The Happy End Part 2

Richmond Braley evidently thought it was time for certain reservations.

"You mustn't come down so hard on Calvin and me," he said practically.

"We're both likely young fellows."

"I'll be here evening after to-morrow," Calvin told Hannah in a low voice.

She nodded without interest. They must be married at once, he decided, his wise horse following unerringly the rocky road, stepping through splas.h.i.+ng dark fords. If there was a repet.i.tion of the past visit he would have something to say. Hannah was his, she was promised to him. He felt the coolness of her cheeks, her bright mouth against his. A tyranny of misery and desire flooded him at the sudden danger--it was as much as that--threatening his happiness and life.

It was a danger founded on his entire ignorance of what he must combat.

He couldn't visualize it, but it never occurred to him that Hannah would actually go away--leave him and Greenstream. No, it was a quality in Hannah herself, a thing that had always lurked below the surface, beyond his knowledge until now. Yet he realized that it formed a part of her appeal, a part of her distinction over the other girls of the county.

Maybe it was because he was never in his heart absolutely certain of her--even when she was closest to him she seemed to slip away beyond his power to follow. His love, he acknowledged for the first time, had never been easy or contented or happy. It had been obscure, like the night about him now; it resembled a fire that he held in his bare hands.

Hannah's particularity, too, was allied to this strange newly-awakened peril. In a manner it was that which had carried Phebe out of the mountains. Now the resemblance between them was far stronger than their difference.

There was more than a touch of all this in the girls' mother, in her bitterness and discontent. He felt that he hated the elder as much as he did Phebe. If the latter were a man----

He dressed with the greatest care for his next evening with Hannah.

Hosmer wore no stiffer nor whiter collar, and Calvin's necktie was a pure gay silk. He arrived just as the moon detached itself from the fringe of mountain peaks and the frogs started insistently. His heart was heavy but his manner calm, determined, as he entered the Braley kitchen. No one was there but Susan; soon however, Phebe entered in an amazing slovenly wrapper with a lace edge turned back from her ample throat; and Hannah followed.

Phebe made a mocking reference to the sofa in the parlor, and Hannah's expression was distasteful; but she slowly followed Calvin into the conventional chamber.

He made no attempt to embrace her, but said instead: "I came to fix the day for our wedding."

"Phebe wants me to go with her for a little first," she replied indirectly. "She says I can come back whenever I like."

"Your Phebe has no say in it." He spoke harshly. "We're honestly promised to each other and don't need outside advice or interference."

"Don't you go to call Phebe 'outside,'" she retorted. "She's my sister.

Perhaps it's a good thing she came when she did, and saved me from being buried. Perhaps I'm not aiming to be married right off."

V

Hannah was standing, a hand on the table that held the pink-shaded lamp, and the light showed her petulant and antagonistic. A flare of anger threatened to shut all else from Calvin's thoughts; but suddenly he was conscious of the necessity for care--care and patience. He forced back his justified sense of wrong.

"I wasn't referring direct to Phebe," he told her. "I meant that between us n.o.body else matters, no one in the world is of any importance to me but you. It's all I think about. When I was building the house, our house, I hammered you into it with every nail. It is sort of made out of you," he foundered; "like--like I am."

He could see her relenting in the loss of the rigidity of her pose.

Hannah's head drooped and her fingers tapped faintly on the table. He moved closer, urging his advantage.

"We're all but married, Hannah; our carpet is being wove and that suite of furniture ordered through Priest. You've been upset by this talk of theaters and such. You'd get tired of them and that fly-by-night life in a month."

"Phebe hasn't."

"What suits one doesn't suit all," he said concisely.

"It would suit more girls than you know for," she informed him. "Take it round here, there's nothing to do but get married, and all the change is from one kitchen to another. You don't even have a way to match up fellows. Soon as you're out of short skirts one of them visits with you and the rest stay away like you had the smallpox. Our courting lasted a week and you were here four times."

"We haven't much time, Hannah," he reminded her. "It was right hard for me to see you that often. There was a smart of things you were doing, too."

"The more fool!" she exclaimed.

Again his resentment promised to leap beyond control. He clenched his hands and stared with contracted eyes at the floor.

"Well," he articulated finally, "we're promised anyhow; that can't be denied. I have your word."

"Yes," she admitted, "but chance that I went with Phebe doesn't mean I'd never come back."

"It would mean that you'd never come back," he paraphrased her.

"Maybe I would know better," she answered quickly. "I'm sorry, Calvin.

I didn't go to be so sharp. Only I don't know what's right," she went on unhappily.

"It isn't what's right," he corrected her, "but what you want. I wish Phebe had stayed away a little longer."

"There you go again at Phebe!" she protested.

He replied grimly; "Not half what I feel."

In a dangerously calm voice she inquired, "What's the rest then?"

"She's a trouble-maker," he a.s.serted in a shaking tone over which he seemed to have no command; "she came back to Greenstream and for no reason but her own slinked into our happiness. Your whole family--even Hosmer, pretending to be so wise--are blind as bats. You can't even see that Phebe's hair is as dyed as her stories. She says she is on the stage, but it's a pretty stage! I've been to Stanwick and seen those Parisian Dainties and burlesque shows. They're nothing but a lot of half-naked women cavorting and singing fast songs. And the show only begins--with most of them--when the curtain drops. If I even try to think of you in that I get sick."

"Go on," Hannah stammered, scarcely above her breath.

"It's bad," Calvin Stammark went on. "The women are bad; and a bad woman is something awful. I know about that too. I've been to the city as well as Phebe. Oh, Hannah," he cried, "can't you see, can't you!" With a violent effort he regained the greater part of his composure. "But it won't touch you," he added; "we're going to be married right away."

"We are?" Hannah echoed him thinly, in bitter mockery. "I wouldn't have you now if you were the last man on earth with the way you talked about Phebe! I don't see how you can stand there and look at me. If I told pa or Hosmer they would shoot you. You might as well know this as well--I'm going back with her; it'll be some gayer than these lonely old valleys or your house stuck away all by itself with nothing to see but Senator Alderwith's steers."

There flashed into Calvin Stammark's mind the memory of how he had planned to possess just such cattle for Hannah and himself; he saw in the elusive lamplight the house he had built for Hannah. His feeling, that a second before had been so acute, was numb. This, he thought, was strange; a voice within echoed that he was going to lose her, to lose Hannah; but he had no faculty capable of understanding such a calamity.

"Why, Hannah," he said impotently--"Hannah--" His vision blurred so that he couldn't see her clearly; it was as if, indistinct before him, she were already fading from his life. "I never went to hurt you,"

he continued in a curious detachment from his suffering. "You were everything I had."

Calvin grew awkward, confused in his mind and gestures. At the same time Hannah's desirability increased immeasurably. Never in Greenstream or any place else had he seen another like her; and he was about to lose her, lose Hannah.

Automatically he repeated, "If Phebe were a man----"

He was powerless not only against exterior circ.u.mstance but to combat what lay with Hannah. Phebe would never set her hands in hot dishwater.

He recalled their mother, fretful and impatient. He shook his head as if to free his mind from so many vain thoughts. She stood, hard and unrelenting.

He tried to mutter a phrase about being here if she should return, but it perished in the conviction of its uselessness. Calvin saw her with green-yellow hair, a cigarette in painted lips; he heard the blurred applause of men at the spectacle of Hannah on the stage, dressed like the women he had seen there. Then pride stiffened him into a semblance of her own remoteness.

"It's in you," he said; "and it will have to come out. I'm what I am too, and that doesn't make it any easier. Kind of a fool about you.

Another girl won't do. I'll say good night."

He turned and abruptly quitted the room and all his hope.

VI

When the furniture Calvin had ordered through the catalogue at Priest's store arrived by mountain wagon he placed it in the room beside the kitchen that was to have been Hannah's and his. Hannah had gone three weeks before with Phebe. This done he sat for a long while on the portico of his house, facing the rich bottom pasturage and high verdant range beyond. It was late afternoon and the rift was filling with a golden haze from a sun veiled in watery late-spring vapors. An old apple tree by the road was flushed with pink blossoms and a mocking bird was whistling with piercing sweetness.