Mountain Blood Part 10

The "board or so" to be replaced on the ice house, as Gordon had surmised, proved to be extensive--a large section of the inner wall had rotted from the constant dampness, the slowly seeping water. The ice house stood back of the dwelling, by the side of the small barn and beyond a number of apple trees: it was a square structure of boards, with no opening save a low door under the peak of the roof with a small platform and exterior flight of steps.

In the gloomy, dank interior a rough ladder, fastened to the wall, led down to the falling level of soggy sawdust, embedded in which the irregular pieces of ice were preserved against the summer. From the interior the opening made a vivid square of blue sky; for long hours the blue increased in brilliancy, after which, veiled in a greyer haze of heat, the patch of sky grew gradually paler, and then clear; the suggestion of immeasurable s.p.a.ce deepened; above the dark hole of the ice house the illimitable distance was appalling. Gordon was resting from the sullen, m.u.f.fled knocking of his hammer when a figure suddenly blotted out the light, hid the sky. He recognized the sharply-cut silhouette of the school-teacher.

"What a horrid, spooky place," she spoke with a shiver, peering within.

"It's cool," Gordon told her indifferently.

"And quiet," she added, seating herself upon the platform with an elbow in the opening; "there's none of the bothersome clatter of a lot of detestable children." She raised her voice in shrill mimicry, "'Teacher, kin I be excused? Teacher!... Teacher--!'"

"Don't you like children?"

"I loathe them," she shot at him, out of the depths of a profound, long-acc.u.mulated exasperation; "the muddy little beasts."

"Then I wouldn't be vexed with them."

"Do you like nailing boards in a rotten ice house?"

"Oh, I'm dog poor; I've got to take anything that comes along."

"And, you fool, do you suppose I'd be here if I had anything at all? Do you suppose I'd stay in this d.a.m.n lost hole if I could get anywhere else?

Do you think I have no more possibilities than this?"

He mounted the ladder, and emerged upon the platform by her side, where he found a place, a minute, for a cigarette.

The woman's face was bitter, her body tense.

"I'll grow old and die in places like this," she continued pa.s.sionately; "I'll grow old and die in pokey, little schools, and wear prim calico dresses, with a remade old white mull for commencements. I'll never hear anything but twice two, and Persia is bounded on the north by,--with all the world beyond, Paris and London and Egypt, for the lucky. I want to live," she cried to Gordon Makimmon, idly curious, to the still branches of the apple trees, the vista of village half-hid in dusty foliage. "I want to see things, things different, not these dumb, depressing mountains. I want to see life!"

Gordon had a swift memory of a city street grey in a reddening flood of dawn, of his own voice in a reddening flood of dawn, of his own voice mumbling out of an overwhelming, nauseous desperation that same determination, desire. "Perhaps," he ventured, "you wouldn't think so much of it when you'd seen it."

"Wouldn't I?" she exclaimed; "oh, wouldn't I?--smart crowds and gay streets and shops on fire with jewels. That's where I belong; I'd show them; I've got a style, if I only had a chance! I've got a figure ... shoulders."

He appraised in a veiled glance her physical pretensions. He discovered, to his surprise, that she had "shoulders"; her body resembled her hands, it was smoothly rounded, provocative; its graceful proportion deceived the casual eye.

With a disdainful motion she kicked off a heavily clumsy slipper--her instep arched narrowly to a delicate ankle, the small heel was sharply cut. "In silk," she said, "and a little brocaded slipper, you would see."

She replaced the inadequate thing of leather. The animation died from her countenance, she surveyed him with cold eyes, narrowed lips. Her gaze, he felt, included him in the immediate, hateful scene; she gained fresh repugnance from his stained, collarless shirt, his bagging knees coated with sawdust.

She rose, and, her skirt gathered in one hand, descended the precarious flight of steps. She crossed the gra.s.s slowly, her head bent, her hands tightly clenched.

Later, in the yard, Gordon saw, at a lighted, upper window, the silhouette of her back, a gleam of white arm. The window cast an elongated rectangle of warm light on the blue gloom of the gra.s.s. It illuminated him, with his gaze lifted; and, while, standing in the open window, she saw him clearly, she was as indifferent, as contemptuous of his presence, as though he had been an animal. A film of cambric, golden in the lamplight, settled about her smooth shoulders, fell in long diaphanous lines. She raised her arms to her head, her hair slid darkly across her face, and she turned and disappeared. He moved away, but the memory rankled delicately in his imagination, returned the following morning. The thought lingered of that body, as fine as ivory, unguessed, hidden, in a coa.r.s.e sheath.

XXVII

His miscellaneous labors at the minister's filled nearly a week of unremitting labor. But, upon the advent of Sunday, mundane affairs were suspended in the general confusion of preparation for church. It had rained during the night, the day was cool and fragrant and clear, and Gordon determined to evade the morning's services, and plunge aimlessly into the pleasant fields. He kept in the background until the cavalcade had started, headed by the minister--the circuit rider had driven off earlier in his cart to an outlying chapel--and his wife. It was inviting on the deserted veranda, and Gordon lingered while the village emptied into the churches, the open.

Finally he sauntered over the street, past the Courthouse, by Pompey Hollidew's residence. It was, unlike the surrounding dwellings, built of brick; there was no porch, only three stone steps descending from the main entrance, and no flowers. The path was overgrown with weeds, the front shutters were indifferently flung back, half opened, closed. The door stood wide open, and, as he pa.s.sed, Gordon gathered the impression of a dark heap on the hall floor. He dismissed an idle curiosity; and then, for no discoverable reason, halted, turned back, for a second glance.

Even from the path he saw extending from the heap an arm, a gnarled hand.

It was Pompey Hollidew himself, cold, still, on the floor. Gordon entered, looking outside for a.s.sistance: no one was in sight. Pompey Hollidew wore the familiar, greenish-black coat, the thread-bare trousers and faded, yellow shirt. The battered derby had rolled a short distance across the floor. The dead man's face was a congested, olive shade, with purple smudges beneath the up-rolled eyes, and lips like dried leaves. His end, it was apparent, had been as sudden as it was natural.

Old Pompey ... dead! Gordon straightened up. Simultaneously two ideas flashed into his mind--Lettice and Hollidew's gold. Then they grew coherent, explicable. Lettice and the gold were one; she was the gold, the gold was Lettice. He recalled now, appositely, what Bartamon had told him but a few days before ... Hollidew would consent to make no will; there were no other children. The money would automatically go, princ.i.p.ally, to Lettice, without question or contest. If he had but considered before, acted with ordinary sense ... the girl had been in love with him; he might have had it all. He gazed cautiously, but with no determined plan of action, out over the street--it lay deserted in the ambient sunlight.

He quickly left the house, the old man sprawling grotesquely across the bare hall, forcing himself to walk with an a.s.sumed, deliberate ease over the plank walk, past Simmons' corner. As he progressed a plan formulated in his mind, a plan obvious, promising immediate, practicable results ... Lettice had told him that she would remain for two weeks at the farm. It was evident that she was still there. His gait quickened; if he could reach her now, before any one else.... He wished that he had closed the door upon the old man's body; any one pa.s.sing as he had pa.s.sed could see the corpse; a wagon would be sent for the girl.

He commenced, outside the village, to run, pounding over the dusty way with long-drawn, painful gasps, his chest oppressed by the now unaccustomed exercise, the rapid motion. When he came in sight of the farmhouse that was his objective, he stopped and endeavored to remove all traces of his haste; he rubbed off his shoes, fingered his necktie, mopped his brow.

There was a woman on the porch; it proved to be Mrs. Caley, folded in a shawl, pale and gaunt. Suddenly the possibility occurred to him that Lettice had driven into church. But she was in the garden patch beyond, Mrs. Caley said. Gordon strolled around the corner of the house as hastily, as slowly, as he dared.

He saw her immediately. She wore a blue linen skirt, a white waist, and her sleeves were rolled up. The sun glinted on her uncovered hair, blazed in the bright tin basin into which she was dropping scarlet peppers. She appeared younger than he had remembered her; her arms were youthful and softly dimpled; her brow seemed again the calm, guileless brow of a girl; her eyes, as she raised them in greeting, were serene.

"I wanted to explain to you," he began obliquely, "about that--that falling asleep. It's been worrying me. You see, I hadn't had any rest for three or four nights, I had been bothering about my affairs, and about something more important still."

Bean poles, covered with bright green verdure, made a background of young summer for her own promise of early maturity. She placed the basin on the ground, and stood with her arms hanging loosely, gazing at him expectantly, frankly.

"The most important thing in my life," he added, then paused. "I thought for a while that I had better go away without saying anything to you, and more particularly since I have lost everything." He could hear, coming over the road, the regular hoof-beats of a trotting horse, and he had the feeling that it must be a messenger from the village, dispatched in search of Lettice with the news of her father's death. For a moment the horse seemed to be stopping; he was afraid that his opportunity had been lost; but, after all, the hoof-beats pa.s.sed, diminished over the road.

Then, "Since I have lost everything," he repeated.

"Please tell me more," she demanded, "I don't understand--"

"But," he continued, in the manner he had hastily adopted, "when the time came I couldn't; I couldn't go away and leave you. I thought, perhaps, you might be different from others; I thought, perhaps, you might like a man for what he was, and not for what he had. I would come to you, I decided, and tell you all this, tell you that I could work, yes, and would, and make enough--" He paused in order to observe the effect of his speech upon her. She was gazing clear-eyed at him, in a sort of shining expectancy, a grave, eager comprehension, appealing, incongruous, to her girlhood.

"But why?" she queried.

"Because I'm in love with you: I want to marry you."

Her gaze did not falter, but her color changed swiftly, a rosy tide swept over her cheeks, and died away, leaving her pale. Her lips trembled. A palpable, radiant content settled upon her.

"Thank you," she told him seriously; "it will make me very happy to marry you, Gordon."

With a fleeting, backward glance he moved closer to her, his arm fell about her waist, he pressed a hasty, ill-directed kiss upon her chin.

"Will you marry me now?" he asked eagerly. "You see, others wouldn't understand, you remember what your father said about the Makimmon breed?

They would repeat that I had nothing, or even that I was marrying you for old Pompey's money. You know better than that, you know he wouldn't give us a penny."

"It wouldn't matter now what any one said," she returned serenely.

"But it would be so much easier--we could slip off quietly somewhere, and come back married, all the fuss avoided, all the say so's and say no's shut up right at the beginning."

"When do you want to be--be married?"

"Right away! now! to-day!"

"Oh ... oh, Gordon, but we couldn't! I haven't even a white dress here. I might go into Greenstream, be ready to-morrow--"