CHAPTER VI. Treats of the Tragedy Which Wears a Comic Mask
As she hastened on, Christopher's presence was still with her—his arm still enveloped her, his voice still spoke in her ears; and so rapt was the ecstasy in which she moved that it was with a positive shock that she found herself presently before the little area which led into the brick kitchen in the basement of the Hall. Here from the darkness her name was spoken in a stifled voice, while a hand reached out and clutched her by the shoulder.
"I say, Maria, I've been waiting hours to speak to you."
Forcing back the cry upon her lips, she opened the door and stole softly into the kitchen. Then, turning, she faced Will with a frightened gesture.
"How reckless—how very reckless!" she exclaimed in a whisper.
He closed the door that led up into the house, and coming over to the stove, where the remains of a fire still smouldered in a deep red glow, stood looking at her with nervous twitches of his reddened eyelids. There was a wildness in his face before which she fell back appalled, and his whole appearance, from the damp hair lying in streaks upon his forehead to his restless feet which he shuffled continually as he talked, betrayed an agitation so extreme as to cause her a renewed pang of foreboding.
"Oh, Will, you have been drinking again!" she said, in the same frightened whisper.
"And why not?" he demanded, throwing out his words between thick breaths. "What business is it of yours or of anybody else's if I have been? A pretty sister you are—aren't you?—to let a fellow rot away on a tobacco farm while you wear diamonds on your fingers."
She looked at him steadily for a moment, and his shifting glance fell slowly to the floor.
"If you are in any fresh trouble you may as well tell me at once," she said. "It is a mere waste of time and breath to reproach me. You can't possibly make me angry to-night, for I wear an armour of which you do not dream, and so little a thing as abuse does not even touch me. Besides, grandfather may hear us and come down at any moment. So speak quickly."
Her coolness sobered him instantly, as if a splash of icewater had been thrown into his face, and his tone lost its aggressiveness and sank into a whimpering complaint.
It was the same old thing, he went on, only worse and worse. Molly had been ill again, and the doctor ordered medicine he couldn't buy. Yes, he had tried to take the diamond from her, but she flew into hysterics at the mere mention of selling it. Once he had dragged it off her finger, and had given it back again because her wildness frightened him, "Why on earth did you ever let her have it?" he finished querulously.
"Well, I never imagined she would be quite so silly," returned Maria, distressed by what she heard. "But it may be that jewels are really her passion, and the bravest of us, I suppose, are those who sacrifice most for their dearest desire. I really don't see what is to be done, Will. I haven't any money, and I don't dare ask grandfather, for he makes me keep a strict account of every cent I spend. Only yesterday he told me he couldn't allow me but two postage stamps a week, and yet I believe that he is worth considerably more than half a million dollars. Sometimes I think it is nothing short of pure insanity, he grows so miserly about little things. Aunt Saidie and I have both noticed that he would rather spend a hundred dollars—though it is like drawing out an eyetooth—than keep a pound of fresh butter from the market."
"And yet he likes you?"
"Oh, he tolerates me, as far as that goes; but I don't believe he likes anything on earth except his money. It's his great passion, just as Molly's love of jewelry is hers. There is something so tremendous about it that one can't help respect it. As for me, he only bears with my presence so long as I ask him for absolutely nothing. He knows I have my little property, and we had a dreadful scene when I refused to let him keep my check-book. I gave you all the interest of the last six months, you know, and the other isn't due until November. If he finds out that it goes to you, heaven help us!"
"And there's not the faintest hope of his coming to his senses?
Have you spoken of me again?"
"I've mentioned your name twice, that was all. He rose and stamped out of the room, and didn't speak for days. Aunt Saidie and I have planned to bring the baby over when it comes. That may soften him—especially if it should be a boy."
"Oh, the bottom will drop out of things by that time," he returned savagely, tearing pieces of straw from his worn hat-brim. "If this keeps up much longer, Maria, I warn you now I'll run away. I'll go off some day on a freight train and hide my head until he dies; then I'll come back to enjoy his precious money."
She sighed, thinking hopelessly of the altered will.
"And Molly?" she questioned, for lack of a more effectual argument.
"I can't stop to think of Molly: it drives me mad. What use am I to her, anyway, I'd like to know? She'd be quite as well off without me, for we do nothing but quarrel now night and day; and yet I love her—I love her awfully," he added in a drunken whimper.
"Oh, Will, Will, be a man for her sake!"
"I can't; I can't," he protested, his voice rising in anger. "I can't stand the squalor of this life; it's killing me. Why, look at the way I was brought up, never stopping an instant to ask whether I could have a thing I wanted. He had no right to accustom me to luxuries till I couldn't do without them and then throw me out upon the world like this!"
"Hush! Hush! Your voice is too loud. It will bring him down."
"I'll be hanged if I care!" he retorted, but involuntarily he lowered his tone.
"You mustn't stay here five minutes longer," urged Maria. "I'll give you a diamond brooch I still have left, and you may take it to town yourself and sell it. Only promise me on your honour that you will spend the money on the things Molly needs."
"Oh, I promise," he replied roughly. "Where is it?"
"In my room. I must get it now. Be perfectly quiet until I return."
Opening the door and closing it carefully behind her, she stole noiselessly up the dark staircase, while Will, twitching nervously, paced restlessly up and down the brick floor. A pile of walnuts which Miss Saidie had been shelling for cake lay on the hearth, and, picking up the heavy old hammer she had used, he cracked a nut and ate it hurriedly. Hungry as he was—for he had not been home to supper—he found difficulty in swallowing, and, laying the hammer down upon the bricks, he rose and stood waiting beside the stove. Though the night was warm, a shiver ran suddenly through him, and, stirring the fading embers with a splinter of resinous pine, he held out his shaking hands to the blaze.
In a moment Maria entered and handed him the brooch in a little box.
"Try to keep up courage, Will," she said, pushing him into the area under the back steps; "and above all things, do not come here again. It is so unsafe."
He promised lightly that he would not, and then told her good-by with an affectionate pat upon the arm.
"Well, you are a bully good chap, after all," he added, as he stepped out into the night.
For a while Maria stood looking after him across the moonlit fields, and then, even as she turned to enter the house, the last troubled hour was blotted from her consciousness, and she lived over again the moment of Christopher's embrace. With that peculiar power to revive and hold within the memory an instant's emotion which is possessed by ardent and imaginative women, she experienced again all the throbbing exhilaration, all the fulness of being, which had seemed to crowd the heartbeats of so many ordinary years into the single minute that was packed with life. That minute was hers now for all time; it was a possession of which no material loss, no untoward fate could defraud her; and as she felt her steps softly up the dark staircase, it seemed to her that she saw her way by the light of the lamp that was burning in her bosom.
To her surprise, as she reached the dining-room a candle was thrust out before her, and, illuminated by the trembling flame, she saw the face of Fletcher, hairy, bloated, sinister, with the shadow of evil impulses worked into the mouth and eyes. For a moment he wagged at her in silence, and in the flickering radiance she saw each swollen vein, each gloomy furrow, with exaggerated distinctness. He reminded her vaguely of some hideous gargoyle she had seen hanging from an early Gothic cathedral.
"So you've taken to gallivanting, like the rest," he observed with coarse pleasantry. "I'd thought you were a staid and sober-minded woman for your years, but it seems that you are of a bunch with all the others."
"I've been out in the moonlight," answered Maria, while a sensation of sickness stole over her.
"It is as bright as day, but I thought you were in bed long ago."
"Thar's not much sleep for me during tobacco planting, I kin tell you," rejoined Fletcher; "but as for you, I reckon thar's more beneath your words than you like to own to. You've been over to see that young scamp, ain't you?"
"I saw him, but I did not go out for that purpose."
"It's the truth, I reckon, for I've never known you to lie, and
I'll be hanged if it ain't that I like about you, after all.
You're the only person I kin spot, man or woman, who speaks the
truth jest for the darn love of it."
"And yet I lived a lie for five years," returned Maria quietly.
"Maybe so, maybe so; but it set on you like the burr on a chestnut, somehow, and when it rolled off thar you were, as clean as ever. Well, you're an honest and spunky woman, and I can't help your traipsing over thar even if I wanted to. But thar's one thing I tell you now right flat—if that young rascal wants to keep a whole skin he'd better stay off this place. I'd shoot him down as soon as I would a sheep-killing hound."
"Oh, he won't come here," said Maria faintly; and, going into the dining-room, she dropped into a chair and lay with her arms outstretched upon the table. The second shock to her emotional ecstasy had been too much, and the furniture and Fletcher's face and the glare of the candle all spun before her in a sickening confusion.
After looking at her anxiously an instant, Fletcher poured out a glass of water and begged her to take a swallow. "Thar, thar, I didn't mean to skeer you," he said kindly. "You mustn't mind my rough-and-ready ways, for I'm a plain man, God knows. If you are sure you feel fainty," he added, "I'll git you a sip of whisky, but it's a pity to waste it unless you have a turn."
"Oh, I'm all right," answered Maria, sitting up, and returning his inquiring gaze with a shake of the head. "My ankle is still weak, you know, and I felt a sudden twinge from standing on it. What were you looking for at this hour?"
"Well, I've been out in the air sense supper, and I feel kind of gone. I thought I'd like a bite of something—maybe a scrap of that cold jowl we had for dinner. But I can't find it. Do you reckon Saidie is such a blamed fool as to throw the scraps away?"
"There's Malindy, you know; she must eat."
"I'd like to see one nigger eat up half a jowl," grumbled Fletcher, rooting among the dishes in the sideboard. "Thar was a good big hunk of it left, for you didn't touch it. You don't seem to thrive on our victuals," he added bluntly, turning to peer into her face.
"I'm a small eater; it makes little difference."
"Well, we mustn't starve you," he said, as he went back to his search; "and if it's a matter of a pound of fresh butter, or a spring chicken, even, I won't let it stand in your way. Why, what's this, I wonder?"
Ripping out an oath with an angry snort, he drew forth Miss Saidie's walnut cake and held it squarely before the candle. "I declar, if she ain't been making walnut cake agin, and I told her last week I wan't going to have her wasting all my eggs. Look at it, will you? If she's beat up one egg in that cake she's beat up a dozen, to say nothing of the sugar!"
"Don't scold her, grandfather. She has a sweet tooth, you know, and it's so hard for her not to make desserts."
"Pish! Tush! I don't reckon her tooth's any sweeter than mine. I've a powerful taste for trash myself, and always had since the time I overate ripe honey-shucks when I was six months old; but the taste don't make me throw away good money. I'll have no more of this, I tell you, and I've said my say. She can bake a bit of cake once a week if she'll stint herself to an egg or two, but when it comes to mixing up a dozen at a time, I'll be darned if I'll allow it."
Lifting the plate in one hand, he stood surveying the big cake with disapproving yet admiring eyes. "It would serve her right if I was to eat up every precious crumb," he remarked at last.
"Suppose you try it," suggested Maria pleasantly. "It would please Aunt Saidie."
"It ain't to please her," sourly responded Fletcher, as he drove the knife with a lunge into the yellow loaf. "She's a thriftless, no-account housekeeper, and I'll tell her so tomorrow."
Still holding the knife in his clenched fist, he sat munching the cake with a relish which brought a smile to Maria's tired eves.
"Yes, I've a powerful sweet tooth myself," he added, as he cut another slice.
CHAPTER VII. Will Faces Desperation and Stands at Bay
Rising at daybreak next morning, Will's eyes lighted in his first glance from the window on Christopher's blue-clad figure commanding the ploughed field on the left of the house. In the distance towered the black pines, and against them the solitary worker was relieved in the slanting sunbeams which seemed to arrest and hold his majestic outline. The split basket of plants was on his arm, and he was busily engaged in "setting out" Will's neglected crop of tobacco.
Leaving Molly still asleep, Will dressed himself hurriedly, and, putting the diamond brooch in his pocket, ran out to where Christopher was standing midway of the bare field.
"So you're doing my work again," he said, not ungratefully.
"If I didn't I'd like to know who would," responded Christopher with rough kindliness, as he dropped a wilted plant into a hole. "You're up early this morning. Where are you off to?"
Will drew the brooch from his pocket and held it up with a laugh.
"Maria gave me this," he explained, "and I'm going to town to turn it into money."
"Well, I'll keep an eye on the place while you are away," returned Christopher, without looking at the trinket. "Go about your business, and for heaven's sake don't stop to drink. Some men can stand liquor; you can't. It makes a beast of you."
"And not of you, eh?"
"It never gets the chance. I know when to stop. That's the difference between us."
"Of course that's the difference," rejoined Will a little doggedly. "I never know when to stop about anything, I'll be hanged if I do. It's my cursed luck to go at a headlong gait."
"And some day you'll get your neck broken. Well, be off now, or you'll most likely miss the stage."
He turned away to sort the young plants in his basket, while Will started at a brisk pace for the cross-roads.
The planting was tedious work, and it was almost evening before Christopher reached the end of the field and started home along the little winding lane. He had eaten a scant dinner with Molly, who had worried him by tearful complaints across the turnip salad. She had never looked prettier than in her thin white blouse, with her disordered curls shadowing her blue eyes, and he had never found her more frankly selfish. Her shallow-rooted nature awakened in him a feeling that was akin to repulsion, and he saw in imagination the gallant resolution with which Maria would have battled against such sordid miseries. At the first touch of her heroic spirit they would have been sordid no longer, for into the most squalid suffering her golden nature would have shed something of its sunshine. Beauty would have surrounded her, in Will's cabin as surely as in Blake Hall. And with the thought there came to him the knowledge, wrung from experience, that there are souls which do not yield to events, but bend and shape them into the likeness of themselves. No favouring circumstance could have evolved Maria out of Molly, nor could any crushing one have formed Molly from Maria's substance. The two women were as far asunder as the poles, united only by a certain softness of sex he found in them both.
The sun had dropped behind the pines and a gray mist was floating slowly across the level landscape. The fields were still in daylight, while dusk already enshrouded the leafy road, and it was from out the gloom that obscured the first short bend that he saw presently emerge the figure of a man who appeared to walk unsteadily and with an effort.
For an instant Christopher stopped short in the lane; then he went forward at a single impetuous stride.
"Will!" he cried in a voice of thunder.
Will looked up with dazed eyes, and, seeing who had called him, burst into a loud and boisterous laugh.
"So you'll begin with your darn preaching," he remarked, gaping.
For reply, Christopher reached out, and, seizing him by the shoulder, shook him roughly to his senses.
"What's the meaning of this tomfoolery?" he demanded. "Do you mean to say you've made a beast of yourself, after all?"
Partly sobered by the shock, Will gazed back at him with a dogged misery which gave his face the colour of extreme old age.
"I'm not so drunk as I look," he responded bitterly. "I wish to Heaven I were! There are worse things than being drunk, though you won't believe it. I say," he added, in a sudden, hysterical exclamation, "you're the only friend I have on earth!"
"Nonsense. What have you been doing?"
"Oh, I couldn't help it—it wasn't my fault, I'll be blamed if it was! I did sell the breastpin and get the money, and wrapped it in the list of things that Molly wanted. I put them in my pocket," he finished, touching his coat, "the money and the list together."
"And where is it?"
For a moment Will did not reply, but stood shaking like a blade of grass in a high wind. Then removing his hat, he mopped feebly at the beads of sweat upon his forehead. His eyes had the dumb appeal of a frightened animal's. "I haven't had a morsel all day," he whimpered, "and the effect of the whisky has all worn off."
"Speak up, man," said Christopher kindly. "I can't eat you."
"Oh, it's not you," returned Will desperately; "it's Molly. I'm afraid to go home and look Molly in the face."
"Pish! She doesn't bite."
"She does worse; she cries."
"Then, for God's sake, out with the trouble," urged Christopher, losing patience. "You've lost the money, I take it; but how?"
"There was a fair," groaned Will, his voice breaking. "I met Fred Turner and a strange man who owned horses, and they asked me to come and watch the racing. Then we had drinks and began to bet, and somehow I always lost after the first time. Before I knew it the money was all gone, every single cent, and I owed Fred Turner a hundred and fifty dollars."
Christopher's gaze travelled slowly up and down the slight figure before him and he swore softly beneath his breath.
"Well, you have made a mess of it!" he exclaimed with a laugh.
"I knew you'd say so, and you're the only friend I have on earth.
As for Molly—oh, I'm afraid to go home, that's all. Do you know,
I've half a mind to run away for good?"
"Pshaw! Accidents will happen, and there's nothing in all this to take the pluck out of a man. I've been through worse things myself."
"But Fred Turner!" groaned Will. "I promised him I'd pay him in two days."
"Then you'll do it. I'll undertake to see to that."
"You!" exclaimed the other, with so abject a reliance upon the spoken word that it brought a laugh from Christopher's lips. "How will you manage it?"
Oh, somehow—mortgage the farm, I reckon. At any rate, in two days you shall be clear of your debt to Fred Turner; there's my word. All I hope is that you'll learn a lesson from the fright."
"Oh, I will, I will; and by Jove! you are a bully chap!"
"Then go home and make your peace with Molly. Mind you, if you get in liquor again I warn you I won't lift a hand."
With a last cheery "good night" he swung on along the road, dismissing the thought of Will to invoke that of Maria, and meeting again in fancy the rich promise of her upturned lips. Body and soul she was his now, flame and clay, true brain and true heart. "I will follow you, for the lifting of a finger, anywhere," she had said, and the words reeled madly in his thoughts. Her impassioned look returned to him, and he closed his eyes as a man does in the face of an emotion which proclaims him craven.
When Christopher's footsteps had faded in the distance, Will, who had been looking wistfully after him, shook together his dissolving courage and started with a strengthened purpose to bear the bad news to Molly. A light streamed through the broken shutters of her window, and when he laid his hand upon the door it shot open and she stood before him.
"So you're back at last," she said sharply; "and late again."
"I couldn't help it," he answered with assumed indifference, entering and passing quickly under the fire of her questioning look. "I was kept."
"What kept you?"
"Oh, business."
"I'd like to know what business you have!" she retorted querulously; and a minute later: "Have you brought the medicine?"
He went over to the table and stood looking gloomily down upon the scattered remains of supper upon the sloppy oilcloth, the cracked earthenware teapot, and the plate half filled with soppy bread. "Give me something to eat. I'm almost starved," he pleaded.
A flash shot from her blue eyes, while the anger he had feared worked threateningly in the features of her pretty face. There was no temperateness about Molly; she was all storm or sunshine, he had once said in the poetic days of courtship.
"If you've brought the things, where are they?" she demanded, driving him squarely into a corner from which there was no escape by subterfuge.
A sullen defiance showed in his aspect, and he turned upon her with a muttered curse. "I haven't them, if you want the truth," he snarled. "I meant to buy them, but Fred Turner got me to drinking and we bet on the races. I lost the money."
"To Fred Turner!" cried Molly. "Oh, you fool!"
He made an angry movement toward her; then checking himself, laughed bitterly.
"You're as bad as grandfather," he said, "and it's like jumping from the frying-pan into the fire. I'll be hanged if I knew you were a shrew when I married you!"
Molly's eyes fairly blazed, and as she shook her head with an enraged gesture, her hair, tumbling upon her shoulders, flooded her with light. Even in the midst of his fury his ready senses responded to the appeal of her dishevelled loveliness.
"And I'll be—anything if I knew you were a drunkard!" she retorted, pressing her hand upon her panting breast.
"Well, you ought to have known it," he sneered, "for I was one. Christopher Blake could have told you so. But if I remember rightly, you weren't so precious particular at the time. You were glad enough to get anybody, as it happened!"
"How—how dare you?" wailed Molly, in the helplessness of her rage, and throwing herself upon the lounge, she beat her hands upon the wooden sides and burst into despairing sobs. "Why, oh, why did I marry you?" she moaned between choking gasps.
"Some said it was because Fred Turner threw you over," returned Will savagely, and having hurled his last envenomed dart, he seized his hat and rushed out into the night.
The scene had worked like madness on his nerves, and in the darkness of the lane, where the trees kept out the moonbeams, he still saw the flickering lights that he had left behind him in the room. He had eaten nothing all day, and his empty stomach oppressed him with a sensation of nausea. His head spun like a top, and as he walked the road rocked in long seesaws beneath his feet. Yet his one craving was for drink, drink, more drink.
Running rather than walking, he reached the store at last, and went back to the little smoky room where Tom Spade was drawing beer from the big keg in one corner.
"Give me something to eat, Tom; I'm starving," he said; "and whisky. I must have whisky or I'll die."
"It's my belief that you'll die if you do have it," responded Tom. "As for bread and meat, however, Susan will give you a bite an' welcome." Nevertheless, he poured out the whisky, and, leaving it upon one of the dirty tables, went hastily out in search of Mrs. Spade.
Lifting the glass with a shaking hand, Will drained it at a single swallow, feeling his depleted courage revive as the raw spirit burned his throat. A sudden heat invaded him; his eyes saw clearer, and the tips of his fingers were endowed with a new quality of touch. As his hands travelled slowly over his face he became aware that he was looking through his finger ends, and he noted distinctly his haggard features and the short growth of beard which made him appear jaded and unwashed. Then almost instantly the quickness died out of his perception, and he felt the old numbness creeping back.
"Another glass—I must have another glass," he called out irritably to the empty room. His hands hung stone dead again at his sides, and his head dropped limply forward upon his breast. He had forgotten his quarrel with Molly; he had forgotten everything except his own miserable bodily condition.
When Susan Spade came in with a plate of bread and ham, he roused himself with a nervous start and inhaled quickly the strong odour of the meat, endeavouring through the sense of smell to reawaken the pang of hunger he had felt earlier in the evening. But in place of the gnawing emptiness there had come now a deadly nausea, and after the first mouthful or two he pushed the food away and called hoarsely for more whisky. His head ached in loud, reverberating throbs, and a queer fancy possessed him that the sound must be as audible to others as to himself. With the thought, he glanced about suspiciously, but Tom Spade was stopping the keg that he had tapped, and Susan was wiping off the table with energetic sweeps of her checked apron. Relieved by their impassiveness, he braced himself with the determination to drink to the dead-line of unconsciousness and then lie down somewhere in the darkness to sleep off the effects.
"Whisky—give me more whisky," he repeated angrily.
But Mrs. Spade, true to her nature, saw fit to intervene between him and destruction.
"Not another drop, Mr. Will," she said decisively. "Not another drop shall you have in this room if it's the last mortal word I speak. An' if you'd had me by you in the beginning, I'm not afeard to say, things would have held up a long sight sooner than this."
"Don't you see I'm in downright agony?" groaned Will, rapping the glass upon the table. "My head is splitting, I tell you, and I must have it."
"Not another drop, suh," replied Mrs. Spade with adamantine firmness of tone. "I ain't a weak woman, thank the Lord, an' as far as that goes, you might split to pieces inside and out right here befo' my eyes an' I wouldn't be a party to sendin' you a step nearer damnation. I ain't afeard of seein' folks suffer. Tom will tell you that."
"That she ain't, suh," agreed Tom with pride. "If I do say it who shouldn't, thar never was a woman who could stand mo' pain in other people than can Susan. Mo' than that, Mr. Will, she's right, though I'd be sayin' so even if she wasn't—seein' that the only rule for makin' a woman think yo' way is always to think hers. But she's right, and that's the truth. You've had too much."
"Oh, you're driving me mad between you!" cried Will in desperation. "I'm in awful trouble, and there's nothing under heaven will make me forget it except drink. One glass more—just one. That can't hurt me."
"May he have one glass, Susan?" asked Tom, appealing to his wife.
"Not another drop, suh," returned Mrs. Spade, immovable as a rock.
"Not another drop, she says," repeated the big storekeeper in a sinking voice. Then he laid his hand sympathetically on Will's shoulder. "To be sure, I know you're in trouble," he said, "an' I'll swear it's an out-an'-out shame, I don't care who hears me. Yes, I'll stand to it in the very face of Bill Fletcher himself."
"Oh, he's a devil!" cried Will, stung by the name he hated.
"I ain't sayin' you've been all you should have been," pursued Tom in his friendly tones, "but as I told Susan yestiddy, a body can't sow wild oats in one generation without havin' a volunteer crop spring up in the next. Now, yo' wild oats were sown long befo' you were born. Ain't that so, Susan?"
Mrs. Spade planted her hands squarely upon her hips and stood her ground with a solidity which was as impressive in its way as dignity.
"I've spoken my mind to Bill Fletcher," she said, "an' I'll speak it again. 'How's that boy goin' to live, suh?' That's what I asked, an' 'twas after he told me to shut my mouth, that it was. Right or wrong, that's what I told him. You've gone an' made the meanest will this county has ever seen."
"What?" cried Will, springing to his feet, while the room whirled round him.
"Thar, thar, Susan, you've talked too much," interposed Tom, a little frightened. "What she means is just some foolishness yo' grandpa's been lettin' out," he added; "but he'll live long enough yet to change his mind an' his will, too."
"What is it about? Speak louder, will you? My ears buzz so I can't hear thunder."
Tom coughed reproachfully at Susan.
"Well, he was talkin' down here last night about havin' changed his will," he said apologetically. "He's tied it up, it seems, so you can't get it, an' he's gone an' left the bulk of it to Mrs. Wyndham."
"To Maria!" repeated Will, and saw scarlet.
"That's what he says; but he'll last to change his mind yet, never fear. Anger doesn't live as long as a man—eh, Susan?"
But Will had risen and was walking quite steadily toward the door. His face was dead white, and there were deep blue circles about his eyes, which sparkled brilliantly. When he turned for a moment before going out, he sucked in his under lip with a hissing sound.
"So this was Maria's trick all along," he said hoarsely.
CHAPTER VIII. How Christopher Comes Into His Revenge
"So this was Maria's trick all along," he repeated, as he lurched out into the road. "This was what she had schemed for from the beginning—this was what her palavering and her protestations meant. Oh, it had been a deep game from the first, only he had been too much of a blind fool to see the truth." A hundred facts arose to drive in the discovery; a hundred trivial details now bristled with importance. Why had she been so willing—so eager, even—to give away her little property, unless she intended to divert him with the crumbs while she reached for the whole loaf? Why, again, had she shrunk so from mentioning him to his grandfather? And why, still further, had she always fearfully postponed a meeting between the two? He remembered suddenly that she had once drawn Molly behind the trees when the old man passed along the road. Poor, defrauded Molly! Forgetting his bitter quarrel with her, he was ready to fall upon her neck in maudlin sympathy.
Yes, it was all plain now—as clear as day. He saw one by one each devilish move that she had made, and he meant to pay her back for all before the night was over. He would tell her what he thought of her, freely, fully, in words that she would never forget. The names that he would use, the curses he would utter, spun deliriously in his head, and as he went on he found himself speaking his phrases aloud to the darkness, trying upon the silence the effect of each blighting sentence.
The lights of the Hall twinkled presently among the trees, and, crossing the lawn, he crept into the little area under the back steps. If Maria was not in the kitchen, the servant would be, he argued, and he would send up a peremptory summons which would bring her down upon the instant. It was not late enough for her to be in bed, at least, and he chuckled over the thought of the sleepless night which she would spend.
Pushing back the door cautiously on its old, rusty hinges, he entered on tip-toe and glanced suspiciously around. The room was empty, but a lamp with a smoked chimney burned upon the table, and there were the glimmering embers of a wood fire in the stove. It was just as he had left it the evening before, and this aroused in him a feeling of surprise, so long a stretch appeared to cover the last twenty-four hours. The same basket of chicken feathers was in the sagging split-bottomed chair, the same pile of black walnuts lay on the hearth, and the rusted hammer was still lying where he had dropped it upon the bricks. Even the smell was the same—a mixture of baked bread and burned feathers.
Going to the door that led into the house, he opened it and looked up the dark staircase; then a sound reached him from the dining-room, and with nervous shiver he turned away and came back to the stove. A dread paralysed him lest the meeting with Maria should be delayed until his courage oozed out of him, and to nerve himself for the encounter he summoned to mind all the evidence, which gathered in a cloud of witnesses, to prove her treachery. Once it occurred to him that after a few minutes of waiting he might tighten the screw upon his nerves and so pluck up the audacity, if not the resolution, to ascend the stair boldly and denounce her in the presence of his grandfather. But the memory of Fletcher's face wagged before him, and, quaking with terror, he huddled with open palms above the stove. Then, pacing slowly up and down the room, he set to work frantically to lash himself into the drunken bravado which he miscalled courage.
Of a sudden his hunger assailed him, violent, convulsive, and, going over to the tin safe, he rummaged among the cold scraps he found there, devouring greedily the food which lead been set by for the hounds. A bottle of Miss Saidie's raspberry vinegar was hidden in one corner, and he tore the paper label from the cork and drank like a man who perishes from thirst. His energy, which had evaporated from fatigue and hunger, surged back in spasms of anger, and as he turned away, invigorated, from the safe, he realised as he had never done before the full measure of his rage against Maria. At the moment, had she come in upon him, he felt that he could have struck her in the face.
But she did not come, and the slow minutes fretted him in their passage. A flame shot up in the stove, and, catching a knot of resinous pine, burned steadily, licking patiently about the fading embers. The air became charged again with the odour of burned feathers, and he saw that a handful, with the dried blood of the fowl still adhering to them, had been scattered upon the ashes. As he idly noted the colours of red and black, he remembered with bitterness that he had raised game-cocks once when he was a boy at the Hall, and that Maria had smashed a nestful of his eggs in a fit of passion. The incident swelled to enormous proportions in his thoughts, and he determined that he would remind her of it in the interview that was before them.
The door into the house creaked suddenly behind him; he wheeled about nervously, and then stood with hanging jaws staring into the face of Fletcher.
"So it is you, is it?" said the old man, raising the stick he carried. "So it is you, as I suspected—you darn rascal!"
But the power of speech had departed from Will in the presence that he dreaded, and he stood clutching tightly to his harvest hat, and shaking his head as if to deny the obvious fact of his own identity.
"I thought it was you," pursued Fletcher, licking his dry lips. "I heard a noise, and I picked up my stick, thinking it was you. I'll have no thieving beggars on my place, I tell you, so the quicker you git off the better. When were you here last, I'd like to know?"
"Yesterday," answered Will, speaking the truth from sheer physical inability to frame a lie. "I came to see Maria. She's cheated me—she's cheated me all along."
"Then she lied," said Fletcher softly. "Then she lied and I didn't know it."
"She's cheated me," insisted Will hoarsely. "It's been all a scheme of hers from the very beginning. She's cheated me about the will, grandpa; I swear she has."
"Eh? What's that?" responded the old man, shaking back his heavy eyebrows. "Say your say right now, for in five minutes you go off this place with every hound in the pack yelping at your heels. I'll not have you here—I'll not have you here!"
The words ended in a snarl, and a fleck of foam dropped on his gray beard.
"But it was all Maria's doing," urged Will passionately. "She has been against me from the first; I see that now. She's plotted to oust me from the very start."
"Well, she might have spared herself the trouble," was Fletcher's sharp rejoinder.
"Let me explain—let me explain," pleaded the other, in a desperate effort to gain time; "just a word or two—I only want a word."
But when his grandfather drew back and stood glowering upon him in silence, the speech he had wished to utter withered upon his lips, blighted by a panic terror, and he stood mumbling incoherently beneath his breath.
"Give me a word—a word is all I want," he reiterated wildly.
"Then out with your damned word and begone!" roared Fletcher.
Will's eyes travelled helplessly around the room, seeking in vain some inspiration from the objects his gaze encountered. The tin safe, the basket of feathers, the pile of walnuts on the hearth, each arrested his wandering attention for an instant, and he beheld all the details with amazing vividness.
A mouse came out into the room, gliding like a shadow along the wall to the pile of walnuts, and his eyes followed it as if drawn by an invisible thread.
"It's Maria—it's all Maria," he stuttered, and could think of nothing further. His brain seemed suddenly paralysed, and he found himself tugging hopelessly at the most commonplace word which would not come. All his swaggering bravado had scampered off at the first wag of the old man's head.
"If that's what you've got to say, you might as well be gone," returned Fletcher, moving toward him. "I warn you now that the next time I find you here you won't git off so easy. Maria or no Maria, you ain't goin' to lounge about this place so long as my name is Bill Fletcher. The farther you keep yourself and your yaller-headed huzzy out of my sight the better. Thar, now, be off or you'll git a licking."
"But I tell you Maria's cheated me—she's cheated me," returned
Will, his voice rising shrilly as he was goaded into revolt.
"She's been scheming to get the place all along; that's her
trick."
"Pish! Tush!" responded Fletcher. "Are you going or are you not?"
Will's eyes burned like coals, and an observer, noting the two men as they stood glaring at each other, would have been struck by their resemblance in attitude and expression rather than in feature. Both leaned slightly forward, with their chins thrust out and their jaws dropped, and there was a ceaseless twitching of the small muscles in both faces. The beast in each had sprung violently to the surface and recognised the likeness at which he snarled.
"You've left me to starve!" cried Will, strangling a sob of anger. "It's not fair! You have no right. The money ought to be mine—I swear it ought!"
"Oh, it ought, ought it?" sneered the old man, with an ugly laugh.
At the sound of the laugh, Will shrank back and shivered as if from the stroke of a whip. The spirit of rage worked in his blood like the spirit of drink, and he felt his disordered nerves respond in a sudden frenzy.
"It ought to be mine, you devil, and you know it!" he cried.
"I do, do I?" retorted Fletcher, still cackling. "Well, jest grin at me a minute longer like that brazen wench your mother and I'll lay my stick across your shoulders for good and all. As for my money, it's mine, I reckon, and, living or dead, I'll look to it that not one red cent gits to you. Blast you! Stop your grinning!"
He raised the stick and made a long swerve sideways, but the other, picking up the hammer from the hearth, jerked it above his head and stood braced for the assault. In the silence of the room Will heard the thumping of his own heart, and the sound inspired him like the drums of battle. He was in a quiver from head to foot, but it was a quiver of rage, not of fear, and a glow of pride possessed him that he could lift his eyes and look Fletcher squarely in the face.
"You're a devil—a devil! a devil!" he cried shrilly, sticking out his tongue like a pert and vulgar little boy. "Christopher Blake was right—you're a devil!"
As the name struck him between the eyes the old man lurched back against the stove; then recovering himself, he made a swift movement forward and brought his stick down with all his force on the boy's shoulder.
"Take that, you lying varmint!" he shouted, choking.
The next instant his weapon had dropped from his hand, and he reached out blindly, grappling with the air, for Will had turned upon him with the spring of a wild beast and sent the hammer crushing into his temple.
There was a muffled thud, and Fletcher went down in a huddled heap upon the floor, while the other stood over him in the weakness which had succeeded his drunken frenzy.
"I told you to let me alone. I told you I'd do it," said Will doggedly, and a moment later: "I told you I'd do it."
The hammer was still in his hand, and, lifting it, he examined it with a morbid curiosity. A red fleck stained the iron, and glancing down he saw that there was a splotch of blood on Fletcher's temple. "I told him I'd do it," he repeated, speaking this time to himself.
Then instantly the silence in the room stopped his heartbeats and set him quaking in a superstitious terror through every fiber. He heard the stir of the mouse in the pile of walnuts, the hissing of the flame above the embers, and the sudden breaking of the smoked chimney of the lamp. Then as he leaned down he heard something else—the steady ticking of the big silver watch in Fletcher's pocket.
A horror of great darkness fell over him, and, turning, he reeled like a drunken man out into the night.
CHAPTER IX. The Fulfilling of the Law
Christopher had helped Tucker upstairs to bed and had gone into his own room to undress, when a sharp and persistent rattle upon the closed shutters brought him in alarm to his feet. Looking out, he saw a man's figure outlined in the moonlight on the walk, and, at once taking it to be Will, he ran hastily down and unbarred the door.
"Come in quietly," he said. "Uncle Tucker is asleep upstairs.
What in thunder is the trouble now?"
Stepping back, he led the way into what so short a time ago had been Mrs. Blake's parlour, and then pausing in the center of the floor, stood waiting with knitted brows for an explanation of the visit. But Will, who had shrunk dazzled from the flash of the lamp, now lingered to put up the bar with shaking hands.
"For God's sake, what is it?" questioned Christopher, and a start shook through him at sight of the other's face. "Have you had a fit?"
Closing the parlour door behind him, Will crossed the room and caught at the mantel for support. "I told you I'd do it some day—I told you I'd do it," he said incoherently, in a frantic effort to shift the burden of responsibility upon stronger shoulders.
"You might have known all along that I'd do it some day."
"Do what?" demanded Christopher, while he felt the current of his blood grow weak. "Out with it, now. Speak up. You're as white as a sheet."
"He struck me—he struck me first. The bruise is here," resumed Will, in the same eager attempt at self justification. "Then I hit him on the head with a hammer and his skull gave way. I didn't hit hard. I swear it was a little blow; but he's dead. I left him stone dead in the kitchen. "
"My God, man!" exclaimed Christopher, and touched him on the shoulder.
With a groan, Will put up his hands and covered his bloodshot eyes. "I didn't mean to do it—I swear I didn't," he protested. "Who'd have thought his head would crush in like that at the first little blow—just a tap with an old hammer? Why, it would hardly have cracked a walnut! And what was the hammer doing there, anyway? They have no business to leave such things lying about on the hearth. It was all their fault—they ought to have put the hammer away."
A convulsive shudder ran through him, ending in his hands and feet, which jerked wildly. His face was gray and old—so old that he might have been taken, at the first glance, for a man of eighty, and in the intervals between his words he sucked in his breath with a hissing noise. Meeting Christopher's look, he broke into a spasm of frightened sobs, whimpering like a child that has been whipped.
"I told you not to drink again," said Christopher sharply as he struggled to collect his thoughts. "I told you liquor would make a beast of you."
"I'll never touch another drop. I swear I'll never touch another drop," groaned Will, still sobbing. "I didn't mean to kill him, I tell you. It wasn't as if I really meant to kill him; you see that. It was all the fault of that accursed hammer they left lying on the hearth. A man must have a lot of courage to murder anybody—mustn't he?" he added, with a feeble smile; "and I'm a coward—you know I've always been a coward; haven't I—haven't I?" he persisted, and Christopher nodded an agreement.
"You see, I wasn't to blame, after all; but he flew into such a rage—he always flew into a rage when he heard your name."
"So you brought my name in?" asked Christopher carelessly.
"Oh, it was that that did it; it was your name," replied Will breathlessly. "I told him you said he was a devil—you did say so, you know. Christopher Blake was right; he called you 'a devil,' that was it. Then he ran at me with his stick, and I jerked up the hammer, and Oh, my God, they mustn't hang me!"
"Nonsense!" retorted Christopher roughly, for the other had dropped upon the floor and was grovelling in drunken hysterics at his feet. "It makes me sick to see a man act like an ass."
"Get me out of this and I'll never touch a drop," moaned Will. "Take me away from here—hide me anywhere. I'll go anywhere, I'll promise anything, only they mustn't find me. If they find me I'll go mad—I'll go mad in gaol."
"Shut up!" rejoined Christopher, listening with irritation to the sound of the other's hissing breath. "Stop your infernal racket a minute and let me think. Here, get up. Are you too drunk to stand on your feet?"
"I'm sober—I'm perfectly sober," protested Will, and, rising obediently, he stood clutching at the chimney-piece. "Get me out of this—only get me out of this," he repeated, with a desperate reliance on the other's power to avert the consequences of his deed. "I've always been a good friend to you," he went on passionately. "The quarrel first started about you, and I stood up for you to the last. I never let him say anything against you—I never did!"
"I'm much obliged to you," returned Christopher, and felt that he might as well have wasted his irony on a beaten hound. Turning away from the wild entreaty of Will's eyes, he walked slowly up and down the room, taking care to step lightly lest the boards should creak and awaken Tucker.
The parlour was just as Mrs. Blake had left it; her highbacked Elizabethan chair, filled with cushions, stood on the hearth; the dried grasses in the two tall vases shed their ashy pollen down upon the bricks. Even the yellow cat, grown old and sluggish, dozed in her favourite spot beside the embroidered ottoman.
On the whitewashed walls the old Blake portraits still presided, and he found, for the first time, an artless humour in the formality of the ancestral attitude—in the splendid pose which they had handed down like an heirloom through the centuries. Among them he saw the comely, high-coloured features of that gallant cynic, Bolivar, the man who had stamped his beauty upon threegenerations, and his gaze lingered with a gentle ridicule on the blithe candour in the eyes and the characteristic touch of brutality about the mouth. Then he passed to his father, portly, impressive, a high liver, a generous young blood, and then to the classic Saint—Memin profile of Aunt Susannah, limned delicately against a background of faded pink. And from her he went on to his mother's portrait, painted in shimmering brocade under rose garlands held by smiling Loves.
He looked at them all steadily for a while, seeking from the changeless lips of each an answer to the question which he felt knocking at his own heart. In every limb, in every feature, in every fiber he was plainly born to be one of themselves, and yet from their elegant remoteness they stared down upon the rustic labourer who was their descendant. Degraded, coarsened, disinherited, the last Blake stood before them, with his poverty and ignorance illumined only at long intervals by the flame of a soul which, though darkened, was still unquenched.
The night dragged slowly on, while he paced the floor with his thoughts and Will moaned and tossed, a shivering heap, upon the sofa.
"Stop your everlasting cackle!" Christopher had once shouted angrily, forgetting Tucker, and for the space of a few minutes the other had lain silent, choking back the strangling sobs. But presently the shattered nerves revolted against restraint, and Will burst out afresh into wild crying. The yellow cat, grown suddenly restless, crossed the room and jumped upon the sofa, where she stood clawing at the cover, and he clung to her with a pathetic recognition of dumb sympathy—the sympathy which he could not wring from the careless indifference of Christopher's look.
"Speak to me—say something," he pleaded at last, stretching out his hands. "If this keeps up I'll go mad before morning."
At this Christopher came toward him, and, stopping in his walk, frowned down upon the sofa.
"You deserve everything you'd get;" he said angrily. "You're as big a fool as ever trod this earth, and there's no reason under heaven why I should lift my hand to help you. There's no reason —there's no reason," he repeated in furious tones.
"But you'll do it—you'll get me out of it!" cried Will, grasping the other's knees.
"And two weeks later you'd be in another scrape."
"Not a single drop—I'll never touch a drop again. Before God I swear it!"
"Pshaw! I've heard that oath before."
Strangling a scream, Will caught him by the arm, dragging himself slowly into a sitting posture. "I'll hang myself if you let them get me," he urged hysterically. " I'll hang myself in gaol rather than let them do it. I can't face it all I can't—I can't. It isn't grandpa I mind; I'm not afraid of him. He was a devil. But it's the rest—the rest."
Roughly shaking him off, Christopher left him huddled upon the floor and resumed his steady walk up and down the room. In his ears the incoherent phrases grew presently fainter, and after a time he lost entirely their frenzied drift. "A little blow—just a little blow," ended finally in muffled sounds of weeping.
The habit of outward composure which always came to him in moments of swift experience possessed him so perfectly now that Will, lifting miserable eyes to his face, lowered them, appalled by its unfeeling gravity.
"I've been a good friend to you—a deuced good friend to you," urged the younger man in a last passionate appeal for the aid whose direction he had not yet defined.
"What is this thought which I cannot get rid of?" asked Christopher moodily of himself. "And what business is it of mine, anyway? What am I to the boy or the boy to me?" But even with the words he remembered the morning more than five years ago when he had gone out to the gate with his bird gun on his shoulder and found Will Fletcher and the spotted foxhound puppies awaiting him in the road. He saw again the boy's face, with the sunlight full upon it—eager, alert, a little petulant, full of good impulses readily turned adrift. There had been no evil upon it then—only weakness and a pathetic absence of determination. His own damnable intention was thrust back upon him, and he heard again the words of Carraway which had reechoed in his thoughts. "The way to touch the man, then, is through the boy." So it was the way, after all .
He almost laughed aloud at his prophetic insight. He had touched the man vitally enough at last, and it was through the boy. He had murdered Bill Fletcher, and he had done it through the only thing Bill Fletcher had ever loved. From this he returned again to the memory of the deliberate purpose of that day—to the ribald jests, the coarse profanities, the brutal oaths. Then to the night when he had forced the first drink down Will's throat, and so on through the five years of his revenge to the present moment. Well, his triumph had come at last, the summit was put upon his life's work, and he was—he must be—content.
Will raised his head and looked at him in reviving hope.
"You're the only friend I have on earth," he muttered between his teeth.
The first streak of dawn entered suddenly, flooding the room with a thin gray light in which the familiar objects appeared robbed of all atmospheric values. With a last feeble flicker the lamp shot up and went out, and the ashen wash of daybreak seemed the fit medium for the crude ugliness of life.
Towering almost grotesquely in the pallid dawn, Christopher came and leaned above the sofa to which Will had dragged himself again.
"You must get out of this," he said, "and quickly, for we've wasted the whole night wrangling. Have you any money?"
Will fumbled in his pocket and brought out a few cents, which he held in his open palm, while the other unlocked the drawer of the old secretary and handed him a roll of banknotes.
"Take this and buy a ticket somewhere. It's the money I scraped up to pay Fred Turner."
"To pay Fred Turner?" echoed Will, as if in that lay the significance of the remark.
"Take it and buy a ticket, and when you get where you're going, sit still and keep your mouth shut. If you wear a bold face you will go scot—free; remember that; but everything depends upon your keeping a stiff front. And now go—through the back door and past the kitchen to the piece of woods beyond the pasture. Cut through them to Tanner's Station and take the train there, mind, for the North."
With a short laugh he held out his big, knotted hand.
"Good—by," he said, " and don't be a damned fool."
"Good—by," answered Will, clinging desperately to his outstretched arm. Then an ashen pallor overspread his face, and he slunk nervously toward the kitchen, for there was the sound of footsteps on the little porch outside, followed by a brisk rap on the front door.
"Go!" whispered Christopher, hardly taking breath, and he stood waiting while Will ran along the wooden platform and past the stable toward the pasture.
The rap came again, and he turned quickly. "Quit your racket and let me get on my clothes!" he shouted, and hesitated a little longer.
As he stood alone there in the center of the room, his eyes, traversing the walls, fell on the portrait of Bolivar Blake, and with one of the fantastic tricks of memory there shot into his head the dying phrase of that gay sinner: "I may not sit with the saints, but I shall stand among the gentlemen."
"Precious old ass!" he muttered, and unbarred the door.
As he flung it open the first rays of sunlight splashed across the threshold, and he was conscious, all at once, of a strange exhilaration, as if he were breasting one of the big waves of life.
"This is a pretty way to wake up a fellow who has been planting tobacco till he's stiff," he grumbled. "Is that you, Tom?" He glanced carelessly round, nodding with a kind of friendly condescension to each man of the little group. "How are you, Matthew? Hello, Fred!"
Tom drew back, coughing, and scraped the heel of his boot on the topmost step.
"We didn't mean to git you out of bed, Mr. Christopher," he explained apologetically, "but the truth is we want Will Fletcher an' he ain't at home. The old man's murdered, suh."
"Murdered, is he?" exclaimed Christopher, with a long whistle, "and you want Will Fletcher—which shows what a very pretty sheriff you would make. Well, if you're so strong on his scent that you can't turn aside, most likely you'll find him sleeping off his drunk under my haystack. But if you're looking for the man who killed Bill Fletcher, then that's a different matter," he added, taking down his hat, "and I reckon, boys, I'm about ready to come along."
CHAPTER X. The Wheel of Life
Throughout the trial he wore the sullen reserve which closed over him like a visor when he approached one of the crises of life. He had made his confession and he stood to it. "I killed Bill Fletcher" he gave out flatly enough. What he could not give was an explanation of his unaccountable presence at the Hall so nearly upon midnight. When the question was first put to him he sneered and shrugged his shoulders with the hereditary gesture of the Blakes. "Why was he there? Well, why wasn't he there?" That was all. And Carraway, who had stood by his side since the day of the arrest, retired at last before an attitude which he characterised as one of defiant arrogance.
It was this attitude, people said presently, rather than the murder of Bill Fletcher, which brought him the sentence he heard with so insolent an indifference.
"Five years wasn't much for killin' a man, maybe," Tom Spade observed, "but it was a good deal, when you come to think of it, for a Blake to pay jest for gettin' even with a Fletcher. Why, he might have brained Bill Fletcher an' welcome," the storekeeper added a little wistfully, "if only he hadn't put on such a nasty manner afterward."
But it was behind this impregnable reserve that Christopher retreated as into a walled fortress. There had been no sentiment in his act, he told himself; he had not even felt the romantic fervour of the sacrifice. A certain staunch justice was all he saw in it, relieved doubtless by a share of his hereditary love of desperate hopes—of the hot—headed clinging to that last shifting foothold on which a man might still make his fight against the power of circumstance. And so, with that strange mixture of rustic crudeness and aristocratic arrogance, he turned his face from his friends and went stubbornly through the cross-questioning of the court.
>From first to last he had not wavered in his refusal to see Maria, and there had been an angry vehemence in the resistance he had made to her passionate entreaty for a meeting. When by the early autumn he went from the little town gaol to serve his five years in the State prison, his most vivid memory of her was as she looked with the moonlight on her face in the open field. As the months went on, this gradually grew remote and dim in his remembrance, like a bright star over which the clouds thicken, and his thoughts declined, almost without an upward inspiration, upon the brutal level of his daily life. Mere physical disgust was his first violent recoil from what had seemed a curious deadness of his whole nature, and the awakening of the senses preceded by many months the final resurrection of the more spiritual emotions. The sources of health were still abundant in him, he admitted, if the vile air, the fetid smells, the closeness as of huddled animals, the filth, the obscenity, the insufferable bestial humanity could arouse in him a bodily nausea so nearly resembling disease. There were moments when he felt capable of any crime from sheer frenzied loathing of his surroundings—when for the sake of the clean space of the tobacco fields and the pure water of the little spring he would have murdered Bill Fletcher a dozen times. As for the old man's death in itself, it had never caused him so much as a quiver of the conscience. Bill Fletcher deserved to die, and the world was well rid of him—that was all.
But his own misery! This was with him always, and there was no escape from the moral wretchedness which seemed to follow so closely upon crime. Fresh from the open country and the keen winds that blow over level spaces, he seemed mentally and physically to wither in the change of air—to shrink slowly to the perishing root, like a plant that has been brought from a rich meadow to the aridity of the close—packed city. And with the growing of this strange form of homesickness he would be driven, at times, into an almost delirious cruelty toward those who were weaker than himself, for there were summer nights when he would brutally knock smaller men from the single window of the cell and cling, panting for breath, to the iron bars. As the year went on, his grim silence, too, became for those around him as the inevitable shadow of the prison, and he went about his daily work in a churlish loneliness which caused even the convicts among whom he lived to shrink back from his presence.
Then with the closing of the second winter his superb physical strength snapped suddenly like a cord that has stood too tight a strain, and for weeks he lingered between life and death in the hospital, into which he was carried while yet unconscious. With his returning health, when the abatement of the fever left him strangely shaken and the unearthly pallor still clung to his face and hands, he awoke for the first time to a knowledge that his illness had altered for the period of his convalescence, at least the vision through which he had grown to regard the world.
A change had come to him, in that mysterious borderland so near the grave, and the bare places in his soul had burst suddenly into fulfilment. Sitting one Sunday morning in the open court of the prison, with his thin white hands hanging between his knees and his head, cropped now of its thick, fair hair, raised to the sunshine, it seemed to him that, like Tucker on the old bench, he had learned at last how to be happy. The warm sun in his face, the blue sky straight overhead, the spouting fountain from which a sparrow drank, produced in him a recognition, wholly passionless, of the abundant physical beauty of the earth—of a beauty in the blue sky and in the clear sunshine falling upon the prison court.
A month ago he had wondered almost hopefully if his was to be one of those pathetic sunken graves, marked for so brief a time by wooden headboards the graves of the men who had died within the walls—and now there pulsed through him, sitting there alone, a quiet satisfaction in the thought that he might still breathe the air and look into men's faces and see the blue sky overhead. The sky in itself! That was enough to fill one's memory to overflowing, Tucker had said.
A tall, lean convict, newly released from the hospital, crossed the court at a stumbling pace and stood for a moment at his side.
"I reckon you're hankerin', he remarked. "I was sent down here from the mountains, an' I hanker terrible for the sight of the old Humpback Knob."
"And I'd like to see a level sweep—hardly a hill, just a clean stretch for the wind to blow over the tobacco."
"You're from the tobaccy belt, then, ain't you? What are you here for?"
"Killing a man. And you?"
"Killin' two."
He limped off at his feeble step, and Christopher rubbed his hands in the warm sunshine and wondered how it would feel to bask on one of the old logs by the roadside.
That afternoon Jim Weatherby came to see him, bringing the news that Lila's baby had come and that she had named it Christopher. "It's the living image of you, she says," he added, smiling; "but I confess I can't quite see it. The funny part is, you know, that Cynthia is just as crazy about it as Lila is, and she looks ten years younger since the little chap came."
"And Uncle Tucker?"
"His old wounds trouble him, but he sent you word he was waiting to go till you came back again."
A blur swam before Christopher's eyes, and he saw in fancy the old soldier waiting for him on the bench beside the damask rose-bush.
"And the others—and Maria Wyndham?" he asked, swallowing the lump in his throat.
Jim reached out and laid his hand on the broad stripes across the other's shoulder.
"She was with Mr. Tucker when he said that," he replied; "they are always together now; and she added; Tell him we shall wait together till he comes."
The tears which had blinded Christopher's eyes fell down upon his clasped hands.
"My God! Let me live to go back!" he cried out in his weakness.
>From this time the element of hope entered into his life, and like its shadow there came the brooding fear that he should not live to see the year of his release. With his declining health he had been given lighter work in the prison factory, but the small tasks seemed to him heavier than the large ones he remembered. There was no disease, the physician in the hospital assured him; it was only his unusual form of homesickness feeding upon his weakened frame. Let him return once more to the outdoor life and the fresh air of the tobacco fields and within six months his old physical hardihood would revive.
It was noticeable at this time that the quiet tolerance which had grown upon him in his convalescence drew to him the sympathy which he had at first repulsed. The interest awakened in the beginning by some rare force of attraction in his mere bodily presence became now, when he had fallen away to what seemed the shadow of himself, a friendly and almost affectionate curiosity concerning his earlier history. With this there grew slowly a rough companionship between him and the men among whom he lived, and he found presently to his surprise that there was hardly one of them but had some soft spot in his character—some particular virtue which was still alive. The knowledge of good and evil thrust upon him in these months was not without effect in developing a certain largeness of outlook upon humanity—a kind of generous philosophy which remained with him afterward in the form of a peculiar mellowness of temperament.