The Happy End Part 32

"Please," she repeated, holding up a prohibitory palm.

"Rose petals," he said, regarding it. His madness increased. She withdrew her hand and gazed at him with a small frown. She was sitting upright, propped on her arms. Her mouth, with its slightly full under lip, was elevated, and an outrageous desire possessed him. His countenance slowly turned hotly red, and slowly a faint tide of color stained Rosemary Roselle's cheeks. She looked away; Elim looked away.

He proceeded aft and learned that Bramant's Wharf lay only a few miles ahead.

The old man cursed the wind in his stringent tones. Elim hadn't noticed anything reprehensible in the wind. It appeared that for a considerable time there hadn't been any. A capful was stirring now, and humanity--ever discontented--silently cursed that.

"We're nearly there," he said, returning to Rosemary Roselle.

He was unable to gather any intelligence from her expression.

She rose, and stood with a hand on Indy's shoulder, murmuring affectionately in the colored woman's ear. The sloop once more headed at a long angle for the sh.o.r.e. Bramant's Wharf grew visible, projecting solidly from a verdant bank. They floated silently up to the dock, and the youth held the sloop steady while Rosemary Roselle and Indy mounted from its deck. Elim followed, but suddenly he stopped, and his hand went into his pocket. A half dollar fell ringing into the boat. Elim indicated the youth; he was now penniless.

X

"The house," Rosemary explained, "is almost a mile in. There is a carriage at the wharf when they expect you. And usually there is some one about."

Elim, carrying the cake and bottle, followed over a gra.s.sy road between tangles of blackberry bushes. On either hand neglected fields held a spa.r.s.e tangle of last year's weeds; beyond, trees closed in the perspective. The sun had pa.s.sed the zenith, and the shadows of walnut trees fell across the road. Elim's face was grim, a dark tide rose about him, enveloping his heart, bothering his vision. He wanted to address something final to the slim girl in black before him, something now, before she was forever lost in the gabble of her relatives; but he could think of nothing appropriate, expressive of the tumult within him. His misery deepened with every step, grew into a bitterness of rebellion that almost forced an incoherent reckless speech. Rosemary Roselle didn't turn, she didn't linger, there were a great many things that she might say. The colored woman was positively hurrying forward. A great loneliness swept over him. He had not, he thought drearily, been made for joy.

"It's queer there's no one about," Rosemary Roselle observed. They reached the imposing pillars of an entrance--the wooden gate was chained, and they were obliged to turn aside and search for an opening in a great mock-orange hedge. Before them a wide sweep of lawn led up to a formal dark facade; a tanbark path was washed, the gra.s.s ragged and uncut. Involuntarily they quickened their pace.

Elim saw that towering brown pillars rose to the roof of the dwelling and that low wings extended on either hand. Before the portico a stiffly formal garden lay in withered neglect.

The flower beds, circled with masoned rims and built up like wired bouquets, held only twisted and broken stems.

A faint odor of wet plaster and dead vegetation rose to meet them. On the towering wall of the house every window was tightly shuttered. The place bore a silent and melancholy air of desertion.

The girl gave a dismayed gasp. Elim hastily placed his load on the steps and, mounting, beat upon the door. Only a dull echo answered. Dust fell from the paneling upon his head.

"Maybe they have shut up the front for protection," he suggested. He made his way to the rear; all was closed. Through the low limbs of apple trees he could see a double file of small sad brick quarters for the slaves. They, too, were empty. The place was without a living being. He stood, undecided, when suddenly he heard Rosemary Roselle calling with an acute note of fear.

He ran through the binding gra.s.s back to the garden.

"Elim Meikeljohn!" She stumbled forward to meet him. "Oh, Elim," she cried; "there's no one in the world----" A sob choked her utterance.

He fell on his knees before her:

"There's always me."

She sank in a fragrant heap into his arms.

Elim Meikeljohn laughed over her shoulder at his entire worldly goods on the steps--the fragmentary fruit cake and a bottle of champagne.

Here they are lost on the dimming mirror of the past.

THE THRUSH IN THE HEDGE

I

Harry Baggs came walking slowly over the hills in the blue May dusk.

He could now see below him the cl.u.s.tered roofs and tall slim stack of a town. His instinct was to avoid it, but he had tramped all day, his blurred energies were hardly capable of a detour, and he decided to settle near by for the night. About him the country rose and fell, clothed in emerald wheat and pale young corn, while trees filled the hollows with the shadowy purple of their darkening boughs. A robin piped a belated drowsy note; the air had the impalpable sweetness of beginning buds.

A vague pleasant melancholy enveloped him; the countryside swam indistinctly in his vision--he surrendered himself to inward sensations, drifting memories, unformulated regrets. He was twenty and had a short powerful body; a broad dusty patient face. His eyes were steady, light blue, and his jaw heavy but shapely. His dress--the forlorn trousers, the odd coat uncomfortably drawn across thick shoulders, and incongruous hat--held patently the stamp of his worldly position: he was a tramp.

He stopped, looking about. The road, white and hard, dipped suddenly down; on the right, windows glimmered, withdrawn behind shrubbery and orderly trees; on the left, a dark plowed field rose to a stiff company of pines and the sky. Harry Baggs stood turned in the latter direction, for he caught the faint odor of wood smoke; behind the field, a newly acquired instinct told him, a fire was burning in the open. This, now, probably meant that other wanderers--tramps--had found a place of temporary rest.

Without hesitation he climbed a low rail fence, found a narrow path trod in the soft loam and followed it over the brow into the hollow beyond.

His surmise was correct--a fire smoldered in a red blur on the ground, a few relaxed forms gathered about the wavering smoke, and at their back were grouped four or five small huts.

Harry Baggs walked up to the fire, where, with a conventional sentence, he extended his legs to the low blaze. A man regarded him with a peering suspicious gaze; but any doubts were apparently laid, for the other silently resumed a somnolent indifference. His clothes were an amazing and unnecessary tangle of rags; his stubble of beard and broken black hat had an air of unreality, as though they were the stage properties of a stupid and conventional parody of a tramp.

Another, sitting with clasped knees beyond the fire, interrupted a monotonous whining recital to question Harry Baggs. "Where'd you come from?"

"Somewhere by Lancaster."

"Ever been here before?" And, when Baggs had said no: "Thought I hadn't seen you. Most of us here come back in the spring. It's a comfortable dump when it don't rain cold." He was uncommonly communicative. "The Nursery's here for them that want work; and if not n.o.body's to ask you reasons."

A third, in a grimy light overcoat, with a short bristling red mustache and morose countenance, said harshly: "Got any money?"

"Maybe two bits."

"Let's send him in for beer," the other proposed; and a new animation stirred the dilapidated one and the talker.

"You can go to h.e.l.l!" Baggs responded without heat.

"That ain't no nice way to talk," the second proclaimed. "Peebles, here, meant that them who has divides with all that hasn't."

Peebles directed a hard animosity at Harry Baggs. His gaze flickered over the latter's heavy-set body and unmoved face. "Want your jaw slapped crooked?" he demanded with a degree of reservation.

"No," the boy placidly replied.

A stillness enveloped them, accentuated by the minute crackling of the disintegrating wood. The dark increased and the stars came out; the clip-clip of a horse's hoofs pa.s.sed in the distance and night. Harry Baggs became flooded with sleep.

"I s'pose I can stay in one of these brownstones?" he queried, indicating the huts.

No one answered and he stumbled toward a small shelter. He was forced to bend, edge himself into the close damp interior, where he collapsed into instant unconsciousness on a heap of bagging. In the night he cried out, in a young strangely distressed voice; and later a drift of rain fell on the roof and ran in thin cold streams over his still body.

II

He woke late the following morning and emerged sluggishly into a sparkling rush of sunlight. The huts looked doubly mean in the pellucid day. They were built of discarded doors and variously painted fragments of lumber, with blistered and unpinned roofs of tin, in which rusted smokepipes had been crazily wired; strips of moldy matting hung over an entrance or so, but the others gaped unprotected. The clay before them was worn smooth and hard; a replenished fire smoked within blackened bricks; a line, stretched from a dead stump to a loosely fixed post, supported some stained and meager red undergarb.

Harry Baggs recognized Peebles and the loquacious tramp at the edge of the clearing. The latter, clad in a grotesquely large and sorry suit of ministerial black, was emaciated and had a pinched bluish countenance.

When he saw Baggs he moved forward with a quick uneven step.

"Say," he proceeded, "can you let me have something to get a soda-caffeine at a drug store? This ain't a stall; I got a fierce headache. Come out with a dime, will you? My bean always hurts, but to-day I'm near crazy."