The Happy End Part 8

"I've heard about that too," Bowman returned; "but somehow I don't take stock in these miracles."

"If you ever see me looking like I might be Snow, go quiet," Lemuel advised. "That's all."

With clenched hands he abruptly departed. The cords of his neck were swollen and rigid; there was a haze before his eyes. He went up to the refuge of his daughter's room. She was lying still, breathing thickly, with a finger print of scarlet on each cheek.

She was so thin, so wasted, the bed and room so stripped of every comfort, that he dropped forward on his knees, his arms outflung across her body in an inarticulate prayer for faith, for strength and patience.

It was not much he wanted--only food for one child and help for a woman, and a grip on the devil tearing at him in the form of hatred.

He got only a temporary relief, for when he went down Bella and June Bowman were whispering together; he pa.s.sed the door with his silent tread and saw their heads close. Bella was actually pretty.

An astonis.h.i.+ng possibility occurred to him--perhaps Bella would go away with Bowman. An unbidden deep relief at such a prospect invaded him; how happy he could be with Flavilla. They would get a smaller house, which Flavilla would soon learn to keep for him; they would go to church and prayer meeting together, her soprano voice and his ba.s.s joined in the praise of the Lord, of the Almighty who raised the dead and his Son, who took the thief to glory.

This speculation was overcome by a troubled mind; both his innate pride in his wife as an inst.i.tution of his honor, the feeling that he would uphold it at any cost, and his Christianity interrupted the vision of release. He must not let her stumble, and he would see that June Bowman didn't interfere in his home. More beer made its appearance, and the other man grew louder, boastful. He exhibited the roll of money--that was nothing, four times that much could be had from the same source. He was a spender, too, and treated all his friends liberally. Lemuel was to see if there was any wine in the d.a.m.ned jumping-off place; and when would they all go to Atlantic?

"Never," Doret repeated.

Bowman laughed skeptically.

The rage stirred and increased, blinding Lemuel Doret's heart, stinging his eyes. Bella, watching him, became quieter, and she gave June--she called him June--a warning pressure of her fingers. Her husband saw it with indifference; everything small was lost in the hot tide enveloping him. His hands twitched, but there was no other outward sign of his tumult. He smoked his cigarettes with extreme deliberation.

It was evening again, and they were sitting on the narrow porch. The west was a serene lake of fading light against which the trees made dark blots of foliage. Nantbrook seemed unreal, a place of thin shadow, the future unsubstantial as well; only the past was actual in Lemuel Doret's mind--the gray cold prison, the city at night, locked rooms filled with smoke and lurid lights, avaricious voices in the mechanical sentences of gambling, agonized tones begging for a shot, just a shot, of an addicted drug, a girl crying.

He tried to sing a measure of praise beneath his breath but the tune and words evaded him. He glanced furtively at Bowman's complacent bulk, the flushed face turned fatuously to Bella. Under the other's left arm his coat was drawn smoothly on a cus.h.i.+on of fat.

Later Lemuel stopped at Flavilla's bed, and though she was composed he was vaguely alarmed at what seemed to him an unreal rigidity. She was not asleep, but sunk in a stupor with a glimmer of vision and an elusive pulse. He should not have listened to Bella but had a doctor as Frazee had advised. It appeared now that--with all Flavilla held for him--he had been strangely neglectful. At the same time he was conscious of the steady increase of his hatred for Bowman. This was natural, he told himself; Bowman in a way was the past--all that he, Doret, had put out of his life. At least he had believed that accomplished, yet here it was back again, alive and threatening; drinking beer in his rooms, whispering to his wife, putting the thought of Flavilla from his head.

In the morning even Bella admitted that Flavilla might be sick and a doctor necessary. He took one look at his daughter's burning face, heard the shrill labor of her breathing, and hurried downstairs with a set face. He was standing with Bella in the hall when June Bowman descended.

"Flavilla ain't right," she told him.

The latter promptly exhibited the wad of money. "Whatever you need," he said.

"Put it away," Lemuel replied shortly. "I don't want any of that for Flavilla."

Bowman studied him. Doret made no effort to mask his bitterness, and the other whistled faintly. Bella laughed, turning from her husband.

"He's cracked," she declared; "you'll get no decency off him. A body would think I had been in jail and him looking out for her all those ten years and more. I can say thank you, though; we'll need your help, and glad."

"Put it away," Lemuel Doret repeated. He was more than ever catlike, alert, bent slightly forward with tense fingers.

Bowman was unperturbed. "I told you about this flash stuff," he observed. "n.o.body's forcing money on you. Get the bend out of you and give me a shave. That'll start you on the pills."

Lemuel Doret mechanically followed him into the rude barber shop; he was fascinated by the idea of laying the razor across Bowman's throat.

The latter extended himself in the chair and Doret slowly, thoroughly, covered his lower face with lather, through which the blade drew with a clean smooth rip. A fever burned in the standing man's brain, he fought constantly against a stiffening of his employed fingers--a swift turn, a cutting twist. Subconsciously he called noiselessly upon the G.o.d that had sustained him and, divided between apprehension and the increasing l.u.s.t to kill, his lips held the form in which they had p.r.o.nounced that impressive name. He had the sensation of battling against a terrific wind, a remorseless force beating him to submission. His body ached from the violence of the struggle to keep his hand steadily, evenly, busied, following in a delicate sweep the cords of June Bowman's neck, the jugulars.

The other looked up at him and grinned confidently. "Little children,"

he said, "love one another."

Lemuel stopped, the razor suspended in air; there was a din in his ears, his vision blurred, his grip tightened on the bone handle. A sweat started out on his brow and he found himself dabbing June Bowman's face with a wet cold towel.

"Witch hazel?" he asked mechanically.

Suddenly he was so tired that his legs seemed incapable of support.

He wiped the razor blade and put it away with a lax nerveless hand.

He realized that he had been again at the point of murder. He had been saved by the narrowest margin in the world. For a moment the fact that he had been saved absorbed him, and then the imminent danger of his position, his weakness, filled him with the sense of failure, a heavy feeling of hopelessness. His prayers and singing, his plans for redemption, for a G.o.dly life, had threatened to end at the first a.s.sault of evil.

He temporarily overcame his dejection at the memory of Flavilla. Doctor Markley lived in a larger town than Nantbrook, a dozen miles beyond the fields and green hills, and he must get him by telephone. Then there was the problem of payment. The doctor, he knew, would expect his fee, two dollars, immediately from such an applicant as himself; and he had less than a dollar. He explained something of this over the wire, adding that if Markley would see Flavilla at the end of the day the money would be forthcoming. That, the crisp, disembodied tone replied, was impossible; he must call in the middle of the morning, but no difficulty would be made about his bill; Doret could send the amount to him promptly.

He hurried back to the house with this information, and found Bella seated in the kitchen, the inevitable cigarette throwing up its ribbon of smoke from her fingers, and June Bowman at her shoulder. Lemuel ignored the latter.

"The doctor'll be here at about eleven," he announced. "Mind you listen to all he says and get Flavilla into a clean nightgown and sheets."

"What's the matter with your tending to her?" Bella demanded.

"I won't be here; not till night. I'm going to put up hay with one of the farmers. I hear they're in a hurry and offering good money."

Bella's expression was strange. She laughed in a forced way.

"We got to hand it to you," Bowman admitted genially; "you're there. I guess I'd starve before ever it would come to me to fork hay."

Lemuel's wife added nothing; her lips twisted into a fixed smile at once defiant and almost tremulous. Well, he was late now; he couldn't linger to inquire into Bella's moods. Yet at the door he hesitated again to impress on her the importance of attending the doctor's every word.

It seemed to him an hour later that he was burning up in a dry intolerable haze of sun and hay. He awkwardly balanced heavy ragged forkfuls, heaving them onto the mounting stack of the wagon in a paste of sweat and dust. His eyes were filmed and his throat dry. He struggled on in the soft unaccustomed tyranny of the gra.s.s, the glare of sun, with his mind set on the close of day. He thought of cool shadows, of city streets wet at night, and a swift plunge into a river where it swept about the thrust of a wharf. He wondered what Doctor Markley would say about Flavilla; probably the child wasn't seriously sick.

The day drew apparently into a tormenting eternity; the physical effort he welcomed; it seemed to exhaust that devil in him which had so nearly betrayed and ruined him forever in the morning; but the s.h.i.+fting slippery hay, the fiery dust, the incandescent blaze created an inferno in the midst of which his mind whirled with monotonous giddy images and half-meaningless phrases spoken and re-spoken. Yet the sun was not, as he had begun to suppose, still in the sky; it sank toward the horizon, the violet shadows slipped out from the western hills, and Lemuel finished his toil in a swimming gold mist. It was two miles to Nantbrook, and disregarding his aching muscles he hurried over the gray undulating road. The people of the village were gathered on their commanding porches, the barkeeper at the hotel bulked in his doorway.

The lower part of Lemuel's own house was closed; no one appeared as he mounted the insecure steps.

"Bella!" he cried in an overwhelming anxiety before he reached the hall.

There was no reply. He paused inside and called again. His voice echoed about the bare walls; he heard a dripping from the kitchen sink; nothing more.

"I'd better go up," he said aloud with a curious tightening of his throat. He progressed evenly up the stairs; suddenly a great weight seemed to bow his shoulders; the illusion was so vivid that he actually staggered; he was incapable of breaking from his measured progress. He turned directly into Flavilla's room. She was there--he saw her at once. But Bella hadn't put a fresh nightgown on her, and the sheets were disordered and unchanged.

Lemuel took a step forward; then he stopped. "The fever's gone," he vainly told the dread freezing about his heart at a stilled white face.

"Yes," he repeated with numb lips; "it's gone."

He approached the bed and standing over it and the meager body he cursed softly and wonderingly. The light was failing and it veiled the sharp lines of the dead child's countenance. For a moment his gaze strayed about the room and he felt a swift sorrow at its ugliness. He had wanted pretty things, pictures and a bright carpet and ribbons, for Flavilla.

Then he was conscious of a tearing rage, but now he was unmindful of it, impervious to its a.s.sault in the fixed necessity of the present.

Later----

He was sitting again on his porch, after the momentary morbid stir of curiosity and small funeral, when the unrestrained sweep of his own emotion overcame him. His appearance had not changed; it was impossible for his expression to become bleaker; but there was a tremendous change within. Yet it was not strange; rather he had the sensation of returning to an old familiar condition. There he was at ease; he moved swiftly, surely forward in the realization of what lay ahead.

Bella and June Bowman had left the house almost directly after him, and Markley, finding it empty, with no response to his repeated knocking, had turned away, being as usual both impatient and hurried. Yes, Bella had gone and left Flavilla without even a gla.s.s of water. But Bella didn't matter. He couldn't understand this--except where he saw at last that she never had mattered; yet it was so. June Bowman was different.

There was no rush about the latter--to-morrow, next week would do equally. There was no doubt either. Lemuel Doret gave a pa.s.sing thought, like a half-contemptuous gesture of final dismissal, to so much that had lately occupied him. The shadow of a smile disfigured his metallic lips.