The Bondboy Part 16

CHAPTER VI

BLOOD

Joe had debated the matter fully in his mind before going in to supper.

Since he had sent her tempter away, there was no necessity of taking Ollie to task, thus laying bare his knowledge of her guilty secret. He believed that her conscience would prove its own flagellant in the days to come, when she had time to reflect and repent, away from the debauching influence of the man who had led her astray. His blame was all for Morgan, who had taken advantage of her loneliness and discontent.

Joe now recalled, and understood, her reaching out to him for sympathy; he saw clearly that she had demanded something beyond the capacity of his unseasoned heart to give. Isom was to blame for that condition of her mind, first and most severely of all. If Isom had been kind to her, and given her only a small measure of human sympathy, she would have clung to him, and rested in the shelter of his protection, content against all the world. Isom had spread the thorns for his own feet, in his insensibility to all human need of gentleness.

Joe even doubted, knowing him as he did, whether the gray old miser was capable of either jealousy or shame. He did not know, indeed, what Isom might say to it if his wife's infidelity became known to him, but he believed that he would rage to insanity. Perhaps not because the sting of it would penetrate to his heart, but in his censure of his wife's extravagance in giving away an affection which belonged, under the form of marriage and law, to him.

Joe was ashamed to meet Ollie at the table, not for himself, but for her. He was afraid that his eyes, or his manner, might betray what he knew. He might have spared himself this feeling of humiliation on her account, for Ollie, all unconscious of his discovery, was bright and full of smiles. Joe could not rise to her level of light-heartedness, and, there being no common ground between them, he lapsed into his old-time silence over his plate.

After supper Joe flattened himself against the kitchen wall where he had sat the night before on the bench outside the door, drawing back into the shadow. There he sat and thought it over again, unsatisfied to remain silent, yet afraid to speak. He did not want to be unjust, for perhaps she did not intend to meet Morgan at all. In addition to this doubt of her intentions, he had the hope that Isom would come very soon.

He decided at length that he would go to bed and lie awake until he heard Ollie pa.s.s up to her room, when he would slip down again and wait.

If she came down, he would know that she intended to carry out her part of the compact with Morgan. Then he could tell her that Morgan would not come.

Ollie was not long over her work that night. When Joe heard her door close, he took his boots in his hand and went downstairs. He had left his hat on the kitchen table, according to his nightly custom; the moonlight coming in through the window reminded him of it as he pa.s.sed.

He put it on, thinking that he would take a look around the road in the vicinity of the gate, for he suspected that Morgan's submissive going masked some iniquitous intent. Joe pulled on his boots, sitting in the kitchen door, listening a moment before he closed it after him, and walked softly toward the road.

A careful survey as far as he could see in the bright moonlight, satisfied him that Morgan had not left his horse and buggy around there anywhere. He might come later. Joe decided to wait around there and see.

It was a cool autumn night; a prowling wind moved silently. Over hedgerow and barn roof the moonlight lay in white radiance; the dusty highway beyond the gate was changed by it into a royal road. Joe felt that there were memories abroad as he rested his arms on the gate-post.

Moonlight and a soft wind always moved him with a feeling of indefinite and shapeless tenderness, as elusive as the echo of a song. There was a soothing quality in the night for him, which laved his bruised sensibilities like balm. He expanded under its influence; the tumult of his breast began to subside.

The revelations of that day had fallen rudely upon the youth's delicately tuned and finely adjusted nature. He had recoiled in horror from the sacrilege which that house had suffered. In a measure he felt that he was guilty along with Ollie in her unspeakable sin, in that he had been so stupid as to permit it.

But, he reflected as he waited there with his hand upon the weathered gate, great and terrible as the upheaval of his day-world had been, the night had descended unconscious of it. The moonlight had brightened untroubled by it; the wind had come from its wooded places unhurried for it, and unvexed. After all, it had been only an unheard discord in the eternal, vast harmony. The things of men were matters of infinitesimal consequence in nature. The pa.s.sing of a nation of men would not disturb its tranquillity as much as the falling of a leaf.

It was then long past the hour when he was habitually asleep, and his vigil weighed on him heavily. No one had pa.s.sed along the road; Morgan had not come in sight. Joe was weary from his day's internal conflict and external toil. He began to consider the advisability of returning to bed.

Perhaps, thought he, his watch was both futile and unjust. Ollie did not intend to keep her part in the agreement. She must be burning with remorse for her transgression.

He turned and walked slowly toward the house, stopping a little way along to look back and make sure that Morgan had not appeared. Thus he stood a little while, and then resumed his way.

The house was before him, shadows in the sharp angles of its roof, its windows catching the moonlight like wakeful eyes. There was a calm over it, and a somnolent peace. It seemed impossible that iniquitous desires could live and grow on a night like that. Ollie must be asleep, said he, and repentant in her dreams.

Joe felt that he might go to his rest with honesty. It would be welcome, as the desire of tired youth for its bed is strong. At the well he stopped again to look back for Morgan.

As he turned a light flashed in the kitchen, gleamed a moment, went out suddenly. It was as if a match had been struck to look for something quickly found, and then blown out with a puff of breath.

At once the fabric of his hopes collapsed, and his honest attempts to lift Ollie back to her smirched pedestal and invest her with at least a part of her former purity of heart, came to a painful end. She was preparing to leave. The hour when he must speak had come.

He approached the door noiselessly. It was closed, as he had left it, and within everything was still. As he stood hesitating before it, his hand lifted to lay upon the latch, his heart laboring in painful lunges against his ribs, it opened without a sound, and Ollie stood before him against the background of dark.

The moonlight came down on him through the half-bare arbor, and fell in mottled patches around him where he stood, his hand still lifted, as if to help her on her way. Ollie caught her breath in a frightened start, and shrank back.

"You don't need to be afraid, Ollie--it's Joe," said he.

"Oh, you scared me so!" she panted.

Each then waited as if for the other to speak, and the silence seemed long.

"Were you going out somewhere?" asked Joe.

"No; I forgot to put away a few things, and I came down," said she. "I woke up out of my sleep thinking of them," she added.

"Well!" said he, wonderingly. "Can I help you any, Ollie?"

"No; it's only some milk and things," she told him. "You know how Isom takes on if he finds anything undone. I was afraid he might come in tonight and see them."

"Well!" said Joe again, in a queer, strained way.

He was standing in the door, blocking it with his body, clenching the jamb with his hands on either side, as if to bar any attempt that she might make to pa.s.s.

"Will you strike a light, Ollie? I want to have a talk with you," said he gravely.

"Oh, Joe!" she protested, as if pleasantly scandalized by the request, intentionally misreading it.

"Have you got another match in your hand? Light the lamp."

"Oh, what's the use?" said she. "I only ran down for a minute. We don't need the light, do we, Joe? Can't you talk without it?"

"No; I want you to light the lamp," he insisted.

"I'll not do it!" she flared suddenly, turning as if to go to her room.

"You've not got any right to boss me around in my own house!"

"I don't suppose I have, Ollie, and I didn't mean to," said he, stepping into the room.

Ollie retreated a few steps toward the inner door, and stopped. Joe could hear her excited breathing as he flung his hat on the table.

"Ollie, what I've got to say to you has to be said sooner or later tonight, and you'd just as well hear it now," said Joe, trying to a.s.sure her of his friendly intent by speaking softly, although his voice was tremulous. "Morgan's gone; he'll not be back--at least not tonight."

"Morgan?" said she. "What do you mean--what do I care where he's gone?"

Joe made no reply. He fumbled for the box behind the stove and sc.r.a.ped a slow sulphur match against the pipe. Its light discovered Ollie shrinking against the wall where she had stopped, near the door.

She was wearing a straw hat, which must have been a part of her bridal gear. A long white veil, which she wore scarf-wise over the front display of its flowers and fruits, came down and crossed behind her neck. Its ends dangled upon her breast. The dress was one that Joe never had seen her wear before, a girlish white thing with narrow ruffles. He wondered as he looked at her with a great ache in his heart, how so much seeming purity could be so base and foul. In that bitter moment he cursed old Isom in his heart for goading her to this desperate bound.

She had been starving for a man's love, and for the lack of it she had thrown herself away on a dog.

Joe fitted the chimney on the burner of the lamp, and stood in judicial seriousness before her, the stub of the burning match wasting in a little blaze between his fingers.

"Morgan's gone," he repeated, "and he'll never come back. I know all about you two, and what you'd planned to do."

Joe dropped the stub of the match and set his foot on it.