Mountain Blood Part 7

The smile vanished as she greeted him; her eyes were dark on a pale, still countenance. He noticed that she was without the heady perfume which stirred him as the other girls pa.s.sed, and he was silently critical of the omission.

He delivered quickly, with a covert glance above, the customary period about seeing her home. Immediately she walked with him into the obscurity, the mystery, of the night.

"It was certainly nice-hearted of you to come to Clare's funeral," he began.

Close beside him she s.h.i.+vered, it might be at the memory of that occasion.

She was without a hat, and he was able to study her profile: it was irregular, with a low, girlish brow and a nose too heavy for beauty; she had a full under lip and a strongly modelled chin, a firm line ending in a generous throat, milk-white in the gloom. Her figure too, he judged, was too heavy for his standard of feminine charm. His interest in her burned low, sustained only by what he recognized as a conquest.

She walked slowly and more slowly as he dallied by her side. Almost subconsciously he adopted the tone by which he endeavored to enlist the interest of the opposite s.e.x: he repeated in a perfunctory manner the stereotyped remarks appropriate for such occasions.

She listened intently, with sudden, little glances from a momentarily lifted gaze. He grew impatient at the absence of the flattering responses to which he was largely accustomed. And, dropping abruptly his artificial courtesy, he maintained a sullen silence, quickened his stride. He drew some satisfaction from the observation that his reticence hurt her. Her hands caught and strained together; she looked at him with a longer, questioning gaze.

"I wanted to tell you," she said finally, with palpable difficulty, "how sorry I am about ... about things; your home, and--and I heard of the stage, too. It was a shame, you drove beautifully, and took such care of the pa.s.sengers."

"It was that care cost me the place," he answered with brutal directness; "old Simmons did it; him and his precious Buckley."

She stopped with an expression of instant, deep concern. "Oh! I am so sorry ... then it was my fault. But it's horrid that they should have done that; that they should be able; it is all wrong--"

"Right nor wrong don't make any figure I've ever discovered," he retorted; "Valentine Simmons has the power, he's got the money. That's it--money's the right of things; it took my house away from me, like it's taken away so many houses, so many farms, in Greenstream--"

"But," she objected timidly, "didn't they owe Mr. Simmons for things? You see, people borrow, borrow, borrow, and never pay back. My father," she proceeded with more confusion, "has lost lots of money in that way."

"I can tell you all about that," he informed her bitterly, proceeding to mimic Simmons' dry, cordial tones, "'Take the goods right along with you, pay when you like, no hurry between old friends.' Then, when Zebener Hull's corn failed, 'I'll trouble you for that amount,' the skinflint says, and sells Zebener out. And what your father's lost," he added more directly still, "wouldn't take you on the stage to Stenton. Your father and Simmons have got about everything worth getting in the county; they've got the money, they've got the land, they've got the men right in their iron safes. Right and wrong," he sneered, "it's money--"

"Oh! please," she begged, "please don't be so unhappy, so hard. Life isn't as dreadful as that."

"It's worse," he declared somberly. They turned by Simmons' store, but continued in the opposite direction from the one-time Makimmon dwelling.

They pa.s.sed a hedge of roses; the perfume hung heavy-sweet, poignant; there was apparently no sky, no earth, only a close, purple envelopment, imminent, palpable, lying languidly, unstirring, in a s.p.a.ce without form or limit and of one color.

Lettice walked silently by his side; he could hear her breathing, irregular, quick. She was very close to him, then moved suddenly, consciously, away; but, almost immediately, she drifted back, brus.h.i.+ng his shoulder; it seemed that she returned inevitably, blindly; in the gloom her gown fluttered like the soft, white wings of a moth against him.

"It's worse," he repeated, his voice loud and harsh, like a discordant bell clas.h.i.+ng in the sostenuto pa.s.sage of a symphony; "but it's all one to me--there's nothing else they can take; I'm free, free to sleep or wake, to be drunk when I like with no responsibility to Simmons or any one else--"

Her breathing increasingly grew labored, oppressed; a little sob escaped, softly miserable. She was crying. He was completely callous, indifferent.

They stood before the dark, porchless facade of her home.

"I thought life was so happy," she articulated, facing him; "but now it hurts me ... here;" he saw her press her hand against the swelling, tender line of her breast. His theatrical self-consciousness bowed him over the other hand, pressing upon it a half-calculated kiss. She stood motionless; he felt rather than saw the intensity of her gaze. "I wish I could mend the hurt," he began, appropriately, professionally.

He was interrupted by a figure emerging from the obscurity of the house.

Pompey Hollidew peered at them from the low, stone lintel. "Letty," he p.r.o.nounced, in a voice at once whining and truculent; "who?--oh! that Makimmon.... Letty, come in the house." He caught her arm and dragged her incontinently toward the door. "... rascal," Gordon heard him mutter, "spendthrift. If you ever walk again with Gordon Makimmon," the old man, through his daughter, addressed the other, "don't walk back here, don't come home. Not a dollar of mine shall fall through the pockets of that s.h.i.+ftless breed."

XX

Clare's funeral deducted a further sum from the amount Gordon had received for the sale of his home, but he had left still nine hundred and odd dollars. He revolved in his mind the disposition of this sum, once more sitting with chair tilted back against the dingy wooden home of the _Greenstream Bugle_; he rehea.r.s.ed its possibilities for frugality, for independence, as a reserve ... or for pleasure. It was the hottest hour of the day; the prospect before him, the uneven street, the houses beyond, were coated with dust, gilded by the refulgent sun. No one stirred; a red cow that had been cropping the gra.s.s in the broad, shallow gutter opposite sank down in the meager shadow of a chance pear tree; even the children were absent, the piercing, staccato cries of their games unheard.

To Gordon Makimmon Greenstream suddenly appeared insufferably dull, empty; the thought of monotonous, identical days spun thinly out, the nine hundred dollars extended to its greatest length, in that ba.n.a.l setting, suddenly grew unbearable.... There was no life in Greenstream....

The following morning found him on the front seat of the Stenton stage, sharing with the driver not his customary cigarettes but more portentous cigars from an ample pocketful. "Greenstream's dead," he p.r.o.nounced; "I'm going after some life."

Late that night he leaned across the sloppy bar of an inferior saloon in Stenton, and, with an uncertain wave of his hand, arrested the barkeeper's attention. "I'm here," he articulated thickly, "to see life, understand!

And I can see it too--money's power." The other regarded him with a brief, mechanical interest, a plat.i.tude shot suavely from hard, tobacco-stained lips.

Later still: "I'm here to see life," he told a woman with a chalky countenance, a countenance without any expression of the consciousness of the sound of his voice, a vague form lost in loose draperies. "Life," he emphasized above the continuous, macabre rattle of a piano.

In a breathless, hot dawn pouring redly into the grey city street, he swayed like a pendulum on the steaming pavement. His side was smeared, caked, with unnamable filth, refuse; a tremulous hand gripped feverishly the shoulder of a policeman who had roused him from a constrained stupor in a casual angle. "I wan' to see life," he mumbled dully, "I got power ... money." He fumbled through his pockets in search of the proof of his a.s.sertion. In vain--all that was left of the nine hundred and sixty dollars was some loose silver.

XXI

Again sober, without the resources of the citybred parasite, and without money, his instinct, his longing, drew him irresistibly into the open; his heredity forced him toward the mountains, into familiar paths, valleys, heights.

He avoided the stage road, and progressed toward Greenstream by tangled trails, rocky ascents, sharp declines. By late day he had penetrated to the heart of the upland region. He stood gazing down upon the undulating, verdant hills, over which he could trace the course of a thunder gust. The storm moved swiftly, in a compact, circular shadow on the sunny slope; he could distinguish the sudden twisting of limbs, the path of torn leaves, broken branches, left by the lash of the wind and rain. The livid, sinister spot on the placid greenery drew nearer; he could now hear the continuous rumble of thunder, see the stabbing, purplish flashes of lightning. The edge of the storm swept darkly over the spot where he was standing; he was soaked by a momentary a.s.sault of rain driving greyly out of a pa.s.sing, profound gloom. Then the cloud vanished, leaving the countryside sparkling and serene under a stainless evening sky.

The water dripped down his back, swashed in his shoes; he was, in his lowered vitality, supremely uncomfortable. The way was slippery with mud; wet leaves bathed his face in sudden, chill showers, clung to his hands.

He fell.

When he arrived at the rim of Greenstream night had hidden that familiar, welcome vista. The lights of the houses shone pale yellow below. A new reluctance to enter this place of home possessed him, a shame born of his denuded pockets, his bedraggled exterior. He descended, but turned to the left, finding a rude road which skirted the base of the eastern range. He was following no definite plan, moving slowly, without objective; but a window glimmering in a square of orange light against the night brought him to a halt. It marked, he knew, the dwelling of the Jesuit priest, Merlier. In a sudden impulse he advanced over a short path, and fumbling, found the door, where he knocked. A chair sc.r.a.ped within and the door swung open. The form of the priest was dark against the lighted interior which absorbed them.

XXII

The room was singularly bare: a tin lamp with a green gla.s.s shade, on an uncovered deal table, illuminated an open book, wood chairs with roughly split, hickory backs, a couch with no covering over its wire springs and iron frame; there was no carpet on the floor of loosely grooved boards, no decorations on the plastered walls save a dark engraving of a man in intricate armor, with a face as pa.s.sionate, as keen, as relentless, as a hawk's, labelled, "Loyola."

Merlier silently indicated a chair, but he remained standing with his gaze lowered upon the floor. He was a burly man, with a heavy countenance impa.s.sive as an oriental's, out of which, startling in its unexpected rapidity, a glance flashed and stabbed as steely as Loyola's sword. His hands were clasped before him; they were, in that environment, strangely white, and covered with the scars of what, patently, were unaccustomed employments.

"It feels good inside," Gordon observed tritely. He noted uneasily the muddy tracks his shoes had printed upon the otherwise spotless board floor, "I got caught in a gust on the mountain," he explained awkwardly, in a constraint which deepened with the other's continued silence; "I ought to have cleaned up before I came in ... it's terrible dark out." He rose, tentatively, but the priest waved him back into the chair. Opening a door opposite the one by which Gordon had entered, and which obviously gave upon an outer shed, Merlier procured a roughly made mop; and, returning, he obliterated all traces of the mud. Suddenly, to Gordon's dismay, his supreme discomfort, he stooped to a knee, and began to remove the former's shoes.

"Hey!" Gordon protested; "don't do that; I can tend to my own feet." He was prepared to kick out, but he recognized that a struggle could only make the situation insufferable, and he submitted in an acute, writhing misery to the ministrations. The priest rose with Gordon's shoes and placed them, together with the mop, outside the door. He then brought from an inner room an immaculate, white cambric s.h.i.+rt, a pair of trousers, old but carefully ironed, and knitted, grey worsted slippers.

"If you will change," he said in a low, impersonal voice, "I will see what there is for you to eat." He left the room, and Gordon gratefully s.h.i.+fted into the fresh, dry clothes. The trousers were far too large; they belonged, he recognized, to the priest, but he belted them into baggy folds. The other appeared shortly with a wooden tray bearing a platter of cooked, yellow beans, a part loaf of coa.r.s.e bread, raw eggs and a pitcher of milk. "I thought," he explained, "you would wish something immediately; there is no fire; Bartamon is out." The latter, Gordon knew, was a sharp-witted old man who had made a precarious living in the local fields and woodsheds until the priest had taken him as a general helper. "There are neither coffee nor tea in the house," Merlier stated further.

He closed the book, moved the lamp to the end of the table, and stood with his countenance lowered, his folded hands immovable as stone, while Gordon Makimmon consumed the cold food. Once the priest replenished the other's gla.s.s with milk.

If there had been a gleam of fraternal feeling, the slightest indication of generous impulse, a mere accent of hospitality, in the priest's actions, Gordon, accepting them in such spirit, might have been at ease.

But not the faintest spark of interest, of curiosity, the most perfunctory communion of sympathy, was evident on Merlier's immobile countenance; his movements were machine-like, he seemed infinitely removed from his charitable act, infinitely cold.

Gordon's discomfort burned into a species of illogical, resentful anger.

He cursed the priest under his breath, choked on the food; he was heartily sorry that he had obeyed the fleeting impulse to enter. But even the anger expired before Merlier's impa.s.sivity--he must as well curse a figure carved from granite, cast in lead. He grew, in turn, uneasy at the other's supernatural detachment; it chilled his blood like the grip of an unexpected, icy hand, like the imminence of inevitable death. The priest resembled a dead man, a dead man who had remained quick in the mere physical operations of the body, while all the machinery of his thoughts, his feelings, lay motionless and cold within.