Lodusky Part 6

"Oh!" and she walked out of the room.

He did not see her for three days, and the picture stood still. He went to the Harneys' and found Rebecca packing her trunk.

"We are going back to New York," she said.

"Why?" he asked.

"Because our holiday is over."

Miss Thorne regarded him with chill severity.

"When may we expect to see you?" she inquired.

He really felt half stupefied,--as if for the time being his will was paralyzed.

"I don't know," he answered.

He tried to think that he was treated badly and coldly. He told himself that he had done nothing to deserve this style of thing, that he had simply been busy and absorbed in his work, and that if he had at times appeared preoccupied it was not to be wondered at. But when he looked at Rebecca he did not put these thoughts into words; he did not even say that of course he should follow them soon, since there was nothing to detain him but a sketch or two he had meant to make.

By night they were gone and he was left restless and miserable. He was so restless that he could not sleep but wandered down toward the spring.

He stopped at the exact point at which he had stopped on the night of his arrival--at the top of the zigzag little path leading down the rocky incline. He stopped because he heard a sound of pa.s.sionate sobbing. He descended slowly. He knew the sound--angry, fierce, uncontrollable--because he had heard it before. It checked itself the instant he reached the ground. Lodusky leaning against a projecting rock kept her eyes fixed upon the water.

"Why did you come here?" he demanded, a little excitedly. "What are you crying for? What has hurt you?"

"Nothing" in a voice low and unsteady.

He drew a little nearer to her and for the first time was touched.

She would not look at him, she was softened and altered, in her whole appearance, by a new pallor.

"Have "--he began, "have I?"

"You!" she cried, turning on him with a bitter, almost wild gesture.

"_You_ wouldn't keer if I was struck _dead_ afore ye!"

"Look here," he said to her, with an agitation he could not master. "Let me tell you something about myself. If you think I am a pa.s.sably good fellow you are mistaken. I am a bad fellow, a poor fellow, an ign.o.ble fellow. You don't understand?" as she gazed at him in bewilderment. "No, of course, you don't. G.o.d knows I didn't myself until within the last two weeks. It's folly to say such things to you; perhaps I say them half to satisfy myself. But I mean to show you that I am not to be trusted.

I think perhaps I am too poor a fellow to love any woman honestly and altogether. I followed one woman here, and then after all let another make me waver"--

"Another!" she faltered.

He fixed his eyes on her almost coldly.

"You," he said.

He seemed to cast the word at her and wonder what she would make of it He waited a second or so before he went on.

"_You_, and yet you are not the woman I love either. Good G.o.d! What a villain I must be. I am an insult to every woman that breathes. It is not even you--though I can't break from you, and you have made me despise myself. There! do you know now--do you see now that I am not worth "--

The next instant he started backward. Before he had time for a thought she had uttered a low cry, and flung herself down at his feet.

"I don't keer," she panted; "I wont keer fur nothin',--whether ye're good or bad,--only don't leave me here when ye go away."

A week later Lennox arose one morning and set about the task of getting his belongings together. He had been up late and had slept heavily and long. He felt exhausted and looked so.

The day before, his model had given him his last sitting. The picture stood finished upon the easel. It was a thorough and artistic piece of work, and yet the sight of it was at times unbearable to him. There were times again, however, when it fascinated him anew when he went and stood opposite to it, regarding it with an intense gaze. He scarcely knew how the last week had pa.s.sed. It seemed to have been spent in alternate feverish struggles and reckless abandonment to impulse. He had let himself drift here and there, he had at last gone so far as to tell himself that the time had arrived when baseness was possible to him.

"I don't promise you an easy life," he had said to Dusk the night before. "I tell you I am a bad fellow, and I have lost something through you that I cared for. You may wish yourself back again."

"If you leave me," she said, "I'll kill myself!" and she struck her hands together.

For the moment he was filled, as he often was, with a sense of pa.s.sionate admiration. It was true he saw her as no other creature had ever seen her before, that so far as such a thing was possible with her, she loved him--loved him with a fierce, unreserved, yet narrow pa.s.sion.

He had little actual packing to do--merely the collecting of a few masculine odds and ends, and then his artistic accompaniments.

Nothing was of consequence but these; the rest were tossed together indifferently, but the picture was to be left until the last moment, that its paint might be dry beyond a doubt.

Having completed his preparations he went out. He had the day before him, and scarcely knew what to do with it, but it must be killed in one way or another. He wandered up the mountain and at last lay down with his cigar among the laurels. He was full of a strange excitement which now thrilled, now annoyed him.

He came back in the middle of the afternoon and laughed a rather half-hearted laugh at the excellent Mandy's comment upon his jaded appearance.

"Ye look kinder tuckered out," she said. "Ye'd oughtn't ter walked so fur when ye was a-gwine off to-night. Ye'd orter rested."

She stopped the churn-dasher and regarded him with a good-natured air of interest.

"Hev ye seed Dusk to say good-by to her?" she added. "She's went over the mountain ter help Mirandy Stillins with her soap. She wont be back fur a day or two."

He went into his room and shut the door. A fierce repulsion sickened him. He had heretofore held himself with a certain degree of inward loftiness; he had so condemned the follies and sins of other men, and here he found himself involved in a low and common villainy, in the deceits which belonged to his crime, and which preyed upon simplicity and ignorant trust.

He went and stood before his easel, hot with a blush of self-scorn.

"Has it come to this?" he muttered through his clinched teeth--"to _this!_"

He made an excited forward movement; his foot touched the supports of the easel, jarring it roughly; the picture fell upon the floor.

"What?" he cried out. "Beck! You! Great G.o.d!"

For before him, revealed by the picture's fall, the easel held one of the fairest memories he had of the woman he had proved himself too fickle and slight to value rightly.

It was merely a sketch made rapidly one day soon after his arrival and never wholly completed, but it had been touched with fire and feeling, and the face looked out from the canvas with eyes whose soft happiness stung him to the quick with the memories they brought. He had meant to finish it, and had left it upon the easel that he might turn to it at any moment, and it had remained there, covered by a stronger rival--forgotten.

He sat down in a chair and his brow fell upon his hands. He felt as if he had been clutched and dragged backward by a powerful arm.

When at last he rose, he strode to the picture lying upon the floor, ground it under his heel, and spurned it from him with an imprecation.

He was, at a certain hour, to reach a particular bend in the road some miles distant. He was to walk to this place and if he found no one there, to wait.

When at sunset that evening he reached it, he was half an hour before the time specified, but he was not the first at the tryst. He was within twenty yards of the spot when a figure rose from the roots of a tree and stood waiting for him--the girl Dusk with a little bundle in her hand.

She was not flushed or tremulous with any hint of mental excitement; she awaited him with a fine repose, even the glow of the dying sun having no power to add to her color, but as he drew near he saw her look gradually change. She did not so much as stir, but the change grew slowly, slowly upon her face, and developed there into definite shape--the shape of secret, repressed dread.