that night, half real, half a child of his own erratic imagination, bulked small beside the throat-tightening terror of this moment.
And yet he did not turn back. The thought that he had only to wheel his buggy and beat as silent a retreat as his ungreased axles would permit never occurred to him. It was much as if his harrowed spirit, driven hither and yon without mercy throughout the whole day long, had at last backed into a corner, in a mood of last-ditch, crazy desperation, and bared its teeth.
”If he is up there,” he stated doggedly, ”if he is up there, a-putterin' with his everlasting lump o' clay, he ain't got no more right up there than I hev! He's just a-trespa.s.sin', that's what he's a-doin'. I'm the legal custodian of the place--it was put into my hands--and I'll tell him so. I'll give him a chance to git out--or--or I'll hev the law on him!”
The plump mare went forward again. There was something terribly uncanny, even in her relentless advance, but the old man clung to the reins and let her go without a word. When she reached the top she slumped lazily to a standstill and fell contentedly to nibbling gra.s.s.
The light in the window was much brighter, viewed from that lessened distance--thin, yellow streaks of brightness that quivered a little from the edges of a drawn shade. An uneven wick might easily have accounted for the unsteadiness, but in that flickering pallor Old Jerry found something ominously unhealthy--almost uncanny.
But he went on. He clambered down from his high seat and went doggedly across--steadily--until his hand found the door-latch. And he gave himself no time for reconsideration or retreat. The metal catch yielded all too readily under the pressure of his fingers, and when the door swung in he followed it over the threshold.
The light blinded him for a moment--dazzled him--yet not so completely but that he saw, too clearly for any mistake, the figure that had turned from the stove to greet him. Dryad Anderson's face was pink-tinted from forehead to chin by the heat of the glowing lids--her lips parted a little until the small teeth showed white beyond their red fullness.