Once to Every Man Part 20

They had always had a forbidding aspect--Young Denny's black, unpainted farmhouse and dilapidated outbuildings--even when he had been certain that just as surely as he reached the crest he would find the boy's big body silhouetted against the skyline, waiting for him, they had not been any too prepossessing. Now they never served to awake in him anything but actual dread and distrust.

Old Jerry laid it to the lonesomeness of the place--to the bleak blindness of the shaded windows and the untenanted silence--but he took good care that no loitering on his part would be to blame for his arrival at the house after dusk.

No one, not even he himself, knew how strong the temptation was that week to make tentative advances of peace to the members of the circle of Tavern regulars, for the more he dwelt upon it the finer the dramatic possibilities of the thing seemed. But he had misread in the hushed respect of his former intimates a chill and uncompromising disapproval, and he had to fall back upon a one-sided conversation with himself as the next best thing.

"I wa'n't brought up to believe in ghosts," he averred to himself more than once. "Ghosts naturally is superst.i.tion--and that ain't accordin'

to religion, not any way you look at it. But allowing that there could be ghosts--just for the sake of argument allowing that there is--now what would there be to hinder him from just kinda settlin' down up there, as you might say? It's nice and quiet, ain't it? Sort of out of the way--and more or less comfortable, too?"

At that point in the mumbled monologue the white-haired driver of the buggy usually paused for a moment, tilting his head, birdlike, to one side, wrapped in thought. There were those shelves lined with countless white figures which also had to be considered.

"He must've worked mighty steady," he told himself time and again in a voice that was small with awe. "He must hev almost enjoyed workin' at 'em, to hev finished so many! And he kept at it nearly all the time, I reckon. And now, that's what I'm a-gettin' at! Now I want to ask how do we know he's a-goin' to quit now--how do we know that? We don't know it! And G.o.dfrey 'Lisha, what better place would he want than that back kitchen up there? Ain't there a table right there by the window, all a-waitin' for him--an'--an'----"

Invariably he broke off there, to peer furtively at the sun, before he whipped up his horse.

"Git along!" he admonished her earnestly, then, "Git along--you!

n.o.body believes in ghosts--leastwise, I don't. But they ain't no sense nor reason in just a-killin' time on the road, neither. And I ain't one to tempt Providence--not to any great nor damagin' extent, I ain't!"

And yet in spite of all the uneasiness which the combination of the dark house and the persistent image of the little, worn-out stone-cutter kept alive in him, in so far as Young Denny's team of horses was concerned, and the scanty rest of the stock which the boy had left in his care, Old Jerry kept strictly to the letter of his agreement. At the most it meant no more than a little readjustment of his daily schedule, which he high-handedly rearranged to suit his better convenience.

But all the rest which he had promised so fervidly to carry out--the message which he had meant to deliver the very next morning after the boy's departure and the explanation of Young Denny's bruised face, even a diplomatic tender of the damp wad of bills which Denny had pushed in his hand--had somehow been allowed to wait. For it had proved to be anything but the admirably simple thing it had seemed to the old man when he had volubly acquiesced to the plan.

He had forgotten it that first morning. With the well-planned opening sentence fairly trembling upon his tongue-tip when he opened the door, the whole thing had been swept utterly from his mind. And in the press of events that followed he never so much as thought of it again for days. When the memory of it did return, a week later, somehow he found it almost impossible to introduce the subject--at least impossible to introduce it gracefully.

That was one of the reasons for his failure to execute the mission entrusted to him. The other reason, which was far weightier, so far as Old Jerry was concerned, was even harder to define. He blamed it directly to the att.i.tude of the girl with the tumbled yellow hair and blue eyes, which were never quite the same shade of purple. More than a small proportion of the remarks which he had prepared beforehand to deliver to her had consisted of reproof--not too harsh, but for all that a trifle severe, maybe--of her hasty and utterly unfair judgment of Young Denny. That, he had a.s.sured himself, was only just and merited, and could only prove, eventually, to have been for the best.

But she never gave him a chance to deliver it. One moment of sadness on her part would have been sufficient excuse. If he could have surprised her just once gazing at him from moist, questioning eyes, he felt that that would have been enough proof of contrition and humble meekness of spirit on her part. But he never did.

Instead Old Jerry had never seen so astounding a change take place in any human being as that which came over her day by day. By the end of that first week the pallor had gone entirely from her cheeks. The deep dark circles which had rimmed the wet eyes which she had lifted to him that first morning disappeared so entirely that it was hard to remember that they had ever been there at all. Even the lithely slender body seemed fuller, rounder. To every outward appearance at least Old Jerry had to confess to himself that he had never seen a more supremely contented, thoroughly happy creature than Dryad Anderson was at that week's end.

And it irritated him; it almost angered him at times. Remembering his own travail of spirit, the self-inflicted agony of mind which he had undergone that day when he had first looked square into the eyes of his own soul and acknowledge his years of guilty unfairness to the lonely boy on the hill, he shut his lips tight upon the message he might have delivered and waited, stubbornly, for her to show some sign of repentance.

For a day or two a mental contemplation of this necessarily severe course brought him moments of comparative peace of mind. It justified in a measure, at least, his own remissness, and yet even that mind-state at times was rudely shaken. At each day's end, after he had made his reluctant ascent of the hill which led up to Young Denny's unlighted house, and a far speedier, none too dignified return, the little driver of the squealing buggy made it a point to turn off and stop for a moment or two before the gate of John Anderson's cottage.

At first the girl's real need of him prompted this daily detour; then, when the actual need no longer existed, he excused the visit on the plea of her lonesomeness and his promise to Denny to look after her.

His own loneliness--for he had never been so lonely before in all his lonely life--and the other and real reason for this habit, he never allowed himself to scrutinize too closely. But each day he sat a little forward on the buggy seat as soon as he had turned the last sharp curve in the road and stared eagerly ahead through the afternoon dusk until he made out her slim figure leaning against the fence waiting for him. And every afternoon, after he had pulled the shuffling horse to a standstill, he bent down from his vantage point on the high seat to scan her upturned face minutely, almost craftily at times, for some tell-tale trace of tears on her long lashes, or a possible quiver of her lips, or a suspicious droop in her boyish shoulders. And he never discovered either the one or the other.

It was at such moments that his peace of mind suffered, for no sane man could ever have read, by any stretching of the imagination, anything akin to sorrow or sadness in the low laugh with which she invariably met his scrutiny. It fairly bubbled joy. Each day Old Jerry found her only happy--offensively happy--and where he had been secretly watching her for one betraying sign he became uneasily conscious after a time that very often she, too, seemed to be scanning his own face as if she were trying to penetrate into the inner tumult of perplexities behind his seamed forehead. Some days he was almost certain that there was a calculating light in her steady eyes--a hint of half-hidden delight in something he couldn't understand--and it worried him. It bothered him almost as much as did the unvaried formula with which she greeted him every afternoon.

"Have you any news for me today?" she always asked him. "Surely you've something new to tell me this afternoon--now, haven't you?"

The tone in which she made the query was never anything but disarming; it was quite childishly wheedling and innocently eager, he thought.

But reiterated from day to day it wore on his nerves after a while.

Added to the something he sometimes thought he caught glimmering in her tip-tilted eyes, it made him more than a little uncomfortable. He fell back upon a quibble to dodge the issue.

"Was you expectin' a letter?" he always countered.

This daily veiled tilt of wits might have gone on indefinitely had not a new development presented itself which threw an entirely different aspect upon the whole affair.

A fortnight had elapsed since Denny Bolton's mysterious departure from the village when it happened. As usual, after the day's duties were completed with his hurried return from the Bolton homestead, Old Jerry turned off at the crossroads to stop for a moment before the cottage squatting in its acre of desolate garden. He didn't even straighten up in his seat that afternoon to gaze ahead of him, so certain he had grown that she would be waiting for him, a hint of laughter in her eyes and the same disturbing question on her lips, and not until the fat animal between the shafts had stopped of her own accord before the straggling fence did he realize that the girl was not there. Then her absence smote him full.

It frightened him. Right from the first he was conscious of impending disaster born quite entirely of the knowledge of his own guilt. The front door of the house was open and after fruitless minutes of panicky pondering he clambered down and advanced uncertainly toward it. His shadow across the threshold heralded his reluctant coming, and Dryad turned from the half-filled box upon the table over which she had been bending and nodded to him almost before he caught sight of her.

That little, intimately brief inclination of the head was her only greeting. With hands grasping each side of the door-frame Old Jerry stood there and gazed about the room. It had never been anything but bare and empty looking--now with the few larger pieces of furniture which it had contained all stacked in one corner and the smaller articles already stored away in a half-dozen boxes, the last of which was holding the girl's absorbed attention, it would have been barnlike had it not been so small. From where he stood Old Jerry could see through into the smaller back-room workshop. Even its shelves were empty,--entirely stripped of their rows of tiny white woman-figures.

He paled as he grasped the ominous import of it; he tried to speak unconcernedly, but his voice was none too steady.

"So you're a-house-cleanin', be you?" he asked jauntily. "Ain't you commencin' a little early?"

He was uncomfortably conscious of that interrogative gleam in Dryad's glance--that amused glimmer which he couldn't quite fathom--when she turned her head. She was smiling, too, a little--smiling with her lips as well as with her eyes.

"No-o-o," she stated with preoccupied lack of emphasis, as she bent again over the box. "No--I'm packing up."

Old Jerry had known that that would be her answer. He had been certain of it. The other interpretation--the only other possible one which could be put upon the dismantled room--had been nothing more or less than a momentary and desperate grasping at a straw.

For a while he was very, very quiet, wondering just what it was in her mind which made her so cheerfully indifferent to his presence. She filled that last box while he stood there in the doorway, stood off to survey her work critically, and then picked up a hammer that lay on the table and prepared to nail down the lid.

"I've hit my finger four times today," she apprised him between strokes as she drove the first nail home. "Four times this afternoon--and always the same finger, too!"

The very irrelevancy of the statement, coupled with her calm serenity, was appalling to the old man. She didn't so much as lift her eyes when she told him, but when the lid was fastened she whirled suddenly with that impetuosity which always startled him more than a little, her hands tightly clasped in front of her, and fairly beamed at him.

"There, that finishes everything--everything but the pots and pans,"

she cried. "And I'll need them a little longer, anyway, won't I? But maybe I won't take them with me, either--they're pretty old and worn out. What do you think?"

Old Jerry cleared his throat. He ignored her question.

"Ain't--ain't this a trifle sudden," he faltered--"jest a trifle?"

She shook her head again and laughed softly, as if from sheer joyous excitement.

"No," she said. "No, I've been planning it for days and days--oh, for more than a week!"

Then she seemed to catch for the first time the dreariness of his whole att.i.tude--the dejection of his spare angular body and sparrowlike, anxious face.

"You're sorry I'm going," she accused him then, and she leaned toward him a little, eyes quizzically half closed. "I knew you'd be sorry!"

And then, swiftly, "Aren't you?"

Old Jerry sc.r.a.ped first one foot and then the other.

"I reckon I be," he admitted faintly. "Kinda surprised, too. I--I wa'n't exactly calculating on anything like this. It--it's kinda thrown me off my reckonin'! Are you--are you figurin' on goin' right away?"

Dryad spun about and threw her head far on one side to scan the whole bare room.

"Tomorrow, maybe," she decided, when she turned back to him. "Or the next day at the very latest. You see, everything is about ready now, and there isn't any reason for me to stay, on and on, here--is there?"

A little tired note crept into the last words, edging the question with a suggestion of wistfulness. It was something not so very different from that for which Old Jerry had been stubbornly waiting throughout those entire two weeks, but he failed to catch it at that moment. He had heard nothing but her statement that she meant to remain at least another day. It made it possible for him to breathe deeply once again.

Much could happen in twenty-four hours. She might even change her mind, he desperately a.s.sured himself--women were always doing something like that, wern't they? But even if she did go it was a reprieve; it gave him one last opportunity. Now, for the present, all he wanted was to get away--to get away by himself and think! On heavily dragging feet he turned to go back down the rotting boardwalk.

"I--I'll drop in on you tomorrow," he suggested, pausing at the steps.

"I'll stop in on my way 'round--to--to say good-by."