Once to Every Man

He had forgotten it that first morning. With the well-planned opening sentence fairly trembling upon his tongue-tip when he opened the door, the whole thing had been swept utterly from his mind. And in the press of events that followed he never so much as thought of it again for days. When the memory of it did return, a week later, somehow he found it almost impossible to introduce the subject–at least impossible to introduce it gracefully.

That was one of the reasons for his failure to execute the mission entrusted to him. The other reason, which was far weightier, so far as Old Jerry was concerned, was even harder to define. He blamed it directly to the attitude of the girl with the tumbled yellow hair and blue eyes, which were never quite the same shade of purple. More than a small proportion of the remarks which he had prepared beforehand to deliver to her had consisted of reproof–not too harsh, but for all that a trifle severe, maybe–of her hasty and utterly unfair judgment of Young Denny. That, he had assured himself, was only just and merited, and could only prove, eventually, to have been for the best. But she never gave him a chance to deliver it. One moment of sadness on her part would have been sufficient excuse. If he could have surprised her just once gazing at him from moist, questioning eyes, he felt that that would have been enough proof of contrition and humble meekness of spirit on her part. But he never did.

Instead Old Jerry had never seen so astounding a change take place in any human being as that which came over her day by day. By the end of that first week the pallor had gone entirely from her cheeks. The deep dark circles which had rimmed the wet eyes which she had lifted to him that first morning disappeared so entirely that it was hard to remember that they had ever been there at all. Even the lithely slender body seemed fuller, rounder. To every outward appearance at least Old Jerry had to confess to himself that he had never seen a more supremely contented, thoroughly happy creature than Dryad Anderson was at that week’s end.

And it irritated him; it almost angered him at times. Remembering his own travail of spirit, the self-inflicted agony of mind which he had undergone that day when he had first looked square into the eyes of his own soul and acknowledge his years of guilty unfairness to the lonely boy on the hill, he shut his lips tight upon the message he might have delivered and waited, stubbornly, for her to show some sign of repentance.

For a day or two a mental contemplation of this necessarily severe course brought him moments of comparative peace of mind. It justified in a measure, at least, his own remissness, and yet even that mind-state at times was rudely shaken. At each day’s end, after he had made his reluctant ascent of the hill which led up to Young Denny’s unlighted house, and a far speedier, none too dignified return, the little driver of the squealing buggy made it a point to turn off and stop for a moment or two before the gate of John Anderson’s cottage. At first the girl’s real need of him prompted this daily detour; then, when the actual need no longer existed, he excused the visit on the plea of her lonesomeness and his promise to Denny to look after her.

His own loneliness–for he had never been so lonely before in all his lonely life–and the other and real reason for this habit, he never allowed himself to scrutinize too closely. But each day he sat a little forward on the buggy seat as soon as he had turned the last sharp curve in the road and stared eagerly ahead through the afternoon dusk until he made out her slim figure leaning against the fence waiting for him. And every afternoon, after he had pulled the shuffling horse to a standstill, he bent down from his vantage point on the high seat to scan her upturned face minutely, almost craftily at times, for some tell-tale trace of tears on her long lashes, or a possible quiver of her lips, or a suspicious droop in her boyish shoulders. And he never discovered either the one or the other.

It was at such moments that his peace of mind suffered, for no sane man could ever have read, by any stretching of the imagination, anything akin to sorrow or sadness in the low laugh with which she invariably met his scrutiny. It fairly bubbled joy. Each day Old Jerry found her only happy–offensively happy–and where he had been secretly watching her for one betraying sign he became uneasily conscious after a time that very often she, too, seemed to be scanning his own face as if she were trying to penetrate into the inner tumult of perplexities behind his seamed forehead. Some days he was almost certain that there was a calculating light in her steady eyes–a hint of half-hidden delight in something he couldn’t understand–and it worried him. It bothered him almost as much as did the unvaried formula with which she greeted him every afternoon.

“Have you any news for me today?” she always asked him. “Surely you’ve something new to tell me this afternoon–now, haven’t you?”

The tone in which she made the query was never anything but disarming; it was quite childishly wheedling and innocently eager, he thought. But reiterated from day to day it wore on his nerves after a while. Added to the something he sometimes thought he caught glimmering in her tip-tilted eyes, it made him more than a little uncomfortable. He fell back upon a quibble to dodge the issue.

“Was you expectin’ a letter?” he always countered.

This daily veiled tilt of wits might have gone on indefinitely had not a new development presented itself which threw an entirely different aspect upon the whole affair.

A fortnight had elapsed since Denny Bolton’s mysterious departure from the village when it happened. As usual, after the day’s duties were completed with his hurried return from the Bolton homestead, Old Jerry turned off at the crossroads to stop for a moment before the cottage squatting in its acre of desolate garden. He didn’t even straighten up in his seat that afternoon to gaze ahead of him, so certain he had grown that she would be waiting for him, a hint of laughter in her eyes and the same disturbing question on her lips, and not until the fat animal between the shafts had stopped of her own accord before the straggling fence did he realize that the girl was not there. Then her absence smote him full.

It frightened him. Right from the first he was conscious of impending disaster born quite entirely of the knowledge of his own guilt. The front door of the house was open and after fruitless minutes of panicky pondering he clambered down and advanced uncertainly toward it. His shadow across the threshold heralded his reluctant coming, and Dryad turned from the half-filled box upon the table over which she had been bending and nodded to him almost before he caught sight of her.

That little, intimately brief inclination of the head was her only greeting. With hands grasping each side of the door-frame Old Jerry stood there and gazed about the room. It had never been anything but bare and empty looking–now with the few larger pieces of furniture which it had contained all stacked in one corner and the smaller articles already stored away in a half-dozen boxes, the last of which was holding the girl’s absorbed attention, it would have been barnlike had it not been so small. From where he stood Old Jerry could see through into the smaller back-room workshop. Even its shelves were empty,–entirely stripped of their rows of tiny white woman-figures.

He paled as he grasped the ominous import of it; he tried to speak unconcernedly, but his voice was none too steady.

“So you’re a-house-cleanin’, be you?” he asked jauntily. “Ain’t you commencin’ a little early?”

He was uncomfortably conscious of that interrogative gleam in Dryad’s glance–that amused glimmer which he couldn’t quite fathom–when she turned her head. She was smiling, too, a little–smiling with her lips as well as with her eyes.

“No-o-o,” she stated with preoccupied lack of emphasis, as she bent again over the box. “No–I’m packing up.”

Old Jerry had known that that would be her answer. He had been certain of it. The other interpretation–the only other possible one which could be put upon the dismantled room–had been nothing more or less than a momentary and desperate grasping at a straw.

For a while he was very, very quiet, wondering just what it was in her mind which made her so cheerfully indifferent to his presence. She filled that last box while he stood there in the doorway, stood off to survey her work critically, and then picked up a hammer that lay on the table and prepared to nail down the lid.

“I’ve hit my finger four times today,” she apprised him between strokes as she drove the first nail home. “Four times this afternoon–and always the same finger, too!”

The very irrelevancy of the statement, coupled with her calm serenity, was appalling to the old man. She didn’t so much as lift her eyes when she told him, but when the lid was fastened she whirled suddenly with that impetuosity which always startled him more than a little, her hands tightly clasped in front of her, and fairly beamed at him.

“There, that finishes everything–everything but the pots and pans,” she cried. “And I’ll need them a little longer, anyway, won’t I? But maybe I won’t take them with me, either–they’re pretty old and worn out. What do you think?”

Old Jerry cleared his throat. He ignored her question.

“Ain’t–ain’t this a trifle sudden,” he faltered–“jest a trifle?”

She shook her head again and laughed softly, as if from sheer joyous excitement.

“No,” she said. “No, I’ve been planning it for days and days–oh, for more than a week!”

Then she seemed to catch for the first time the dreariness of his whole attitude–the dejection of his spare angular body and sparrowlike, anxious face.

“You’re sorry I’m going,” she accused him then, and she leaned toward him a little, eyes quizzically half closed. “I knew you’d be sorry!” And then, swiftly, “Aren’t you?”

Old Jerry scraped first one foot and then the other.

“I reckon I be,” he admitted faintly. “Kinda surprised, too. I–I wa’n’t exactly calculating on anything like this. It–it’s kinda thrown me off my reckonin’! Are you–are you figurin’ on goin’ right away?”

Dryad spun about and threw her head far on one side to scan the whole bare room.

“Tomorrow, maybe,” she decided, when she turned back to him. “Or the next day at the very latest. You see, everything is about ready now, and there isn’t any reason for me to stay, on and on, here–is there?”

A little tired note crept into the last words, edging the question with a suggestion of wistfulness. It was something not so very different from that for which Old Jerry had been stubbornly waiting throughout those entire two weeks, but he failed to catch it at that moment. He had heard nothing but her statement that she meant to remain at least another day. It made it possible for him to breathe deeply once again.

Much could happen in twenty-four hours. She might even change her mind, he desperately assured himself–women were always doing something like that, wern’t they? But even if she did go it was a reprieve; it gave him one last opportunity. Now, for the present, all he wanted was to get away–to get away by himself and think! On heavily dragging feet he turned to go back down the rotting boardwalk.

“I–I’ll drop in on you tomorrow,” he suggested, pausing at the steps. “I’ll stop in on my way ’round–to–to say good-by.”

The girl stood in the doorway smiling down at him. He couldn’t meet her eyes. As it was he felt that their gaze went through and through him. And so he did not see her half lift her arms to him in a sudden quite wonderful gesture of contrite and remorseful reassurance. He did not hear the first of the impulsive torrent of words which she barely smothered behind lips that trembled a little. His head was bowed so that he did not see her eyes, and if he could but have seen them and nothing else, he would have understood, without the words or the gesture.

Instead he stood there, plucking undecidedly at his sleeve.

“Because I–I wouldn’t like to hev you go–without seein’ you again,” he went on slowly–“without a chance to tell you something–er–to tell you good-by.”

He didn’t wait for her answer. At the far bend in the road, when he looked back, she was still there in the doorway watching him.

He was not quite certain, but he thought she threw up one thin white arm to him as he passed out of sight.

CHAPTER XVII

It rained that next day–a dull, steady downpour that slanted in upon a warm, south wind. Old Jerry was glad of the storm. The leaden grayness of the low-hanging clouds matched perfectly his own frame of mind, and the cold touch of the rain soothed his hot head, too, as it swept in under the buggy hood, and helped him to think a little better. There was much that needed readjusting.

Throughout the early hours of that morning he drove with a newspaper spread flat upon his knees–the afternoon edition of the previous day, which, in the face of other matters, he had had neither the necessary time nor enthusiasm to examine until it was an entire twelve hours old. At any other time the contents of that red-headlined sheet would have set his pulses throbbing in a veritable ecstasy of excitement.

For two whole weeks he had been watching for it, scanning every inch of type for the news it brought, but now that account of Young Denny’s first match, with a little, square picture of him inset at the column head, fell woefully flat so far as he was concerned.

Not that the plump newspaperman who had written the account of that first victorious bout had achieved anything but a masterpiece of sensationalism. Every line was alive with action, every phrase seemed to thud with the actual shock of contest. And there was that last paragraph, too, which hailed Denny–“The Pilgrim,” they called him in the paper, but that couldn’t deceive Old Jerry–as the newcomer for whom the public had been waiting so long, and, toward the end, so hopelessly.

It was really a perfect thing of its kind–but Old Jerry could not enjoy it that morning, even though it was Denny Bolton’s first triumph, to be shared by him alone in equal proportion. Instead of sending creepy thrills chasing up and down his spine it merely intensified his doleful bitterness of spirit. Long before noon he breathed a leaden heavy sigh, refolded the sodden sheet and put it away in the box beneath the seat.

The old mare took her own pace that day. In a brain that was already burdened until it fairly ached there was no room for the image of the silver-haired stone-cutter which had made for speed on other occasions. He had plenty to occupy his mind which was of a strictly immediate nature.

A dozen times that morning Old Jerry asked himself what he would tell Dryad Anderson that night, when he stopped at the little drab cottage at the route’s end, ostensibly to bid her good-by. He asked himself, in desperate reiteration, how he would tell, for he knew that the long delay in the delivery of Denny’s message was going to need more than a little explanation. And when he had wrestled with the question until his eyes stung and his temples throbbed, and still could find no solution for it, he turned helplessly to the consideration of another phase of the problem.

He fell to tormenting himself with the possibility of her having gone already. Everything in those bare rooms had been packed–there was no real reason for the girl to remain another hour. Perhaps she had reconsidered, changed her mind, and departed even earlier than she had planned, and if she had–if she had–

Whenever he reached that point, dumbly he bowed his head.

It was dark when he turned off the main road and started up the long hill toward the Bolton place–not just dark, but a blackness so profound that the mare between the shafts was only a half formless splotch of gray as she plodded along ahead. Even his dread of the place, which formerly had been so acute, did not penetrate the mental misery that wrapped him; he did not vouchsafe so much as one uneasy glance ahead until a glimmer of light which seemed to flash out from the rear of the house fairly shocked him into conscious recollection of it all.

He sprang erect then, spilling a cataract of water from his hat brim in a chill trickle down the back of his neck, and barked a shrilly staccato command at the placid horse. The creaking buggy came to a standstill.

He tried to persuade himself it was a reflection of the village lights upon the window panes which had startled him, but it was only a half-hearted effort. No one could mistake the glow that filtered out of the black bulk of the rear of the house for anything save the thing it was. Half way up the hill he sat there, hunched forward in a hopeless huddle, his eyes protected by cupped palms, and stared and stared.

Once before, the evening of that day when the Judge’s exhibition of Young Denny’s bruised face had been more than his curiosity could endure, he had approached that bleak farmhouse in fear and trembling, but the trepidation of that night, half real, half a child of his own erratic imagination, bulked small beside the throat-tightening terror of this moment.

And yet he did not turn back. The thought that he had only to wheel his buggy and beat as silent a retreat as his ungreased axles would permit never occurred to him. It was much as if his harrowed spirit, driven hither and yon without mercy throughout the whole day long, had at last backed into a corner, in a mood of last-ditch, crazy desperation, and bared its teeth.

“If he is up there,” he stated doggedly, “if he is up there, a-putterin’ with his everlasting lump o’ clay, he ain’t got no more right up there than I hev! He’s just a-trespassin’, that’s what he’s a-doin’. I’m the legal custodian of the place–it was put into my hands–and I’ll tell him so. I’ll give him a chance to git out–or–or I’ll hev the law on him!”

The plump mare went forward again. There was something terribly uncanny, even in her relentless advance, but the old man clung to the reins and let her go without a word. When she reached the top she slumped lazily to a standstill and fell contentedly to nibbling grass.

The light in the window was much brighter, viewed from that lessened distance–thin, yellow streaks of brightness that quivered a little from the edges of a drawn shade. An uneven wick might easily have accounted for the unsteadiness, but in that flickering pallor Old Jerry found something ominously unhealthy–almost uncanny.

But he went on. He clambered down from his high seat and went doggedly across–steadily–until his hand found the door-latch. And he gave himself no time for reconsideration or retreat. The metal catch yielded all too readily under the pressure of his fingers, and when the door swung in he followed it over the threshold.

The light blinded him for a moment–dazzled him–yet not so completely but that he saw, too clearly for any mistake, the figure that had turned from the stove to greet him. Dryad Anderson’s face was pink-tinted from forehead to chin by the heat of the glowing lids–her lips parted a little until the small teeth showed white beyond their red fullness.

In her too-tight, boyish blouse, gaping at the throat, she stood there in the middle of the room, hands bracketed on delicate hips, and smiled at him. And behind her the lamp in its socket on the wall smoked a trifle from a too-high wick.

Old Jerry stood and gazed at her, one hand still clutching the door latch. In one great illuminating flash he saw it all–understood just what it meant–and with that understanding a hot wave of rage began to well up within him–a fierce and righteous wrath, borne of all that day’s unnecessary agony and those last few minutes of fear.

It was a hoax on her part. She had been trifling with him the day before, just as she had been playing fast and loose with his peace of mind for days. An ejaculation bordering close upon actual profanity trembled upon his lips, but a draft of cold air sweeping in at the open doorway set the lamp flickering wildly and brought him back a little to himself. His eyes went again to the girl in the middle of the floor. She was rocking to and fro upon the balls of her feet, every inch of her fairly pulsing with mocking, malicious delight.

She waited for him to speak, and he, stiff of back and grim of face, stood stonily silent. She seemed all innocently unaware of his unconcealed disgust. The quizzical smile only widened before the chilly threat of his beady eyes and ruffled forehead. And then, all in one breath, her little pouted chin went up and she burst into a low gurgle of utter enjoyment of the tableau.

“Well,” she demanded, “aren’t you ever going to say anything? Here I am! I–I decided to move today–there really wasn’t any use of waiting. Aren’t you surprised–just a little?”

The meekness of her voice, so wholly belied by her eyes and lips and swaying boy-like body, only tightened the old man’s mouth. He was still reviewing all that long day’s mental torment, counting the wasted hours which might have been applied to a soul-satisfying feast upon Morehouse’s red-headlined account in the paper. No veteran had ever marched more hopelessly into a cannon’s mouth than he had approached the door of that kitchen.

And yet a flood of thankfulness, the direct reflex of his first impotent rage, threatened to sweep up and drown the fires of his wrath. Already he wanted to slump down into a chair and rest weary body and wearier, relieved brain; he wanted a minute or two in which to realize that she was there–that his unfulfilled promise was still far from being actual catastrophe–and he would not let himself. Not yet!

She had been playing with him–playing with him cat-and-mouse fashion. The birdlike features which had begun to relax hardened once more.

“Maybe I be,” he answered her question with noncommittal grimness. “Maybe I be–and maybe I ain’t!” And then, almost belligerently: “Your lamp’s a-smokin’!”

She turned and strained on tiptoe and lowered it.

“I thought you would be,” she agreed, too gravely for his complete comfort, when she had accomplished the readjustment of the wick to her entire satisfaction. “For, you know, you seemed a little worried and–well, not just happy, yesterday, when I told you I was going to move I–I felt sure you would be glad to find that I hadn’t gone far!”

Old Jerry remembered at that moment and he removed his soaked hat. He turned, too, and drew up a chair. It gave him an opportunity to avoid those moistly mirthful eyes for a moment. Seated and comfortably tilted back against the wall he felt less ill at ease–felt better able to deal with the situation as it should be dealt with.

For a moment her presence there had only confounded him–that was when the wave of righteous wrath had swept him–but at the worst he had counted it nothing more than a too far-fetched bit of fantastic mischief conceived to tantalize him.

Her last statement awakened in him a preposterously impossible suspicion which, now that he had a chance to glance about the room, was confirmed instantly–absolutely. It was astounding–utterly unbelievable–and yet on all the walls, in every corner, there were the indisputable evidences of her intention to remain indefinitely–permanently.

At least it gave him an opening.

“You don’t mean to say,” he began challengingly, “you don’t mean to tell me that you’re a-figurin’ on stayin’ here–for good?”

She pursed her lips and nodded vigorously at him until the loosened wisps of hair half hid her eyes. It was quite as though she were pleased beyond belief that he had got at the gist of it all so speedily.

“Yes, for good,” she explained ecstatically, “or,” more slowly, “or at least for quite a while. You see I like it here! It’s just like home already–just like I always imagined home would be when I really had one, anyway. There’s so much room–and it’s warm, too. And then, the floors don’t squeak, either. I don’t think I care for squeaky floors–do you?”

A quick widening of those almost purple eyes accompanied the last question.

The little white-haired figure in the back-tilted chair snorted. He tried to disguise it behind a belated cough, but it was quite palpably a snort of outraged patience and dignity. She couldn’t fool him any longer–not even with that wide-eyed appealingly infantile stare. He knew, without looking closer, that there was a flare of mirth hidden within its velvet duskiness. And there was only one way to deal with such shallowness–that was with firm and unmistakable severity. He leaned forward and pounded one meager knee for emphasis as Judge Maynard had often done.