The Fighting Shepherdess Part 28

Mrs. Toomey turned pale when she looked through the front window and saw Kate, a few days after Mrs. Pantin's visit, dismount and tie her horse to the cottonwood sapling, for the threat, which held for her all the import of a Ku-Klux warning, had been hanging over her like the sword of Damocles.

It had haunted her by day, and at night she could not sleep for thinking of it, and yet she was no nearer reaching a decision than when the struggle between her conscience and her cowardice had started.

Quite instinctively she glanced again to see if the neighbors were looking. There were interested faces at several windows. Mrs. Toomey had a sudden feeling of irritation, not with the sentinels doing picket duty but with Kate for tying her horse in front so conspicuously. Mrs. Toomey shrank from the staring eyes as though she had found herself walking down the middle of the road in her underclothing.

The feeling vanished when Kate came up the walk slowly and she saw how white and haggard the girl's face was.

Mrs. Toomey opened the door and asked her in nervously.

Kate looked at her wistfully as though she yearned for some display of affection beyond the conventional greeting, but since Mrs. Toomey did not offer to kiss her she sank into a chair with a suggestion of weariness.

"I hope you're not busy--that I'm not bothering?"

"Oh, no--not at all."

"I couldn't help coming, somehow--I just couldn't go back without seeing you. I wanted to see a friendly face--to hear a friendly voice." She clasped her fingers tightly together: "Oh, you don't know how much you mean to me! I feel so alone--adrift--and I long so for some one to lean on, just for a little, until I get my bearings. It seems as though every atom of courage and confidence had oozed out of me. I don't believe that ever again in all my life I'll long for sympathy as I do this minute."

She spoke slowly with breaths between, as though the heaviness of her heart made talking an effort.

"I presume you miss your--uncle." There was a constraint in Mrs.

Toomey's voice and manner which Kate was too engrossed and wretched to notice.

She put her hand to her throat as though to lessen the ache there.

"I can't tell you how much. And remorse--it's like a knife turning, turning--his eyes with the pain and astonishment in them when I struck at him so viciously in my temper; they haunt me. It's terrible."

Mrs. Toomey fidgeted.

Kate went on as though she found relief in talking. Her voice sounded thick, somehow, and lifeless with suffering.

"I have such a feeling of heaviness, of oppression"--she laid her hand upon her heart--"I can't describe it. If I were superst.i.tious I'd say it was a premonition."

"Of what, for instance?" Mrs. Toomey looked frightened.

Kate shook her head.

"I don't know. The thought keeps coming that, bad as things have been, there are worse ahead of me--unhappiness--more unhappiness--like a preparation for something."

Distinctly impressed, Mrs. Toomey exclaimed inanely:

"Oh, my! Do you think so?" Was _she_ going to get "mixed up" in something, she wondered.

"I have a dread of the future--a shrinking such as a blind person might have from a danger he feels but cannot see. Your friends.h.i.+p is the only bright spot in the blackness--it's a peak, with the sun s.h.i.+ning on it!"

Kate's eyes filled with quick tears. They were swimming as she raised them and looked at Mrs. Toomey.

"I'm glad you feel that way," Mrs. Toomey murmured.

Something in the tone arrested Kate's attention, an unconvincing, insincere note in it. She fixed her eyes upon her face searchingly, then she crossed the room swiftly and dropped upon her knees beside her.

Taking one of her thin hands between both of hers she said, pleadingly:

"You will be my friend, won't you? You won't go back on me, will you?"

She could scarcely have begged for her life with more earnestness.

"I am very fond of you," Mrs. Toomey evaded. She did not look at her.

Kate regarded her steadily. Laying down the hand she had taken she asked quietly:

"Will you tell me something truthfully, Mrs. Toomey?"

Mrs. Toomey's mind, ratlike, scuttled hither and thither, wondering what was coming.

"If I can," uneasily.

Kate laid her hand upon the older woman's shoulder and searched her face:

"Is my friends.h.i.+p an embarra.s.sment to you?"

Mrs. Toomey squirmed.

"Tell me! The truth! You owe that to me!" Kate cried fiercely, her grip tightening on the woman's shoulder.

As Mrs. Toomey was a coward, so was she a petty liar by instinct. Her first impulse when in an uncomfortable position was to extricate herself by any plausible lie that occurred to her. But Kate's voice and manner were too compelling, her eyes too penetrating, to admit of falsifying or even evading further. Then, too, she had a wild panicky feeling that she might as well tell the truth and have it over--though it was the last thing in the world she had contemplated doing.

"It is--rather."

"Why?" Her voice sounded guttural.

Like a hypnotic subject Mrs. Toomey heard herself whimpering:

"People will talk about it--Mrs. Pantin has warned me--and I'll--I'll get left out of everything, and--and when j.a.p gets into something it will hurt us in our business."

Kate got up from her knees; involuntarily Mrs. Toomey did likewise.

The girl did not speak but folded her arms and looked at her "friend."

Mrs. Toomey had the physical sensation of shrivelling: as though she were standing naked before the withering heat of a blast furnace.

In the silence that seemed interminable, Kate's eyes moved from her head to her shabby shoes and back again, slowly, as though she wished to impress her appearance upon her memory, to the minutest detail.

As by divination, Mrs. Toomey saw herself as Kate saw her. Stripped of the virtues in which the girl had clothed her, she stood forth a scheming, inconsequential little coward in a weak ineffectual rack of a body--not strong enough to be vicious, without the courage to be dangerous. Thin-lipped, neutral-tinted, flat of chest and scrawny, without a womanly charm save the fragility that incited pity; to Kate who had idealized her she now seemed a stranger.

Kate completed her scrutiny, and searched her mind for the word which best expressed the result of it. Her lip curled unconsciously when she found it. She said with deliberate scathing emphasis:

"You--Judas Iscariot!"

Then she walked out, feeling that the very earth had given way beneath her.

Nothing was definite, nothing tangible or certain; there was not anybody or anything in the world, apparently, that one could count on. She had a feeling of nausea along with a curious calm that was like the calm of desperation. Yet her mind was alert, active, and she understood Mrs.

Toomey with an uncanny clearness. She believed her when she had said that she liked her, just as she knew that she had lied when she had said that she was glad to see her. She understood now that Mrs. Toomey had accepted the loan hoping to carry water on both shoulders, and finding herself unable to do so, had eased herself of the burden which required the least courage. The perspicacity of years of experience seemed to come to Kate in a few minutes, so surely did she follow Mrs. Toomey's motives and reasoning.