The Best Short Stories of 1915 Part 24

Her brows were raised, contracted gently, resolutely; her eyes were yearningly fixed on Hastings; her lips were parted tenderly for the generous appeal she had at last found the need to make to him.

"Forgive me, O my husband!" she begged. "Nothing can come between us, nothing shall. But I could not love you as I do if I loved not others--if, for the chance love that came my way, I should give in exchange no thanks. You understand me? You would not have me avoid what I was made to love? You would not have me disregard the sunlight and the sea and the stars in the sky? Yes, it is true, my husband, I loved him. He said that my fingers on the spinet made into harmony all the discords of the day; he said that I wove them away, with the notes of birds and the sound of running brooks and the sighing of the wind, into patterns, as in the long winter evenings I could spin flax at my wheel. It made me happy to have him love me. It filled me with strength.

It taught me many new things I could do for you. John, John, say that you forgive me?"

Though Hastings wanted to take her in his arms, he was impelled to turn away from her and to view that silent figure still leaning against the calico bag, whose head was lifted haughtily in deference to her supplication.

"He loved you, too," she continued to Hastings, "because you loved me. He did not mean to kiss me." She just raised her hands, as if involuntarily, and let them fall at her sides. "You thought that he was stealing me from you. He couldn't; he can't; and n.o.body can--now, nor ever. His kiss was as pure as the perfume of lilies, pressed close to breathe; it but made sweeter your love and mine, your life and mine."

"Adulteress! With my curses go to him, then, forever!"

The cry brought Hastings round to that other whose presence he had forgotten. But next moment she was down before him; Hastings felt her arms tight clasped about his knees.

"My husband, listen to me!" she implored. "I--we--there is somebody else to be considered." Hastings shuddered. "We--you and I--shall be the parents of a child! I have not told you. For the sake of our child, from you, that child's father, I must ask forgiveness!"

She bowed her head sobbingly against Hastings. He put his hand on her hair and was drawing her up to him when the stranger rushed forward to tear her fiercely away.

"Lies! lies!" the stranger ranted. "Go to him, I tell you! _His_ child--his mistress shall not dishonor my house. Go to him, for he isn't dead, and he needs you--you who are not needed here."

"Don't! don't!" she screamed out to Hastings. "I am your wife, the mother of your--!"

Hastings sprang toward her. He saw that her hands were raised straight up in the air. Just as he was about to reach forth to her, the stranger plunged before him, caught the gray chiffon from her shoulders, and pressed it madly on her throat. Hastings leaped upon him, pulled him away, pinned him to the floor, rolled over him.

She had gone. The room was in darkness.

Hastings felt for the door. It yielded. He opened another door, and stepped through it.

His head swam in the midst of the lights outside. He slunk back like one who hesitates to confront the unknown. The stairs were there before him; he began to descend, his right hand held forth, his eyes fastened in horror upon it. Then, as he heard the distant hum of voices below, once more pompous and erect he swung down the last broad treads between the landing and the floor.

A servant who pa.s.sed uttered a cry and vanished; but that did not deter him. With long strides he boldly rounded the familiar corner to the dining-room door and entered.

He flourished his right hand wildly in the air. He saw that it was bleeding.

"See, see!" he called to them. "At last he is dead. I have killed him! I have killed him!"

The room seemed to recede in the distance. Something snapped inside his brain. Everything was different. Mr. and Mrs. Elliott, with shrieks of terror, were moving to the pantry-door far at the other end. Confusedly he saw Julia try to force herself toward him; saw her half come, heard his name on her lips. He wanted to smile, he wanted to bend down over her affectionately; but when he sought to reach her with his b.l.o.o.d.y hand, she shrank back, turned, and fled with the others. He shouted to them; but he stumbled, and thought he might fall. He caught hold of the table. After that all was blackness.

He awoke amid the appointments of the chamber which Julia had called his room. A quick flood of memories, some clear and accurate, others vague and troublesome, inundated his tired consciousness. Gradually he became aware of a thick, muddy pain rolling in dreadful rhythmic waves through his head. He looked toward the clock on the mantelpiece to see if it wasn't time to get up. He met the eyes of Mrs. Elliott. He lifted himself, falling back on the pillow. The pillow was as cold as ice. She came over to him.

"Dear boy--you feel better?"

"Better? Better?" he echoed. "Why are you here?"

"Your head is cooler. You've been--you--my dear child, you may as well know it--you fainted last night--yesterday. You were worn out; you caught cold, and had--a chill. You hadn't eaten anything since--not since--" She fondled the bed-clothes. "You'll be all right now. Your head--struck something. The doctor said you weren't to talk--"

It hurt him to move his eyes. The sockets ached. He tried hard to realize what she had told him, repeating s.n.a.t.c.hes of it feverishly over to himself.

"Is it dangerous?" he finally got to the point of asking.

"No; a slight--just a very slight concussion."

"Concussion?" He floundered in the ominous meaning of it until Julia came in. Every time he spoke they begged him not to. She looked so real to him, so natural, so tangibly alive! When she put her face down by his he trembled, and burst out crying like a child. He was afraid she would go away. She sat on the edge of the bed, her hands about one of his. The other hand lay bandaged on the counterpane.

The next day he was better, but he wasn't allowed to get up; and he was secretly not sorry not to have to try. The weakness which followed the first shock had made him submissive to the situation; he began to be used to the fact that he was ill; even the nurse's presence he philosophically accepted, so resigned was he to the necessity. He asked questions concerning his pulse and temperature, wanted to know if the bags of ice could be dispensed with soon. Julia read aloud to him for an hour every morning.

But, having a half-attentive interest in what she read, he would look fixedly at her and try to piece together his jumbled recollections.

Partly from lack of strength, mostly because he was loath to admit to anybody that his brain wasn't normally clear, he let the questions which rose to his lips pa.s.s unuttered. Once he exclaimed irrelevantly:

"Where, Julia, did that portrait come from?" And when he caught the intensity of her stare, he looked around the walls, and, smiling bashfully, concealed his embarra.s.sment by saying, "I'm really listening, but I must have dozed for a second." At times he would gaze wonderingly at the ceiling, lose himself following the lines of the panels, or counting the little square panes in the window-sashes. He sometimes slept, but not quite soundly; half his somnolence was busy with irrational calculations beyond his control.

A musty smell elusively kept fading as soon as he was aware of breathing it; a dim room, in which the windows were shut close and the shades pulled down, drifted through his quick fancy into darkness; he would find himself deliriously sorting many strange garments into piles, counting them, opening drawers to take others out, until the acc.u.mulations drove him to despair. His right hand throbbed under the tight bandage; he kept fingering the bandage and pressing on the sore spots. Everything about him would seem suddenly definite and real as compared with the dismal bewilderment of his dreamings. Perhaps the doctor would enter, with professional cheerfulness. But then, right in the middle of answering some question, Hastings would be blinded by a great rush of bright light through the opened door.

A day came when all this phantasmagoria ceased to bother him; with returning vigor he had to make less and less effort to forget it, until at last it altogether went. The joy of new health swept over him, filling the gaps and low, miasmic areas of his mentality, as the rising tide fills the empty pools of the sh.o.r.e.

III

It was a month after the day of John Hastings's arrival at Rockface.

Unlike that day, the weather was sunny and mild; big c.u.mulus clouds moved languidly through the sky, as if it were midsummer instead of late October. Julia was crocheting, and he was watching her. They were sitting in front of the house on a leaf-strewn gra.s.s-plot near the avenue between the lines of larches that, now calm in the windless forenoon, stretched diagonally from the street to the corners of the bland old facade.

"But if you knew all along," he, with his habitual freshness of wonder, put to her, "that it was, that it _is_, really Mr. Eberdeen's house, why in the name of things didn't you tell me _then_?"

She became irritatingly absorbed in her work.

"I thought," she at length said, "that you were pretending not to know, and I wanted, in that case, to discover what other--what else you might be holding back from me."

"Holding back from you? What _else_?" he echoed. "What else was there?"

"I wasn't sure, you see. Nothing that I knew," she affirmed frankly, laughing away the sudden rigor of sadness on his face. "There was another reason, though. There was something which I had been saving for the very last moment to show you. But I was rather ashamed of wanting to so much, and, after the way you had taken the rest of the house, I hesitated. Just as I finally was going to, lunch was ready--remember?"

Hastings awkwardly withdrew his right hand, which had been resting palm downward on his knee, and thrust it into his pocket.

"Julia," he cried out, in characteristic disregard of all context, "suppose Mr. Eberdeen should turn out to have been--well--a relative, or something? It might account, you know, for my asking that question, and--and for how everything here"--he looked inclusively round him--"for how this all impressed me so."

She waited, hopeful of the time having at last come when he might wish to confide in her whatever it was--if, indeed, he knew--that had happened; but he only ingenuously continued to hold out to her the possibility of his new idea.

"No," she told him, with a disappointment which she couldn't conceal, "he wasn't. I've looked up his entire history. He died right here, and he had no children. _Your_ pedigree I know by heart."

Hastings smiled at her thoroughness.

"What," he exclaimed, "if some unrecorded forebear of mine has eluded you? Somebody," he dreamily improvised, "who knew this house, who was familiar with every turn of the road, every habit of the mist. It's just such a smug little, old, weather-worn town like Rockface, where any New Englander is likely to find traces of forgotten ancestors."

The sound of footsteps made them both look toward the gate.

"Who is it? Why is he coming here?" Julia demanded half-indignantly under her breath.

"The same old man I met, but so much older!" whispered Hastings, unexpectedly puzzled whether to welcome or dread this intrusion.